As you may have heard of the saying “the more the better” this goes in vain when we talk about links. As long as you want to rank high on the search results, this saying is not true as more links do not mean that it is good for your backlinking profile. It is thus better to aim for few but high quality links only. The risky or poor links don’t help in any way, leave aside giving you boosted rankings. In turn, they can go worse and can get you Google penalty and loss of traffic.
So, let’s take a look at the popular link building tips/secrets that you may not be aware of or you may not be using them.
Ask for backlinks from your known
This is the first way to start and that too when you are a newbie in the world of Internet. Just think of your relatives, colleagues, friends, clients, partners if they run any site or blog. All you need to do is to just ask for their backlinks. But at the same time see to it that they have reputed sites or blogs. Ask for the in content links rather than links in footer or sidebar. Also ensure that the link comes from a source which is relevant to your particular field or niche otherwise it will not have much impact or may even prove to be harmful in the long run.
Building relationships first
For proper link building, you have to build strong relationships as well. There are a number of opportunities available for building contacts. You can start with going to your niche related forums and communities like social groups, blogs etc. Your very first step towards this approach should be to start contributing in these forums with relevant information, comments, posts and provide contextual value to the discussions. Through participating in such communities, you will not just gain quality links, you will also get access to new industry news, details and can connect with some people who share same passions and interests as yours.
Start your own blog
Never make a blog with a single post and backlink to your website in it. If you do so, you will not just waste your time, you will even create risky links. So, if you want to start your blog, make sure you keep it live and active. By keeping it live, we mean that you should post on it regularly. In no time, you will see that your blog will gain authority. Also keep it a point that your content is high in quality, rich, user friendly, useful, relevant and very well structured.
Guest posting
There are a lot of blogs and sites which accept publishing your articles. So before writing any article somewhere, make certain that the blog or site is related to your niche, the article is not regarding what your company is all about or what it does. Also, focus on the quality of the content and make it professional and interesting to read. Always remember that a bad quality article will just get in poor reputation of your business. Further, it is crucial that you build the links which help your site and not the links which can negatively impact your site’s rankings on the search results.
Recover your dead backlinks
There are times when you may find broken links to a site. This may be due to the location of the page changes or if your link is misspelt. In any of these cases, the backlinks will give a 404 error. Such problems may even occur after your site was migrated or re launched. You should thus redirect the backlinks to other page. A tool like LJR or Link Juice Recovery is the one that lets you find backlinks which your site has linking to the non-existent page having the HTTP code 404. The tool doesn’t just detect the 404 errors, it even detects the timeout errors like 504 and access errors like 403. So when re-launching the site, you may want to have a look at these errors, find the problems and fix them before getting into any mess.
Turn mentions into backlinks
You will love this. This is indeed the best way to gain new backlinks. This is like someone already wrote something about your business, product or services like they mentioned your brand etc but have not included any link or linked to your site. In such situations, it is good that you contact the webmaster to ask them to convert this sort of a mention into a valuable back link. It is as simple as that.
Find useful link building opportunities
There are a lot of opportunities for building links. There are blogs, sites and forums where you can place your links but generally it is not as easy. Whether you wish to find a relevant site or blog in which you can place the guest article or some forum with Follow links, the popular SERP research tool will be of great help to you. SERP is basically designed to help find most relevant results. And after you enjoy the results, you can easily sort them by theme, strength or other factors that you want. The best part about SERP is that you already know the links which are high authority and relevant for your niche.
Earn links, don’t buy
Building and buying links are different but you can even earn links if you have good content. Google’s main aim is to earn money, just like other companies out there. And Google cannot simply earn anything till the time they offer good experience to its users. Also, this good experience comes with relevant and useful search results. In case they fail to show any relevant results, the users will switch to other search engines.
Google also checks the technical features of a site like the navigation, loading speed, designing, keyword density etc. They also measure the user experience through CTR, time spent on the site and the bounce rate. But there is something that you may be forgetting- Great content will get you lots of natural links.
Infographics
Irrespective of your content quality and richness, some people find it easy to grasp the information when it is visually appealing. Different people grasp information in a different way and your message needs to be available in the form which it can capture attention of a large base of audience. A lot of people use Infographics for attracting the links and it truly works. Sometimes one may use the Infographics but with no linking to you. In such situation, you can start the Google reverse image search.
Newsletter subscriptions
Last but not least, companies do not give credit to importance of newsletters. When used in the right way, there can be many benefits of a newsletter. Publishing the newsletter can increase awareness and attention of the clients as well as readers. With interesting and quality content, you actually increase probability of sharing the same and thus increase traffic as well as backlinks.
Try including effective call to action buttons in the newsletter like offer them for registering for the webinar, download eBook etc. It is better if you start building the links. But before doing so, ensure that you do detailed link audit as well as disavow the spammy links that you may bought in past. Disavow the links which have high rate of risk first and then move towards disavowing other links. You surely don’t want Google Penguin to search the, right?
To sum up
To conclude, we can say that natural link building has always been a tough task. And why wouldn’t it be. All creative things need efforts and time and this is what link building is all about- a way of adding value and having good content. Most importantly, focus on users and give people the value they should get. Build links which are enriching, useful and relevant both for the web as well as for the users. Here is an awesome guide on Linkbuilding for noobs by ahrefs.com – https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building , its an interesting read for all who want to do your link building yourself.
