Link building is an essential part of growing any website. The amount of backlinks is also one of the biggest factors that affect your website ranking.
Link building is exactly what it sounds like: the process of acquiring links that point to your site from other websites.
Let’s start by discussing some benefits of link building.
A Strong Backlink Profile Can Do Wonders for Your Ranking
First of all, by building links you’re gaining much-needed exposure. For example, if you do guest posting (which we will discuss a little further along), you’re putting your content in front of new audiences.
When a site links to you, it directs some of its own traffic your way. Links from quality resources also serve as an indicator for Google that your content is relevant and high-quality.
But what matters even more than the amount of backlinks, is the amount of referring domains. You will get much more juice out of 10 links from 10 different domains than from 10 links from a single site.
Keep in mind that not all links will bring you the same kind of value. Naturally, a link from a large resource like Forbes isn’t comparable to a link from a tiny blog that has literally just started out on the Internet.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build links with smaller resources though, as a healthy backlink profile features connections with a wide spectrum of sites.
How to Choose Link Building Prospects
As I said, it’s healthy for a site to have links from various resources. But the best link building opportunities would be businesses that are relevant to your niche, have an established audience and are reachable with a single email.
Also, influencers and bloggers related to your niche make for pretty good link building prospects.
The most important thing to consider when choosing link building prospects is relevance. After all, it wouldn’t make sense to build links from an online pet toy store when you’re selling jet engines.
The Best Way of Getting the Strongest Links
There is a number of ways of getting backlinks, and some of them you can do on your own without going through the whole outreach thing, but the strongest, highest-authority links require it.
I mentioned guest posting before. It’s arguably the best and most efficient way of acquiring the juiciest links.
Again, it is exactly what it sounds like: you write a post for someone, they publish it on their site and in return you get a link back to your own one, usually in your author bio.
The great thing about guest posting is that most websites accept guest posts since there is literally no reason to turn down a solid, relevant piece of content that will engage with their audience and entertain it.
The not-so-great thing about it is that it can be quite time-consuming to write individual articles per each link built.
Some Other Ways of Building Links
Remember: in order to get links you need to have content that is worth linking to. But I’m sure that won’t be a problem for you.
Let’s look at some other ways of building links.
Broken Link Building and Taking Links From Inferior Content
These two are really quite similar. Broken link building is done by seeking out broken or removed links that used to point to content similar to yours. But who said the link has to be broken to get it for yourself?
If you find links to articles on the same topics as yours but worse, you can also contact the website’s owner and offer your own instead. If it’s longer, more informative and brings more value than the one currently linked to, you have all the chances of snatching that link for yourself.
To find such opportunities, you’re going to need the backlink checker from Respona, otherwise Ahrefs would be a pretty good choice.
Partnerships and Sponsorship
Partnerships are also the way to go. Establish relationships with other businesses in your niche and work on joint projects together. Organising events or simply writing content for one another works great too.
Stay away from “link-for-link” offers that will periodically show up in your inbox though, as Google is against it.
Offering your products to influencers for them to review it is a pretty good strategy too. Some influencers also seek out sponsors, and if you have the money to become one of them, you’re sure to get some extra promotions.
Note that sponsorships are not the same as buying links and you should never straight-up pay for links as it goes against Google’s guidelines.
Repurpose Your Content and Participate in Forums, Comments, etc.
As for some ways of link building that don’t require outreach, you can turn your best-performing articles into videos and upload them to YouTube (slotting the link back to the original in the description), for example, make infographics and so on.
Answering peoples questions about niche-specific things on places like Quora, Reddit, and other message boards/forums while plugging your content or products can also get you links. Keep in mind most of them will have the no-follow attribute though and won’t affect your rankings at all. They will still generate traffic though.
Keep Building More Links to Boost the Growth of Your Site
A steady increase in the number of backlinks is a pretty good indication of your success online. And the more links you get, the bigger the traffic boost. And the more traffic you get, the faster you grow, which opens up opportunities for even more backlinks.
So, don’t leave the job for tomorrow, grab some awesome link building tools to streamline the process and start improving your website rankings right now.