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The Ultimate Guide to Link Building

Posted by Celene Robert

December 11, 2020

Link building is among the best ways to boost a company’s SEO, but many entrepreneurs don’t know what this means. The goal of link building is to build high-quality backlinks to help your website show up higher on Google search results when people search for terms related to your business. If your website has quality content with relevant keywords, it can attract a large audience.

Here we’ve detailed the benefits of link building for SEO, how to perform it, and what to do once you have a link building strategy in place.

Benefits of Link Building for SEO

Link building can help more users discover your site on the web. It can also give you instant exposure to the audience of the website linking to you. Link building gets your content and brand in front of a larger audience. The benefits that you can get by building high-quality links are:

Increase Your Blog Visibility in Search Results

The number of relevant links pointing back to your domain can assist you in analyzing your domain authority. Thus, the more high-quality backlinks you build for your site, the higher your domain authority will become and the higher your search ranking is for a suitable query.

Get Referral Traffic and Increase Brand Recognition

When respected sites link your website within the content, users may click and check out your website, thus providing constant referral traffic. The amount of referral traffic depends on your link location, the traffic the linking website generates, as well as the quality of your content or post.

Improve Brand Authority

If you publish quality content, you can probably make your brand stand out from the competition. This assists you in building brand authority. When influencers publish your content, it instantly becomes visible to a large audience, thus increasing your brand reach.

Provide Trust Signals and Social Proof

You can use the logo of highly authoritative sites like Forbes if they feature you. This can build a lot of trust and social proof for your website in the reader’s mind.

Offer Organic Ranking

The organic ranking of a page increases based on the number of high-quality, relevant backlinks pointing to your website. The more of these backlinks you build, the more trustworthy and authoritative your website becomes, and the higher a page on your site ranks in its search results.

How to Perform Link Building

High-quality content promoted in the right ways can be most effective for building links. You can perform link building efficiently in the following four simple steps.

Step 1: Find Sites Where Your Target Audience Spends Time

The first step is to find keywords in your niche around which you can frame your content. You can use tools like SEMRush to find the keywords that your competition is already using to get a high ranking. You can use this information to write something better in a way that generates natural links and social shares.

Start by reviewing competitors’ content and backlinks to find the topics or keywords to create content that can rank well and attract your audience. Find relevant sites and blogs in your industry or niche for link building opportunities. Conduct competitor backlink analyses and outline a strategy to create valuable content with important keywords for your business.

Step 2: Create Unique and Valuable Content

Before you start building links, create content that adds value to your site and related sites. High-quality content is well-researched, accurate and updated information that addresses the target audience's challenges and provides strategies to overcome them. You can create your content by following the below tips or leveraging the vast wealth of internet resources.

Create Lists and How-to Guides

You can create content in the form of a list with a proper headline and description. A how-to guide can help you get a diverse set of links from resource pages and mentions in related content. Engaging content that matches the website you’re pitching to can attract more readers. Use relevant images and keep your information as up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing.

Develop Compelling Infographics

Infographics are a creative and simple way of conveying complex information. Create original infographics about your industry, including information about your business. To increase inbound link likelihood, share your design with any sources cited in your infographic. A visually appealing infographic that includes important information can be shared on many other websites with a link back to you.

Write Case Studies and Research Reports

Posting case studies of clients’ successes and research reports can help you build links naturally. If you provide services to other businesses, case studies are the ideal opportunity to get links to your clients’ websites.

Start a Blog

Writing blog posts consistently engages readers in a valuable way and provides your business with a platform to engage in several link building strategies. A well-written, helpful article allows you to earn listings and links from other blogs.

Design Videos

Much like written content, videos can also use different platforms for link building. Video is the most liked content on the internet and has a higher chance of getting better traffic and brand awareness for your company. You must mention your website link in your video description.

Feature Experts’ Insights

Including experts’ opinions in your articles can be effective at earning links and a good way of creating unique content. If you’ve interviewed people, contributors with a good following on social media can also help you to promote content via their accounts.

Comment on Blogs to Gain Backlinks

Acquire backlinks from different blog sites by including your URL while commenting on them. Commenting on blogs allows you to build relationships with blog owners and open the door to content-sharing or trading agreements.

Write Press Releases About Your Business

Sharing your press releases about new products or services or commenting on popular news stories can assist you significantly in the link building process. If you’re the first person to comment on a relevant news story, you can expect to improve your search ranking. Also, first, link your press release to your company website, then push it out via large-scale newswire agencies.

Step 3: Use the Right Strategy for Success

By creating keyword-infused, topic-focused good content, you are likely to generate links from other webpages. For any successful link building campaign, it is vital to link to the right website and page. Use tools like Open Site Explorer to determine backlinks that other sites have generated and their quality or spam score.

After you’ve created a list of sites that you want to link to, reach out to relevant blogs, influencers, journalists, or other industry professionals, and invite them to share and link to your content. Following is a list of the link building tactics for 2020 that can make a noticeable impact on your ranking performance.

Use Social Media

Sharing your content on social media can help you route more traffic to your page. Engaging customers in the comments section can boost your positive image and lead to getting your links and content shared. The greater the number of social shares, likes, and comments you’ll receive on your content, the more you can convince readers that your content is valuable, popular and link-worthy.

Build Links from Trusted Sites

When your website has backlinks from a trusted site, it establishes your site’s authority on that subject and improves its search ranking. Identify other websites or blogs that discuss topics similar to those featured on your website, and reach out to related people to promote your content or request a backlink.

Start Guest Posting

Guest posting is the process of writing a blog that another website will feature and earning links from that website in return. Choose a website with a significant amount of traffic and backlinks and a high-authority domain in your niche. Posting your content on such a site can allow you to gain a new following. Make sure you provide a link to your website’s landing page or a relevant, informative blog on your site in the bio section of the article.

Earn Links from News Media

When a popular industry news site or digital magazine publishes your post, people who read and trust these websites may click the link to your website. Thus, you may earn new leads and sales from the increased traffic or a boost to your SEO. To accrue high-quality backlinks from popular publications or public relations, you can share new product/service releases, or other business news. You may also respond with high-level quotes that reporters can use in their articles.

Use Internal Linking on Your Website

An internal link connects your web page or post to another page or post on your website through a keyword phrase. You can link these keywords to a post containing more information about the topic, so the reader stays longer and explores the website further. A high number of internal links pointing to a particular page on your site will provide a signal to Google that the page is important, thus boosting your SEO.

Always Stay Up-to-Date

Users always prefer to click on the latest and updated posts. Therefore, by adding new information or a call to action to the headline and updating your posts, you can maximize the potential to get initial backlinks. This can help you get your site on first page spots.

Target

Link Roundups

Link roundups are monthly, weekly or daily summaries of the industry’s best content or latest news useful to readers. These roundups can be a good way to build links and get a decent amount of referral traffic. You can easily find tons of link roundup articles by using search tools on Google. You can also bring your content to the attention of the people who put these link roundups together.

Fix Broken Links

If you’ve deleted a page on your website, any inbound links that are directed to it will now generate a 404 error. You can find these broken links easily by running a link audit with SEO software or tools. Once you have identified any broken links to your site, you can redirect the destination of each broken link to a new, relevant location on your site.

Track Unlinked Mentions and Turn Them into Backlinks

When you or your brand get mentioned on any website that you can monitor via Google Alerts, reach out to the site owners or webmaster to turn it into a backlink to your website.

Participate in Forum Discussions

Join forum communities that are relevant to your business to promote your content. Participating in discussions can often provide you with the opportunity to answer questions and suggest a solution with links to your content.

Online Business Directories

Online directories are typically trusted high-ranking and authoritative sources. They’ll include your company’s details on the web, including name, phone number, website URL, address or zip code. Adding your link to an authoritative site can help you improve your business visibility, reach and search ranking.

Use Testimonial Link Building

If you’ve got partners or loyal customers, you can ask them to write testimonials on their websites along with links back to you. In addition, share a positive experience about using a particular product or service through a testimonial to earn a link back to your site.

Step 4: Start Action Once You’ve got a Link Building Strategy in Place

After finalizing your link building strategy, pull everything together into an action plan, and put it to work. Next, perform an overall assessment of all the inbound links your site has earned.

The page you want to link to on your website will depend on your link building objective. For example, if your primary focus is to sell a product, your homepage could become a linkable asset for people looking for that specific product.

There are various SEO tools available that you can leverage to analyze your link profile. Use them to regularly access the total number of links, their quality, or diversity to make sure any site link to your content is relevant and highly authoritative.

Author

Celene Robert

Celene heads up the marketing at Escalon. Passionate about helping companies grow their business, she spends her days finding new ways to bring essential business services to startups, SMBs, and growth-minded companies. Based in the PNW, she’s the proud owner of 8 pairs of Birkenstocks and a sassy, cuddly cat.

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