Link building strategies that shouldn't be ignored

©Ion Chiosea via 123RF

The thing about link building is that the value it adds to your SEO campaigns cannot be replaced. Link building is probably the oldest technique that has been employed for search engine optimisation (SEO) activities. Social media marketing, content marketing and other strategies that are being used today are all geared towards earning your website links - one way or another.

Even as many articles are being fabricated to announce the demise of link building in the coming year, there is no way it's going to be removed from the world of SEO. It will always have its place in SEO. It will continue its evolution. Before checking out some link building strategies, let’s have a look at its evolution in brief.

Evolution of link building

Initially when internet technology was still figuring itself out and search engines were just like another website, link building was not as differentiated as it is today. Manual link building existed to put sites at the top of these search engines. The more sites you had linking to your website, the better for your site. Quantity was by far more important than quality. People would link their sites to spam sites and vice versa. Any link would do the trick then.

Google made an update to its Penguin algorithm and this brought a grave change in the world of link building. Many professionals in SEO refrained from using link building as an SEO strategy and focused more on content marketing. This algorithm was designed to improve the quality of search results. How would you feel if a Google search turned up a bunch of spam sites on page one that are totally unrelated to what you were looking for? To improve your search experience, Google’s Penguin algorithm was designed to get rid of those spam sites and this meant punishing websites that were linked to them.

The result is that SEO professionals paid more attention to the quality of links that they put on their sites. Links from high-authority websites came highly appreciated and those from low authority domains were shunned. Secondly, sites in the same niche created links with each other more making it easy for the search engines to crawl them and produce more relevant results effortlessly.

Strategies to build your link profile

However, building these high quality links is not such a simple activity. This is why the following strategies are employed.

1. Blog commenting

Sounds like a silly strategy to put at the top of this list but it does work quite well. Commenting on blog posts is simple and it does produce some amazing results. It is also quite common nowadays. Complimenting is probably the thing that you do most on blog posts but it is not as effective as asking and answering questions. People have learnt that complimenting is a sneaky way of getting links but when you ask a question the article creator will have no choice to answer. Other people commenting will want to check who you are and the webmaster will also want to know why you are so interested in the topic. This earns you connections so easily.

2. Guest posting

Creating guest posts is not anything new for many people. When you contract SEO services this is probably one of the first strategies that will be proposed to you. Guest posting requires you to come up with clever topics, pitch and most of all seek out the prospects. You have to look for sites with good PR (high authority sites). Study the site and get an understanding of the owner. With this information you will be able to create a good pitch that will be accepted.

3. Content marketing

Creating and posting content on your website/blog is one thing but marketing it is something that you must do. When you have developed content for your blog then you have to let people know that it is available. You can share it out on social media and curated blogs. Many people create content and stop at that. There will be those random links that will come from the content you have created but then they will be very few and far in between. Marketing content well will help you in your link building efforts.

4. Social media referrals

A majority of links from the social media channels come with a nofollow tag but they are still great when it comes to bringing in traffic and conversions. Therefore you should not ignore this strategy. The mistake that many people make when using social media is using their profiles to promote their stuff only. This is selfish and as you probably know by now the principle of reciprocity is very important on social platforms. Therefore, take time to mention other people’s posts on your social media sites. Using hashtags will also increase visibility of your content.

5. Testimonials

When you use an app or software in your business then you take some time to review it. Try out a bunch of tools, application or software that is related to your business and then review them. Reach out to the developers and ask if you can take part of their testimonial page. They want reviews of their products and you want links. It is definitely a win-win situation.

These five strategies are by no means the only ones available for you to earn links. A majority of these techniques tend to be ignored quite a lot. However, the impact that they can have on your site is great. Link building is probably going to take on a different face in 2016 but its importance does not diminish at all.