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Climbing the search engine results page rankings requires sophisticated SEO practices, including link building, the process of acquiring inbound links or attracting other websites to link to your content. When done correctly, it’s a powerful growth strategy that can increase the visibility and authority of your web pages.
When sites link to your content, they drive traffic to you, which is, of course, essential for discoverability and exposure, especially if a site was created recently. Perhaps more importantly, the quality and quantity of backlinks are among Google’s most important ranking factors, as well as determinants of a site’s domain authority. Simply put, a site will never perform well from an SEO perspective unless its managers are committed to successful link building.
Here are some effective techniques that will take advantage of this vital task.
1. Submit to relevant, authoritative websites
Raising awareness or asking website owners (in your niche or industry) to link to your website is a major link building tactic. To be effective, it’s important to create a compelling and convincing presentation that includes how useful, in-depth, and unique your content is, both relevant and informative, and not something that can easily be produced by a novice blog writer.
As much as possible, make your contact personal but professional and avoid using templates. This helps effectively convey the desire to improve not only your link profile but also the value you offer site visitors.
Email is usually the go-to outreach channel for link building, but you can also consider social media platforms, especially if the recipient is active on these channels.
Related: 2 things you need to convince Google that you are an expert in your niche and attract traffic
2. Building broken links
Many websites have “broken” or “dead” external links that direct users to inaccessible or non-existent pages. Such links can harm a site’s UX and SEO performance, and website owners are typically looking for ways to address them.
By building broken links, you can reach out to websites in the hope that they will consider your content as a “replacement” for their broken links. This is similar to the outreach technique above (except that your request is focused on providing an alternative external link), so the same tips apply, including highlighting originality, accuracy and usefulness of the new contents.
3. Produce “link-worthy” content.
An organic way to boost your inbound links is to create quality content. When other websites find your site useful, factual, and original, they are more likely to link to your associated pages, even without you contacting them. So, what makes content worth linking to? Value. If writers, bloggers, and journalists see useful information or opinions in your content, they will likely include relevant links in their work.
Examples of such content:
• Step by step guides: In-depth instructional primers (with illustrations or videos) that solve problems with specific, valuable tips.
• Professional interviews: Insights gained from industry leaders can provide credible material worth referring to.
• Data analysis: Extract insights from data using statistical tools, potentially valuable to other content creators.
• Surveys: In-the-moment analysis: Taking the pulse of the public on an issue.
• Case studies: Accounts of real experiences, from individuals or organizations, that can provide a nuanced analysis of various problems/situations.
• Research studies: This can be original experimental or descriptive research that aims to generate new findings on a topic.
• Visual content: Including graphs, diagrams, infographics and images.
• Online resources and tools: Digital tools that people can use to perform tasks more easily. For example, a website’s tax calculator can be used as an inbound link through content that discusses tax preparation.
Related: The step-by-step guide to creating and publishing quality content
4. Benchmarking your competitors’ links
To see how you can improve your link profile, compare it to others in your industry. Take a look at their pages, see which ones generate the most backlinks, then guess why. (For example, a competitor might perform well with well-structured how-to guides or in-depth, data-driven posts.)
Additionally, “taking a look” at your competitors’ link profiles will likely present potential link sources relevant to your content. You may discover websites, blogs or directories that are interested in linking to content like yours and you can then approach them.
5. Guest blog
This process involves sharing content for other websites in hopes of getting links to your site and offers numerous benefits. First, guest blogging reliably results in audience and traffic growth. Secondly, it is a cost-effective link building solution. As you write guest blogs, include links within the text that point to your content – easily and at no monetary cost.
Be strategic, however, in choosing which sites to approach; they must be credible and have high domain authority to ensure that your site actually benefits from them.
Related: 4 Ways Guest Blogging Quickly Grows Your Blog Audience
6. Look for unrelated mentions
Other websites may mention your website or digital business without connecting to it. While this can potentially improve your visibility, it’s also helpful to request actual backlinks from site owners.
7. Apply the “skyscraper technique”
This term and strategy refers to outperforming your competitors’ widely linked content by producing a more complete and valuable alternative. After you publish your improved version, approach websites that link to your competitors’ content and request that they link to your improved version instead.
If managed effectively, the result will not only be new inbound links, but also attract traffic from your competitors as you climb the search results. To make this technique work, however, it is important to carefully evaluate how to significantly surpass the quality of a competitor’s content, perhaps by relying on a more authoritative author, updating facts and data, adding new points of view or insights, incorporating visual elements and/or making everything simply easier to read.
Related: 5 ways to steal your competition’s web traffic
Successful link building involves intelligently reaching out to relevant websites, producing content that attracts links, evaluating your competitors’ link profiles, and other tactics. It will all fuel the goal of improving the website user experience and offering real value to readers. Once achieved, you will have a solid link profile that will drive SEO success.