Link building has been known as an SEO strategy to gain backlinks from reputable websites.
As a practice, it has received negative reaction mainly because of the link builders who do it incorrectly.
Instead of going for sustainable but difficult to achieve backlinks, they resort to quick, easy, but spammy links for their client sites. As a result, not only do these links do anythign for their client sites, but they also put the sites at risk of being penalized by search engines.
This is the reason why Matt Cutts has always pushed for generating of organic backlinks. Instead of launching a sophisticated campaign only to perfom low risk, low reward link building strategies, marketers should go with earning links from your target audience.
This can be achieved by not building links, but by earning them.
This way, you don't have to plead website to link to your site, but have them link to you without even asking!
Here are ways on how to implement this.
Create content your audience wants to read
As the cliche goes, Google loves content - it indexes pages for a lving, for crying out loud! However, an underlying strategy is necessary to maximize the SEO capabilities of the created page.
One way of getting lots of backlinks pointing to your site is by creating evergreen content. An example of such is QuickSprout's The Beginner's Guide to Online Marketing. Like all evergreen content, the example is a very comprehensive and extremely helpful content to help beginners (its target audience) learn the tricks of the online marketing trade. Not only will its target market read the content, but there's a great chance that other websites will use the content as resource to their posts.
Another way to create effective linkbait content is to follow the Skyscraper Technique. This lets you research for existing content that has the most shares based on BuzzSumo and create a much better one than that. Publishing a content based off an already successful content will also gain you more backlinks to your site.
Pro tip: Neil Patel suggests that you adapt newsjacking in your content strategy. "Articles that are news-like are linkable," says Patel. "If you're one of the first sites to cover a news item, other authority sites are more likely to link back to that piece of content."
Reach out to bloggers
A strategy to consider with regard to creating content for building links is to reverse-engineer your process of writing and publishing content.
Instead of placing link building at the end of the process, place it at the part before you write your blog post or landing page.
"Link building," is this case, is mining backlinks from competitor sites using SEMrush and Open site Explorer and see which ones you can reach out to with the upcoming content you plan on publishing. Filter out the bloggers from the list as they are easier to negotiate with in terms of getting a backlink from their blog.
Once you have created the content, visit the backlinks of the pages you're competing for and send them a personally crafted email. Tell them that you have an even better content they might want to link to instead.
By doing this, you can maximize the link building opportunities by way of reaching out to websites and encouraging them to read your content.
Pro tip: Instead of writing content, create an infographic instead according to ClickDo Agency. "Keep in mind when you are doing a infographic you must get a quality one done or else no other blogger would like to publish yours on their blog with a link back to your blog."
Launch contests and giveaways
Spread the word about your your online service by running a a giveaway contest. This is a fun way to raise awareness to your site, drive interest to your services, and ultimately gain backlinks and referral traffic from people. You can offer discounted prices to your service or a premium resource content (like an ebook) to winners.
Pro tip: To increase signups and entries, Shopify suggests that you lower the barrier to entry, among other tips. "If the barrier to entry is too high, it means that either your entry process is too long and requires too much information or the requirements necessary to enter take too much time to complete."
Additional tips
- When creating content, make sure to implement the best on-page SEO tactics to increase its chances of ranking for its target keyword.
- While jury is still out on how much of a factor is social media to your SEO strategy, it can nonetheless effectively drive referral traffic to your site. Find a way on how to leverage social media into your strategy so your target audience can view your content and increase the chances of getting backlinks.