How to Do Link Building Correctly

When you have a website, whether it’s informational or it’s used as e-commerce to promote a product or service, it might be really hard to make yourself visible all over the internet for potential customers and consumers. Aside from having a strong social media strategy and a solid SEO working on your site and being constantly updated, one of the most crucial parts of promoting your brand online is link building.

If you feel like a complete stranger to this concept and don’t really know where to begin, check out this article to clear your mind about link building and effective strategies to implement it.

What is Link Building?

First off, we need to understand what link building is. For tech-savvy people and beginners alike, link building is the process in which you get other websites to link back to your own website. This is usually by the means of a DoFollow link, but it can also include NoFollow links and even simple mentions.

This is quite important because, when you’re mentioned and linked by other sites, your reputation grows in the eyes of Google, thus you also grow in the eyes of the millions of users of search engines around the world. The purpose of link building is to drive referral traffic to your site and increase your authority.

Can Your Site Rank without Backlinks?

It can be said by digital marketing specialists, there’s no way your website can rank without it having some inbound links (also known as backlinks). Creating backlinks is important because it’s actually Google’s #1 ranking factor, links are the most basic structure that helps build the world wide web and they have the ability to “pass over” power from one website to another.

Having backlinks is the best way to point out readers to more great and relevant content, building trust in them. In fact, Google has confirmed that the algorithm finds it “unnatural” to see a website without backlinks. After all, that’s exactly how this search tool helps people get to your website in the first place!

The Best Link Building Strategies

Now that we’ve stated the importance of creating a solid backlink strategy for your website and your brand or product, you also need to know some of the most trusted methods to get started. While there are countless ways to do this, we’ll be focusing on the most common, easiest, and legitimate ways to do this.

1. Do Guest Blogging

We’ll start with one of the oldest and most trusted tactics to do link building: guest blogging. You simply write an article for another website that relates to your niche. You make it the right length and with great quality and they’ll publish it. You then link to yourself from that article. The trick to doing this right is to look for sites that you see are really related to your niche and seem relevant to a wide audience; the truth is most sites are open to taking guest posts.

2. Work on Your Unlinked Mentions

When your website or brand reaches certain fame, it’s normal that you’ll often get mentioned without there being a link in the name of the brand. When you see this, we could say that you have half the work done, because the other website included you in the content because they thought your brand was relevant. The only thing you need to do is reach out and convince them to turn their mention into a link to your site.

3. Repurpose Content

Sometimes you work on some amazing content and there are so many places where you can share it as it is, that’s why we recommend you repurpose your content to fit many formats. In this way, you could have a guest blog and you can turn it into an infographic, a video, and even a photo gallery. Then you’ll have more opportunities to pitch it to different platforms that’ll have original content, all linking back to the same place!

4. Good Old Fashioned Outreach

You can work very hard on creating engaging content or having the perfect product, but you can’t expect people to get to know about it magically if you don’t knock on some doors. You should reach out to startups, blogs, entrepreneurs, and even digital magazines to let them know about your product, service, or content. Search for people who have mentioned your niche in their articles or who’ve linked to similar content like yours in the past. If they like your content they’ll surely end up creating a backlink for you to help their own traffic organically.

5. Do Link Building Through Community Sites

Most people make the mistake of only focusing on the big sharks, the highest quality links. This is not ideal because you should also see the bigger picture and find several sources such as forums and message boards such as Reddit and Quora. This way you’re marketing your website organically while getting some free backlinks. Don’t stress out because not all backlinks need to be editorial, from high DR websites and DoFollow.

6. Buy More Backlinks Instead of Bulk

There are very different opinions when it comes to the quality and quantity of backlinks. Some experts say that you don’t need to have lots of backlinks, as long as the ones you have come from high authority sites. There are others who like to concentrate on getting big amounts of backlinks even if they’re of lesser quality. While we can agree that a good combination of both of these characteristics is important, we’d like to focus on the way you purchase your backlinks.

We recommend buying several backlinks from different sites instead of making bulk purchases, this way Google identifies it as a more natural action and growth for your account. You should also stay away from scheduled purchases and posting since random dates are also more natural to the eyes of Google.

7. How to Optimize Anchor Text

Anchor text is visible and refers to the clickable texts used to link one web page to another. For Google, anchor text is a strong indicator to determine the relevance of your site and each individual page. If you want to optimize your anchor text, start by using it only ONCE on your page and make sure the main anchor text is the same as the Meta Title to reinforce relevance in Google’s eyes. If your keyword tools throw a complicated anchor text try to break it into simpler terms that can be included organically into the content of your page. Lastly, remember that you’re writing for “normal” people who don’t Google things quite literally. With this in mind, you might want to try longer phrases that try to tackle people’s most common concerns.

Add Image Anchors

You shouldn’t only be careful about the text that’s included both in the texts of your site and the metadata, you should always consider every call piece of information you can take advantage of. One of the places people tend to forget when working their SEO is a website’s image ALTs. Because Google takes an image’s ALT text as the anchor text of any image, this is another opportunity for you to rank your website higher.

Work with More Complex Keywords as Anchor text

When it comes to keywords, a keyword anchor becomes the most important piece of information which will help people fully recognize your brand. A good recommendation is to diversify your anchor text by adding your brand name to the main keyword, such as BiggieTips Life Tips

Think of Complex Keywords Instead of Going for the Obvious Ones

It is important that you learn to do some small keyword variations in order to reach bigger audiences that can relate to your topic of interest. To create more complex words you can think of the main keyword then try to answer all the main questions people might have around it. If you don’t know where to start thinking of the 5 W’s: who, what, why, where, and how. People usually Google things as questions, so you can take advantage of that by looking for complex keywords such as “Why is my cat sleeping more than usual?” Instead of “Cat sleeps a lot”.

Focus on Keywords with Transactional Intent

According to digital marketing experts, when you use keywords with a transactional intent you’re more likely to improve your sales. A transactional intent keyword is a word that includes terms with commercial use such as “buy”, “discount”, “deals”, “free shipping” and related terms.

Now you know the strongest tactics to start working on your link-building strategy. If you start now and try all of the tips in this list, after a few weeks you will start seeing your ranking scale up and your traffic increase.

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