Link building is known as one of the most effective SEO methods employed nowadays. But, along with effectiveness, it has also given a lot of trouble to bloggers since Google launched its Panda algorithm in April, 2014. To succeed in link building, you can’t go without a smart plan. This is when the advanced linking building strategies highlighted in our post will come in handy.
Before you proceed to the strategies, we’d like to remind you of the link building importance. The number of inbound links is a critical factor influencing your website’s page rank in Google. However, it is not the only thing that matters today. It’s much more important to focus on the quality of inbound links rather than their quantity to win Google’s recognition. Instead of poking links into dubious resources, you must focus on authoritative sites. Read on to find out how to start interacting with them.
One of the latest link building techniques is all about keeping things organic with the help of editorial links. Compared to paid ones, editorial links are of much higher value, as they are earned naturally, i.e. without any payment or requests. If you get all the inbound links manually, it may cost you a pretty penny and gives no guarantee that you’ll retain them for the long run.
To get editorial links, you must focus on the creation of compelling content, to which authoritative bloggers would like to refer naturally. The most effective types of content that can attract their attention today are pillar content and infographics. Let’s examine each of them below.
Pillar Content. An article of this type is written in the style of a guide instructing readers in a certain issue. As a rule, it is composed of at least 500 words. What makes pillar content so advantageous is its evergreen nature. In other words, its informational value is independent of time, be it a publication date or some other day, say, in a year. In such a way, pillar content will constantly bring readers and, hopefully, links to you.
Infographics. The interest in infographics has skyrocketed lately for a solid reason. By means of these tools, you can visually represent any complex information in a clearly outlined manner, which is easy to perceive by the human brain. Infographics also catch an eye immediately and engage more than paragraphs of printed words, that’s why they are must-haves for earning editorial links for free. Here are a few modern templates that will help you build cool Infographics in no time.
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At present, a lot of people rely on guest blogging, as it helps them obtain a lot of authority links and drive more traffic to their web resources. The key idea in such a case is to have your content posted on blogs that rank high in Google. To find them, type in the main idea of your article to the Google bar and check the top 10 search results.
Besides blogs with high SEO rankings, you are recommended to interact with web resources, where posts are actively discussed and shared. It will let you extend your content reach in addition to generating inbound links to your site.
To dig deeper into blogging SEO, check an extensive guide in the form of a slideshow.
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If you strive for success in link building, be ready to practice the art of give and take. It means linking solely to internal pages of your site is not enough. Just like you want other bloggers to link to your write-ups, you should link to their content too. The easiest way to do it is to create link roundups, i.e. posts featuring other bloggers’ posts. Dedicated to a specific topic, a link roundup is usually published once a week or a month. To find posts relevant to your content, enter Google and type in “roundup / best of / top 10 / mashup” and your keyword.
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Along with link roundups, you can also create resource pages with a set of 25, 50, or more links to reliable blog posts. These pages serve as checklists of useful resources to provide in-depth information about a certain subject for readers. The more resources you include to such a page, the more chances you have to get backlinks. As soon as your resource page is ready, notify owners of all the blogs listed there about it. Send a message with a modest offer to cite or share it optionally. This is a foolproof tactic to show some respect and gratitude to your colleagues in blogging and get the same in return.
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Analysis of competitors’ backlinks also belongs to the advanced link building strategies pursued today. First of all, detect your main rivals with the help of a free web service, SEMrush.
For this, type in your target keyword to the search bar, and you will see URLs of pages with the highest Google rankings for your keyword.
Next, copy one of the links from SEMrush and paste it to the search bar of another free service, OpenSiteExplorer.
Then, you will see a page with inbound links of your competitor’s blog as well as presumable their domain and page authority rates.
Now that you know which links work for your competitor, you can try to get links from those resources yourself. Keep in mind that the higher the domain and page authority rates, the more powerful the link.
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Content promotion often takes a lot of time, that’s why it may be a challenge to write a lot of guest posts. This is when broken link building comes to help. Just find a ready-made post with a broken link and ask the blogger to replace it with a link to the relevant article published on your site. You can check broken links in the Advanced Reports section of OpenSiteExplorer, but that comes at a price.
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Bloggers often remove links to third-party resources from their posts later, that’s why it’s important to track them. Majestic is a free tool that will help you with this undertaking. Type in the URL of your blog to the search bar, and you’ll see a results page that shows the number of IPs referring to your site.
Scrolling down, you can find pages, from which links to your site were removed and the date of removal. Contact owners of those resources and ask them politely to return your link. If they refuse, you’d better avoid collaborating with them again.
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Some bloggers may cite your website’s name or URL, but don’t link to it. This is another case when you should get in touch with those bloggers and submit a request for a link. To find them at no charge, type in your URL to the search bar of SocialMention. You can choose the places, where your site was mentioned but never linked, namely blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, images, videos and questions.
What’s more, results can be sorted by the source and date (last hour / 12 hours / day / week / month).
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Smart link building is awarded by Google dramatically. It won’t only bring you a lot of traffic, but will also help your blog acquire a reputation of a valuable resource. Just apply the advanced linking building strategies mentioned above, and it won’t take long for your site to approach the desirable top 10 search results.
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