Acquiring backlinks is an integral part of any good SEO strategy.
Without these incoming links, your website will not gain popularity with Google and your visibility on the search engine will be impacted.
But gathering these valuable external links is not easy, and before you despairingly rush into buying links, here are 5 link-building strategies you must use!
1. Differentiate between a good and a bad inbound link
In SEO, organic search relies on three main pillars:
website content (texts, images, meta descriptions…), on-site technical (internal linking, 404 errors, site design…) and the off-site SEO part (online reputation, off-site content and backlinks).
To please search engine algorithms (Google, Bing, Yahoo…), each area must be optimized, and Google places great importance on backlinks because they allow it to judge your site's reputation and popularity.
However, the link-building process (creation of links) is long and requires a lot of effort. To gain SEO points more quickly, link farms emerged.
The process was simple: pages, sites, or blogs were created and you just had to buy a backlink to see your PageRank increase!
Of course, the link-building strategy did not please Google and it is now penalized as a black-hat SEO technique.
Consequently, buying inbound links from a link farm will get you flagged as spam.
Why? The reason is simple: the content on those sites was generally poor quality and had nothing to do with the buyers' sites.
For Google, a 'good' backlink must come from a site that:
- Is authoritative in its field
- Is related to your topic
- Has high-quality content and rich semantics
2. Earn backlinks with link baiting
Among link-building strategies, link baiting involves attracting a natural backlink. It's by far the most effective and least expensive strategy.
There's no secret: if you want to attract backlinks naturally, your site must capture the interest of sites with strong authority.
And that means creating relevant, informative content with a wide semantic scope and the right keywords.
Then, promote your content on the social mediaIf your posts demonstrate expertise, you should attract inbound links easily.
3. Target competitors' backlinks
Another link-building strategy is to analyze competitors' hyperlinks. Semrush's link analysis tool will help you find which sites point to competing sites.
All that's left is to contact the authors of the sites in question, either by email or by phone, and negotiate an inbound link by selling them the merits of your content.
Guest Blogging
The Guest Blogging Or sharing guest articles is a particularly effective link-building strategy in SEO.
The idea is to build partnerships with authoritative sites in your niche and write articles that will be published on their sites while also allowing them to publish on yours.
Beyond link exchanges, if your partners are influential and their content creation is relevant, you'll gain additional visitors to your website!
Monitor inbound links
Not all backlinks pointing to your website are beneficial for your organic ranking.
For your link-building strategy to be effective, there are a few points to check:
- That hyperlinks are dofollow
- The quality of the inbound link
- That its anchor is not over-optimized
Dofollow tells search engine crawlers they can follow the link and take it into account.
Conversely, if an incoming link is nofollow, the bot will not follow it and you will gain no SEO benefit.
The same goes for incoming links from low-quality external sites or sites that have no relation to your industry.
Finally, if the anchor text does not accurately describe the content the user should find, or if it is over-optimized, you will receive penalty points from Penguin (Google's algorithm that evaluates the quality of your inbound links).
You will therefore need to sort through your backlinks, starting by identifying low-quality links (directories, spam, sites with poor reputations…).
Contact the administrators of those sites and ask them to remove or modify the links pointing to your site.
If that approach fails, you will need to use Google's disavow tool from Search Console.
Our advice
A good link-building strategy will improve your visibility and your rankings in search results provided your backlinks are high-quality and natural!
And if you want to attract backlinks with relevant content, there is only one solution: call on Professional web writers ![/su_note]
