So, you’ve done a basic SEO site audit. What’s next?
Link building or back linking is a major component of building a strong SEO-friendly site. Getting a site up and going is a one-off activity. Promoting it, on the other hand, is a continuous effort.
Have you encountered this frustration:
You’ve poured countless hours creating awesome, informative articles. Yet, regardless of how valuable they are, no matter how well you’ve adhered to the on-page SEO practices, they don’t seem to be ranking in search results.
Why’s that?
One of the most common reasons is because those articles either have low or no backlinks at all. Without backlinks, search engines are unable to recognize the “credibility” of a page. Each backlink is like a stamp of approval to search engines. The more stamps you have, the more credible and recognized your page is.
Many people have questions related to link building. They are not sure if it’s still relevant to build backlinks in 2020 given the many black hat techniques that come along with it.
The answer, my friend, is still a resounding yes.
You may not require a huge quantity of backlinks today, but you still need some decent, quality backlinks to push your articles up in search results.
To be able to build natural do-follow backlinks from high authority sites, you will need to learn the art of building backlinks.
This article covers some powerful link-building methods that you need to follow in 2020 to rank your website or blog on Google.
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What type of backlinks does Google favour?
There are guidelines shared by Google when it comes to back linking. According to Google, any link-building technique that tries to trick and manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results is part of a link scheme and violates Google’s webmaster guidelines.
A common example of such techniques can be found on Fiverr with claims of how they can build hundreds of backlinks for you in a day. DO NOT FALL PREY to it. Such link building techniques will only get your site penalised by Google.
What should you do instead?
Check the Domain Authority of inbound links
All links are not made equally, so make sure you are building links to the most relevant ones for your site.
To check a link’s quality, you can check the site’s Domain’s Authority (DA) on Moz for free and then consider including or excluding it based on the DA value. The higher the DA, the more “authoritative” and link juice it can pass from their site to yours.
Content Must be High Quality
Similar to high quality links, high quality content is also important. Although content and links go hand in hand, quality content is what leads to quality links. Content is what would separate your site from the rest out there.
In short, to stand out from the rest, you need to have quality content. Find a relevant angle, optimize the copy, focus on readers, and include a CTA.
Once you have a set up and are ready to publish your high quality content, it is time to create some backlinks to your content.
Below we share ideas on how to create link-worthy content and different link-building strategies to help you increase backlinks to your posts.
How to increase backlinks to your site?
1. Expert roundup posts
People like sharing informative and relevant articles, and that’s why high quality articles attract links naturally. Millions of articles are written each day, so how do you stand out?
One way to stand out from the crowd and the stiff competition is by being an expert matter and including expert resources via roundup posts. You can do that by dedicating a post summarizing a list of expert interviews in a certain industry.
Doing an article based on the opinion of the industry leaders will surely grab your target readers’ attention as you are generating discussion about their interested topic.
Here’s an example of one round up post I did discussing how bloggers are still making money despite a difficult start to 2020. (It also covers different niches, time spent blogging and amount earned from blogging.)
Reach out to the industry professionals with relevant questions that are trending in the industry and questions commonly posed by your readers or issues they are concerned about.
Then, sum up the articles with their answers and that’s it. Not only will the published article be picked up and shared amongst interested readers, the KOLs will be happy to share the piece where they’ve been featured in. Hence, you greatly increase your chance of getting increased exposure, traffic, and backlinks.
Roundup posts are one of the best ways for getting started on shareable content. However, you should also build your content in a way where you are considered an authority in your niche.
A cornerstone blog post is what I’m referring to. Keeping in mind your content strategy, cornerstone content are posts that consist of a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know about a certain topic. It’s where you can find all the content about a particular topic in one place. Cornerstone content shows that you are an expert in your niche.
For example, Yoast has a blog built around the WordPress SEO plugin. Their cornerstone content covers everything about WordPress SEO, thus making them an expert about WordPress SEO.
They share tips on how to improve SEO for your WordPress site, including the implementation of their free Yoast SEO plugin. These comprehensive articles helped them generate a lot of quality backlinks through links and shares back to their articles, thereby solidifying their knowledge on WordPress SEO even more.
High-quality cornerstone content also makes for a keyword-rich article, thus strengthening your article position on search rankings, increasing your search traffic, and in turn increases the chances of generating more backlinks.
An infographic, as the name suggests, is a combination of information and graphics. They are easy and attractive to consume for making your point in a concise manner.
An infographic is also an excellent tool to attract backlinks. Piktochart, for example, has 600+ templates. Canva is another fun tool to use to create infographics for free.
After you have designed an infographic, share it along with your article it summarizes with an embedded link and social sharing buttons. Reach out to prospects who might benefit from offering your informative infographic.
In short, it is a highly under-utilised opportunity to add high quality backlinks to your site.
4. Invest time in an outreach strategy
Outreach is an important part of every link-building strategy. There are tools available which make the outreaching process as easy as possible.
Take Pitchbox, for instance. This paid automatic tool finds leads to help you build backlinks. You can also find software or other templates to reach prospects.
5. Broken link building
Things keep changing from time to time. This is even more true for backlinks. The roundup posts have hundreds of contributors. Compiling and maintaining such an article can be rather time-consuming.
The broken link strategy is the best for countering it.
Check for broken links on relevant articles written and published on other sites. There are Google Chrome extensions for that, such as Domain Hunter Plus or Check My Links that scans broken links in an article. Just install these tools from the Google Chrome extensions and then click it to use it whenever you open a new link. These will give you an update regarding any broken and valid links.
For example if you want to find broken links related to your field e.g. “digital marketing” or “SEO”, use those keywords in your search query to populate some articles related to “digital marketing” or “SEO.”
When you’ve landed on some relevant articles, activate the Chrome extension to check for any broken links. After you have discovered any broken links, create a useful, informative article that can serve to replace the broken link’s replacement.
Then, reach out to the site owner and offer them your own resource article to replace the broken link.
Apart from getting backlinks to your own article, another side benefit to writing articles to replace broken links is that you can use those broken links as inspiration for new content ideas for you. Your high quality content will then provide value to your target audience and establish your authority in the topic.
6. Internally link your blog posts
Linking your sites internally to other relevant pages is a great way for passing link juice and page authority. This is also why blogging is crucial to your website’s success.
It helps to continuously internally link relevant posts and pages together. This helps Google in determining the relevant pages through crawling that people want to see.
This is a reason why sites that don’t publish regularly have less search traffic. This also makes crawling and indexing easy for Google.
Internal link building is the way to begin especially for new websites with limited resources and struggle for others to link to your site.
7. Using testimonials to build links
Everyone needs a testimonial. If you are using some online tools or services such as an email service provider, a social scheduling tool, a plugin or a SEO service, offer to write a testimonial for them including your site, profile link, and social media channels.
When they publish your testimonial on their services page, you will get a valuable high quality backlink on their site that’s promoting their product or service.
Of course, since the primary purpose is to offer them a review, don’t expect them to include your backlink in the testimonial. Write it out of goodwill. Whether or not they decide to include it, you still get a great opportunity getting your name out to their audience regardless!
Google doesn’t like webmasters to build artificial links. The strategies used 10 years ago are all obsolete today. This is why it’s necessary to develop link-worthy content that people love to link to. This may take time but is worth all the effort and is also loved by Google.
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