Link building is a hot topic in the SEO community, but even if you aren’t a marketer or SEO specialist, you can undoubtedly appreciate the importance organic web traffic plays in boosting your brand recognition and SERP ranking.

What Is Link Building?

Backlinks – also known as Inbound Links are links that connect a page, product, or piece of content from one website to a page on another site. This makes your website easier for users to find and helps to build trust. However, Backlinks also increase your digital “street cred” with search engines like Google, and the more creditability your content earns, the higher it will rank on search result pages.

Link building isn’t a new strategy. Creative inbound linking has been a part of the SEO essentials toolkit for years. However, how these links are obtained has changed significantly, and if your off-site SEO hasn’t adapted along with it, you will not see the kind of results you want.

How Do I Use Inbound Links to Boost My SEO Results?

In the past, link building focused on quantity with little regard for quality. Unsurprisingly, search engines like Google have released several upgrades over the years that now not only ignore this type of spammy linking but will actively penalize it.

Today, the quality and authority of your inbound links are just as important as the quality and authority of the content you are producing. Before you set off building your inbound links, make sure you pay attention to:

The Relevance of The Referring Website

Thematic relevance might be the most important attribute of a high-quality backlink. That means if you sell pet food, don’t waste time targeting inbound links from a resource that sells shoes.

The Authority of The Referring Website

Links from low-authority domains will not boost your ranking and may hurt it. In an ideal world, your backlinks should come from both thematically relevant and authoritative websites.

Link Placement

Where your link appears on the referring page matters with the most desired position being within the content itself and not as a sidebar or footer.

Acquiring Dofollow Links

Not all of your links will be Dofollow – links that point search engines back to your website, but they are considerably more valuable than Nofollow links which essentially tell search engines not to share any of the referring page’s ranking influence.

We’ll now get into a few tips and tricks that you can use to help build your backlink portfolio keeping in mind that link building is a long-term strategy. Think of link building as an SEO marathon- not a race as there are no ways to cheat search algorithms for rapid gains with dodgy shortcuts like keyword stuffing and “link farms.”

Link Building Strategies for 2022

1. Become a Go-To Resource for Trending Topics and Information Related to Your Field

You will hear the words quality, relevance, and authority mentioned a lot, but that’s because these issues are important and deserve constantly repeated mention. If you want to earn backlinks, the most straightforward way is to create content so good that people can’t help but want to share it.

To win over bloggers, brands, and publishers, focus on content that delivers something of value to readers. Infographics and research studies are pretty much guaranteed to generate links, however, they are also costly and time-consuming and may not be realistic for many small businesses. However, lower-hanging fruit like in-depth resource pages, how-to guides, and listicles, can be used by nearly anyone. The goal is to make sure your content is better and more in-depth than competing resources.

Once you have this captivating content, you can search the web for similar pieces, find out whose linking it, and convince them that your content is more valuable to their readers.

2. Leverage Strategic Guest Blogging

As with so many other SEO strategies, guest blogging has been beaten almost to death but it’s still hanging there. You will need to be highly selective with your guest blogs and the referring source must be relevant to your niche and have high domain authority.

In return for free content, guest blogs deliver easy access to editorial backlinks provided you can get web admins to take you up on your offer. Remember how we keep driving home the importance of quality, relevant content? If you want to entice people to publish your content then it needs to provide readers with something of value.

3. Broken Link Building

Links can break for many reasons- a page may have been moved, hosting expired, or typing errors. Whatever the case, broken links provide you with an opportunity to swoop in and fix it and earn a backlink in the process.

To leverage this underutilized strategy, you need first to find articles or blogs relevant to your niche with broken links. Once you have your targets, reach out to them. Identify the broken links and suggest replacing them with your well-written, highly informative content on that topic. If they accept, it’s a win for everyone and they’ve repaired a dead link while you’ve earned a new backlink.

4. Leverage Your Competitors’ Backlinks

There is a lot of valuable information to be gained from snooping on your competitors and their backlinks are fair game. There are a couple of ways you can use your competitors’ backlinks to benefit your linking profile- you are able to replicate or steal them.

In either case, your first step is to find and analyze your top competitors’ backlinks. There are several tools readily available on the web that you can use to do this, however, it’s labour intensive but perhaps well worth the effort. The key is to narrow your focus by concentrating on a few competitors and checking out their best links. Then, using the same techniques you would use to audit your own links, you can audit someone else’s in the case of the competition. Once you have their top links, you can get them working for you!

5. Replicate Competitors’ Backlinks

To replicate a backlink, simply follow the same technique your competitor did. If they earned a link by providing a practical, relevant response on a blog comment, find another query, post your own better reply, and include a link to a resource on your website with more information.

Bonus- Steal the Competitions’ Links

With the data you’ve gathered before, you can also directly go after your competitor’s best links. The strategy is simple. Reach out to the sources of your competitor’s links and see if they would be willing to link to your content instead. If they are willing to backlink to your competition, they might be willing to link to you assuming that your content is superior to what they already have.

Moving Up on the SERP with Backlinks

When it comes to boosting your rank, what you do off-site is just as important as what you do on-site and building your backlink portfolio should be the focus of your larger SEO strategy.

The post Drive More Traffic to Your Website with These 5 Link-Building Strategies appeared first on Nirvana Canada.