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Improving search engine results page rankings requires sophisticated SEO practices, including link building – the process of acquiring inbound links or attracting other websites to link to your content. When done correctly, it is a powerful growth strategy that can increase website visibility and authority.
When websites link to your content, they drive traffic your way, which is of course crucial for discoverability and exposure, especially when a website is newly created. Perhaps more importantly, the quality and quantity of backlinks are among Google’s most important ranking factors and determine a website’s domain authority. Simply put, a website will never perform well when it comes to SEO if its managers don’t put effort into successful link building.
Here are some effective techniques to make this important task easier.
1. Pitch on relevant and authoritative websites
Contacting or asking website owners (in your niche or industry) to link to your website is one of the most important link building tactics. To be effective, it is important to write an engaging and compelling pitch that expresses the usefulness, depth and uniqueness of your content – both relevant and informative, and not something that can be easily created by an inexperienced blog writer .
Make your outreach as personalized yet professional as possible and avoid using templates. This helps to effectively convey a desire to improve not only your link profile but also the value you provide to your website visitors.
Email is typically the preferred outreach channel for link building, but you can also consider social media platforms, especially if the recipient is active on these channels.
Related: 2 things you need to convince Google that you are an expert in your niche and increase traffic
2. Broken link building
Many websites have external “broken” or “dead” links that redirect users to inaccessible or non-existent pages. Such links can affect a website’s UX and SEO performance, and website owners are usually looking for ways to combat them.
By building broken links, you can reach websites in the hopes that they will consider your content as a “replacement” for their dead links. This is similar to the outreach technique above (except your request focuses on providing an alternative external link), so the same tips apply – including highlighting the originality, accuracy and usefulness of new content.
3. Produce link-worthy content
An organic way to increase your inbound links is to create high-quality content. If other websites find your site helpful, factual, and original, they are more likely to link to related pages, even without you contacting them. So what makes content link-worthy? Value. When authors, bloggers, and journalists see valuable information or opinions in content, they are likely to include the relevant links in their work.
Examples of such content:
• Step-by-step instructions: Detailed instructions (with illustrations or videos) that solve problems with specific and valuable insights.
• Professional Interviews: Opinions obtained from industry leaders can provide credible material worth citing.
• Data analysis: Gaining insights from data using statistical tools – potentially valuable to other content creators.
• Survey: In-the-moment analysis: keeping your finger on the public’s pulse on a topic.
• Case studies: Reports of real experiences – whether from individuals or organizations – that can provide a nuanced analysis of different problems/situations.
• Studies: This can be original experimental or descriptive research that aims to gain new insights into a topic.
• Visual content: Including graphs, charts, infographics and images.
• Online resources and tools: Digital tools that help people complete tasks more easily. For example, a website’s tax calculator can be used as an inbound link for content about tax preparation.
Related: The step-by-step guide to creating and publishing high-quality content
4. Benchmarking competitors’ links
To see how you can improve your link profile, compare it to others in your industry. Look at their pages, see which ones generate the most backlinks, and then guess why. (For example, a competitor might achieve good results based on well-structured guides or data-driven insight posts.)
Additionally, looking at competitors’ link profiles will likely show you potential link sources that are relevant to your content. You may discover websites, blogs or directories that are interested in linking to content like yours and can then reach out to them.
5. Guest blogging
This process involves sharing content to other websites in the hopes of getting links back to your site and offers a number of benefits. First, guest blogging reliably leads to audience and traffic growth. Secondly, it is a cost-effective link building solution. When you write guest blogs, include links in the text that point to your own content – it’s easy and at no financial cost.
However, be strategic when choosing which locations to target. They must be credible and have high domain authority to ensure that your website actually benefits.
Related: 4 Ways Guest Blogging Quickly Grows Your Blog Audience
6. Look for unlinked mentions
Other websites may mention your website or digital business without link to it. While this may improve your visibility, it is also beneficial to request actual backlinks from website owners.
7. Apply the “skyscraper technique”.
This term and strategy refers to outperforming widely linked competitor content by creating a more comprehensive and valuable alternative. Once you’ve published your enhanced version, reach out to sites that link to your competitors’ content and ask them to link to your enhanced version instead.
When managed effectively, this not only leads to new inbound links, but also traffic from competitors as you rise in the search results. However, for this technique to work, it is important to carefully consider how you can tangibly exceed the quality of a competitor’s content – such as having a more authoritative author, updating facts and data, adding new viewpoints or insights, incorporating visual elements, and /or the inclusion of visual elements and/or by creating new content The whole thing is simply easier to read.
Related: 5 Ways to Steal Your Competitors’ Web Traffic
Successful link building requires intelligently targeting relevant websites, creating link magnet content, evaluating competitors’ link profiles, and other tactics. All of this will serve the goal of improving the website user experience and providing real added value to readers. Once you’ve achieved this, you’ll have a robust link profile that drives SEO success.