The Art of Sustainable Link Building: How to Build High-Quality Links that Last
Google’s ranking method is a mystery for everyone. It has roughly two hundred ranking factors out of which many are just assumed by the experts in the industry. However, backlinks have always been key considerations in ranking a website. Though, the way backlinks are considered by Google’s algorithm for ranking has gone through significant changes over the years.
For ranking a website on search engine result pages, Google emphasizes the number of quality backlinks and not just any backlink. Backlinks also demonstrate the credibility of your site, especially if higher authority sites are ranking for it. Backlinks are also necessary to competitive search and secure organic traffic from Google. The need for backlinks to rank higher gave rise to the need for an effective link building strategy. An effective link building strategy helps you to gain links organically and hence helps to improve your site’s search engine rankings.
Link building
Link building is a process of obtaining links to a website with an aim to improve its search engine ranking and visibility. It is an important aspect of off-page optimization. When you gain quality links from authority websites, it helps your business or brand to secure better rankings on SERP (search engine results page) rankings. Link building techniques are popularly classified as follows
Black hat: This includes links obtained through unnatural link building techniques.
White hat: These are links obtained by following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Grey hat: These strategies blur the line between white and black hat link building and are a point of debate in the SEO community.
Google and other major search engines perceive backlinks as a vote of confidence vouching for the authority of a website. They indicate the relevance, quality, and authority to the web page. Pages with a high number of relevant backlinks secure high organic search engine rankings.
If you want to rank higher, you need plenty of high-quality backlinks. Backlinks can be generated by the means of helpful content for your website such as knowledge resource, business listings, industry directories, review sites and more. All of these backlinks are worthy of your attention.
Fundamentally, one can earn quality backlinks by following three things:
- Research, innovate and create awesome content
- Boost your content’s visibility
- Building community
Let’s now discuss each of the above points in detail:
A) Research, innovate and create awesome content
Creating helpful and engaging content is the most important link building strategy for any business wishing to grow online. Your content should be useful and valuable to the users, so that your audience appreciates, use, and share it. Keywords should be used strategically in the content and make sure not to overwhelm your content with SEO keywords. There are thousands of ways to create content, so you should not limit yourself to blog posts. Choose the industry relevant topics and use the formats that make the most sense for your audience.
1. Focus on creating unique yet valuable content
One of the easiest ways to build links sustainably is to spend your time to think, research and create unique yet valuable content for the users and promote it. Your content should be a linkable asset. This means the content published by your brand should be unique, valuable and shareable. Some of the examples of linkable content are –long form blog posts, research studies, and interactive tools.
Creating a linkable asset is an effective way to attract high-quality backlinks. Once you have created a linkable asset, promote it through social media, email outreach, and other marketing channels to increase its visibility and attract links. When you create awesome content, people would like to share it. But keep in mind that you need to promote it to make it reach the targeted audience and ultimately increase the reach of your content.
What kind of content will help you earn links organically?
In three words, valuable, unique and engaging content will help you get more links organically. Fortunately, you have a plethora of choices when it comes to creating content to attract backlinks naturally. You can create high quality long post blogs, engaging infographics, and free tools and knowledgeable resources. There is no limit to the type of content that can help you grow organically. Here we have discussed some of the common types of content to aid natural link building:
Infographics
Infographics are a great way to build links to your site. These are graphical representation of images representing data in an appealing way and they can be sometimes powerful enough to go viral.
• Infographics are engaging and visually appealing, which makes them more likely to be shared and linked to.
• They can also be used to present complex information in a simple and easily understandable, which makes them a valuable resource for other websites.
• The more informative, compelling and engaging your infographics are, the more likely they are to be shared.
To reach a wider audience, one should submit infographics to infographic directories and websites
Guest blogging
Guest blogging is another great way to bring your website in front of a new audience and earn backlinks. When you write guest posts for other websites in your niche, it will help you to increase brand awareness and attract new visitors to your own site.
Writing guest posts is a popular way to earn links naturally as you can include links to your site along with the article. It will give you a chance to increase your website’s visibility and authority, as well as drive traffic to your site.
If you have a strong presence in the industry, you may offer guest blogging opportunities to other bloggers. It will help you to earn links naturally and also help you to earn more high-quality links.
Free website tools
Free website tools are a great way to pull visitors to your site. For this, one must think of a tool that will be beneficial to the targeted audience and it will be great if you create a kind of tool that doesn’t currently exist. You should work with a developer to create useful tools for business. Once visitors start coming to your site. It will give you the opportunity to convert them into customers. Some examples of useful website tools include:
• Free SEO audit tools
• Free grammar checker
• Budget calculators.
• Surveys.
• Formulas.
• Blog topic generators.
• Meta title counter tools.
• When you host valuable web tools on a business site for free, it will help to boost your brand awareness. Visitors will notice your brand and they will be more likely to remember your brand when they are looking for products or services in your industry.
• When other websites link to your free tools, they are creating backlinks to your site.
• It will also help to build authority of your brand in the industry. Visitors to your site will notice your efforts of providing valuable resources to the community, and eventually, they will be more likely to trust you.
Case studies
Case studies show how a product or service helps a particular business or organization. They provide valuable insights and can help to build credibility and trust with potential customers. They can be used to showcase the effectiveness of a particular product or service, which can be highly attractive to other businesses or organizations that are considering using that product or service.
Research and reports
Research and reports are also effective ways to aid your organic link building strategies. They provide informative content and data along with valuable insights on the given topics. These are often well researched and provide great value to the users. As research and reports are perceived as an authoritative source of information, they tend to perform well in link earning campaigns. It can help you improve your search engine rankings and drive targeted traffic to your website.
Industry news and analysis
These are also effective for link building. By keeping yourself abreast with the latest development in the industry, you can provide valuable insights and analysis that other websites may be interested in linking to.
Comprehensive guides and how-to-articles
Comprehensive guides and how to articles are also great for link building. They provide in-depth and step-by-step instructions on a particular topic or process. They are typically well-researched and well-written, and they provide value to the reader. Due to their usefulness, these comprehensive guides and how-to-articles are often linked as the resource by the other websites. One can also share them on social media that can help to increase the reach and visibility of the site.
Knowledge resource
Sharing knowledge resources is also a great way to earn links naturally. You can share your expertise with others in the form of e-books, whitepapers and other kinds of valuable content. By offering valuable information or resources to your audience, you can increase the chances that others will link to your website.
Link bait
Link bait is highly linkable and shareable content. It usually includes things like quizzes, articles and other kinds of content. The purpose of link bait is to evoke interest and encourage people to share it across social media channels or link it to their own sites. Some of the common qualities of link bait content are usefulness, timeliness, visuals, or humor. Such content can be controversial, surprising or unique in that it compels readers to share it as it elicits a strong emotional response from readers.
B) Boost your content’s visibility
The next step after creating awesome content consistently is to take steps to boost its visibility. Your content will get noticed and shared only if you promote it appropriately. Think and implement ways to boost your content visibility.
1. Promote your content on various platforms
Promote your content on your website and social media platforms to increase its reach and visibility, which will in turn lead to more links. By sharing your content on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks, you can make your content reach to a larger audience and increase the chance that it will be shared by other users.
- Maximize your social media presence
Maximize your social media presence to connect with your clients as well as other similar brands and businesses in the industry. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter allow people to interact with their authentic brand voice in a more casual environment.
C) Build community
Building community is a way to harness the power of real-world connections to elevate your link building game. Here are some of the ways to harness the power of community building:
1. Podcasts and webinars
Hosting events, podcasts and webinars is an effective way to gain links naturally. When you attend as guest on other’s podcasts or webinars, it will help you to create publicity for your business or company where you can share your knowledge, strategy, succeeds and get opportunity to earn the links to your website
- Networking at industry events
Attending industry events and conferences allows you to meet like-minded people in the industry. These people may also be willing to link to your site from their own sites or blogs. It is recommended to seek opportunities to present at workshops or panels, participate in discussions, and engage with attendees to connect better with them. When you align your brand with relevant events, you gain exposure to a targeted audience and potentially earn backlinks from event organizers or sponsors.
- Building relationships with journalists
Getting familiar with journalists in the industry can also contribute to your link building efforts. Journalists are mostly looking for new and interesting stories to write about, and they may be willing to link to your website if you provide them with valuable information or insights.
- Traditional marketing materials
Traditional marketing materials like brochures and business cards can also be used effectively to aid your link building efforts. It is advised to include your URL prominently on such marketing material, so people can find your online presence and link back to you.
- Participating in community forums
Participating in community forums can also be a great way to build relationships and earn backlinks. By providing valuable information and insights to other forum members, you can establish yourself as an expert in your field and attract links to your website.
- Building relationships with influencers
Building relationships with influencers and industry experts is nowadays popularly used to aid link building strategy. Influencers often have huge following and high credibility in the industry. This in turn helps your content to reach a wider audience.
Participate in brand partnerships. Another effective way to build links is to participate in brand partnerships and collaborate with the like-minded brands who are likely to have a similar target audience.
- Maintain and build relationships
Once you have built relationships with people and brands, work on ways to organically grow your relationships with them. Don’t be pushy and don’t bother them with constant emails, asks, and direct messages. Be an asset for them. Share stellar resources with them, comment on their blog and social media posts, link to their site in your content, and consistently share their content with your audience.
- Online mentions
If your business has any kind of visibility online mentions can be a great source of quality links. Finding online mentions is one of the undervalue strategy for quality link building anytime someone mentions your brand online, you should want to know about it, not just for getting links but also for getting an insight into the online conversation surrounding your business.
Once you have found the mention about your business, you can simply reach to the site owners and ask them if they would care for linking back. For this, it is advised to set alert for mentions of your brands, business, product etc. via Google alerts and politely outreach the websites mentioning you.
- Diversified approach
Adopt a diversified approach for effective link building. It is important to understand that your customers need multiple engagement with your brands. Understanding which channels your customers are likely to use is the key in creating a diverse approach to your link building strategy.
Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is critical to an effective link building strategy. Thus, it is important to conduct niche research. This will include the competition, keywords, linkable assets, audience, offerings, and more. If your competitors are beating you, you should be checking their link sources to know how they are being linked to.
Determining how your competitors are securing quality links is a great way to guide your own link building strategy. Apart from it, this will allow you to focus on the same quality links as secured by your competitors.
If your website hosts visually captivating images, monitor if the other websites use them. This gives you a stellar opportunity to get a link by simply outreaching and asking if they provide an attribution link back to your site.
Some important things to keep in mind:
• Before you start putting your best foot forward for link building, make sure your website is informative, well designed, easy to navigate and mobile friendly. All these qualities make your website linkable. It is important for your site to be linkable before you start creating link building strategy and work upon it.
• Focus on gaining relevant and quality backlinks and not just any backlink. One must emphasize targeting websites that are relevant to your industry and that have a high domain authority.
• It takes patience and perseverance to earn backlinks and you cannot expect to see results overnight. Just keep up the good work and your efforts will be eventually fruitful.
Final thoughts
Building high quality links is crucial to elevate your SEO game. To build your links sustainably, one should focus on creating helpful and engaging content, promote the content on relevant platforms and build community to harness the power of real-world connections. When requesting backlinks, it is recommended to personalize your message, make it easy to link and follow up in a timely manner. Always emphasize quality over quantity, build links naturally, and monitor your backlinks.
