Link Building

Building Links the Right Way

Building authoritative or high-quality links to your website – or should we say earning them – is an essential aspect of search engine optimization (SEO). According to Google, the best way to build links is to focus on creating valuable content that naturally attracts links from reputable sources. Here are some industry-leading strategies for acquiring high-quality links that can have an impact and move the needle in the right direction:

Create High-Quality Content: Content that is informative, engaging, compelling, educational, and valuable tends to attract natural links from other websites. Focus on creating content that provides unique insights, solves problems, or offers new perspectives in your industry or field of expertise.

Guest Blogging: Writing guest posts for reputable websites in your niche can help you build links back to your site. However, it’s essential to ensure that the content you provide is high-quality and relevant to the audience of the website you’re contributing to.

Earn Editorial Links: Focus on creating content that naturally attracts editorial links from reputable websites, such as news articles, industry publications, or educational institutions. This is key and highly effective.

Citations and Directories: Ensure that your website is listed accurately in local directories and citation sources. This can help improve your website’s visibility in local search results and attract relevant links from local businesses and organizations. Also, many industries feature high quality directories where members can showcase their work, address, and contact information.

Collaborate with Influencers: Partnering with influencers or industry experts to create content, such as web or podcast interviews, round-up posts, or co-authored articles, can help you gain exposure and attract links from their followers. This approach may require more time and energy but can really pay off if a piece of content goes viral or even semi-viral.

Participate in Online Communities: Engage in online communities, forums, and social media platforms where your target audience hangs out. Provide helpful insights, answer questions, and share your content when relevant, which can lead to natural link opportunities. But remember, don’t be cheesy or annoying or self-serving in your communications with this community. Be a human. Do unto others. That sort of approach will win folks over time and time again.

Create Infographics and Visual Content: Visual content such as infographics tends to perform well online and are often shared by other websites. Make sure to include embeddable code with your infographic so that others can easily link back to your site when they use it.

Broken Link Building: Identify broken links on other websites within your industry and reach out to the site owners to suggest replacing them with links to relevant content on your site.

Create Linkable Assets: Develop linkable assets such as whitepapers, case studies, research reports, articles, or interactive tools that other websites in your industry would find valuable and would be willing to link to. It’s often a lot of work to develop these assets but the upside can be considerable.

Monitor Your Backlink Profile: Regularly monitor your website’s backlink profile using tools like Google Search Console or third-party SEO tools. You may want to consider disavowing any low-quality or spammy links that could potentially harm your website’s reputation, but it is not necessary in most cases. Ultimately, it really just depends on the number of toxic backlinks that are pointing at your domain and your appetite for the unknown as rankings may not recover even after a significant link disavowal.

Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Building and earning high-quality links is a long-term process that requires patience, persistence, and a commitment to creating valuable content for your audience whether or not your rankings are where you want them to be. Avoid shortcuts like buying links or engaging in link schemes, as these tactics can result in penalties from Google and seriously harm your website’s SEO performance in the long run.