Link building has changed a great deal over the years, and not everyone has managed to keep up. For those who have allowed their skills and knowledge to drift into obsolescence, this potentially fruitful SEO technique is being massively underutilized. Businesses that don’t do everything they can to keep their SEO score high pay the price in missed opportunities and a decline in their overall volume of traffic.
Even amongst those who appreciate the role that link building has to play in any SEO strategy, the potential power of link building as a means of enhancing SEO is still regularly overlooked and underappreciated. It is only by familiarizing yourself with the most advanced and effective link building techniques that you can hope to unlock its true potential. Once you have mastered these more advanced techniques, link building may well come to take the center stage when you are planning SEO strategies in the future.
Check Out Your Competitor’s Backlinks
If you start researching your competitors, you may well find that they share a number of backlinks in common that you have yet to identify and use yourself yet. If you find that your most successful competitors are all using a particular backlink that you aren’t, this is a good indicator that you should be making use of it as well. Fortunately, there is already a tool, The Common Backlinks Tool, that automates this process for you.
All you need to do is enter your competitor’s domain names, up to 10, and the CBLT will show you common backlinks. This allows you to discover your competitor’s primary resources and techniques. If you are struggling to generate new leads of your own, this is a useful way of acquiring some new sources with minimal effort.
Get Indirect Backlinks from Your Competitors
Just as your competitors will share a number of backlinks, they are also likely to share a number of outbound links to the same websites. You can use a tool such as Link Justice Thief to identify any websites that your competitors are all linking to. Generally, these will be websites relevant to the industry that you all operate in.
If you can get backlinks from the websites that your competitors are all linking to, these will generally be authoritative websites that provide a significant boost to your SEO. Furthermore, if you can get backlinks from one of these websites, you will be receiving an indirect link from your competitors.
Recover Dead Backlinks
Sometimes, backlinks to your website go dead. This is likely to happen if you make any significant changes to your website’s architecture or URL structure. But it can also occur when the webmaster of the site giving you the backlink mistypes your URL. In either case, anyone trying to follow the link will be met with a 404 error.
If you re-launch your website or migrate to a new host or domain, it is likely that a few dead backlinks will result. You can use the Link Juice Recovery Tool to help you find any dead backlinks on your website. This includes links that point to non-existent pages and links that result in a timeout error when they are followed.
Once you have identified these dead links, you can then set up redirects so that anyone trying to access the non-existent pages will be diverted to a new and updated webpage.
Turn Mentions into Backlinks
This has to be one of the easiest ways to score yourself some new backlinks. When a website has already made a mention of you, it’s usually much easier to get them to link back to you as well. In most cases, simply reaching out to the webmaster will be enough. If you ask them nicely, most will be happy to add a link to your website into their content.
The most difficult part of this process is identifying mentions of your site. There are a number of tools available that make this process much easier. Backlink Profiler is one of the most popular. There are relatively few circumstances where a website would mention your brand and not be willing to provide a backlink. Once you realize just how many more links you can get from this technique, you’ll wonder why you weren’t doing it all along.
Look for Relevant Sites to Work With
With the proliferation of tools to enable us to automate large parts of the link building process, it’s easy to forget how important the more traditional methods, such as reaching out directly, can be. When you identify other popular websites whose content is relevant to your brand or business, you should reach out to them to see if there’s any way that you can work together with them.
As with requesting links from those who have already written about you, the biggest challenge with this technique is to identify the relevant sites, to begin with. You should be able to find a reasonable number of websites by simply using Google, but the more creative you get with looking for leads, the more likely you are to be successful.
Focus on Your Own Content
Never overlook the importance of organic link building methods. The surest way of earning more links to your website is to continue to produce excellent content. Other websites will naturally prefer to link to higher quality content, so the better the content of your website, the more likely you are to generate links.
Google has become much more discerning over the years. Its SEO algorithms have become much more adept at spotting illegitimate content or content that is low-effort and designed to game the SEO system. Producing consistently high-quality content is surely the most effective link building tip of them all. It is also the method most likely to get you those precious backlinks from industry-leading websites.
Link building is a vital technique to utilize as part of any SEO strategy. Compared to some of the newer methods that exist for SEO, link building can seem a little outdated. However, while link building might be one of the oldest SEO techniques out there, it has changed a great deal in that time. Staying on top of the latest techniques and methods is essential if you’re to utilize it to its full ability.