17 Great Link Building Strategies Loved by Search Engines

In this article, we’ll discuss the 17 main link building strategies, and how you can use them to your advantage! This article will help you out by going over the best link building strategies on the market right now. We’ll also give you some actionable tips that will help you implement these strategies into your own work.

Link building with Google’s regular updates and scrutiny has become a sophisticated and strategy-driven undertaking, therefore, the process of building high-quality links which lasts for long and helps in nourishing other inter-links via a seamless stitch has to evolve.

If you are getting started with finding link building strategies this article will definitely help you.

What is Link Building Strategies?

Link building strategies are a way to increase the number of links pointing to your website from other websites. This can be done by targeting and reaching out to people who have websites that might be interested in linking to yours.

These strategies vary widely depending on the purpose of your website and what kind of content it provides. The most common types of link building are:

Guest posting – writing an article for another site, usually in exchange for a link back to your site.

Why are Link Building Strategies Important?

Link building strategies are important for SEO because they help websites gain a higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). When Google, or any other search engine, crawls the web, it looks for links that point to your website.

The more links you have, with more authority and relevancy, the more Google will consider your site relevant and valuable. In turn, this can help boost your site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

Popular Link Building Strategies

The process of building links begins before you start your SEO strategy, you need to plan who your target audience is and who you plan to target for links. It takes some really good eye to find the right and effective link building strategies and with the years of experience, this enables us to share with you what works best and is capable of moving the needle in the SERPs.

1. Copy Competitor Links

Copying competitor backlinks is one of the easiest and oldest link building strategies of all.

My favorite link-building method is stealing links from competitors. I use Linkody to monitor all our competitors and getting backlinks from there is super easy:

When I am searching for new blog submission opportunities – I search for “blogs” among all our competitors’ backlinks and everywhere where our competitors have been featured, there are high chances also Linkody could be featured.

If I need someone to write a review about Linkody – I search for “reviews” or “testimonials” and immediately have the complete list of sites that do reviews for backlink tracking tools.

When I have written a new article and I need sites to link with this content – I just go through all our competitor landing pages and check who also has the same article, then I find all the sites that link to their content and contact them.

This basically means that monitoring competitors’ backlinks is extremely important and automatically creates amazing link-building opportunities.

2. Write Guest Posts

Guest post submission is the most popular out of all the link building strategies.

The most scale-able is guest posts. We personalize each email we send and match our outreach as much as we to the guidelines etc. We have found that it’s not as effective as it used to be with more and more websites not accepting guest posts due to the volume of spam.

We often get automated responses specifically saying they aren’t accepting guest posts because it’s too hard to manage. When we’re really stuck we try the skyscraper but there are too many variables that can go wrong, planning and research are the keys but keeping everyone’s spirits high during the process is more hassle than it’s worth.

How to do it:

1. Only write posts on sites related to your niche.
2. Check the reputation and credibility of each site you are planning to write a guest post for.
3. Write the guest post for the people and try to connect with them as this exactly what the website owner needs for their blog.
4. The guest post should have a strong headling and body.
5. Add links to your own site using the anchor text of the keyword you want to rank.
6. Share the guest post with your audience via social media in order to grow the impact of the post.
7. Keep a check on the guest posts and check how impactful was your guest post.
8. Do not stop writing guest posts, you need to write posts for a lot of websites in order to outrank your competition and build your reputation.

The dead man technique is probably the most powerful way we create backlinks but hard to find suitable deadlinks but works a treat when all the factors happen at the right time.

3. Answer Public Questions

Answering public questions is aimed at helping your audience.

Using Answer the Public to find issues/ questions and then answering them and seeding the question and answer back into community forums and via other website owners as guest posts.

I completely agree with Rebecca, by using Answer the Public service as a contributor you are actually helping out a lot of people interested in your niche and branding yourself / company into a success. This strategy is perfect to grow your website’s click-through rate (CTR) as well.

How to do it:

1. Visit answerthepublic.com
2. Enter your keyword
3. Export the results in an excel file
4. Filter out the list of questions in the results from the rest of the results
5. Start creating posts for every question and answer the questions in detail. You will have a lot of posts on your blog/website which is also a good thing as all these questions are closely connected with your industry and are searched by a lot of people
6. Share all your answers on your social media accounts and also check sites like Quora, Linkedin, Twitter, and Forums to see if anyone has posted the same question, it is likely someone has, if yes, then simply give them the link of your website which has that answer
7. It is likely others who are writing about your niche will link to your site in order to provide answers to questions to their own audience and this is a win-win for both partiesl

Helpful Tips:

Answering multiple industry questions makes you stand out of the competition and showcase yourself as an industry leader, which would make your competitors link to your website and also share your links with their own audience in the long run.

4. Submit Press Releases

A good link building strategy option for branding your business.

This is probably going to surprise you but my answer is Press Releases, say what? you have to be kidding, right?

No, not kidding and what I mean by press releases is the Good old-fashioned kind coupled together with a press launch and event (depending on the industry).

I launched a major luxury chocolate brand site in the UK. The press event for this evolved around a cooking competition with the brand. Users submitted their recipes and images – all of which were published on the website and a panel of celebrity chefs and master chocolatiers decided on finalists – now for the main event.

The main event was streamed live across a lot of social channels, the celebrity chefs promoted via their channels and of course the participants. Press were handed goodie bags as well as champagne, canapés during the event, and of course promotion on their channels.

The last release like this was for a wedding venue that had 23 articles (links) written about the venue in different online magazines which resulted in all of the summer dates being booked up for that year.

5. Respond to HARO Queries

Link building strategies that let you connect with niche-specific journalists.

We’ve been rooting for HARO (Help a Reporter Out) since we initially began The Content Factory in 2010, and there are a few reasons why we’re such energetic evangelists for the brand. To begin with and most self-evident, the service is free. Second, HARO opens the doors to media coverage that you may not believe is conceivable. It’s likewise one of the least demanding approaches to reliably get high quality, in-content backlinks to your site, which can recognizably enhance your SEO.

As an organization, we have a rundown of HARO success stories that runs out the door and around the block — or near it, in any event. We’ve utilized HARO to get hundreds (!!!) of media positions for our customers throughout the years, my most loved being a Huffington Post article about Etta Britt, which transformed into a 3+ minute fragment on the Today Show, and high profile gigs with living legends like Delbert McClinton.

How to do it:

1. Visit HARO’s website and sign up as a source
2. Select your categories
3. Start getting journalist questions on your email every day
4. Answer the reporter’s questions using around 300+ words
5. When writing the answer try to provide strong and relevant content that adds value to the press release and also helps the reporter
6. Add your link to the answer, however, ensure it is entered naturally or you can also add your details in the end as an author
7. Don’t stop by writing one answer instead write as many answers as you can and visit HARO’s site on a regular basis in order to find new inquiries by reporter’s

Helpful Tips:

• Create something cool/interesting/useful.
• Find blogs that have an audience who would be interested in that thing.
• Show it to them and ask them to share it with their audience (human to human).
• Follow up with them until they see it.

If the reporter likes your answer, it will be published on their platform and other media partner channels may also pick it up.

6. Outreach with External Linking

One of the most difficult link building strategies.

This strategy is just as simple as it sounds and here is how it works,

First, you need to write an interesting article and add external links to it, once done write an email to the webmasters of that particular site letting them know that you loved their work and linked to a specific page from their website. Now, ask them how they feel about the article and if they would like to link to it.

Most likely they will say yes and you will end up having a high-quality backlink.

How to do it:

1. Check the domain authority of the external site and the web page you are linking to and also check for their social media shares. Only add external links of the sites that have a strong authority and social media strength.
2. Keep the contact details of the site owners you want to link to handy prior you post the article with their links on it or you may end up adding a link of a site and not be able to connect with them for perks.
3. Send an email to them that shows that you appreciate them for their contribution and linked to their web page in your post and ask them if they could link back and also share your post with their audience.
4. If you do not get a reply in a week, send follow up email and wait for another 7 days and if still nothing wait for another day and send the last email and wait for 10 days. If still they do not reply back simply look for a new opportunity.

Helpful Tips:

You really need to be careful while using this strategy as search engines like Google do not like too many link exchange tracks, therefore, make sure you only use this strategy to link to high authority sites only, in order to get that link juice and boost your SEO.

Local Link Building Strategies

Local backlinks help the local business websites rank higher in the Google search results, adding relevancy and authority to the targeted webpages. 

7. Contribute to Industry Journals

As for link building strategies, industry journal submission is the most powerful one.

I find that contributing to industry journals is a great way to get authoritative links. You need to position yourself as an industry expert in order to be welcomed to post articles. This usually means choosing a specific niche and providing an immense amount of value to your prospective clients over a long period of time.

How to do it:

1. Search Google with the keywords “[Your niche] + Journals” or “[Keyword] + Journals”.
2. Read their author guidelines carefully and ensure you follow and abide by it. Normally, you will find author guidelines, article guidelines and submitting guidelines that you need to go through before posting.
3. Remember these are journals are followed by experts thus you cannot just submit random articles and expect great results, you need to generate some awesome content and submit it to the journal.
4. Your article has to be original and not spun or duplicate, doing this may get you banned and also create a bad reputation in the industry.
5. Every article you submit is first reviewed by experts and only once it is approved it’s posted and made available to the audience and followers of the journal.
6. Read sample articles, generally, you will sample articles in the submission guidelines section of the journal, go through it and understand what is expected of your article.
7. Use references, stats, notes, tables, charts in your article to showcase that your article was created after a lot of research and is relevant.

Helpful Tips:

These industry publications are well-read by your target audience. They’ll position you as an expert. Best of all, they almost always link back to your website in your author’s biography, which will boost your search engine rankings!

8. Create Citations

I’ve always found the best link building strategy to be what I call “branding”. With branding, you are using free online sources to help spread the word about your site. For example things like making sure you have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc… page and linking back to your website.

If you are a local business find local business listings/citations, as many as you can and get listed with a link back to your site. If you are a startup find launch listing websites and get your site listed. Use high-quality link-sharing sites to share your website URL like Reddit (these can drive traffic as well as long as it’s not done in a spammy way).

To make life easier try to build citations for your business.

How to do it:

1. Visit Yext powerlisting scan
2. Enter your business details and search for your current local score, you will now see your business details current active on different citation sites and also the ones missing your business information
3. Make a list of the sites that do not have your business details in an excel file
4. Visit all these sites and create an account, now add your business information on them
5. Keep checking these citation links on a regular basis in order to be sure they remain active
6. A good Citation score is always above 80% so you need to keep creating citations till the time you reach this score

Make sure to become a part of niche relevant communities and forums and share your link in the signature space. The idea here is to think of it as building your brand. Just like you would with a brick and mortar business, you are finding every avenue to list and promote your business.

When done correctly it can give your SEO a quick jumpstart. This is exactly what I tell any clients, friends or family looking to get started with SEO.

9. Interact on LinkedIn

LinkedIn professional connections and interactions can go a long way and prove to be an effective link building strategy.

LinkedIn is the biggest professional networking platform in the world with around 90 million users. I found that people from every niche are present here, therefore, I would simply use a tool called Dux-Soup and pull up all the LinkedIn accounts related to my keyword and then send out a message to them about a helpful article that I just wrote for them and their target audience.

I would also request them to link to it from their own website and to share it on social media as well, this will give me a relevant niche-specific link and a ton of traffic as well.

How to do it:

1. Connect with the right people as you want to contact the decision makers and not the staff members.
2. Ensure you are not spamming them. It is common that sometimes you may get carried away and start sending multiple emails, so be sure to keep a track of your emails and not to overdo it.
3. Double check to check if the professionals are still active on LinkedIn.
4. Check if they changed their profession, most people start working for others and forget to update their profile, so it’s wise to ask them if they are still in the industry.
5. Check their LinkedIn followers and their site’s authority and reputation.
6. Frequent messages can be annoying so avoid sending too many messages and wait for at least 10 days before you send another message.
7. Be professional and make sure your own profile is updated with all the relevant information. Go for a LinkedIn premium account if required to build more trust when they look at your profile.

Helpful Tips:

This strategy will grow my online reputation and authority.

10. Write Testimonials

Testimonials are a great way to get links.

This link building strategy is really fruitful for ranking and customer acquisition, all you have to do is write a review for a service you are using and drop your link along with it. Every service provider welcomes positive testimonials on their website and also links back to your website through it as an appreciation.

You can also encourage people using your services to leave a testimonial about your business on your own website and then link back yourself and then do the same for them.

How to do it:

• Visit Google and type “Write testimonial” “Your Keyword” example: “Write testimonial” “SEO” and this will give me a list of SEO sites that are accepting testimonials.
• Check when was the last testimonial written, if it is too old then avoid writing a testimonial on it and move on to the next one.
• Try to write naturally and submit a testimonial with at least 100+ words.
• Send an email to the site owner letting them know that you have written a testimonial for them and check if there are any more opportunities like guest posting or sharing direct links.
• Don’t overdo or misuse this strategy only create few testimonial links each month. Like 10 to 15 would be a safe number.

Helpful Tips:

All I have to do is visit them one by one and write some good things about them and in return, I will get a link back.

Advanced Link Building Strategies

Advanced link building strategies are a great way to take your website’s visibility to the next level. When used correctly, they can help you improve your rankings and get more traffic from search engines.

11. Conduct Podcast Interviews

Podcast interviews help you to become an industry specialist and bring in natural links.

Podcast interviews are an excellent strategy for link building. As a bonus, interviews on podcasts build brand awareness and thought leadership.

One of the most beneficial strategies would be for you to become a guest speaker on a podcast as this would mark you as an expert in the industry and grow your website’s authority and trust ratio.

How to do it:

1. Search online for YouTube and Vimeo channels that are talking about your niche.
2. Click on the about section of their YT channel and extract their email address.
3. Send an email to them, either to invite them to your own podcast session or to participate in their podcast as an expert on a particular subject.
4. Your first contact should show them the value of connecting with you and this can be done and sharing your work and reach in the industry as everyone wants to stand with the popular guys.
5. You can even offer some money to influencers to be a part of your podcast or for you to be a part of their podcast session.
6. Share the podcast on your site and social media also in your newsletters to build your reputation and stand out as an expert in the industry.
7. Try to attend as many podcasts, as this would boost your value and make you a brand in yourself. One of the professional SEO experts I know participated in 126 podcasts in 3 months which boosted his value and he managed to grow his business by 436%.

Helpful Tips:

In order to become a guest speaker on a podcast simply send an email to the niche-specific podcasting site owner and show them some of your work with the request to be part of their next podcast as an expert for a specific topic.

Once the podcast is launched it would definitely have your link in it and multiple podcast followers will naturally link to it as well as share it on various social media channels.

12. Engage with Influencers

My favorite link building tactic is relationship link building.

It’s simple, really – just find the influencers in your niche or in a related niche (bloggers, store owners, other non-competing businesses, etc.) and start building a friendship with them.

How?

By doing things for them you wish people would do for you. Follow them on social media, share and comment on their posts, comment on their blog, and be as helpful as you can. Link to their content. Don’t ask for anything in return.

Once they’ve gotten to know your face, then you can reach out and ask to write a guest post for them or for their feedback on a post you’re writing. Or ask them for a quote to include in an article with a link back to their site.

Influencers can add that spice to your business that you were always looking for and in order to ensure things go right to try these things.

How to do it:

1. Choose influencers that are fit for you as some may promote your business in exchange for free giveaways and few may charge you some money. So, choose wisely.
2. Check their content, before finalizing a deal with an influencer be sure that their content sharing techniques fit your business model and can really boost its performance.
3. Ask for a link on their social media profiles and the main website. Influencers prefer to do a one time gig for a business and move on with their lives, thus you need to get the best deal out of the situation. Ensure that you make them add a link of your site to their sites and profiles.
4. Always have a contract, email conversations are definitely the key to connect with an influencer however you must have a contract in place to ensure no party uses each others brand for personal or negative promotion.
5. Track the impact of every influencer this can easily be done by providing each one of them a unique discount code. Which means X influencer gets the code X12 and then Y gets the code Y12, and this way when the influencers promote your work on their channels you can check on the codes used on the number of orders and know exactly which influencer was highly profitable for you. You can hire them again in the near future or even on a bi-monthly or quarterly contract.
6. Create trust and strong business relation with al influencers especially the ones you are not going to hire. A bad experience with an influencer can lead them to downrate your products or services. You cannot stop a podcaster or an Instagrammer from posting their personal view about a brand so, be nice to everyone.

Helpful Tips:

Keep doing this, and you’ll eventually have a friend. If you build the relationship well enough, you can do guest posts for each other and even get multiple links from them just by writing an email letting them know about a new article you wrote!

13. Share Useful Content

Creating evergreen content that provides an in-depth insight around a topic to your audience is a great way to get natural links to your web pages.

The best strategy will always be to put cool stuff in front of the right people’s eyes, I’ve written and made plenty of videos about this, the strategy is essentially 4 parts.

How to do it:

1. Create something cool/interesting/useful.
2. Find blogs that have an audience who would be interested in that thing.
3. Show it to them and ask them to share it with their audience (human to human).
4. Follow up with them until they see it.

Helpful Tips:

The process of building high-quality links which last for long and helps in nourishing other inter-links via a seamless stitch.

14. Invest in Video Content

Videos have undoubtedly dominated the marketing sector and are considered to be one of the easiest strategies to connect with your audience.

Adding a video on your webpages explaining the content of the page can have higher conversions and can lure the audience to link to your page naturally.

How to do it:

1. Upload your video directly on your webpage
2. Add appropriate description to your videos
3. Add share button specific to your video
4. Add your logo into the video and mention your brand name in it

Helpful Tips:

Videos are known to grow conversion rates and increase brand authority which makes it one of the perfect link building strategies to gain links naturally. It is highly recommended that you ensure you talk to your audience in the videos and try to create a bond  even ask them to take an action such as commenting, sharing.

Natural Link Building Strategies

Natural link building is the process of acquiring links that come from content that you’ve written or created. You can do this by creating content that’s compelling enough to motivate other people to link to it.

15. Create Infographic

Infographic link building is a great way to get backlinks, because it’s a very unique and helpful form of content. People who want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and information about a certain topic will find your infographic useful, and therefore be inclined to share it with their followers. This can lead to natural links from other websites that have also shared your infographic (or even more valuable: links from other sites that have embedded your infographic).

If you’re feeling ambitious, you can also create an infographic specifically for this purpose. Define your target keyword and then create an infographic that is directly related to that keyword. You can use the infographic itself as a landing page for your website or publish it on social media.

Infographics are often very popular and widely shared because they offer information in a visual format that’s easy to understand. They also tend to rank well in Google’s search results due to how many links they generate!

16. Publish Data Analysis Studies

Data analysis studies are time consuming and complicated hence no one really likes to do it themselves, however, everyone loves to link to it.

Why?

Because linking to statistical data within your content to prove your point adds authority and legitimacy to your work.

One way to approach data analysis is through qualitative research, which means that you want to understand the context behind your information and its implications.

Conducting data analysis studies for link building is a complex, time-consuming process.

It requires you to:

1. Collect and analyze data from multiple sources
2. Examine the results of the analysis and determine what they mean in relation to your business goals
3. Identify areas where more information is needed to better understand the data, then collect more information and repeat steps 1-3 until all questions have been answered

17. Write Better Blog Posts

The best way to build natural links is to create content that your target audience will want to read and share.

When you’re thinking about what kind of content you should write, think about your target audience and what they might be interested in. Is there a particular type of problem they face? What kinds of questions do they have? What are their needs?

Once you’ve identified these needs, then create content that addresses them. Be sure to use keywords related to the topic, but don’t stuff them into paragraphs where they don’t make sense. Instead, try using them in titles and headlines and then linking back to those pages when possible.

The content should also be useful for readers and help them solve some kind of problem or learn more about something that interests them. This way, when people share your post on social media or send it along via email (if allowed), they’ll be doing so because they like what they read and not just because they want a link back to their site!

Link Building Strategies FAQs

How do I know if my site needs link building?

If you want to improve your rankings on major search engines like Google and Bing, then you’ll need to build links to your site. If not, the best way to find out if you need link building is by using a free tool like Moz’s Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs to find your competitor’s backlinks and success strategy. Both tools will analyze your site and provide recommendations based on their findings.

What is the best and free way to build links?

The best way to build links is by creating content that will be shared by other people who have websites or blogs in a natural manner because of the value of the content. For example, if you’re a plumber who wants more customers then you could write an article about how to spot a leaky faucet or how much water leaks out of toilets every year (based on statistics). This article would get shared by other plumbers as well as homeowners who want their pipes checked out regularly so they know if there’s an issue before it becomes costly repair work later down the road!

What is the difference between natural and unnatural link building?

Natural link building is the process of earning links to your site naturally, through a variety of different strategies. Unnatural link building refers to strategies that are considered manipulative or deceptive, such as buying links or writing content that includes links back to your site.

How to qualify a website for a link?

Links from all websites are not good as there are spammy and low authority sites which you definitely need to avoid and go straight to the highest authoritative sites. You definitely need to do your research and differentiate good sites from bad ones. We will learn about this now.

Spam Score – Use the Moz Bar tool or go use the Moz Link Research tools to check a website’s spam score, if the score is higher then you need to avoid that link. Spam scores basically mean how spammy the website is and if it negatively impacts your website if you link to it.

Website Authority – We use three tools to check the authority of the website. Ahrefs tells us about a website’s Domain Rating then we have Majestic that tells us the Trust Flow of the website and lastly, we got Moz tool that tells the Domain Authority of the website.

Organic Traffic – The website you get the link from needs to have a good amount of organic traffic and that link should have a higher probability to transfer some of that traffic to your site when the link goes LIVE.

Google is now capable to track your traffic source as well as the sites that link to you thus when they see that the site linking to you does not provide any traffic and they see that there are a majority of such links it would naturally lower the rankings of your site.

What are the best practices for link building?

The best way to build links is to offer something of value to the people who are linking to you. This could be in the form of a special discount code, or it could be a free product you’re offering.

How do I get links from influencers?

You’ll want to target influencers who are active on social media (especially Twitter and Instagram), as well as bloggers and journalists who write about your industry. You can find them by searching for keywords related to your business in relevant search engines, or by using tools like Followerwonk and BuzzSumo, which allow you to search for specific Twitter accounts by their follower count and ranking on Google respectively.

How do I get links from press releases?

Press releases are one of the most traditional ways to get links, but they’re not as effective as they used to be—at least not without heavy promotion and outreach afterwards. The best way is by submitting your press release through services like PRWeb or PRNewswire, which will include a link back to your website at no additional cost!

What is white hat link building?

White hat link building is the process of creating “natural” or “organic” links to your website. White hat link building is an ethical strategy for building links that helps you improve your website’s search engine ranking. White hat link building ensures that you are using the best practices for building and maintaining links to your site, and it’s one of the most important strategies you can use to increase your brand’s visibility online.

Trying & Testing Link building Strategies

My team personally tries and tests multiple link building strategies from the white hat community and then from the dark side as well, of course, we never test this on client sites, we have multiple demo sites that we test these links on and then track their performance using SEO tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush.

We also spoke with multiple SEO professionals both specializing in local and national SEO to find out their favorite strategy to build quality links.

Luckily our outreach was successful and they did not hesitate to share their strategy. Once we had those we went ahead and tested it ourselves and filtered them out for you and finally the list was ready.

We had 20+ strategies when we started, however, our test found that most of them were not compatible and the only worthy ones have been listed in this article for you to use.

Conclusion to Link Building Strategies

Link building is definitely an important ranking factor and has been one of the strongest factors. You still need good quality content before you start building links to your webpages.

It really does not matter how many links you build towards your webpages as long as they all are high quality and real site links.

Never pick a short way out when it comes to building links instead invest in building a strong base and plan as this would go a long way. If you have more link building strategies that you want to share, please mention them in the comments below I would love to discuss and test them out.

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