Link building helps web pages to become more visible for their target keywords on the search engines, but there are effective and ineffective ways to build those links.
Enterprise-level industry leaders trust LSEO’s link building services because they know we can reliably produce those links at scale. Learn more below about why we are the premier link building agency in today’s SEO industry. Get a free consultationWhen you think about all the elements of an online business that you could optimize in 2023, what comes to mind first? There’s content, page titles and other technical SEO, and backlinks, of course.
If you’ve been wondering about the place of backlinks in the SEO of the modern era, know this: they are still one of the most crucial ranking factors for a website – and yet 95% of websites don’t actually have any backlinks going to them, even in 2023!
Backlinks – relevant, trustworthy ones from high-quality websites – say to Google, “Hey, this content is so useful for people that other websites want to refer their followers to it.”
So, while backlinks have remained vital for organic rankings in 2023, what have changed are the methods we use to build those links.
Let’s dive into what makes link building still so important for SEO in 2023.
Don’t forget: if you’ve been struggling to build natural backlinks to your website and need professional link building services from a team of SEO experts, get in touch with LSEO.
Before we jump into link building, it’s important for you to understand what hyperlinks are and what they mean to search engines. A hyperlink, or “link,” is used to connect one website to another for easy navigation between web pages.
A link can be words or an image that will redirect you to a new web page or a specific section of a page that is relevant to whatever text or image it is embedded in. Hyperlinks are commonly used by search engines to discover new web pages or help rank websites.
The anchor tag indicates to a search engine that a link to another page is going to follow.
The link referral location starts off with “href,” which stands for “hyperlink referral.” The URL that follows is the page location to which the hyperlink will redirect you.
The anchor text is the word or phrase that contains the hyperlink on the page. Oftentimes, this text will have some sort of visual indication that it is a clickable link.
The closure of the link tag tells the search engine that this is the end of the linked area.
Now that you have a good understanding of exactly what a hyperlink is, let’s move right into link building.
Link building is the process of increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage.
Search engines consider backlinks as recommendations to your site. The more people recommend your site through external links on their sites, the more trustworthy search engines think your site is.
For that reason, search engines such as Google base how well your site ranks off of the number of links to your website.
Kenny Trinh, CEO of Netbooknews, has a ton of experience with link building and believes it is imperative to the success of your website. “Essentially, backlinks act as a vote of trust. The more high-quality backlinks your website has, the more likely it will earn higher rankings.”
But link building is not as straightforward as “the more links you have, the higher you rank.”
That’s why SEO specialists say that link building is the hardest skill to master. Google has access to such advanced technology that it considers so many more factors than links when crawling a website.
Some of these additional factors include the quality of the website the backlink is posted on and the topical relevance between the two sites. Simply put, the backlink needs to seem like it belongs where it is. Website owners don’t want to slap a link on any old website or in the middle of an irrelevant article.
We spoke with Swati Chalumuri, the founder of Hear Me Folks, on what she considers when building links. She told us, “You need to keep some things in mind: the link should come from a valuable website, a website in your niche, and must be included in an article covering a topic similar to your website’s.” These are her key steps to having her website rank well in 2023.
Not only do backlinks factor into how well you rank on a search engine, but they are also used to discover new web pages. Google and other search engines “crawl” websites to discover different web pages, so having your backlinks out there can help the engines come across your site more often.
Despite Google’s complex and ever-changing algorithm, one thing that never changed is the importance of backlinks. That is why link building remains one of the bigger keys to success in SEO. Boosting your website’s credibility through the number of links to your site can be the difference between having your site rank on the first page of a search engine or getting lost in the mix.
Link building is important to the success of a website because, as we mentioned, it is one of the main ranking factors on every search engine. Most queries on the internet start out with a search engine, and most people conducting these queries click on one of the first three search results.
Since search engines place so much importance on links, it is physically impossible to rank well with search engines without acquiring backlinks in some way. If you have a quality website with great information, people may link to your website naturally without you having to put much effort into link building.
However, that only works if people already know about your website. Most websites need to put their efforts into link building before they can get to that point.
Link building can also help to increase traffic to your website. Nandini Sharma from ProofHub agrees, saying, “Acquiring quality backlinks is not only important to earn higher search ranking but also to help businesses drive more traffic and build a better readership base that will convert into paying customers.”
Higher, link-driven rankings on search engines usually result in more clicks to your site (especially if you make it to the first page). The more links you get from high-quality sites with healthy traffic, the more results you should see in organic traffic to your own website.
In that sense, links placed on sites that are relevant to your website should also increase your referral traffic.
You want the content to be relevant to what you have to offer because we know the reader is interested in the article you are linked in (they clicked on it, didn’t they?). If your link is relevant to the content, they are more likely to follow the link and explore your site, as well.
Other than helping your site to rank higher and ultimately increase your traffic, link building can also benefit your brand awareness. The ultimate long-term goal for most websites or companies is to become a household name.
Emily Garner, a content specialist for Blue Claw, agrees, stating that, “Running link building campaigns works to increase brand awareness and make it more likely that you’ll become the go-to site for many customers looking for reliability and convenience.” The whole goal behind link building is to find external sources that will link back to you, or in LSEO’s terms “link back to our client’s site.”
Eventually, if you get enough quality sites to link back to your domain, it can not only increase your non-branded organic traffic, but also your branded traffic due to the awareness and eyes getting put on your domain. The search volume on your brand can increase ten-fold.
Google and search engines alike have been using links to rank websites since their formation, and the importance of links in ranking is not changing anytime soon. Some SEOs believed that, with the introduction of Google’s Penguin update in 2012, backlinks would become obsolete.
However, Penguin just made it more important to get higher-quality links. Not all links are created equal anymore.
So, moving forward the quality and relevancy of your links will only become more vital. Search engines are relying on links to grade your E-A-T (expertise, authority, trust) and will continue to use this as the core of their algorithm in the years to come.
The future of link building stands in the creative ways you go about generating links. Yes, you can continue writing guest posts and publishing third-party content, but you need to get your creative juices flowing.
For example, have you gotten into broken link building yet? If not, it’s one of the best ways to earn quality backlinks for your website. What about finding unlinked mentions through Ahrefs and reaching out to get those domains to add a link to you?
Since Google and its competitors are paying attention to the quality of links, SEO experts are looking for more trustworthy websites to obtain links such as news sites, magazine websites, and big niche players.
Now, you may be asking, “How do I get links on such large scale sites?”
That’s where creativity comes in.
Link builders are taking advantage of sites such as HARO to submit quotes to major publications.
HARO is a platform in which journalists can submit queries to get a plethora of quotes and inputs from experienced professionals. But it isn’t as simple as signing up and using the tool. You need to read the platform’s specific guidelines and master the art of communication since there will be a lot of back and forth.
Oksana Chyketa shared with us how the use of HARO was a game changer in her role as a marketer at Albacross. “HARO is one of the best ways to generate high-quality backlinks from authority news sites.”
HARO is not the only way to start building higher-quality links, but you get the point: be creative!
All in all, the future of link building is bright, despite the fact that we can never fully predict what Google will do next or how they will change.
Fortunately for SEO, the only constant so far has been the ongoing importance of link building in 2023. As long as you are staying on top of the trends, getting creative in the ways you acquire links, and obtaining relevant links, you are on the right track.
If link building is something you struggle with, LSEO can help. Get in touch with us to let us know about what you’re doing, and we’ll go over the ways we can help using our experts’ deep experience in natural link building.
Link building has long been one of the foundational pillars of search engine optimization (SEO). At its core, link building is the process of securing backlinks from other websites to one’s own site. These links serve as signals to search engines, implying authority, relevance, and trustworthiness. However, not all links are created equal. Depending on the nature of your business, your focus might be on local, national, or even international link building. Local link building, as the name suggests, zeroes in on building links that are geographically relevant, helping businesses connect more effectively with their immediate communities and markets.
LSEO is a three-time “Best SEO Agency” of the year and provides local link building services.
In the nascent days of the internet, search engines gauged the relevance of a site largely through the quantity of backlinks it garnered. But as search algorithms grew more sophisticated, quality became more important than mere quantity. Google, in its bid to provide increasingly relevant search results to users, recognized the significance of location-specific results. Thus, Google’s local search algorithms came into existence, paving the way for local SEO.
Local link building’s roots trace back to this shift in focus. As businesses recognized the potency of appearing in local search results, the push for local links began. No longer were businesses simply vying for any backlink; they were chasing links with strong local relevance. The rise of smartphones, with their location-tracking capabilities, further augmented the importance of local SEO. Suddenly, ‘near me’ searches exploded, and local businesses that had invested in local link building found themselves at an advantage.
Local link building, while sharing the same core principles as its national or international counterpart, stands apart in its nuances and execution.
– The Relevance of Geographical Proximity: Local link building prioritizes links from sources close to a business’s geographical location. For a local bakery in Brooklyn, a backlink from a Brooklyn-based food blogger would hold more weight than one from a national food magazine. Such localized links send strong signals to search engines about the relevance of a business to its immediate locality.
– The Role of Local Directories and Citations: National businesses might focus on getting listed in major, broad-spectrum directories. For local businesses, however, the magic often lies in smaller, localized directories. Think of town-specific business lists, local Chamber of Commerce websites, and regional online communities. These not only help in link building but also ensure that the business’s NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information is consistent, boosting local SEO.
– Community Engagement: At its heart, local link building is community-oriented. Businesses are not just faceless entities; they are part of a community tapestry. Engaging with local events, sponsoring community drives, or collaborating with neighboring businesses all lead to genuine, locally-relevant backlinks that resonate deeply with the ethos of community-centricity.
Local link building, thus, while sharing the foundational goals of link building at large, operates in a more nuanced, hyper-targeted manner, prioritizing community and geographical relevance over sheer volume.
For businesses eager to solidify their local presence, a systematic and genuine approach to local link building is indispensable. Below are tried-and-tested strategies that can offer tangible results:
Start by identifying major local directories pertinent to your business domain. Ensure your NAP details are consistent across platforms like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and your local Chamber of Commerce websites. Consistency in these citations reinforces trust with search engines.
Seek collaborations with neighboring businesses that are non-competitive yet cater to a similar audience. Mutual backlinking opportunities can be explored. Additionally, sponsor local events or causes, which can lead to backlinks from event websites, community pages, or local news outlets.
Establish meaningful connections with local bloggers. Offer to write high-quality, locally-relevant guest posts for them. Not only does this provide you with a backlink opportunity, but it also aids in showcasing your expertise to a local audience.
Active participation in local online forums or city-specific Facebook groups can position your business as a helpful community member. Regularly sharing knowledge without overt promotion can naturally lead to link-building opportunities.
Whenever your business achieves something noteworthy, don’t hesitate to share it with local media. This could be through formal press releases or casual updates, ensuring you grab the attention of local journalists and bloggers.
By positioning your business as a local authority in your field and offering knowledge-sharing sessions, you can build credibility. This often leads to organic backlinking from attendees or local institutions.
Tools like Google’s Local Pack and Moz’s Local Search Tool can be pivotal. They offer insights into your local SEO performance and can highlight potential local link-building opportunities.
Even with the best intentions, businesses can sometimes err in their local link-building pursuits. Here are some pitfalls to be wary of:
– Over-optimizing with Geo-specific Keywords: While it’s essential to include local keywords, stuffing content with too many geo-specific terms can appear unnatural and harm your SEO.
– Ignoring Broader Link-building Tactics: Solely focusing on local strategies can limit growth. It’s crucial to strike a balance between local, national, and even international link-building efforts, depending on your business goals.
– Over-reliance on a Single Local Strategy: Diversification is key. If you focus all your energy only on local directories, for instance, you miss out on the benefits of other strategies.
– Neglecting NAP Consistency: Inconsistent business details across platforms can confuse search engines and reduce trustworthiness. Always ensure your NAP details are uniform.
– Pursuing Low-Quality Local Links: Not all local links are beneficial. Prioritize quality over quantity. A backlink from a spammy, low-authority local site can do more harm than good.
By embracing a holistic and genuine approach to local link building, while sidestepping these potential pitfalls, businesses can significantly boost their local visibility and credibility.
Local link building, in the ever-evolving landscape of SEO, remains a powerful tool for businesses aiming to make a mark in their immediate communities. While it operates within the broader umbrella of link building, its nuances demand specific attention and strategies tailored to harness the potential of geographical relevance. Whether through community engagement, local partnerships, or leveraging local directories, these strategies can empower businesses to connect more authentically with their local audience.
However, as with all aspects of digital marketing, it’s essential to approach local link building with a blend of strategy and authenticity. Avoiding common pitfalls and staying updated with the latest in local SEO trends can make all the difference.
In conclusion, as the digital world grows larger, sometimes the most potent strategies are those that bring businesses back to their local roots, creating genuine connections and building trust one local link at a time.
As Google becomes more advanced, SEOs want to get better at building natural backlinks. The way to do that is through using link building tools.
This post complements our link building guide for 2023 and our 2023 link building strategies explainer, since these platforms help a ton with executing the techniques laid out there.
These link building tools can help you start making a real difference in your link building efforts.
Here are our seven favorites.
The go-to tool for working on backlinks.
Here’s a little nugget of truth: most marketers, when they need to research and build backlinks, proceed immediately to Ahrefs.
Pricing:
The reason everyone loves Ahrefs for link building tasks is because the tool just has it all. When you enter a domain, look over on the left in the Backlink profile section.
Here are your options:
Clicking on Backlinks shows you – you guessed it – every single backlink pointing to your domain.
Then there’s the Broken backlinks section, where you can see all the backlinks you’ve gotten in the past that have now broken (usually because you moved your page and caused a 404).
These features by themselves would be enough to make Ahrefs an awesome link building tool, but when you have options such as Anchors – where you can see the words that link to you on your referring domains – and Link intersect – which shows you the domains linking to your competitors but not you – you know you’re into something great.
Where to go to organize link building outreach.
If you’re an SEO professional managing the link building of a handful of small clients, you can handle your prospect outreach with any old email account. For larger-scale operations, you need BuzzStream.
Pricing:
Here’s the story on BuzzStream.
The platform lets you organize and manage all your link building outreach and other emails in one place, period.
But it’s more than just an outreach platform.
You can do your prospecting in there, too.
If you’re just starting out with link building or with the clients you have, you can begin by using BuzzStream to search for websites in your niche that you can then contact for link outreach.
Or, if you know where you want to try to get backlinks from, you can put those domains into BuzzStream and then use the link building tool’s Google Chrome extension to access contact information for those sites.
When you’re ready to reach out, you can keep everything together in BuzzStream.
But that’s not even the best part.
It isn’t just that you can use the platform to see all your emails in one place. You can also mark the status of each reachout thread using custom tags such as “Reached Out,” “Awaiting Response,” and “Link Placed.”
The tool lets numerous users access the same account, so this is a platform that’s optimized for link building teams.
It’s actually incredible.
HARO is where SEO link building and professional journalism meet up.
HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, is a platform where journalists submit requests for expert-source quotes and industry experts provide those quotes in exchange for backlinks.
Pricing:
At its core, HARO is incredibly simple to use but can still promise relevant and authoritative backlinking opportunities.
If you’re looking for backlinks, you sign up on the platform as a source. That means you’ll be providing quotes at the requests of the tool’s journalists.
HARO sends three emails daily based on the categories you have checked for yourself. In those emails will be the requests for quotes based on the journalist’s brief.
For instance, as a HARO source, you might get an email containing a request that reads: “Hi, I’m looking for expert tips on starting a flower garden in extremely humid climates.”
If you’re an expert in that area, that should be enough to go on.
The idea is that, when you respond with a quote, and it gets used, the writer will reference your name and who you are and link to your website.
Keep in mind, though, that getting backlinks attached to your quotes isn’t a hard and fast rule with HARO. You should check out the site where your quote would be appearing to confirm that they link to their sources.
A nice and easy link building tool that no SEO should be without.
When you’re doing link building, there’s almost nothing more important than acquiring the email addresses associated with a domain. Hunter.io lets you collect them.
Pricing:
It’s pretty simple. You want to do some outreach to a handful of cool sites you found in your niche, and they seem to have a good amount of broken external links that you know you can replace.
Just head over to Hunter.io and put in the domains.
The tool then produces all the email addresses it has for that domain, and it draws its data from as many sources as it can.
It’s worth it to mention that, after using it many times ourselves, the addresses aren’t always completely accurate.
However, at the same time, Hunter will verify email addresses for you, letting you be sure you’re emailing a real person. If you have email lists already, you can also upload those to Hunter to see if they’re verified and real.
If you’re a professional SEO link builder who does reachout pretty much all day, we’ll say again: you can’t be without Hunter.io.
Semrush is another go-to link building tool for the experienced SEO professional.
Semrush is one of the heavy hitters in the SEO tool space, bringing the heat when it comes to keyword research, site audits, and backlink data.
Pricing:
Semrush’s link building tools provide just about the same capabilities as Ahrefs:
The Backlinks Analytics feature breaks everything about a domain down like this:
You can see your whole backlink profile, referring domains, lost referring domains, and broken backlinks.
Find broken backlinks by going to Backlink Audit, putting a domain in as a project, and then going up to Target Pages. Check the “Target URL error” box to see all your backlinks that are returning an error (404):
Semrush provides you with all the data you need to manage your domain’s backlinks. That, along with everything else the tool can do for your digital marketing efforts, makes Semrush a winner on this list.
We’ve covered a lot of advanced link building tools here. Linkody is one for beginners.
If you’re just introducing yourself to link building for one or two sites, you don’t necessarily have a ton of money to throw around on big tool plans. Enter Linkody.
Pricing:
It isn’t just the inexpensive plans that make Linkody an interesting backlink tool. It also presents its data in simple, user-friendly ways while still pulling its weight as a link indexer (you can see above that the best plan gives you 40,000 monitored links).
Linkody shows you things such as the top pages that get the most backlinks, the DA and page authority of those backlinks, and the anchor text used to link to you.
We’ll say again that Linkody isn’t the most comprehensive link building tool that you’ll ever use, but for what you do get for these price points, it’s still awesome for beginners and deserves a mention here.
Let’s end with a real winner: the influencer-blogger outreach tool GroupHigh.
If doing link building is all about connecting with others in your niche across the Internet, then you’ll want to check out GroupHigh, as it is a repository for thousands and thousands of blogs and their owners’ contact information.
Pricing: $179-$499 monthly
GroupHigh plays a little coy with its pricing on the website, but we’ve provided plan figures above.
The tool is essentially a search engine for influencer-level bloggers in just about every industry niche you could imagine.
If you build links for yourself or your clients, just think of the opportunities for outreach with a tool such as GroupHigh. You get the bloggers’ followers, engagement rates, and recent content so you can really check them out.
Don’t worry, though; you can filter your results by all of those metrics so you see only what you want.
You’ll have to get creative with how you approach these parties for link building. With their followings, they probably get hundreds of emails per week looking for guest post opportunities.
This could be your chance to be different. Take the broken link building method instead. Who knows what the results might be?
Make no mistake, though: GroupHigh is an awesome platform if you know how to leverage it.
Did you see a tool you liked on this list? As true SEO nerds, we admit these are all pretty nifty, and we enjoy using them to build our clients’ backlink profiles here at LSEO as part of our link building services.
If you, like us, appreciate the ongoing importance of link building in 2023, and you’d like to start digging into the backlink game using tools like these, let’s have a conversation.
Contact LSEO today to get rolling on your link building campaigns.
At their core, backlinks are links on a range of websites that point to pages on other websites. The referring domains should have a high content quality and be relevant to the website getting the backlinks.
If these thresholds are met, Google judges the backlink to be a vote of confidence for the website being linked to.
That’s all good news for you since web pages with strong backlink profiles tend to get found on their target keywords more than pages with few or no backlinks.
Link building takes a lot of time to do effectively. If you’ve been struggling to keep up with this time-intensive task, partner with LSEO, the leading enterprise-level link building agency.
Our experts use a variety of link building methods to acquire quality backlinks to your website. Here are a few of those methods.
Generating high-quality content is one of the most popular and common ways people build links to their sites. If you write useful, authoritative content to which other websites would want to direct people, then use this content to your advantage. This is one service we provide at LSEO as part of our content marketing services. We can then build links to the content we have created.
Another way to build links naturally is to reach out to bloggers and social media influencers who can utilize mentions or endorsements to link back to your website. At LSEO, we work with a network of influencers to earn backlinks and ultimately generate more traffic to our clients’ sites.
Article contributions, or guest posts, are another way to build links back to a site, but, as with link building overall, there are right and wrong ways to do it. It’s considered spammy to send out generic pitches to popular sites, requesting to contribute anything they want as long as they guarantee a backlink.
Guest posts should be directed toward relevant sites and offer something that those readerships will find useful. If you can prove you are offering something high quality, you may just get a backlink from a guest post.
Another way to gain backlinks to a site is to reclaim broken links on other websites. We use a variety of SEO tools to find all broken backlinks to a client’s site. A broken link to your site is simply one that links to a URL that you have since removed. It’s a wasted opportunity.
To correct this, LSEO can reach out to the website owners and ask them to link to a client’s site correctly. The owners don’t have to do this, but it is in their interest to fix broken external links on their sites.
Probably the most least practiced way of aquiring backlinks, LSEO will spend the time reaching out to authors or journalists in an effort to gain our clients a superb backlink. There are millions of articles published daily. If you provide value to the author, there is a backlink to be had. The outreach approach needs to be strategic, and LSEO has mastered it.
The final link building technique we are covering here is competitive analysis. This involves examining the backlinks of a client’s competitors and attempting to acquire those links for our client instead. This is usually done by producing better content to which the linking website would prefer to link. Employing this method successfully takes some finesse, but it is a useful way of accomplishing two things at once: generating high-quality content and earning backlinks to that content.
LSEO is the top link building agency in the industry. Our efforts have spurred the success of enterprise-level clients across just about every major vertical.
We know the time and effort it takes to do link building the right way. That’s why we’re happy to augment your in-house team by becoming the best link building partner you’ve ever had.
Here’s Why LSEO’s Link Building Services will Make a Difference for You.
Here’s some quick common sense for you on link building:
We covered the critical importance of link building in our 2023 guide to link building, but the fact remains this: businesses might acknowledge that they need backlinks, but few of them have the time to build them on their own.
There are actually more strategies for building backlinks than you’ve probably heard of.
Some don’t require that much effort! Other strategies? Sure, they can take a while.
At LSEO, our SEO experts can augment your in-house team by using these link building strategies in the background while your team continues to focus on its daily tasks.
What are those strategies, the ones that can really make a difference for your domain authority and overall organic ranking power?
Let’s get into them.
Let’s start with a simple, well-known, and effective link building strategy: creating awesome content to which many others in your niche would want to link.
It goes without saying that content that has a lot of expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T, anyone?) around it will be naturally linked to by other content creators on the Internet.
It’s all in how you present it, though, too. Listicles are hugely popular and have been for a long time.
That’s because listicles take long, otherwise dense content and turn it into more digestible, bite-sized chunks.
The other benefit? People like linking to listicles because of the way the information is presented.
Another natural way to gain relevant backlinks to your site is to create and share infographics. People love infographics essentially for the same reason they love listicles: because they present dense information in more digestible ways.
The process for you, the creator, will involve research; infographics are often used to communicate statistics on a certain topic. But the end result will be a concise and very shareable piece of SEO content.
Make sure you optimize it with a keyword-infused file name and alt text, but organic rankings are not the primary way we’re looking for backlinks here.
You’ll want to create an embed code and then share that everywhere you can. Put it on social media, and reach out to influencers and others in your industry directly to encourage them to share it with their followers.
People love infographics because they can refer to the statistics they present without having to do that research themselves. It’s a great natural way to earn backlinks.
Broken link building is a tried-and-true classic link building strategy.
SEOs love it because it’s natural and it promotes that healthy, Google-friendly competition among businesses for creating the best content for users.
Broken link building consists of finding broken external links on other people’s websites and presenting the website owners with replacement content for those links.
You point out broken links on these sites and offer up suitable replacement pages to link to; it’s a give and take.
The benefit to you is that, if the publisher agrees, you get those backlinks for yourself.
The only pain point you might encounter is that you have to have the content ready to go. If you don’t have it on your site already, you’ll have to create it.
A simple way to earn backlinks after you’ve been at it for a while is to audit your own website in Semrush or Ahrefs and find your broken backlinks.
Your own backlinks most often break because you moved or deleted some of your pages at some point. It’s okay. It happens.
But when you redirect those broken pages to working pages, you regain all the backlinks you lost.
See how easy?
Guest posting is an old link building strategy, and it still works if you approach it the right way.
The idea of the guest post is that you create an amazing piece of content for a website in your niche. That guarantees the content’s relevance. You then reach out to websites with healthy traffic and domain authority and ask them to post it for a backlink to you.
Ideally, website owners will do it if the content truly benefits their readership.
You may remember Google’s own Matt Cutts famously declaring guest posting dead way back in 2014. He was reacting to the level of spam to which guest posting had sunk in the SEO world.
And he wasn’t exactly wrong: people paying for the opportunity and all that.
But if you produce actually good, relevant content for a website, without offering money or anything else spammy, and the publisher posts it and gets you the backlink in the process, that’s a good backlink.
A word of advice, though: make sure the site where you choose to post is actually relevant to your own site, because that’s the only way Google’s going to assign any SEO value to the backlink.
Here’s one of my favorites. Use HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, to get natural backlinks.
If you don’t know, HARO is a platform where journalists can put questions out there for their stories and get quotes back from experts in that particular niche.
It’s pretty simple: when you answer, you get a quote in the story. And the story will feature a link to your website.
But you should be careful here. Answer only those queries that cover subjects in which you are a true expert. You shouldn’t take HARO frivolously. These are professional journalists who need real insights from real experts.
So, don’t answer anything and everything just to get a backlink. Only the relevant links will help you.
Another quick link building strategy that’s sort of related to HARO is to be interviewed by someone in your niche and have the interview be published in text form.
Just like HARO, this will get your name and brand out there and earn you a relevant backlink from the publishing site.
Just like infographics, listicle-type “best of” lists tend to earn natural backlinks because they have done the work that other content creators want to reference.
In the SEO industry, you might create a “Top SEO Tools” post and update it every year. Then, when people write about SEO tools, they can refer their readers out to your more comprehensive post.
Another easy way to earn backlinks is to turn unlinked mentions of your company or brand into backlinks across the Internet.
It works like this. Say someone mentions LSEO in a list of digital marketing agencies, but there’s no link there.
Well, it would be better if there were.
You’ll find mentions like that from the Mentions alert in Ahrefs. You’ll then reach out to the website owners and ask if they’d link to you in that brand mention.
They have no good reason to refuse. After all, they already mentioned you and so probably think you have something of value to offer.
Case studies are a good category of content to create for the middle section of the content marketing funnel, the evaluation stage.
That stage is where customers will be investigating how you stack up against your competitors in their search for someone to hire for whatever problem they’re having.
But case studies are also good pieces of linkable content because, like infographics, they summarize complex information in digestible form and are easily referenced in other content.
If LSEO writes multiple case studies on our success with certain past clients, we can promote those all over the place and share them with interested parties.
Then, if someone wants to recommend a digital marketing agency to a business that’s looking for one, that person can share our case studies as proof of our track record. We also earn a backlink along the way.
If you provide a product of any kind, digital or otherwise, you can contribute your offerings to influencers who regularly hold giveaways and contests with their followers.
Your product will be given to the winner of a contest, and then you’ll get not only the promotion but the link from the influencer’s channels!
This is another awesome content-based link building idea that isn’t too far off from my suggestions on listicles and “top” or “best of” lists: curate content for your followers.
In whatever your niche is, chances are good that your readership will benefit from a lengthy resource in which you, an industry expert, organize and recommend other resources from around the Web on your particular area.
You can organize these curated resources by category or any other way you want to do it. But this content would read essentially like a list, and you can introduce and comment briefly on each item. Tell your readers why you felt they could benefit from this or that.
Where’s the link strategy here?
You’ll promote this piece of curated content for the purpose of getting backlinks. Remember, people want to link to useful content that they hope can benefit their own audiences.
Make this curated content useful, and then promote it.
No matter what industry you’re in, if you can feature someone else on your own website or social channels, you’ll make them happy and probably encourage them to share it with their own followers. You earn a backlink, too.
Now, this strategy only works if you are not direct competitors with the individual or group. And even though a backlink is still a backlink, it would also be ideal if the party you highlight or profile had a decent audience of their own.
That way, you get some nice referral traffic along with your backlink.
Creating newsworthy content for backlinks is a fun link building strategy because the buzz already exists around your topic.
This doesn’t mean you have to be a news site or a journalist of any kind. But if you attend events in your niche, whether in person or virtually, write about them afterward. Make your observations into a listicle-type blog post in which you share your thoughts or other insights.
Then, promote that content on all your channels so that others can see it while the news cycle around that event is still going strong. People who also attended will be likely to share your content with others.
And you could earn backlinks from it.
As part of your content marketing strategy, you may decide that your site could use cornerstone content.
Cornerstone content is generally long-form evergreen content that lays out a company’s services and philosophy. It’s meant to be there on your site all the time, ready to show visitors of all kinds what you’re about.
Cornerstone content is also extremely shareable and linkable because it’s so comprehensive and will essentially never go out of date.
You have a lot of opportunities to get your cornerstone content to rank organically, and when you promote it, as well, your chances of earning natural backlinks go up.
Another easy (and humanitarian) way to get your name out there and possibly earn a backlink is to reach out to your local community to contribute in charitable ways.
Help at a homeless shelter, donate to an animal hospital, or collect food for people around the holidays. Usually, organizations that do this kind of work will feature the groups that help them as a way to say thank you.
It’s a pretty straightforward way to earn a backlink while doing some good for your fellow citizens.
Content creators know that expert roundups are great ways to generate useful content that people actually want to read. This stuff is just like the curated content I discussed above. It focuses on a specific topic, but instead of just pulling resources on your own from all over the Internet, you’re soliciting the opinions of experts in the industry.
Those experts are happy to contribute because it gets their names and expertise out there to your audience. It also gets them a backlink.
This is a link building strategy you can deploy in 2023. Find existing roundup posts in your chosen industry and see if you can get the publisher to add in a contribution from you.
Interactive content such as quizzes and surveys can be a lot of fun for users. This type of content serves multiple purposes simultaneously. It lets people interact with your website in an entertaining way while still encouraging them to think about their needs and how they relate to what you can offer them.
The other cool thing about quizzes and surveys? They’re so shareable. Friends or business associates who are interested in the same subjects can share with each other, getting that content more traffic.
If your quiz or survey ranks well, there’s a greater chance it will get picked up by bloggers and influencers and shared with their audiences, earning you natural backlinks and more traffic.
I get that we’re talking about backlinks here, but you can help the ranking ability of individual pages on your site by employing a smart internal linking strategy.
How does Google tell which of your pages are the most important? Multiple ways, but one of those is by determining which pages have the most internal links pointing to them.
Create topic clusters around your most valued subjects, ensuring that all the supporting pages point up to the pillar page. They aren’t exactly backlinks, but they’re links that you can plot out and control yourself.
Okay, final strategy here: write ultimate guides to things.
People also call these content pieces “complete” guides or “definitive” guides, but the point is, they have to be comprehensive roadmaps on how to do one specific thing.
Now, what’s the point of this? Why do ultimate guides earn backlinks?
It’s because of the comprehensiveness of the content. There are few people who will put the time into creating content of that caliber to put on their websites for free.
Why do people do it, then?
It’s exactly because few others are doing it. When everyone else is writing their post on just one part of that subject, they can link to you because you cover the rest of it. You put the hours into documenting every square inch of that topic in one post.
How many others are going to do that? How many others will create “A Complete Guide to Core Web Vitals”?
Not that many. Those people are going to be happy to have your resource available, because they’ll send their readers to you for more information.
Natural backlinks are one of Google’s most crucial ranking signals today. The search engine wants you to create really awesome content that people want to link to on their own.
While great content will attract links on its own, it does often take more active reachout to get your killer content in front of the people who would want to share it with their followers.
If you’d like to start earning more and better backlinks, let’s have a talk. LSEO is the most trusted link building agency in the business. We’d love to turn our link building strategies your way to help you improve your rankings and get found by the audiences who matter to you.
Contact us now to learn how we can help drive your growth.
Your competitors who don’t know about link building or how to do it correctly won’t be able to keep up with you if you have a strong backlink profile. Where your competition is sleeping on the importance of link building, we will help you capitalize on this valuable piece of an overall SEO strategy.
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