The following post is a guest contribution by Usman Ali with FME Dubai, the author’s views may not be the same as our own.
If the content is king, backlinks are queen in the world of SEO. Search engines rely heavily on content and backlinks to decide the fate of a website or page in terms of rankings. In this article, we’ll discuss the most effective link building techniques to apply right now.
Link building is an integral part of SEO, the importance of which has only increased in recent years. It increases a website’s authority and signals to Google that the website is a popular and trustworthy one. It will, in turn, increase your individual keywords rankings and organic and referral traffic.
Link building has changed drastically over the years. With the introduction of penguin and EAT, Google now favors quality links only and devalues bad links.
This is to ensure that users get the most relevant and reliable sources against their search queries. For you to achieve and sustain better rankings, it is not only advisable but mandatory to use white hat link building techniques.
Here, we are going to share 4 effective link building techniques that are relevant now and beyond. These techniques are 100% white hat, meaning they are Google-friendly and will never get you penalized.
1. Quality Content
All good links come naturally. For this to occur, there must be a reason for other websites to link back to your website. The #1 thing that’s going to get you natural backlinks is quality content.
If your content is well researched, covers every area of a topic, uses statistics to back your arguments, real-life expertise, and examples to support your claims, people will link to it.
When you are writing content, think this way. “How to solve a problem for somebody and how to get somebody to link back to me.” Content should be created to solve the user’s problems and give them what they are looking for. People prefer to link to content that they find useful and Google is smart enough to understand and value user’s preferences.
The way to create great content is to first choose the topic related to your business. Google common questions related to the topic to see what type of content is ranking.
Use Quora to see what questions people are asking related to the topic. BuzzSomo is a good tool for discovering content ideas. Once you have come up with a good catchy title, do thorough research and find all the relevant information that you may want to include in the content.
Don’t just make assumptions, rather back up your arguments with statistics from authentic sources or industry experts. Assist your readers by citing helpful resources throughout the content. Try to cover every area of the topic and don’t worry if your content becomes lengthy.
2. Content Marketing
Build social media and email list audiences because they will be the first to consume your content. Let’s say you put out your content and you are able to get 20 shares from people on Twitter and Facebook. There will be other people that see your content and the engaged audiences that are sharing your content will continue to amplify it.
People will like your content, leave comments on it and share it. The small percentage of your audience that has their own websites won’t hesitate to link back to you.
Content marketing can be done in multiple forms all of which hold great link building opportunities. Infographics, expert roundups, interviews, and press releases are some common content marketing strategies.
Each of these strategies is a field of its own and should be used for its maximum potential. The key is to stay relevant and share content that triggers people to link back to it.
3. Guest Posting
Guest posting is one of the best ways to get quality backlinks. It is time-consuming but definitely worth the time and effort. Guest posting means sharing content on another website with the goal to increase exposure and traffic for your own site by posting a backlink to your website. It’s a win-win situation because the guest posting site gets quality content and you get a quality backlink. So let’s see how to go about guest posting.
Guest posting has the following 3 steps.
- Find relevant websites to pitch guest post ideas to
- Find topics to write about
- Write content and get it approved/published on their blog
You can find guest posting sites related to your topic/business by typing any of the following phrases in Google.
keyword “submit a guest post”
keyword “guest post”
keyword “guest post by”
keyword “become a contributor”
Replace the keyword with your specific keyword. This will display all the sites that accept guest posts in your niche. Your job is to filter the sites that have good domain authority and traffic. This is important because you don’t want to write for websites that get no traffic. Create a list of websites that you want to pitch to.
The next step is to find the relevant topics that you want to write about. You can use Google or BuzzSomo to come up with a few content ideas. Now you can outreach to the sites one by one with a generic email and pitch the content ideas.
Pitch content ideas according to the site’s target audience which may be different. Don’t expect an immediate and 100% response as some will respond later and some won’t respond altogether.
However, the response ratio can be improved by the brevity of the email and the relevancy and the quality of the content ideas. Some sites allow authors to send the content directly without pitching ideas.
The third step is the most time consuming and that is to wait until one of the ideas is approved and then to write the content. Most sites allow you to post your website’s link or brand name in the author bio section at the end of the article.
4. Outreach
This link building technique is often overlooked probably because it is a hard and time-consuming manual process. Direct link outreach is an authentic way to get backlinks. Let me get you straight to the process.
For example, you have a product page called “Magento 2 Edit Order” for which you are looking to get backlinks. If you type the keyword in Google, you will see a lot of articles, guides, tutorials about this product.
Getting backlinks from these sites should be your top priority because they are highly relevant and already ranking. The way to do this is to outreach them via email, phone, or chat, introduce your product and request them to suggest your product by giving a link to it. This is a sample of the outreach email which is open to customization.
Outreach fundamentally involves an exchange of value. As you are attempting to earn a link from someone directly, offer them something in return. If you are simply asking for something, your success rate is going to be very low compared to those who do provide value in return. In this case, you may want to link back to their website from one of your blog posts.
Wrapping Up
Link building is hard particularly when you do it using white hat techniques. Since this is one of the top 3 ranking factors, you have no other way but to acquire quality backlinks to your site if you want to be at the top. The above link building techniques have worked for all websites and they will work for you too.
About the author
Usman Ali is a Digital Marketing Expert with good experience in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization. He is currently working in FME Dubai – a leading Web development company in Dubai. He is passionate about Digital Marketing and loves to write on various topics and express his thoughts in the form of write-ups. You can find him on LinkedIn.
