Effective Link Building Strategies for SEO
Strategies for building links to the webpage can be a challenging task if you follow every available strategy. The reason is that we have so many of them. Our focus should be to go after only the best approaches for building quality backlinks.
We are exclusively discussing here the effective link building approaches but before that, it is essential to know about link building.
Link building is the exercise of building backlinks (hyperlinks) to a website for increasing visibility prospects of the desired website in a search engine to boost the overall web traffic and brand image. But the obvious questions are,
How to produce these backlinks? And Which are the finest link building strategies for webpages and blogs?
These are the important yet tricky questions to answer. We will be exploring this in a systematic and step by step way. Basically, we will take an in-depth look at the approaches for an effective link building process. The strategies to be implemented in this post consists of content marketing and email outreach.
Advanced Outreach Strategies For Link Building
The backlinks are an essential part of the SEO process and if you want to know, how backlinks can help to increase ranking and how it could help to land your page on Google’s first page, you can check my article at,
- Importance of backlinks and link building
It is highly impossible to outrank the top 10 pages in Google’s search result for the target keyword without having equal or more quantity of backlinks suggesting to your webpage. You can refer to my own article to understand the process for,
- How to rank on the first page of Google
Branded and big-name webpages and authors get backlinks quite easily by distributing their content through various means such as social platforms, paid ads, podcasts, and videos, etc. to a large section of viewers. This obviously gives them a considerable amount of backlinks. The top-ranking pages in Google’s search list also get backlinks automatically. This advantage comes naturally. But how can beginners find a way through this?
For anyone who has just started as a fresher with his webpage or blog should not wait idly in hope of naturally coming backlinks. They have to generate or build backlinks by themselves.
This is possible using the following approaches.
- Posting comments on forums and communities
- Reproducing Competitor’s backlinks
- Guest blogging
- Outreach
In this article, we are going to discuss the first two approaches for link building in SEO in brief.
A] Posting comments on forums and communities
Commenting in topic forums and articles could be considered an outdated approach by many but let’s look at this from another angle. Actually, this is a very helpful approach to boost your efforts to backlinks creation and develop an awareness of your content. You can post comments with links to your own article by answering people’s questions. The good options to do this are at topic forums, online communities, and query and answers webpages and niche YouTube videos.
In the field of SEO, the two most popular and authentic platforms for discussion and link sharing to related content are ‘Quora’ and ‘Reddit’.
As you can see here, I am maintaining a very good track record for answering the related questions in my niche on ‘quora.com’. You have to post answers in the best possible way to satisfy the user posting the question and other readers looking for solutions. While posting the answers you can place the link to your own article if it is related to the topic in such a way that it should not look like spam.
So for most of the answers on ‘Quora’, I have placed a backlink to my article in such a way that it correlates well with the answer and also provides extra information if the user is interested to know further. You have to remember that ‘Quora’ is really strict with spam links and spammers. So avoid links posting which directly looks like spam and which is not well organized or does not provide quality to the content.
This way your answers on ‘Quora’ can get you hundreds if not thousands of views which could result in decent referral traffic to your webpage and articles. So it is highly recommended to search for popular and relevant niche communities and start posting answers and comments. If you struggle to find any relevant community in your niche then you can still post comments on highly popular and quality blog pages. The only thing to remember is to post relevant and insightful comments to add value to the content and avoid unnecessary self-promotion.
One thing to note here is that in almost the majority of the cases, links in your posted comments would be no-follow links. It means that those links will not add any value to your website from an SEO standpoint. But it could benefit you by other means such as increasing the audience network.
As you can see in the above image that one of my answers on ‘Quora’ has around 460 views, and the same answer has a backlink to my article. This would surely help me get some good traffic through these referrals. This could also help to get some regular visitors to your blog and webpage. The audience from such traffic would benefit to get more backlinks and generate a broad network of people.
Even on ‘Reddit.com’, while posting comments to questions; you should not place webpage links of your articles in each and every comment but only in a few comments in between. The reason is, ‘Reddit’ strongly dislikes spamming and if you just keep on placing links in each comment then surly ‘Reddit’ will ban you. They expect you to provide valuable inputs consistently and if you place the links in a few of the comments in between it is acceptable.
So these links from ‘Quora’ and ‘Reddit’ might not help to rank your webpage higher in Google but they do surely help to reach a wider network of people with your content. This could provide you with some good natural backlinks later.
Matt Cutts who is an administrator of the United States Digital Service, informed in a Google Webmaster Q&A forum that blog comment links are perfectly fine and he also uses them whenever required. As per Ryan Stewart (a digital marketing consultant and blogger), it is a suitable method to promote your own content and also helps in developing a backlink profile naturally. But you should not post comments on spammy webpages and stuff unnecessary keywords in them. (Source)
In conclusion, posting comments on blogs and community forums is a suitable way to initiate your link building process and start connecting with people related to your niche. This is one of the effective approaches to link building.
B] Reproducing Competitor’s backlinks
If someone asks you that,
- Is there a way to acquire backlinks from your competitors?
- What is the way to catch backlink ideas from your competitors?
Let’s look at this one by one.
Evaluating the backlinks of your competitor can create lots of link building prospects. But what if your competitor is having hundreds of backlinks? This is highly impossible to study each one of them manually.
Let’s take an example of ‘motleyhealth.com’, this is a website dedicated to personal health and fitness. As I also happen to write articles related to health on my blog knowledgeprey.blogspot.com. This could help me to sense the keywords which ‘motleyhealth.com’ is targeting for their articles and which webpages are linking to them. So that I can also approach those webpages for potential linking to my webpage.
If I check backlinks for ‘motleyhealth.com’ using ubersuggest (a great free tool to analyze linking domains) for ‘motleyhealth.com’. It shows a total of 24481 backlinks which is a big number and not possible to review manually. So how do we find a way?
Let’s look at this systematically,
1) Look for the hard-core followers of your competitors
It is quite obvious that if ‘motleyhealth.com’ is having so many links then some of these might be coming from their dedicated followers or supports consistently. We have to search for these types of followers because if somebody is so keen to link to your competitor then if you have valuable content to share then why would not he be interested to look around at your content?
As for filtering out the high number of backlinks, you can check to show only do-follow links of the referring domains. You can see in the below image all such type of links for our competitor ‘motleyhealth.com’ using ‘ubersuggest’. These links are arranged as per the ‘Domain Score’ and ‘Page score’ of the referring domains, starting with the highest ones. It also shows the type of links like a text or image link and the anchor text for the link.
You should always avoid the toxic links or links from trash websites because they damage your webpage credibility from an SEO perspective. You can identify such links just by taking a closer look at their site address or even visiting those pages.
You can do more in-depth filtering of these results as per the top pages of ‘motleyhealth.com’ which has generated the maximum number of backlinks. This also shows estimated visits to those pages. You can see in the below image that only a few of the pages have generated more backlinks. Just select those pages.
Here we have selected four such pages. Now click on ‘View All’ for each selected page to check the backlinks of those respective pages one by one.
When we check the first page in the above list with 54 backlinks by clicking ‘View All’, we find that it shows me the webpages linking to that particular page according to ‘Domain Score’ and ‘Page Score’. When you start exploring these pages one by one, you find that most of these pages are legitimate pages worth getting the links from. Some of these could be the common backlink pages linking to top pages of ‘motleyhealth.com’. So the possibility of getting a link from these pages is higher if you have quality content from the same niche on your page.
So this is the way we have isolated from random 24481 backlinks to just over hundreds of links for authentic pages to ‘motleyhealth.com’. These are the links worth our consideration and are the exact outreach links to focus on.
Now the interesting thing here is that some of these links could also be linking to our pages, so we have to exclude such links and try for new links not linking to our pages. If your website is relatively new then you would find very few pages linking to you as well.
You have to go with the same process to find the backlinks for other competitors.
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Originally published at https://knowledgeprey.blogspot.com on October 7, 2020.