Link building is probably the most critical component when it comes to a SEO campaign. You cannot expect to rank for keywords without having high quality backlinks. The number of backlinks you need to have is dependent on the keywords you are targeting. Some keywords are more competitive that others. There is no tool that can tell you accurately exactly how many links you need to rank in the top 10 of Google for your keywords.
It can be difficult to start a link building campaign especially because Google does not want you to participate in any paid link building or link building that purposefully tries to increase your ranking positions. Google recommendations are that you should create high quality content and that the links will come naturally.
In real life scenarios this is often not the case and you may be waiting on a lifetime to try and get high rankings and backlinks built to your website if you are not proactively trying to build links. It is unlikely that any webmasters will link to your website unless you publish content that is unique, high quality or something viral.
For most businesses they need to reach out to other webmasters and offer something such as content, testimonial etc in exchange for a link. As an example guest blogging is an effective way to offer content to webmasters and also works for getting a link back to your website.
We have included four types of link building that you can begin on right now. We decided to include a few proven and powerful techniques so that you are not overwhelmed by a link building campaign. These methods work well and you should implement them now so you can begin to see the rewards in the near future.
Competitor Links
This is one of our favourite methods just because it works well. You see your competitors will have put a lot of time, money and resources into getting links back to their website. What you need to do is get a list of backlinks that your competitors have pointing to their website and the reverse engineer these backlinks.
You will need some tools to do this and we recommend using Ahrefs since it tends to have the most data for any given domain. You need to export the backlinks to your competitor domains and then go through this list of backlinks.
You should be able to find opportunities of webmasters that you can reach out to when you are going through this list, you may need to spend time on going through the list but we can assure that this method is tried and tested and proven to work.
Resource Pages
Getting listed on resource pages is a good method of link building. The method works and you only really need to reach out to relevant websites in your niche, show them a piece of high quality content and ask them to link through to your page.
Finding resource pages is pretty simple and you can do this using Google Dorks. These are queries that you input into Google search engine. Below are examples of dorks:
Keyword +inurl:links
Keyword +useful resources
Keyword +helpful resources
These will help you find resource pages that you can reach out to. When pitching you should break it up onto steps so first send them an email that is a link outreach and then follow up with another email where you pitch the link replacement.
Internal Link Building
Internal link building is an underutilized technique. It is a powerful link building technique and one that you should include in your SEO arsenal. It is an awesome way to create links because you have complete control over where you will place your links. It is also easy to implement.
Internal links are just links from one webpage to another internal webpage on your website.
When you begin internal link building you need a list of pages on your website. If you have a CMS such as WordPress then this is easy enough to do but if you don’t use the following Google Dork:
Site:domain.com
This will bring a result of all pages on your website. From here you can add these into a spreadsheet and begin going through them and add your links. Be sure to use a variation of keywords as well as generic anchor text when you begin internal link building.
This should get you started on your link building campaign.
Expired Domains
Expired domains are a great link building technique. They allow you to build powerful links to your website and maintain some control over the links you are building. You can pick domains up that have great metrics and links from highly authoritative websites. You can be sure that you will see a change in ranking positions by utilising this powerful link building technique.
Using expired domains can be seen as a grey hat technique but it is a powerful link building technique. You can find expiring domains in auctions or using other websites to find domains that have already expired.
We hope this guide has been useful. We employ some of the techniques discussed her in our client websites with positive results. If you need a professional agency to help you increase your rankings then be sure to get in touch with us.
