Whether you’re executing SEO strategies on your own or you’ve outsourced SEO services, you need to include link building in your campaigns. That way, search engines like Google and Bing can easily locate your website and give it a proper ranking on its results pages.
Now there are a lot of ways to build links, most of which revolve around creating quality content. For your convenience, we listed those that still work even after years of being tried and tested.
Guest Blogging
This link building tactic involves creating a blog post for another website. Now while most webmasters allow guest authors, there are still a couple of things you need to keep in mind. One, you should only collaborate with websites that have similar niches as you. That means you’re offering the same products and services. Two, their website must have a high ranking and reputation. Otherwise, your guest posting efforts won’t boost your site’s own SEO ratings.
Using the Content Explorer in Ahrefs is a good way to find guest blogging opportunities. All you need to do is follow these steps:
- Search for a nice, relevant topic in the search bar.
- Choose “In title” from the dropdown beside the search bar.
- Click on the “websites” tab after you hit enter.
Doing these will enable the Content Explorer to search through its database and find websites that accept guest posts for you.
Broken Link Building
Meanwhile, broken link building involves looking for a broken link from any relevant website, producing content that’s similar to the dead resource, then asking websites link to the broken resource to link to your content instead. While this might seem like hard work at first glance, it’s actually a great way to find many websites to link to. For instance, if the dead link is used by 40 high-DR websites, then you can potentially have all of them in one fell swoop.
There are several ways to pull off broken link building. The simplest among these is through Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Simply get the dead link’s URL and paste in on the Site Explorer’s search bar. This will show you all the websites that link to that page, allowing you to reach out to them in turn.
Skyscraper Technique
On the other hand, the skyscraper technique focuses on creating better content rather than fixing broken links. The process goes like this:
- Find an article relevant to your website. Make sure the content you choose has lots of backlinks.
- Create a similar piece that’s better than the original post.
- Ask webmasters linking to the original article to link to your better content instead.
- Find the Opportunity using google search term, Submit a guest post Technology, Write for us Business.
As with guest blogging, the quickest way to find opportunities for skyscraping is by using Content Explorer. Again, you’ll have to type the topic you want to write about on the search bar, filter the results based on how many referring domains the topic has, and choose from the list.
Finding Unlinked Mentions
It’s quite common for websites to mention a brand or business without linking to them. This offers a great opportunity if you’re trying to boost your own website’s SEO rankings. Since they’ve already mentioned you in their articles, you’re basically halfway towards getting a backlink. All you need to do is ask them to insert your link to your brand.
Yet again, you can rely on Content Explorer to search for unlinked mentions. With almost a billion web pages listed on its database, it can easily help you find any website (with decent rankings and traffic) that’s been mentioning your brand.
Content Repurposing
Not every link building strategy has to rely on outreach. You can get quality backlinks by repurposing a previous article, too! In case you don’t know what that is, content repurposing involves changing the article’s format. For example, if you’ve recently made a blog post about deactivating LinkedIn accounts and it’s not getting as many views as you’re hoping for, then you can turn it into a video or infographic. Then you can submit it to appropriate websites like Youtube, Visual.ly, and so forth.
Take note that backlinks from repurposed content generally aren’t as strong as your typical ones. Still, it’s better than nothing. Plus, it will help you draw more people’s attention since not everyone loves reading blogs.
Manual Outreach
Lastly, you can rely on good old fashioned manual outreach to get new quality backlinks. That means going back to basics and reaching out to similarly-niched websites to get them to work with you.
But here’s the deal: these days you can also build backlinks without content. Yes, quality content is still crucial in SEO. But if you have a noteworthy product or service to offer, then you can leverage that instead. And once again, you can rely on Ahrefs (as well as other tools) to search for people to collaborate with.
Final Thoughts
With more than half of web traffic coming from Google, using the right link building tactics will help your website go a long way. So better adopt the strategies mentioned above.
