11 Tried and Tested Link Building Strategies
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MarCom Guys have compiled a guide of successful link building strategies that help you make the most of your campaign. It is important that you diversify your tactics to utilize the power of link building completely.
Google still considers links as the key ranking factor, but it is not as simple to build quality links today as it was in the past. It is essential to make certain that high-quality links are coming from different sources. Having a plan in place will help you build quality and worthy links.
In this article, we consider an imaginary new website and plan a link building campaign using different strategies because the approach is different for new and aged sites.
Anatomy of a Good Backlink
There are many factors that determine a good backlink for your website. For example, a ‘Swiss property broker’ is going to need different backlinks when compared to a ‘laptop affiliate website.’ The effects of each link will also differ, like creating local citations at the swiss website will improve maps listing but would not do any good to the affiliate website.
A good backlink is the one that sends out a positive signal to the page it is linking. Keep these factors in mind:
- A good backlink has lower outbound links on a page
- A good backlink will be within the content. A footer or sidebar backlinks do not send strong signals
- A good backlink will be either from a high relevant page or high authority page or even both
Foundation Links
The link building campaign starts off by getting simple links that are essential before jumping to the core ranking strategies. It is crucial to diversify your link profile to keep getting backlinks to your website.
Let’s delve deep into the simple strategies to undertake before the core ones.
1. Citations
The most overstated link in the game is a citation. They are a strong signal for all local websites and works well for national e-commerce trust signals as well.
Manual citations do the trick and also limiting the number to a few is important. This does not mean that one cannot do 50 or 100 quality citations but now days numbers don’t matter, so ticking off these numbers over a course of a few months is suggested.
2. Q&A Websites
One of the most popular platforms that still work for acquiring niche links is Q&A websites. Also, you can get highly targeted traffic from such sites like Quora
3. Social Media
Though this is not a link signal but a trust signal and we recommend getting active traffic from Facebook and Twitter ads. You may reap the benefits of running the ads in the long term by giving organic signals that Google picks up.
Other Recommended Link Building Strategies
1. Guest Posts
Guest posts are one of the most popular and frequently used methods of getting a link from an authoritative domain with your preferred anchor text. No doubt it is amongst the popular methods but also a ‘pure’ way to build links because you are giving a quality piece of content for the link. This means:
- The domain will have syndication and attract its own links
- You can get you content on an authoritative domain, and,
- You can create a link with your preferred anchor text
Remember, not each blog that we come across allows us to use the anchor text we prefer. Every site has its own terms and conditions, so follow every point of it to get approved for the guest post.
2. Blog Commenting
Another way of building a backlink to your website is blog commenting, and we definitely implement this as a part of our link building campaigns. Blog commenting on niche blogs manually is not time-consuming, also free, and provides you immense value.
Blog comment links are Nofollow but essential to maintain the Nofollow/Dofollow balance and trust signals that have an impact on web rankings.
Ensure to put a comment on the blogs that have previous comments (of course not spam) so that you know it is an active blog. Creating a genuine comment is very important and try to get the response of the author. This way, you have a better chance of approving the comment.
3. Broken Link Building
Broken link building is an essential authority to your web page when carried out in the right way. It involves searching for relevant pages to your website and finding those potential broken links that you can use to send traffic to your website.
This method of linking benefits to both parties. It saves work for that website as they do not have to create a new content piece for that page and you get a link plus the traffic. The link can be very effective to your website if it comes from an authoritative page.
Use tools like Ahrefs and mass export all competitor pages with good authority score and look through for any 404 pages that you may utilize.
4. Web 2.0
This is another link building strategy that plays a huge role in our campaign. It is basically a website allowing you to build another website under its name like Tumblr etc.
These can create significant link profiles that will pass on the valuable authority to your website when you get a link from it.
5. Images
Image Link Building is another effective way to encourage webmasters to link to your web page. You can post the graphical content to several websites that are valued, and it will interest the webmasters to pass the link juice as well as traffic to your website.
Infographic is the most popular way to attract interest in your content and can lead you to another link building strategy if you offer a free guide useful to the readers.
When done often, this method can promote your brand well. It is a method that takes a wide and worthy steep turn in our link building efforts.
Also, you can build links from those websites who have used your images but not linked back to you. We found this helpful video that would help you learn more about image link building.
6. Blogger Outreach
With blogger outreach, we reach out to the influencers and make them write about your product or service. This means we give them free access to the product or service you want them to review.
These influencers have a huge audience and this is why they have a high-traffic website as well. Your link on the blog can help you get an authoritative link plus high traffic, increasing your conversions as well.
7. Unlinked Brand Mentions
There is a chance that bloggers or other informative articles have already mentioned about you but forgot to link back to your website. It is a huge opportunity to grab.
We use Ahrefs to find unlink brand mentions for our client websites and request them to give the mention a valid link. Most of them will approve your request.
8. Internal Links
This is one of the most overlooked methods of link building but not at MarCom Guys. It is a powerful technique to get your website more traffic and increase sales.
Have a look at the video by ahrefs on creating quick backlinks:
Types of Pages You Want to Rank
Different pages require different links. We always do a page by page analysis and ensure that the cheaper links are pointing to the support content while the expensive and stronger links are pointing towards the money pages.
Let’s see how you can build links via both these pages and its difference.
1. Supporting Content
It is the relevant content on your site that has internal links with particular anchor texts linking back to the money page. Such pages often add valuable and converting traffic to your website, but when created after complete research.
What makes us different is that we do not create supporting content just to support the money pages but also to rank themselves. The team carries out extensive keyword research and builds content supporting the main pages. This helps us get the best results and also makes the most of the funds utilized.
When it comes to linking via supporting pages, the low keyword density keywords get links from sites having DA 10 and above. The medium to high competition keywords get links from the website having more than 25 domain authority.
2. Money Pages
The main page and competitor analysis are the pillars of building links directly to your money pages.
This does not require you to have backlinks from 90+ domain authority websites or quality citations. What matters is the link profile of your competitor and the campaign you need to outdo them.
Building Dofollow links from sites having a DA of 30+ and organic traffic of 1000 visitors a month can be valuable. Also, considering any steep drops or increases on your website traffic can be positive or negative signals to consider.
Types of Links We Use
It is very important to build high-quality links on your money pages because a single toxic link can throw your valuable campaign into the trash. There is no particular technique that we consider but a variety of many like guest posts, broken link building, niche edits, etc.
The two things that we focus on is that the website we link on is good, and the page has quality and relevant content. Let us explain what makes a good website and relevant page according to us:
1. Anatomy of a Good Website
To be clear, metrics don’t matter a lot, we consider them only as a base. MarCom Guys team specializes in manually reviewing the website, its traffic, link profile, domain age, etc.
We check if the website has not been hit by any google algorithmic change or a penalty in the last one year. We recommend:
- Checking the organic traffic on SEMRush and Ahrefs.
- Checking the link profile via the same tools above and also an overview to ensure the page is not spam.
- Running a Google site operator to ensure the pages are indexed properly. Also, if you spot an AC repair page on a sports blog, do not post anything on it.
- Checking the domain age with the help of whois.com to ensure it is not rebuilt just for stuffing guest posts.
If you want to go further deep into the steps, you can check out this video on ‘How to find hidden PBN links?’
2. Anatomy of a Relevant Page
You are wrong if you think you need an exact topic to rank on the search engines. Google takes up a group of keywords and very well understands that these are related to each other.
For instance, if your page is about ‘camera review’ you don’t necessarily require a link from a page about cameras, but anything related to photography is also relevant.
Explaining Tier 1 Strategy
Let’s take an imaginary new affiliate web page of ‘best headphones’. You have no links pointing to that web page, and the position was #81. To support the money page, you build two supporting content pages of 1000 words each.
The average domain rating in the SERP is in the 70s, but there are websites having DR 30 ranking in the top 3 positions. Consider your website DR to be 40 at that time. What would we do in this case?
Firstly, we would create a link building campaign for the client, which would run for 3 months and assign $5000 to get the page to the top position. Along with off-page SEO, we would also do on-page SEO by updating the article and creating more support content.
We would then choose to build 20 guest posts on relevant sites having DR50+ that links directly to the main page and around 35 pillow links from social media, Q&A sites, etc.
We would not just build links to the main page but also support content. We would also do 3 guest posts on relevant websites with DR30+ pointing each at the supporting content. All these links will be created over 90 days of the campaign which numbers to about 1 diverse link a day.
Link Velocity
Link velocity is the number and the rate of referring domains towards a website over a period of time. We consider the link velocity as the number of links we build at a site every week or month. The tenure can be anything.
It is important to set up a link velocity number to ensure not to mess up while undertaking the link building strategies. ‘Less is More’ also applies in this case.
One of the positive things about our site’s link profile is that we have a quite high link velocity since the time we launched the website.
Building links for an aged site can be done with a high velocity when compared to a brand new website. Also, if you are starting out a campaign on aged sites, you need to get a thorough bad link analysis before the campaign.
We suggest building around 50 Nofollow links and 10 Dofollow links every month at new websites that naturally index. On the other hand, for sites more than 2 years old (aged sites), we suggest building around 60 Nofollow links and 25 Dofollow referring links.
Also, you can build multiple links point at one page. Many websites have several links pointing at one page, which has worked in their favor.
Please note that this is the guidance from our side depending on our testing and research we do on the different project.
How Much Time Does It Take for Backlinks to Show Up?
You may expect a change in your website ranking and traffic from day 1 of the link building campaign. It takes some time to see the effect of the campaign on the website, but no one can determine the exact time.
We have noticed results within 90 days of the campaign for most of our clients after securing quality back link.
We believe there are some factors that affect the rankings on search engine like:
1. What Page Are You Trying to Rank?
The page you are trying to rank affects the search engine ranking to a large extent. It depends on how many competitors the page has. We have seen local search terms ranking faster than global queries.
2. Is Your Website New?
Your website needs to age before you see the traction. This is because google finds fresh sites less reputable than established ones so it could take months to see the change.
3. How Much Content is on the Website?
Google loves content but not any content. Quality content on your website will take you faster to the top position. It is all about user experience and thus, product as informative content as possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is link building still relevant to SEO 2019?
Yes, link building is still alive in 2019. The fact is, it is impossible to rank your website without links because they are Google’s most important ranking factor.
No one can ignore its importance in SEO because they are also Google’s Reputation Management Tool.
2. What is outreach link building?
Outreach is one of the successful methods of link building. It involves reaching out to the other relevant websites for a link back to your website with your preferred anchor text.
3. What are the three types of links?
There are three types of links built on a web page, and those are:
- A relative link which points to the related location in the current page
- An absolute link which includes the entire path to the file
- A site root-relative link which points to the related location in the root directory
4. Why are backlinks important for SEO?
Backlinks are crucial for SEO because Google gives credit to the sites that have a sufficient number of quality backlinks. It also considers them more relevant than other website results for a search query.
These link building strategies can help you get an edge over your competitors, and we are ready to help you. If you have any questions, shoot them in the comments below or email us.
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