Content marketing is the backbone of most businesses today, especially online. However, the idea of linking content with valuable resources- is gaining its popularity in this modern era.
Whether you are looking for a reciprocal link, forum signature linking, blog comment linking, directory linking, social bookmarking or even image linking- not all of them can ascertain equal results for your website.
Considering link building to be one of the most important aspects of SEO, you may not want to spoil the Google rankings and other search engine rankings for your website.
This is why I have decided to come up with this blog that will highlight six tactics that every website owner should consider for a successful link building strategy.
Things to keep in mind while performing your link building strategy.
1. Focus on high-authoritative sites
Importance
Prior to Google Penguin update, many website owners and marketing specialists included black-hat SEO techniques that helped them artificially improve the rankings for their web pages by manipulating the relevance of links pointing their resources.
Following this update, Google search algorithm can now identify links that are unnatural, artificial, manipulative or deceptive and penalize them by decreasing rankings of websites that violate Google Webmaster Guidelines.
What you can do!
Including high-authoritative sites in your link building strategy, means you are connecting with sites that are already ranking high in SERPs and are trusted by large audiences who regularly visit reputed online platforms.
Sites like .edu, .gov and .org are highly ranked by Google and other popular search engines. To manually find such sites online, you can follow the steps below:
In the case of finding sites that will have your keyword in their title
Intitle: keyword: website
In the case of finding sites that will have your keyword in their URLs
Inurl: keyword: website
This way make a list of sites you think you are able to contribute content and can help their audiences.
Offering a scholarship for educational sites is highly appreciated as it directly benefits the students and won’t mind providing a backlink for your website.
Additionally, you can approach sites that already have a high DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) either as a guest blogger, and even contribute content to dead links for already high ranking sites.
You can also target a number of articles with deadlines diverting to Wikipedia page and dead external links.
How can you check DA and PA ranking for websites?
Open Site Explorer by Moz will allow you know the Domain Authority and Page Authority a relevant website that you wish to earn backlinks.
You can also use Robin Gupta’s bulk domain authority checker tool for finding DA and PA of multiple sites in one go.
2. Track people mentioning your site
Importance
With the increasing popularity of your website, you receive good word of mouth from your customers and offer a loyalty reward to make them feel special.
But, what actions do you take when a brand, a blogger, or other educational/resource site mentions about your brand, product, or company?
Most of you would only consider this as an opportunity to share their good reviews on your website and social media platforms. But, let me tell you web mentions are giving an added advantage to website owners to earn backlinks too.
What you can do!
The changes of receiving backlinks from the audience who mentions you in their content increases, as they have already mentioned you once and should not mind linking your brand again.
You can also take an advantage of tracking your competitor’s web mentions to access potential audiences whom you can personally approach them via emails for promoting your content and requesting backlinks.
How can you track your web mentions?
Google alerts can be an ideal option for you to track mentions as per your relevant keywords. Google will crawl across web pages, e-zines, articles, blogs, discussions, forums and other resources that match your mentioned keyword and send you email alerts as soon as new results are found.
3. Link Bait
Importance
This can be one of the most potential link building strategy, as it will allow you to focus on a particular set of audiences that you are ready to offer relevant content and request for backlinks in return.
This strategy designed to appeal to the ego of your potential audience and may sound negative, however, it’s true there are audiences who provide link backs only if they are told to do so.
What you can do!
Email marketing campaigns can help you perform this link building tactic for improved results.
For example, if you have a make-up and grooming website, you may create a blog post about 10 popular make-up artists, or 10 women make-up specialists, or even 10 popular make-up brands and send personalized email to each of them.
Being popular name in the industry they would surely have a high ranking website for which you can request them to link back. However, the quality of your content should encourage them to do so.
How to present a successful content?
Instead of only focusing on a simple blog layout, you can present such type of content via an infographic, a video, or even using Microsoft power point presentation to make it more attractive and encouraging for them to like as well as provide a link back to your website.
4. Identifying bad links
Importance
Google Webmaster penalizes bad links as they are performed in a manipulative way, either via paid service like online directories, automated services like automated links, or even spammy comments to generate backlinks.
However, many SEO experts and online marketers are taking an advantage of fixing those bad links in return for a backlink.
What you can do:
Step 1: Identify bad links across the web and select the ones that match your interest.
Step 2: Contact the webmaster and notify about the broken link via email.
Step 3: Suggest the webmaster replace the broken link with your website content. (Nobody will like a 404 page on their website as it stops the flow of link equity throughout the site, hence, chances of them linking to your website will boost your link building strategy).
Step 4: Continue the above three steps for an improved number of backlinks for your website.
How to find broken links?
Google Analytics is helping SEO experts to find broken links with an easy-to-use interface, however, automated tools like W3C Link checker and Dead link checker can help you identify 404 pages that you can target for your link building opportunities.
5. SEO oriented anchor text
Importance
Post Google Penguin update- the search engine bot focuses more on the LSI (Latin semantic indexing) keywords instead of providing importance to the same keyword used multiple times throughout the article or blog post.
LSI being a part of Anchor text directly impacts the search engine ranking for your website. This is performed by Google algorithm to ensure the page linked to your website is significant or else penalizes the webmaster for over-optimization or even spam.
What you can do!
Lating semantic keywords are basically the synonyms that relate your brand, product or service.
For example, Google search engine discovers the word “cloud,” now how would it differentiate cloud is service, the cloud is a brand, or the cloud is related to the atmosphere.
This is where LSI keywords (like dry, moist or even rainy) will make it easy for the search engine to identify the quality of your anchor text link (clickable text in a hyperlink) and judge the backlink relevancy for your website.
How to find LSI keywords?
One way is to find synonyms or phrases relevant to your target keywords in Google.
For example, we will use the target keyword as “Analytics.”
You’ll obtain relevant keyword prompts which you adopt in your anchor link building strategy. And, by replacing the words in your key phrases, or synonyms means you are using LSI.
Alternatively, you can adopt LSI Graph/LSI Keyword Generator tool to look up for Latent Semantic Indexing keywords for you.
Easy-to-use, this tool is free to use and can generate multiple keywords with just a click of the mouse.
6. Understanding Google’s Quality Criteria
Considering Google Penguin update announced back in 2012, any black-hat SEO technique or manipulative link building technique will be penalized.
Therefore, you may want to first understand Google’s link schemes to eliminate the risks of performing negative link building strategy.
What you can do!
Instead of focusing on artificial link building strategies that include directory submission, blog commenting, forum posting and even purchasing backlinks, why not adopt an organic method of link building strategy for your online business?
How can you perform organic link building strategy?
Perform White Hat SEO
White hat SEO refers to the usage of creating original and quality content that majorly focuses on human audience’s benefits and not majorly targeting the search engines.
Google-friendly keywords
Use WordStream’s Free Keyword Discovery tool to find out the most effective keywords and blend them with your content. This will benefit the webmaster improve their website page ranking and won’t mind linking to your site.
Resource building
You can blog about the latest news and updates matching your niche that will automatically encourage relevant audiences to link your resource pages to their website.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites are now no-follow sites, however, with the popularity of your bookmarked content, you can also expect the audience with similar interest to link back to you on their own.
Guest blogging/E-zine
One of the most time-taking yet effective methods for link building strategy is to write for someone else and get a backlink usually in the author bio section of the website page. Considering point number one (Focus on high-authoritative sites), you can expect improved ranking for your website too.
Allow easy linking
You may want to eliminate the use of codes (backend) for linking to your website article/pages.
With social media allowing people to easily like and share posts, infusing social networking icons will make it easy for potential audiences to post a link to your content on their favorite social networking platforms.
Wrapping up
So, the above are 6 important tactics without which your link building strategy is incomplete.
Feel free to adopt them one-by-one and experience the most effective link building strategy for your online business and websites.
What tactic do you use for your link building?
Godspeed ☺
About the Author – Anil Parmar is the co-founder of Glorywebs, an organic SEO company aiming to help clients with services like web design, mobile apps development, digital marketing and more. Mobile apps, themes & WordPress plugins we develop have a common # 1 goal: Keep it as simple as possible for end users. Find him on Twitter @abparmar99 & say Hi!