Links are an extremely component in any SEO strategy. SEO link building strategies involve those activities which utilize both internal and external links to various online resources.
Links help generate web traffic to your website and increase its online visibility among other benefits of link building.
SEO Link Building Strategies
- Know Your Target Audience
- Compile List of Relevant Websites of Your Target Audience
- Write High-Quality Content
- Match Content to Websites
- Reach Out to Relevant Websites
- Utilize Social Media
In this post, I’ll describe the different strategies you can use for a successful link building strategy for SEO purposes.
Know Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience enables you to create content that is both relevant and informative to them.
Come up with a persona of your ideal client consisting of their preferences and what they’re looking for.
Compile List of Relevant Websites of Your Target Audience
Research and compile a list of websites and online resources with your target audience in mind. These are the websites with the most potential of helping you reach your target audience.
Write high-quality content
Websites will link to your website if your content is of high quality.
Make sure your content is not only of high quality, but it’s relevant, timely and adds value to the audience you’re aspiring to convert them to your readers.
Match Content to Websites
After creating a high-quality blog post, you can now dive into the list you had created earlier at Step 2 and identify those websites whose content resonates with your content as they are most likely to want to link to your website.
Reach Out To Relevant Websites
Reach out to the websites that you have identified within your niche with content that is most likely to be useful to them .i.e. tools, infographics, blog posts etc
You should reach out to either of these two groups:
- Those who’ve mentioned your target keyword in their articles
- Those who’ve linked to similar articles on the topic
Want to know the best part?
The visitors originating from those websites to your website will already be interested in your content hence the reason for clicking the link to come to your website. This means that the chances of sale conversions and recurring visits from these readers will be much higher.
Utilize Social Media
Being your content is of high quality and well structured, you will easily be able to reach new audiences and get shared a loft by readers.
Send tweets about your blog post to specific people whom you think would be interested in your content and forget about Facebook, why?
Well, Facebook is a great way of getting exposure to your article.
Create short posts about your content, attach the link and share the post within the relevant Facebook groups you’re already a member of.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is among the oldest and proved link building strategies used for SEO purposes.
How does it work?
You look for a website that would benefit from your content and request them if you would write for them and allow you to credit the article to you by inserting your author’s bio containing your contact details.
Broken Link Building
It doesn’t get any more interesting than this. So, how does broken link building really work?
Broken link building involves at least three steps:
- Research and find a broken link on a website with relevant content to yours
- Create content that is similar to the broken resource
- Reach out to anyone linking to the dead resource and request them to instead link to your working resource
Unlinked Mentions
You will occasionally come across people who have mentioned your product, service or website without linking to you.
The good thing with such mentions is that you’re already halfway there towards convincing them to insert a link to your website.
There are a couple of ways you would use to find unlinked mentions such as using Ahref’s content Explorer. This tool searches over a billion web pages for any mentions or phrases that you provide it with.
Paid Promotions
Majority of social media platforms and search engines provide businesses with the opportunity to advertise and promote linkable assets which would include: e-courses, e-books, blog posts etc.
These platforms that you can use to promote your linkable assets include Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Twitter, Pinterest ads, Google AdWords among others.
Steal Links from Low-Quality Web Pages
There are many low-quality web pages that got backlinks from numerous sources.
So, how do you go about it?
Their webpage contents may cover only 10 pages with a couple of images and yours may contain over 100 pages with high-quality images for the same topic niche.
You would be asking yourself: Why would someone link to a 10-page article instead of yours?
It is because they probably aren’t aware of the existence of better content: yours. Therefore you should introduce your content and request them to link to yours instead.
Repurpose Your Content
You may have very high-quality content that you would want to share to specific platforms but can’t be submitted in its current state.
This is where content repurposing and syndication comes here.
Embark on structuring your content in the relevant format, would be an infographic, video etc then submit that repurposed content to the appropriate websites.
Community Sites
Majority of people focus on building a link to and from high authority editorial websites, which is a good thing but it isn’t enough.
You should span out and market your content on community platforms such as Community forums, Message Boards, Reddit, Quora etc. You can achieve this by contributing to members posts and leaving helpful information.
Final Thoughts
A successful SEO link building strategy should be well grounded on activities that are all geared towards attracting your target audience to your website.
Not only will you succeed in bringing people to your website, but Google will reward you by ranking your content highly on its Google SERPs when a user searches a search term relevant to your content.