Backlinks now rank as one of the top SEO factors. If you have a lot of links leading to your site from authoritative, high-quality sites from around the web, you have an asset that will place you high in search engine results and give you an edge over competitors.
With the following five tips you can boost your link building strategy. Let’s start with the obvious one…
Build a Team
Link building takes a lot of work, so why not share the work among multiple people? If you run a small business, you can choose to build a remote marketing team comprised of freelancers, remote workers and hybrid employees.
Thanks to high-speed internet connections and innovative apps, you can coordinate the efforts of people located all around the world as easily as you could manage them if they worked inside your physical office.
Tools such as Slack, Trello, VoIP telephony, and video conferencing make project management and collaboration easy and reliable. Combine those features with the reduced overhead and payroll associated with remote teams and you’ll control your expenses while accomplishing a lot.
After assembling your distributed marketing team, be sure to spend time training them, so they know how to build links. Additionally, you’ll need to have an in-house team member lead your link prospecting and outreach teams to coordinate activities and resolve discrepancies.
Guest Blogging
You and your in-house and remote teams should actively pursue opportunities to blog for other websites. This method of link-building gives your brand a chance to establish authority in the industry while earning precious inbound links from authoritative websites.
One way to create your own guest blogging opportunities is to publish a “write for us” page on your website. This will inform the online community that you are willing to offer other businesses valuable links if they are willing to reciprocate.
When you advertise the fact that you’re a “team player” in the online space, you may have a chance to become a hub for your industry. However, be sure to keep an eye on the quality and focus of your guest bloggers so that the content they produce contributes to SEO.
Many websites have published content that needs updating. Do a search for relevant topics and contact webmasters to offer your services for updating those pages for the current year, in exchange for a link to your site.
Broken Links
Many businesses lack the time and resources to keep their website content up to date. This gives you an opportunity to identify broken links on their site and ask them to replace them with links to your fresh content.
As you organize your broken-link campaigns, focus on sites that feature “evergreen” content. This is content that requires little or no updating over the years. However, as time passes link destinations can either go out of business and referenced web pages can get deleted.
To expedite the identification of broken links in your industry, be sure to try one of the many third-party broken link building tools. These apps will coordinate internet searches as well as the status of inquiries with various website owners who host broken links.
You will probably encounter a lot of competition as you engage in broken link building. To compensate, you should consider expanding your scope to ask webmasters to replace their poorly performing outbound links with ones that lead to your high-quality content.
Shareable Content
Have your link building team create content in various formats to encourage sharing. Infographics, for example, are popular because they can visually communicate a lot of factual information in a fun way.
As your team produces content, ask yourself if you’d want to share it with your friends and colleagues. If not, send it back for revision. You’ll probably discover that infographics take a lot of time and creativity to produce and can result in higher costs.
Infographics are much more popular than text-based content, so you can often justify the added expense. However, to protect your investment, be sure to incorporate branded elements as well as your URL in each one that you publish.
To ensure you get the links you deserve from your infographic, stipulate that websites that incorporate your work into their pages must attribute the source of the image and link back to your site.
Off-site tactics
Start a podcast for your business or brand and publish it to every leading podcast repository. In your supporting content both for your channel and individual podcasts, include a link to your website.
As your podcast gains popularity, industry-related websites will create links to it and to your website, leading to even more backlinks. Podcasting can also help establish your brand as an industry authority and thought leader.
Other off-site tactics that can build links include in-person lectures and webinars. This gives you a chance to promote yourself and your team members as experts via press releases and email.
Finally, be sure to produce high-quality videos that entertain, inform and solve real-world problems. Be sure to add a link from your YouTube channel and encourage others to share.
These five ways to improve your link building strategy comprise only some of the activities that you and your team can use to boost your SEO through link building. Stay alert for new ideas and opportunities that will help you expand your reach and grow your brand.
