Best Link Building Tips for Higher Google Rankings
Google uses at least a hundred different factors to rank pages. Every website seeks to comply to these ranking factors as best as they can. They produce good content, a good website design and have a strong social media presence, but even that’s not enough. Ever since the dawn of search engines, the most powerful ranking factor was a site’s backlinks. Its impact is greater than any other factor’s. The link building process takes most of a SEO’s time. With Google’s Penguin update in action, it takes even more time now, since the relevancy of the links also matters.
Back in the day, you could link to any other site. If it had a high authority, you got a strong backlink from it. Things are different now, because you have to find high quality links for your site, for it to rank well. The authority of the web-page linking to your site matters more than any other ranking factor. With high quality links on your site, your way to the top of the search engine results is assured. We’re looking to help you with just that, as well as we can in this article. We’re going to share the link building tips we found to be the best. So, let’s get down to it!
Find Bloggers That Are Relevant To Your Niche
If you have a site that’s built around healthy food recipes, than you’ll want sites that share similar recipes or talk about healthy diets. There are plenty of blogs in nutrition and healthy diets that you can get links from. So, your first job is to do a thorough search to find these blogs. By a thorough search, I mean move every rock you can to find those blogs that you can link to. Typing “healthy food recipe blogs” or “nutrition blogs” won’t be enough. You might come across a few good ones, but you want more.
So, to make your job a lot easier, search for lists, typing “nutrition blog list” or “list of nutrition blogs”. That way you can find these blogs a lot faster and you’ll also find better quality blogs because you’re looking at a curated list.
Also, use a neat tool called Followerwonk to find additional bloggers through Twitter. You can find it on MOZ’s website. It will search through Twitter accounts and analyze them to find whether they have the keywords you’re looking for, such as “nutrition blogger”. This way, you can find influential bloggers who can give you back links. Your job will be a whole lot easier this way. You can then look at the results and find the people that you think are worth reaching out to.
But you can also start your own blog. Don’t just write a blog with a single post on it and link it to your site, because that has plenty of risks involved. Write posts on a regular basis instead and constantly linking out to your main website. Just be sure to write relevant content, with your industry’s and your visitors’ needs in mind. Create well-structured, useful content and you’ll get more out of that blog than just the backlinks.
Write Various Kinds Of Blog Posts
Some blog posts don’t just offer unique value to their readers, but also offer an opportunity for you to reach out and do some link building.
- Reference other blogs – By referencing other blogs, you not only add more value to your own post but can also get some inbound links too. Link to another blog and cross your fingers that they’ll return the favor.
- Do Guest Blogging – Writing some of your content on other niche and industry related blogs is a great way to get some inbound links organically.
- Do Giveaways – Offer free eBooks, webinars, courses and any other resource that might be helpful to your visitors. They will share it in an effort to help out others.
- Add Social Sharing Buttons – Social sharing buttons on your blog’s articles is a great way to have your readers share your content and generate an inbound link.
- Stay Consistent With Your Blog – The best way to generate inbound links is by constantly writing sharable content and blogging it. Post at least twice a week and make sure that your content is high quality. You’ll definitely have others in the same niche share it with their followership.
List Your Website In Directories
One of the SEO favorites is listing your website in directories, but you’ll have to be careful with this one. You can come across plenty of fake directories that don’t actually offer any value to their users. Which is why google penalizes and even deindexes them. So, you probably won’t even come across them, still it’s important that you’re careful.
Find directories that are relevant to your business or industry and that offer value to their users. Directories like this look to provide useful information to its visitors and your potential customers. They will also give you the chance to post a link to your website. Registering your business to these kind of directories will get your website indexed more easily and it will also be easier for people to find you online. So, place your website inside a trustworthy directory and have a strong backlink on your page!
Take Advantage of Link-Building Tools
There are plenty of link-building tools that help you examine potential link sources. You can learn about the authority and quality of the link as well. You might even see that you’re not linking well among your very own websites. Use some of these tools to get to know as much about what you have to work with.
If you’re guest posting, be sure that you get links that positively impact your website. You can the website you’re writing for by using the Link Research SEO Toolbar.
Write Awesome Guest Posts
This is one of the best ways for reaching out to other sites and blogs and get some backlinks from them. It’s a win-win situation, because they’ll get a blog post for free and you’ll get a relevant backlink from them. Just make sure that the website is relevant in your niche and also:
- Be sure to write a high-quality, professionally written article
- Don’t write about how awesome your own website or company is
- Keep in mind that this will be your first impression for a lot of readers out there
Create Awesome Content For Your Own Sites
By creating some awesome and useful content, you’ll encourage people to share it with others. These are called “linkbait”, which are content pieces that will do your work for you, later on. By creating high quality content, you not only attract the attention of new readers but editors’ attention as well. This will in turn earn you editorially earned votes and will establish trust with your followership. It will also build your authority. Your main goal is to create content that is informative, valuable and entertaining.
Build Relationships and Ask For Backlinks
Building your backlinks and your website’s authority isn’t all about your website. You’ll have to cultivate relationships to be fully successful. Build your contact list, meet new people, go to networking events and do as much as you can to reach out to new people. Or at least join the right niche specific forums and social media groups, where people seek to support each other’s endeavors.
If you have at least one friend, relative or college, or someone else you’ve met in person, who has a website, be sure to ask them for a backlink. In fact, don’t be shy to ask anyone you know that has a website which would be able to provide a relevant backlink. Just be sure that it isn’t an irrelevant one, because the impact of a bad backlink would hurt your site.
Write Testimonials
Customer testimonials can be invaluable for some companies. Building links through testimonials is a win-win situation for both you and the website you’re writing the testimonial for. For them, it’s a great way to build trust with their customers. For you it’s an awesome opportunity to earn an organic backlink and maybe even some traffic from their website. You’re a lot more likely to get backlink this way than just asking a site owner in an email.
Link Building With Awesome Infographics
If you make some awesome infographics, someone else will use it soon enough, but they will not give you a link. So, you’ll have to contact these website and ask them to give you one.
For this process, copy the actual filename of your infographics. You can get it from either your PC or from where it is hosted. Copy the filename, go to Google Images and paste the file name you just copied. Once you get the results, just go to the links that were using your photo and ask them to add a link to the original source.
Buying Links
Google and other search engines are constantly developing ways to find paid links and discount their influence. In fact, they might even discredit all paid links they find. Any website that is caught for participating in link schemes will be penalized. But that doesn’t mean that the practice is completely flawed. It can work sometimes but it’s still better to build links naturally.
Claiming Broken Links
You probably saw plenty of links leading nowhere or to a broken page. If you come across one of these on a website in your niche, reach out to their owner. Point out that they have a broken link on their site and offer up one of your content pieces as a substitute. In turn, this will generate you a high quality inbound link.
Always Seek to Learn More
SEO and link building is a very excessive topic and you can’t learn it by reading through these tips alone. Instead, go to MOZ and look up other resources such as, BuzzStream’s blog or this article. There’s a lot you can learn from free resources on the web, so be sure to look over all of them.
Conclusion
These are some of the most straight forward ways to generate some high quality links for your site. By practicing them right from the beginning, you’ll get on the straight road towards success. But remember that there’s always more to learn and that you have to put these tips into practice as frequently as you can. So, what are you waiting for? You know what to do!
