Link building changes each year, this is a summary of how to prosper with your linking activities in the coming years.
5 years ago all we had to do is build exact anchor text links and we could hope for high rankings. 10 years ago we could get high rankings with forum signature links and comments, but today everything revolves around relevancy and natural link profiles.
We know that we need to diversify our links starting from anchor texts we use, position on the page up to types of websites we get links from, not to mention keeping your link velocity in check. So what did we learn in the past few years regarding link building? Are there things that didn’t change and what can we expect to remain the same so we can plan ahead for quality link building.
The types of link we will need to get in the future may change a bit, but they will still rely on several factors that will most likely remain the same. So what do we need to look for to determine a quality page for our link?
Link Metrics
- Relevance
- Authority
- Popularity
- Traffic
- Social presence
Nothing new there right, but this is the basic list of ingredients for quality backlinks. One thing I always look for are traffic pages. Most SEO’s simple look for page rank or MozRank or general authority of a website, but what good will that do for me right now? Yes it may impact my rankings along with some other links, but unless it is a high traffic page I won’t be able to see any traffic increase on my site for quite some time, and link building is not just about rankings, it is about driving targeted traffic to the right location. So let’s look at certain link building strategies that can influence your rankings and drive some quality traffic your way and we know that they will work in the future.
Competitor Research – Moving In on the Competition
Until you come up with a solid link building strategy you need to be mindful of your competitors and get all the good links they have. Well, at least as much as you can. Don’t go blindly after all of the competitor links, evaluate the most valuable ones, the high traffic ones that pass on some link juice as well and concentrate on acquiring those, even if it takes a bit longer. You don’t need your competitor’s bad or low quality links, you just need the cream of their link profile, which should be enough to get you started and at the same time find a working pattern to implement on your personal link building campaign.
There are many tools you can use to find competitor links, I suggest Open Site Explorer and Majesticseo, but don’t forget the power of advanced search queries.
Guest Posting – A Two Way Street
In-content links have a great value as they appear to be natural and provide good value to the users. This depends, but they have been gaining popularity in terms of quality and desire. Everyone wants guest posts, but remember that this is a two way street.
Getting new backlinks by guest posting is great: you will get bigger exposure, social media promotion from your fellow bloggers and ultimately a highly relevant link, but you need to think of the effect of accepting guest posts for your website.
When you do a guest post you should link to it and accept guest posts from other bloggers in your market area. This gives you free content, free extra social media promotion for your website and most likely a few links as everyone wants their content ranking better and passing more link juice. By allowing guest posts you are doing your rankings a favor and helping the community.
Quality Content – Linkbaiting and Natural Links
Natural link building, create great content that attracts links naturally, sounds great, but it is not easy – or is it?
Creating valuable quality content is in fact not that hard, but since the net is full of content this isn’t enough anymore. You need to create something that stands apart from the rest with thorough research and lots of brainstorming. Examine your market and find out what people are looking for, use old data and update it, present it in a new light, create informational content that exceeds the status quo.
Tutorials, how to’s, infographics, slides, videos, controversy, promotions, plugins, tools, these can all attract great links on their own, they just need to be presented in an attractive way. Some people manage to do that even without the best content, they just know how to package the product and serve it to their audience, which is the most important part. Get to know your audience, which is the only way to create something they will link to on their own free will.
If you can rely on informational market one of the easiest ways to get some recognition and establish yourself as authority, get some links as well, is to do extensive research regarding your market, present the new data and talk about it wherever you get the chance. New results, polls, survey, case studies will surely make you stand out from the crowd, so this is a worthy investment that you should pursue by all means.
And if everything else fails you just need a known person to act as your spokesman. That is not as hard as you think; just find a known person in your market on the net or real life celebrity to interview, and present this in a funny way. Get the host to talk about your products, services or simply offer an opinion on a relevant topic. Interviews from known people can be a great ice breaker for your traffic and can help you reach the tipping point for high traffic and social media promotion. They can catapult your website and make it desirable place to link to and promote.
Planning Your Link Building Campaign
This may be new to you or maybe not, most likely you already know about the link building methods mention here, but just knowing something is not enough. You need to know and practice in order to achieve something, and going out blindly will also get you nowhere, you need to plan ahead and create your link building campaign blueprint from the start. This is the only way to expect results and measure the success of your campaign.
Following the mentioned methods in this article you can create a time frame for your link building efforts and act accordingly. You can create a budget and you can have time to do research, preparation and then go out to get results, and you will get them if you just plan ahead. Link building and content creation is not that hard when you know what to look for. Get to know and understand your market and your audience, that is the only way to succeed, online or offline.
Author Bio: Zarko is a creative link builder that enjoys a challenge. He works as a web strategist at Dejan where he has a position of a link building team leader.
17 Responses
High-quality content is the secret of getting popular backlinks. Thanks for the informative post.
The future, thanks for posting these link building strategies….
Interesting points that links will never go away and will always be a factor for webpage ranking. Link building changes every year.
I intended to post you a little observation in order to say thanks once again with the pleasing opinions you’ve shared in this article that will help us SEO our moving website.
I am a dedicated link builder and have just set up an article directory to increase our status in the SEO community.
Link citations are the future of SEO, thanks for posting these linkbuilding strategies.
Its really going to help in making link building strategy for my Local Search website, we tried leaving lots of blog comments to no avail.
I think thinking long term when it comes to link building and establishing any site or offer is the only way to go.
Targeting an evergreen market and then laying in place the proper network can significantly reduce your work over time while increasing your profit margin drastically.
Are these link building companys cheap? We need to get permanent one way links.
Having those methods of links will give us successful links to our sites or blogs. I think that many people would sometimes get wrong how they manage their link building campaign. I agree that to have a good link building campaign, one must have a good plan about it. Links are very essential for the sites to get rank by Google.
I hope the +1 stays around and Google keeps working at it, social media is great for SEO.
Following the mentioned link building methods in this article you can create brand new links in a time frame that will satisfy google completely. for your link building efforts create a budget and do research, preparation and then go out to get only relevant links.
I heard Google is trying to implement social aspect to display even more relevant results ( copying Yandex ).
With the +1 button they are trying again, but i think that going to be failure..
So while they may say links will have less value, i still think good links are and will be the major factor in ranking. (after good onpage seo is done)
Hey guys, thanks for commenting, @Mike, you are 100% right!. SEO has become more about relationships, the more people you know, the more people you are connected to, the easier it becomes to promote your content and build links!
It’s the perfect time to make link building plans for the longer term and focus on creating meaningful partnerships between web properties.
This write-up forced me to check our link building strategy and see if it is something that would pass the Google Panda test.
Thanks so much for the information! I am sure it will help us with long term link building.