The Best Practices for Link Building


You often hear marketers say that link building is crucial for SEO success, but you never really hear them tell you why. One good reason is based on a recent study made by industry experts; they found out that the biggest contributor to search engine results page ranking is building links. This just means that a high number of backlinks would ultimately make you rank high in results pages.



In a nutshell, link building helps you get more traffic to your website. It's a holistic approach to search engine optimization (SEO) and growth. However, this strategy isn't as simple as you think. It's not as easy as putting your link everywhere you can. Here is a list of link building best practices that can help you get the best out of this strategy.

Guest Post

This strategy may be one of the best out there as it does not require too much effort and it's basically a free promotion. Guest posting or blogging is a method of leveraging a website's traffic to get referrals. There are a lot of sites that accept guest posts, but before submitting anything you have to make sure of the following:

       The target blog or website is related to your niche.
       The content you’ll submit isn't created just to promote you or your business.
       The content is of high quality and has relevance to the website's audience.

Guest posting is an opportunity for you to make your brand known to a broader audience. Exposure like this will help make you an industry expert and even a thought leader. Avoid leveraging on websites with no authority because it's not worth it. If you're having trouble finding places to guest post, there are third-party services such as NO BS Agency to help you in your outreach.

Create Shareable Content

Shareable content is one of the best ways to get a natural link. A natural link is a kind of backlink that is earned and is not in any way sponsored, asked for, or paid for. It's basically giving credit where it is due. Getting such kind of links is extremely helpful in making your website rank high in search engine results pages.  The first step in making this happen is by
creating shareable content such as the following:

  1. Listicles – List articles are readworthy, and they make any content worth sharing. Our brain is wired to love order in things, and listicles give us that satisfaction. Would you rather read an article with the title "Reasons You Need an Insurance Right Now" or "7 Reasons You Need an Insurance Right Now"?

  1. Infographics – We're living in a fast-paced world, and sometimes a visual content is more appealing than a long-winded article.  Creating an infographic will make your content easy to share and help generate links in the process. Just be sure people are linking back to you when they use your infographics.

  1. Case studies – Have you noticed that a lot of articles use research and case studies to back up their claim. Creating a well-researched case study will help you earn your links fast and make you an authority. Make sure to use factual data and information.

  1. Round-up articles – This type of articles is much like a listicle, but the aim here is different as you want to mention personalities or businesses in the hope that they share your article with their audience. Just be sure that when you mention an influencer or an industry leader, your article should be of high quality.  An even bolder move is letting them know you've mentioned them in your article.

Create high-quality content that will push people to share and link to your work on their blog or social media pages. Your aim should always be to get as many natural links as you can.

Use the Broken Links Method

This method of link building has been tested by time. The reason this strategy is still alive is that it's simple enough to do. Even beginners will find that this strategy can work in their favor if done correctly.

This is how you prospect for broken links:

       Find an authority blog within your niche.
       Look for broken links in their content.
       Once you see a broken link, send a message to the webmaster or the blogger and inform them of the link problem.
       Pitch your blog to be used in place of the broken link.

Just be sure to avoid being too aggressive when pitching your blog. More than anything else, you just want to raise enough awareness so that in the future they can link to your website.

Do It Consistently

Link building is a long game, and you can't expect overnight results with it. This is one of the reasons you need to be consistent about it. There are other ways that you can promote your blogs to earn that link credit without really making too much of an effort. See the following:



  1. Blog comments – Do you follow other blogs in your niche? Have you tried posting comments? Doing so will help people in your niche to notice you and hopefully link back to you in the future. Make sure to provide relevant and related comments – nothing that's too promotional.

  2. Participate in crowdsourced articles – It'll only take a few minutes of your time, but the rewards can be remarkable. The question they'll ask is probably something you already know, so providing your insights is going to be easy.

  1. Put your link in your email signature – If you're someone who consistently sends out emails to various people, why not include your link in your email signature? While you can't expect to generate thousands of clicks from it, the effort is practically zero and you still get results.

  1. Build relationships – More than anything else, the links you get are made by people. Go to meetups and share other people's stuff. Let them know that they have good content and build a relationship with them. You'll be surprised to see that they’re more likely to return the favor by linking to your website.

Conclusion

If you want to have a high search engine ranking, focus on building links right now. The more links you get, the more your ranking score goes up. As you can see, these are all just simple steps for link building. They're actionable, and they're proven to work no matter what algorithm changes happen.

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