Online business changes every day. People create and promote different types of businesses making good money on the web. Thus, there is nothing unusual in your desire to join the ranks of digital solopreneurs and entrepreneurs.
Well, it’s impossible to start an online business without a website. However, the site without a proper SEO audit is nothing more than wasted time and efforts.
But what are the fundamental strategies that revolve around SEO?
SEO has always been a part of disputes among experts. These endless debates are about tactics, tricks, and tips that SEOs advise to apply.
It would be correct to ask: who is right and who is wrong?
I wouldn’t have put this question here because a technique that works for me might not work for you.
Nevertheless, all SEO experts agree that link-building is the strategy that always rocks.
This guide represents 19 powerful link-building strategies to use.
Shall we begin?
1. Content That Bait Links
What are the primary purposes of the content? Right, to be valuable for readers and attract links. So, what content does bait links?
First of all, you should produce only high-quality, useful, and engaging content. Here are basic content types :
- Different interactive tools showcases
- Visual content (schemes, images, infographics)
- Data-driven maps
- Industry-specific curated sources compilations
You can stick to creating “evergreen content” that attracts links perfectly. But if you want to see it drawing fresh links, you should add something new to it. Nobody wants to read the same material again and again even if it brings value.
2. Links That Bring Traffic Is Option Number One
Link-building is similar to chasing links that bring traffic. Thus, if a particular link doesn’t bring any traffic, it is useless. Likely, you can see how links perform with the help of Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs. Pay attention to “organic traffic” report.
The more traffic the link can bring you, the better.
3. Outreach
Email outreach is one of the best strategies for building links. Despite all its negative aspects, outreach works excellent. It is worth spending your time and efforts. Here are a couple of steps I suggest you to follow:
- Find the opportunities first
- Hunt for emails
- Create personalized email templates
- Track the progress
Now let me show you how to do outreach in a hurry.
If we talk about the way I prefer to do outreach, thus I recommend you to use Google search and Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs. However, time is valuable. That’s why I advise you to set up alerts for keywords you are interested in and get the notifications you want.
How do the alerts work? When someone releases a new post mentioning a keyword, you will get an email notification with the link to this particular post. Afterwards, move to the next step – email hunt.
Email hunt is impossible without using specialized tools. Here are my favorite ones: Findthat.email, ContactOut, and Voilanorbert. These services work fantastic and are resultative. Save your time and get valid email addresses for sure.
Creating personalized email templates is super easy with Buzzstream. Besides an opportunity to craft templates, the tool allows you monitor each outreach campaign you run. The metrics like open, click, and reply rates will help you understand which template performs good and which one bad.
I guess you’ve already arrived at the conclusion that Buzzstream is a must tool for outreach.
4. Use Forums as the Source for Building Links
You know that different SEO experts, marketers, and businessmen prefer to chit-chat on various forums throughout the web. Furthermore, forums could be an excellent place to catch some links as well.
I believe that Quora is one of the most popular forums where people ask questions and get answers. On top of all, you can leave links in your comments.
This is another one great idea to get some additional traffic.
5. Don’t Forget to Fix Broken Backlinks
The first thing I want to do is to remind you what a broken link is.
Broken backlinks are the links that lead to those pages that no longer exist. Hence, such links bring no value to your website. You have to options here. You can remove or fix these links.
The easiest way to find broken backlinks is use Ahrefs Site Explorer tool. Check out “best by links” report + filter the results by “404 not found” feature.
Your further steps are getting in touch with the editors of linking websites and asking them to update these links or to set up 301 redirects.
6. Keep Your Eyes on Competitors’ Links
Competition is an inherent part of any business. It gives a stimulus to move on and improve your business. Your competitors might stay on top of the niche, but don’t get upset because of this.
When it comes to link-building, you can get the information about the links your competitors obtain and use them for your benefit.
You can do it without any hustle. Just set up alerts that will notify you by mail about the links your competitors already got. The only thing you need is competitor’s domain or a separate competitor’s page from the blog.
Now you will be able to get email notifications about new links daily, weekly, or monthly. Reap the benefits!
7. Internal Links to the Best Content
Just for the record, adding internal links from the pages with high URL rating within content is a good practice to boost it up.
I advise you to use Google Search Console to find the pages with internal links. Using these pages will help you move target keywords to Google top 10 search results.
The higher number of impressions a keyword has, the more valuable it is for you.
8. “Nofollow” and “Dofollow” Links Are Both Good to Chase For
I bet you won’t deny that your priority is getting “dofollow” links only. Yes, this type of links is more valuable if we talk about rankings. Nevertheless, “nofollow” links influence SEO as well.
If you want to get a “dofollow” link, it will require some efforts. But “nofollow” links are much easier to earn. Remember, any backlink profile must look natural. Thus, include both types of links.
9. Search for Websites That Link to You Competitors but Don’t Link to Your Site
Have you ever noticed the websites that link to some of your competitors but don’t link to your web-resource? I am sure you have. Do you think it is a reason for concern? No. You can get these links as well.
I suggest you to use link intersect tool to see these target websites. Pick up a couple of your competitors URLs and explore them in the tool.
Now you have a list of links that didn’t link to your website. Go ahead and reach them out.
10. Links from Wikipedia
It is not a big deal to get a link from Wikipedia. The problem is to preserve this link. The question is how to make sure that Wikipedia will approve your link and won’t remove it in the future?
The answer is short and sweet – add links that lead to high-quality and valuable content. It is the only way to see that your link is preserved on Wikipedia.
11. Turn Brand Mentions into Links
Let’s presume that you have stumbled upon the post that mentions your brand but there is no link back to your website. That’s distressing, isn’t it?
Likely, you can always get in touch with a blog’s editor and ask to add a link to the source. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it seems. Editors can ask you something in return. They prefer to build business relationships on a win-win basis.
To find these mentions use alerts from Ahrefs (as I told you above.)
12. Don’t Shy Away from Guest Posting on “Green Blogs”
It goes without saying that we want to pitch with guest posting high-authority blogs only. But due to a massive load of pitches, your one might be missed or ignored.
Fortunately, you can always send your pitch to the blogs that have just started their activity on the internet. You won’t get any traffic, but these “green” blogs can turn into “beasts” in the future.
I recommend you to follow these rules:
- If you send a pitch to a “green” blog, it doesn’t mean that your content should be moderate. No, always offer high-quality content
- Send your pitch to niche related blogs
- Add a naked URL within an author’s bio section
- Don’t overuse adding exact match anchor text to your content
13. Content Repurposing
A piece of content that you published a few months ago already brought you tons of traffic and social media shares. You see that this topic rocks among your target audience. It is a clear signal that you should cover it again. How to give a new life to it?
No, it doesn’t mean that you should rewrite the post. You can turn this content into some other type of information like video, infographics, or image collaborations.
And don’t forget to do “content syndication” that works pretty well.
Here are some resources where you could upload your fresh “old” content, go to Social Media Today, LinkedIn, Medium for example.
14. Your Copyrights Can Bring You Traffic
Knowing the law about “copyright rights” helps you avoid being penalized by Google and use your right to grow traffic.
Let me give you a hint how to do it.
You’ve stumbled upon some post where you noticed an image from your piece of content without any reference to the source. You can ask a blog editor to remove this image or link back to your website.
15. Use Anchor Text Links – They Work
Did you know that using keywords in anchor text affects the search rankings? Yes, it does, and a study across 16,000 keywords has proven this.
Despite this fact, only 2% of anchors had a partial match of 30%. In other words, 1/3 of links may contain a keyword you want to rank for.
Think wisely about the anchors you want to use because Google Penguin can penalize you.
16. Check out the Most Shareable Competitor’s Content and Write Even Better
It is not a secret that the more shares content has, the more traffic it gets. Thus, I advise you to play a spy game. Check out what competitor’s content has more shares.
The most convenient way to see the number of shares on social media channels is by “Top content” report in Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs. Click on “Total” metric and get the list of topics that have the highest popularity among your target audience.
17. Search for Competitor’s Recurring Backlinks
Let me give you a definition of what a recurring backlink is. Recurring backlinks are the links that link back to competitor’s pages multiple times. How can you use this for your benefit?
Follow these two steps:
- See what new backlink opportunities you can get from competitor’s recurring backlinks
- Explore what promotional strategies your competitors use
18. Don’t Neglect Stealing Competitor’s Broken Links
Don’t worry, it is not a “dirty” trick that might seem illegal to you. Actually, I am talking about a popular way to obtain backlinks that lots of SEO practitioners use.
You just find a competitor’s broken link on some website and offer to replace it with your one.
“Broken backlinks” report will help you with this task. Go to Site Explorer tool and find these broken links.
Replace competitor’s broken backlinks with your stuff and get some traffic.
19. Clean Your Backlink Profile
Keeping a backlink profile clean is truly important. Spammy links could be a cause of negative SEO attacks that your competitors use against you. Apparently, it is not a good sign for your website authority.
I recommend you to monitor suspicious links that could be still live in your backlink profile. It requires an in-depth analysis of each link, so don’t avoid exporting a CSV file of the whole backlink report.
Afterwards, you should contact webmasters and ask them to remove these backlinks. If the webmasters ignored your request, you should disavow spammy links with the help of Google’s disavow tool.
To Conclude
Link-building holds the reins as the strategy in the world of SEO. It has a wide-range of tactics and tricks that you can use for building links.
I’ve represented you 19 link-building strategies that work like a charm. It is up to you which one to choose.
I am quite sure you can share some other actionable strategies that could be added in this post. If you do, please, leave your comments and don’t forget to share the post on your social media channels.
Author’s bio:
Sergey Aliokhin is a Marketing Manager at Ahrefs. Apart from working at Ahrefs he likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts and plucking fat bass guitar strings.