To this day, if you ask any marketer, the hardest part of any proper search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is still link building. Despite how challenging it is, it is still the single most significant factor that determines the ranking of your pages on search engine results pages (SERPs). Backlinks are simply too important a part of the ecosystem and to ignore them is to handicap the ranking of your pages. If you want to build the links to your page to improve your SEO, you need to have some solid link building strategies in place. Here are five of the very best that have proven themselves time and again.
1. If They’ve Done It Before, They’re Likely to Do It Again
At this point in the growth of your site, many of your pages already have a healthy number of backlinks. Even if that number of backlinks isn’t healthy, it still exists. The important question here is “who is linking to you?” You are likely to have a few sites in mind that have linked back to you. In fact, it is likely that these sites have linked to you a few times and you have developed a great relationship with them that mutually benefits both of you. The trick is to use that relationship to get even more links from them. Get a list of all the sites that regularly link to you, and then explore opportunities to expand the number of links so you can get even more backlinks from them, and then contact them and ask for those links. You’re more likely to get a positive reply from these sites that you already have a working relationship with than you are from a fresh site.
2. Hijack a Strategy From Your Competition
Another strategy involves looking at your competitors. Chances are, no matter what niche your site operates in, that your competitors are actively trying out different link building strategies and have already built a ton of links as a result. This strategy involves finding these competitors, researching them to find what kinds of link building strategies they use, and then replicating those methods for your own site. How do they do that?
One method is guest posting. Look at all the guest posts they do and find out which sites they are writing guest posts for to approach the same sites for your own guest posts. You can even buy guest posts from them to improve your chances of getting the opportunity. You can also look for the recurring backlink sources to know which sites they have already developed a great working relationship with. Approaching the same sites might lead to more backlinks for you as well.
3. Broken Link Building
Look for sites with broken links, such as those that lead nowhere. Approach the site owner and ask them to replace the link with your own link and then link them to relevant articles on your own site that would fit the links. If those articles do not exist, then create them.
4. Convert Homepage Links
Quite often, most of the backlinks you have, link to your homepage. However, that isn’t where most of your content is. You would probably like more links to link to the deep content in your site. In that case, you can analyze your links to find the ones that link back to your homepage, find the ones that contextually make more sense if redirected to some deep article within your site, and then contact the site masters to change them.
5. Cater to Different Learners to Get Backlinks From High Authority Pages
Most of the information on the internet doesn’t cater to all learning methods. There are those who learn best by text, those who learn best visually, those who prefer audio and so on. You can search for high authority sites in your niche, convert their best articles into different media versions, including audio, video, infographics and so on, and then give it away for free and ask them to link back to you. You’re likely to get many high authority backlinks this way.
