What is link building? Link building is the practice of building up the number of good-quality websites that are linking back to your website.

 

The number and the quality of external links pointing to your website is a known ranking factor in Google’s indexing algorithm. This means that in order to rank highly in the search engine results page, you need to demonstrate that your website is trustworthy enough that others would link to you. This vote of trust is a good signal to Google and will be an essential part of your SEO strategy.

 

External links are not only valued by their number, but also by their quality. Links from reputable sources like institutions, academia and well established brands within your industry will hold more weight with Google than links from sites deemed as spammy or toxic, for example e-commerce link farms. But the most important aspect of your backlinks is that they come from thematically relevant websites, so other sites within your vertical or niche.

 

How to approach link building?

 

The old ways of building up links were to pay a company to list your website on a range of link farm websites. However this is no longer advised as Google doesn’t reward links from toxic domains, and may even penalise you for this.

 

The modern way of building quality links is a two-sided approach. It comprises both organic outreach, and the use of some legitimate link building services. 

 

Using backlink building services:

 

There are some platforms that specialise in linking up bloggers with websites, so you can find links that are relevant to your industry. They take the pain out of manual outreach by supplying you with a database of writers, bloggers and journalists who are looking for useful content to share, and who will in turn link back to your website. Some of the top services we recommend are: RankZ.co and OutreachZ.com. OutreachZ is more of a self-service platform that links webmasters to bloggers, whereas RankZ is a managed guest posting platform that also provides consultancy and support with building your backlinking strategy.

 

Getting links by creating share-worthy content:

 

The most white hat way to get good quality and relevant backlinks is to put out content that people will want to share and link back to you. We have listed below some forms of content that can be used to gain the right kind of links.

 

• Infographics

Infographics that are packed with data and useful information, or show a complex matter in an easy to understand visual way, are a form of content that tends to do very well when released. If named correctly, your infographics may appear in Google’s image results, which is great for bloggers who are always looking for ways to visualise their content. Think of any data or information that you own that others may not, and get your designers or a design agency to visualise this in an infographic that you can list on your website and share on your social media channels.

• How to guides and helpful resources

Guides that give users step by step advice on how to do something is a great way to get backlinks, because if your content genuinely helps a user, they will want to share that with others. When creating resource pages, you should be aiming to create something comprehensive that will be useful to your target audience, on trending topics relevant to your niche. One step further to this is to look into who is linking to similar resource pages, and reach out to them telling them that yours is better, and that they should consider you as a link.

• Writing on someone else’s blog: guest posting 

Guest Posting on someone else’s website or blog is a great way to get genuine backlinks. First of all, the website you would guest-post on will likely be relevant to yours, so within the same industry or niche. Secondly Google considers content-based backlinks as reputable and trustworthy. So naturally by posting on someone else’s blog, there would be a link back to yours. To figure out where to guest-post on, you can research blogs and websites that are relevant to your industry, and email them asking if they would be willing to accept a guest-post. If you don’t want to do this yourself, there are websites and agencies that will take care of this research and emailing bit for you.

• Fixing others’ broken links

Our final top tip for getting backlinks is to scrape some target websites for broken links (where a site is linking to a blog or article and that page is now returning a 404). There are some tools to do this like screaming frog. Once you find the broken links, reach out to the website owner and tell them about their broken link, as well as recommending them a replacement link, to your own site! Just make sure you have the relevant content first. Although this requires a little effort, it is probably one of the most underutilised ways to get backlinks, and it often returns great results. If you want to see what the old link was, you can use a tool like the WayBackMachine on Archive.org.

• Press releases

If you have an announcement to make, and it gets picked up by a news outlet, you could easily gain a number of quality backlinks. So make sure you stay on top of your press-releases, and share, share, share. The more visibility you give them e.g. over social media and other platforms, the more chance you have of someone else picking up the news and sharing it and linking back to you. Make sure you include the who, what and where of your announcement, so your press-release is useful and relevant to your ideal market.

 

In conclusion, link building takes time and effort, but it is well worth doing to improve your organic performance and off-site SEO should be an integral part of your SEO strategy. If you would like help forming or implementing your backlink strategy, get in touch with one of our SEO specialists today.