Five Inbound Link-Building Strategies to Help Your Site Rank Higher

Have you been wondering how to implement some successful techniques for establishing links to your website from external sites?

All the inbound links, also called backlinks, can play a key role in improving your organic search ranking through Google and its algorithm. But how do you go about making this happen?

Clearly, you cannot achieve a winning backlink strategy all by yourself. Instead, effective link-building strategies require networking and cooperation with owners of other relevant websites, and especially those whose sites (linking to yours) have relevance, authority, and credibility.

Take the mystery out of establishing links and start making it work for you with these inbound strategies to build links. Here's a resource page to help you with your link-building efforts.

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What is Link Building?

You can successfully establish backlinks when other websites, or blog writers, create links from their site to yours. These are called inbound or backlinks, and they are valuable to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Having backlinks to your site will boost your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Getting better SEO results is about creating links that have quality, not quantity. You can't just go around to every website you can think of, jump on their blog, and start posting links to your website.

A search engine will not reward you for that type of behavior. Random link-posting also won't engender kind feelings from other website owners and blog owners.

You need to employ a strategy to drive your inbound linking efforts, use strategic guest blogging, and work to grow your relationships to get more links to your site.

Why Make Inbound Linking a Priority?

Writing a blog post or any webpage content without regard to SEO is like hiring an employee just to fill space. They're there in case someone walks up to them, but they're not doing anything otherwise to attract people to them.

Having a good number of links pointing to your content will improve your search engine rankings. It means that other people are linking to your content from their sites.

When lots of sites are linking to your web pages, it tells search engines one thing—you've got something that people need and want to see. So any time a website adds an external link that directs people away from their own site and on to yours, the algorithm assumes that it has high-quality content.

Building links will improve your search ranking with Google, Bing, and other popular engines. Websites that have healthy link profiles rank higher in search results.

What to Include in Your Link-Building Strategy

How do you achieve great results? First and foremost, you need to create great content. If you write it, they will come. But you need to have a strategy behind your content creation, or you'll miss out on the high-quality links you need.

As a blog owner, blog writing is all about adding a human aspect to your business. Blog posts give your business a voice and make customers and clients feel like a friend or colleague is there to support them.

Rich content that reflects this idea will garner backlinks. These reciprocal links tell search engine crawlers that your content is helpful, relevant, and respected.

When creating a link-building strategy, you'll find that this effort goes hand-in-hand with your public relations efforts to increase brand awareness.

Monitor the conversations that are happening in your industry. Comment on them and link them to your own relevant information to add credibility to your business's reputation. Offer to write guest posts on respected blogs related to your expertise.

It's much better to have sites that naturally link to yours, perhaps through editorial links from site owners, rather than trying for paid links or creating an internal link across your own web pages. Aim for authority links with all the sites you respect.

In many ways, backlinks are a result of old-school public relations. You can't always take a shortcut; you have to get out and meet people and display your expertise by appearing on panels and engaging in networking.

Five Inbound Link Tactics that Work

One of the best tactics for getting links to your site is creating engaging content. When you have an effective content strategy, sites with high domain authority will link back to you.

Social Sharing

Another way to generate backlinks is by sharing relevant links from other blog owners on social media.?This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

You follow them on social media because their content is valuable to your audience. Then, they follow you because you tagged them. Then, they start seeing your posts and well-written blogs and add links to your site, and ta-da! a nice increase in organic traffic is the result.

Think of your favorite cartoon frenemies—that's the symbiotic relationship between marketers and business owners in the same or similar industries. During the day, you duke it out for customers. Then, when you're off the clock, you share stories, exchange contact information, and swap a guest post or two.

Keyword Searches: Find the Right Words

Performing a keyword search should be a part of your content strategy. You'll use them as a link-building tactic, too. Learning the terms people are searching for and then utilizing them will help other brands find you and link to your site.

Build Out Your Website Resources

Any backlink campaign will include the creation of some new web pages. For example, create resource pages for industry jargon, frequently asked questions, or common acronyms relevant to your targeted population. These types of pages will get more backlinks from other sites than content that is strictly self-serving.

Highlight Customer Successes

Who are your most excited customers? You know who we’re talking about—your fans who love everything you do. Write about them with case studies so they can link back to you.

Case studies are longer-form, more in-depth writings that outline the service you provided to a specific client and the results.

This client will likely not pass up the chance to share content about themselves that someone else created, so they'll link from their site back to yours.

Broken Link Building

All the broken links out there are enough to make your head spin. So one of the marketing world's favorite link-building strategies is building broken links. A broken link is one that is no longer functional and results in the "page not found" error message.

It happens when a site owner restructures menus and performs other updates. However, they can only change the internal links—they can't change where others have backlinked to a broken link.

For you, the strategy here is this:

????????Find links on a webpage that result in error messages.

????????Contact the website administrator to make them aware.

????????Send them a link of yours that offers similar content (and that actually works!).

?

How do you find these broken backlinks?

You run a search, just like someone from your target audience would do. Find the best results that you would click on from relevant sites, and check the links throughout to find ones that no longer function.

Alternately, you can use one of the many tools available online that are broken backlink checkers. For example, here are some instructions from Ahrefs.

It's OK to start small with your link-building campaign—just get started! First, you'll need to find the most effective link-building opportunities and strategies that work for you.

If you're just getting started with SEO for your small business, pick one tactic at a time, and then run with it. Once you've mastered it, you can start moving on to the next!

?To talk to the experts about establishing a great backlinking campaign, please contact us!

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