Imagine you have a website but no one is visiting it. You know that if this were to continue, your rankings with Google would soon suffer and the company might even take away its ranking privileges as well as remove all those precious traffic numbers from their sheets-not so appetizing right? In order for external sites linking back into ours could help improve SEO rankings through organic search engine results pages (SERPs). So how do we go about making these happen then??
It is clear that you cannot achieve a winning backlink strategy all by yourself. Instead, effective link-building requires networking and cooperation with owners of other relevant websites as well as those whose sites (linking to yours) have relevance, authority or credibility!
Take the mystery out of establishing links and start making it work for you with these inbound strategies to build links. Here, we provide a resource page to help you with your link-building efforts.
What is Link Building?
You can successfully establish backlinks when other websites or blog writers create links from their site to yours. These are called inbound or cross-site publications, and they’re valuable for SEO because it boosts rankings on SERPs . Having a bunch of high ranking posts linked onto your page will give you even more exposure than just having great content alone.
Your website’s SEO shouldn’t be a numbers game. It should focus on quality, not quantity of links that are created from high-quality sources and will last longer in the long run rather than damaging your site with temporary link juice.
The best way to get more links is by employing a strategy that will reward you with helpful outcomes. This means building relationships and engaging in strategic guest blogging for opportunities, which can help boost your site’s rankings!
Why Make Inbound Linking a Priority?
One of the most important aspects to writing great content for search engines is making sure that your words are optimized, keyword rich and include links from other websites. Search engine rankings depend on how many people link to you so it’s only logical then that by creating quality blog posts or webpages with good SEO practices will improve their traffic as well.
When lots of sites are linking to your web pages, it tells search engines one thing—you’ve got something that people need and want to see. So any time a website adds an external link that directs them away from their own site and on toward yours; the algorithm assumes high-quality content with great SEO potential for ranking higher in Google’s results (and other popular platforms like Bing). Building quality backlinks will improve rankings across different industries or niches which means more visibility when prospects do online searches.
What to Include in Your Link-Building Strategy
How do you get people to read your blog? The great thing about blogs is that they’re not just for the content and links! Blog posts give your business a voice, which allows it (in this day in age) to appear more accessible. Your company will feel like an old friend by reading through their posts; clients can relate with what’s going on here – we’ve all been there before at one point or another when something happens outside our control That said, creating high-quality articles isn’t enough anymore: You need strategy behind them too if want results worth writing about.
Rich content that reflects this idea will garner backlinks. These reciprocal links tell search engine crawlers how helpful, relevant and respected your site is!
The strong relationship between link building and public relations is one that you’ll want to take advantage of, especially if your goal is brand awareness.
Monitor the conversations that are happening in your industry. Comment on them and link to relevant information you have for a more credible reputation as an expert within those fields.
It’s a lot easier to get links from sites that already have your back – just ask them nicely and they’ll link out. Avoid doing anything shady or spammy, though! Only go after authority websites with whom you share mutual respect for each other’s work in this industry (and who also happen not too far down the rankings).
Backlinks can be a result of old-school public relations. You might not always take the shortcut; you have to get out and meet people, or at least display your expertise in panels or through networking for backlinking success!
Five Inbound Link Tactics that Work
One of the best tactics for getting links to your site is creating engaging content. When you have an effective content strategy, sites with high domain authority will link back to you.
Social Sharing
Another way to generate backlinks is by sharing relevant links from other blog owners on social media. This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!
You follow them on social media because their content is valuable to your audience. Then, they follow you because you tagged them. Then, they start seeing your posts and well-written blogs and add links to your site, and ta-da! A nice increase in organic traffic is the result.
Think of your favorite cartoon frenemies—that’s the symbiotic relationship between marketers and business owners in the same or similar industries. During the day, you duke it out for customers. Then, when you’re off the clock, you share stories, exchange contact information, and swap a guest post or two.
Keyword Searches: Find the Right Words
Performing a keyword search should be a part of your content strategy. You’ll use them as a link-building tactic, too. Learning the terms people are searching for and then utilizing them will help other brands find you and link to your site.
Build Out Your Website Resources
Any backlink campaign will include the creation of some new web pages. For example, create resource pages for industry jargon, frequently asked questions, or common acronyms relevant to your targeted population. These types of pages will get more backlinks from other sites than content that is strictly self-serving.
Highlight Customer Successes
Who are your most excited customers? You know who we’re talking about—your fans who love everything you do. Write about them with case studies so they can link back to you.
Case studies are longer-form, more in-depth writings that outline the service you provided to a specific client and the results.
This client will likely not pass up the chance to share content about themselves that someone else created, so they’ll link from their site back to yours.
Broken Link Building
All the broken links out there are enough to make your head spin. So, one of the marketing world’s favorite link-building strategies is building broken links. A broken link is one that is no longer functional and results in the “page not found” error message.
It happens when a site owner restructures menus and performs other updates. However, they can only change the internal links—they can’t change where others have backlinked to a broken link.
For you, the strategy here is this:
- Find links on a webpage that result in error messages.
- Contact the website administrator to make them aware.
- Send them a link of yours that offers similar content (and that actually works!).
How do you find these broken backlinks?
You run a search, just like someone from your target audience would do. Find the best results that you would click on from relevant sites and check the links throughout to find ones that no longer function.
Alternately, you can use one of the many tools available online that are broken backlink checkers. For example, here are some instructions from Ahrefs.
It’s OK to start small with your link-building campaign—just get started! First, you’ll need to find the most effective link-building opportunities and strategies that work for you. If you’re just getting started with SEO for your small business, pick one tactic at a time, and then run with it. Once you’ve mastered it, you can start moving on to the next!
