Search engine optimization (SEO) results are nearly impossible without at least some link building.
The high-level view of link building strategies is simple enough; place or earn more links pointing back to your domain so your domain-level and page-level authority grow, at which point you’ll naturally rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
The truth is this exhaustive list of link building strategies should only be used to give your ideas.
It can all be intimidating and difficult for a link building newcomer, and frustrating to a seasoned veteran who just can’t break past their most recent traffic plateau.
These link building strategies include some of the best ways to get free backlinks.
We’ll also answer the following questions:
- What tactics should I focus on for my niche?
- What tactics should I avoid, or which are too costly or time-consuming to be worth my time? SEO pricing can be expensive, but repairing poor SEO is worse.
- What are the easiest ways to acquire quality backlinks?
- How do you make your blog posts and other on-site content irresistibly link worthy?
- How do you avoid spammy link building strategies?
- What are the best link building strategies for new websites?
- How long does it take for even the best link building strategies to work?
- Once you get a good system in place for link building, how do you scale it up?
- How many of of my backlink strategies should involve guest blogging or guest post outreach?
- Should I manually acquire high quality links or rely on passive link acquisition strategies?
- How do I effectively outsource my link building?
In this post, we delve into 77 link building strategies most likely to help you boost the visibility of your own site in the SERPs.
In the rest of this article, we’ll be exploring link building strategies in different categories, from earning backlinks naturally with attractive content to best practices for managing publisher relationships.
Curious about your site’s existing backlinks compared to your competitors?
Use our backlink checker to view your profile and get information about how you can improve.
These backlink strategies will help you ensure that the links you build are the highest possible quality:
Table of Contents
Backlink Quality > Backlink Quantity
And quality is typically time-consuming and more expensive.
This first strategy is more about what you shouldn’t do.
Newcomers are often tempted to build as many links as possible, without putting much thought into which types of links they build or how they build them.
Before you even start link building, make sure you have a clear vision.
- What are you trying to accomplish?
- Which links will help you the most?
- What links could hurt?
- Based on technical keyword research, what phrases do you want to rank for?
- Have you developed an anchor text strategy for your outreach?
It’s much better to build a small number of extremely helpful links than a large number of links that might hurt you in the long run.
Be VERY picky about the links you work to acquire manually:
Work to be that guy or gal in your organization that won’t take or stand for acquiring garbage backlinks!
Backlink Relevance > Referring Domain Authority
Good links exist in context.
A lengthy URL existing by itself in a forum comment isn’t going to get much positive attention; it isn’t helpful, valuable, or even natural.
But a link embedded as a citation to a resource page, or a solidly written article is a different story.
When building links, your first priority should be the content housing your link, and the context that justifies its existence.
Focus on:
- Links from quality sites
- Links embedded in quality content
- Links using appropriate anchor text (depending on your existing profile)
- Links that point to a relevant page to the content topic AND the referring domain
Without good content as a backbone, your link building strategy won’t get far.
High DA > Low DA (duh)
Google judges not just the number of linking domains to your site, but also the quality of those linking domains.
Domain authority (DA) is a relative measure of the trustworthiness of a given site.
Source: Moz
The higher the DA of a domain is, the more authority its links will pass.
Your rankings will increase with 1) enough high DA mixed with low DA sites and 2) enough time for those links to vest.
Accordingly, getting a link on a high-DA site is better than a comparable link on a low-DA site.
As an added bonus, high-DA sites tend to get more traffic on their own, which means they’ll have a higher likelihood of passing referral traffic your way.
Favor new domains and IP addresses over already-linked domains
Links pass authority from one site to another, but there are diminishing returns for links on the same domain.
In other words, the first link you build on a 78 DA website will pass significant authority to your site, but the second link you build there will pass much, much less.
As a general rule, getting a link on a new domain is a better use of your time, even if its DA is slightly lower.
In this example, a link on a new 55 DA site will be superior to a second link on the 78 DA site.
Of course, this isn’t written in stone; even if you aren’t getting as much authority, new links on already-link domains will still increase your brand visibility and may forward additional referral traffic your way.
Add value to user experience, not just anchor text
What function is your link serving?
The best links exist to provide additional value to readers.
There are many possible approaches here, but you’ll need a good one if you want your link to succeed.
For example, your link can serve as additional reading material on a topic, or it could serve as a citation to back up the facts you report.
It could also provide resources in line with what a reader is seeking, or even add a humorous element to the article.
If a reader is happy to see this link, it’s a good link for your campaign.
Never (or rarely) include more than one link to your site in an article
While it may be possible to include multiple contextually relevant links to your domain in the body of a single article, this is inadvisable as a strategy.
If you link to yourself multiple times, each subsequent link will pass less authority to your site, and if you link too much, you’ll flag the suspicions of both your publisher and Google’s search algorithm.
Focus on building one strong, relevant link to your domain instead, and feel free to include links to other domains.
Include descriptive (but not over-optimized) anchor text
Anchor text refers to the section of text in your article that “houses” the link you build (often highlighted in blue).
In the early days of SEO, the best strategy was to use anchor text that exactly matched your target keywords and phrases.
However, doing this now is counterproductive, both because keywords are less relevant (thanks to Google’s semantic search updates) and because excessive keyword use in your anchor text can harm your campaign.
Still, the text you use for your link anchors is an important consideration, but make sure you keep it natural:
Monitor the anchor text on your most important pages to understand whether your incoming links are natural. If not, you may need to engage in link building to smooth them out.
These days, your best strategy is to include anchors that effectively describe the content you’re linking, with phrasing that naturally blends with the rest of your article.
Don’t ignore nofollow link building
By default, links are “dofollow,” which means Google’s web crawlers and search algorithm will consider them when making calculations and determining rankings.
While authority is only passed with dofollow links, Google has recently been pushing publishers to provide more clarity by tagging links based on their placement type.
However, it’s also possible to include a “nofollow” tag in the backend HTML code that prevents a link from being considered.
Some sites (especially high-DA publishers) intentionally make the majority of their links nofollow links to preserve their online reputation in Google’s eyes.
Because nofollow links won’t increase your authority directly, many link builders dismiss them as worthless.
However, nofollow links can be valuable; they’re still a source of brand visibility and referral traffic, and they may be your chance to make a good impression on a high-DA publisher, serving as a steppingstone to the dofollow link you’d prefer.
They’re also part of a natural backlink profile:
One common approach to getting backlinks for your site is earning links passively.
The overarching goal here is to create onsite assets so interesting or valuable that other authorities naturally want to link to them.
These are some of the best link building tactics for the job:
Include original, reference-able stats in your core content
If you want people to link to your blog posts, you need to give them a reason.
Think about the links you’d build in high-quality content of your own; you’ll likely link to sources that give you numerical statistics, original research, or unique arguments that aren’t all over the web.
If you include these points of reference in your own work, it will be far more likely to be cited by other authors.
Conducting original research can be cost- and time-intensive, but you can guarantee access to data no one else has; as long as those data are valuable, you’ll almost certainly earn links.
Engage Influencers in Your Niche
This link building tactic is something of a hybrid between asking for links and earning them naturally.
The idea is to find an influencer in your field (i.e., someone with a large social following or someone known for producing great content), then provide that influencer with a piece of your content you think they’d appreciate.
Find influencers in your niche with many followers. The purpose is not for social media links, but to get the word out so, blogs will also link to your great content.
For example, let’s say a leading authority in your industry makes a social media post about the seeming decline of sales in the industry.
You can use this opportunity to send them a case study you did on long-term industry growth; if they like it and find it valuable, they’ll probably link to it in future content (or share it with their followers).
Collaborate on Posts
You can try something similar by collaborating on posts.
Find another expert in your field, and work together on a shared piece of content.
You can write a blog post together, or each contribute pieces of research that one author stitches together in a finished narrative.
If you host the content on your site, you can be sure your partner will want to generate links to it; after all, it will work in both your best interests.
Guest post and invite guest post authors
Similarly, it’s beneficial to invite more guest post authors to your site.
Ask for contributions from guest post authors as a mutually beneficial backlink exchange; they get the visibility of your blog platform, and you get the value of their work.
But, be aware, guest blogging has its limitations and has been viewed negatively by Google since time immemorial.
If you have trouble finding guest post authors willing to contribute, consider offering a trade and guest posting on their site.
Your new guest blogging authors will likely want to reference their own work (with backlinks) in the future, or spend effort to popularize it; accordingly, you’ll earn more links.
Plus, guest blogging helps you to have more diverse, authoritative voices across your various blog posts.
Network offline
This has countless benefits; it will increase your number of social media followers, increase your total readership, give you access to more guest blogging authors, and introduce you to more guest posting opportunities for your own strategy.
The bigger your collective network is, the more likely you’ll be to earn links.
But beware of begging and definitely beware of forcing:
Create amazing on-site pages
Whether you want to earn links naturally or build them yourself, you’ll need amazing onsite pages to succeed.
High-quality onsite content and blog posts will make people more eager to link to you, and will make your links “stickier”—in other words, publishers will be less likely to remove or alter them.
Plus, remember that all your link building strategies will generate traffic to your site.
If you get referral visitors, you’ll want them to be left with a good impression of your brand.
Strong blog posts and other website pages are the only way to accomplish your link building goals.
No one legitimate is going to link to a poorly created blog post.
If you want to make the most of your link building strategy, you should prioritize building links to your best onsite pages.
If you have a comprehensive guide or an amazing piece of research to show off, build several links to it; this piece will rank higher and get more traffic, ultimately benefitting your brand in multiple ways.
The caveat here is that you need to mix up your links as well; link building exclusively to one onsite page can look suspicious.
Monitor (and mimic) your competitors’ link building strategies
You aren’t the only company building backlinks for SEO; chances are, most of your competitors are doing the same.
You can learn a lot by observing and mimicking their strategies.
The easiest way to start here is with a tool like Moz’s Link Explorer; here, you can enter a competitor’s domain and quickly generate a list of all the links pointing to that domain on the web.
Check those links to see where they’ve been built, and where they’re pointing.
You’ll discover new publishers you can work with, and possibly some weaknesses in your link building strategy that you can exploit for competitive dominance.
Work with a professional link building agency [shameless plug]
That said, a professional link building company could help you develop your strategy faster and more reliably.
Expert link building agencies understand the nuances of the strategy, and make content, link quality, and long-term relationships with publishers their priorities. They have access to far more resources and more specialists than you do, and while they tend to charge a relatively high fee, they also tend to give you a high return on your investment (ROI).
Just make sure you do your due diligence; work with an SEO company that has a good reputation and investigate their strategic approach so you know what you’re getting.
And, if you’re an SEO agency yourself, it may make sense to find a company that will allow you to outsource SEO and your link building as a white label SEO reseller.
Estimate link value and update your strategy as needed
Whenever you build a link with a new publisher, try to estimate the total value of that link.
Try to isolate its effects on your domain- and page-level authority, determine page views of the main blog post, and measure referral traffic.
Compare and combine these metrics to estimate how valuable this link is and compare your conclusion to other links you’ve built.
Then, adjust your link building strategy for the future; build more links on the best publishers, and find more publishers like them.
Don’t waste any more time on links or publishers that aren’t returning much value your way.
Create “Best of” lists or listicles
“Best of” lists, or listicles, tend to be numbered lists that collect some of the best or most notable items within a given topic.
They’re appealing because they promise the reader a concise read; something like “10 tips to improve your onion chopping experience” invites the reader in with the understanding they can glance at those tips at a high level and still learn something.
It’s also easy to build a link within one of these points if you use this archetype for a guest post.
Create surveys and other original research
Original research is extremely powerful for attracting links, but it can also be expensive to conduct.
A good, inexpensive method of original research is conducting surveys; get a few hundred people within a niche to respond to a short survey, collect the data, and publish it on your site.
Now you have statistics that no one else has, and you can attract or build links as you see fit.
Throw in some visuals on the data and you’ll have an amazing onsite asset.
In fact, we have found that original research, published well, is one of the best link building strategies for scaling natural, inbound links from other websites.
Create controversial opinion pieces
Most brands are reluctant to write controversial opinion blog post pieces, for fear of alienating their target audience.
However, taking a controversial stance can be great for your link building campaign, so long as you do it respectfully and with hard evidence.
Being resolute in your opinion and sharing it, can also help you gain credibility giving you a boost for outranking other bigger brands online.
And as long as your topic is debatable, it will invite lots of people to discuss and share the topic.
All those comments and shares will make your work more visible, making it easier to generate links.
Report on original news
If you have access to original news in your industry, work to be the first ones to report it.
If your customers and other readers grow to trust you as a first-line publisher, they’re going to stay glued to your blog post—and link to your news articles the moment they get published.
Newsjacking
Of course, if you don’t have immediate access to industry news, there’s another way to make use of newsworthy content: newsjacking (not to be confused with brand jacking).
The general idea here is to read up on some event in the news, then write a piece of content with your own spin on it.
Consolidate details from multiple different sources to create an article with comprehensive coverage, or include your unique opinion on the news.
Become an original topic source
Being the first to explore a topic can also be powerful, since you won’t face much competition, but it’s hard to find a topic that’s never been covered.
For example, you might review the latest tech gadget the moment it becomes available to consumers, or you might analyze a new trend in your industry.
Entertaining/funny content
Though somewhat riskier, you can also attract links via entertaining content.
Hilarious and/or fun videos tend to get lots of shares and are frequently cited in online compilations.
A nut shot compilation will always bring some laughs.
The trouble is, there’s no formula for what people find fun or humorous, so if you miss the mark, it could hurt more than help.
Create infographics
Infographics capitalize on people’s desire for information and their love for digestible visuals.
Visual content remains some of the most shared types of content on the web, so a sufficiently detailed and aesthetically pleasing infographic can help you earn dozens of links.
Infographic link building, while still helpful, was a much more effective link building strategy five years ago, but it has admittedly diminished over time.
Infographics could also include quote graphics and other social media “shareables.”
Interviews and podcasts
Interviews have several advantages as a type of content for building links.
For starters, you can publish interviews in multiple different mediums, such as video, audio, or a written transcript.
You’ll also likely be interviewing people from outside your organization; those people will be incentivized to link to the finished product and share it on their own social media platforms.
It’s a built-in boost to your initial distribution.
Set up 301 redirects for old, outdated or broken links (but be careful)
Occasionally, you’ll need to get rid of a page, either because it’s no longer relevant or because you’re retooling it into something else.
If you change the URL, all the links you built to that page in the past will become broken, rendering them practically useless for your brand.
You can combat broken links by setting up 301 redirects, which take all traffic from the old URL and redirect that traffic to a new URL.
As a link building strategy, broken link building in this way can be highly effective.
As long as you’re sending people to a new, relevant site page, Google is completely fine with using broken link building as an effective backlink tactic—it even encourages it.
Keep your old content updated
If you’re following best practices for content marketing, much of your content will be “evergreen,” meaning it’s likely to remain relevant for a long time, if not forever.
However, even evergreen content could stand to be periodically updated.
Revisit your older material and make sure it’s relevant, and be willing to add new facts, updated old statistics, and make tweaks to make sure it’s better suited for the modern era.
It’s much cheaper and more efficient to keep your old content updated, relevant and link-generating than to only create new ones.
Engage in a broken link building campaign
As you read content on the web, you’ll likely encounter broken links—links that send you to a 404 page, or links that are no longer relevant.
Treat these as an opportunity for engaging in broken link building services.
If you have an Ahrefs subscription, you can start by checking for broken links there:
If not Ahrefs, would suggest using our broken link checker tool:
Use a broken link checker to check for broken backlinks.
If and when you find a broken link, reach out to the authors, publishers or site owners with a suggestion for a quality backlink to replace the broken link; assuming you have a piece of content that fulfills this requirement, your broken link request has a high probability of being met.
A broken link building strategy is one of the best ways to acquire backlinks from pages on relevant websites that are appropriately aged and have existing page authority.
Similarly, you can engage in a 404 link reclamation campaign.
Offer corrections or updates to existing articles or article statistics
Occasionally, you’ll find mistakes on pieces of offsite content.
They may cite a statistic or other resource pages that are out of date, or make an argument that isn’t quite accurate.
When you find these instances, offer to make a correction—especially if you have an onsite article that already features the correct information.
You can do something similar by offering to update old content.
For example, let’s say you find an article with a title like “How to Buy a Used Car in 2010” that hasn’t been touched or updated since.
If you can sell another site on updating outdated content (showing of course that doing so is likely to increase their rankings if done well), then it can be a great strategy for earning more links.
You can reach out to the site owner and offer to write a new version that’s updated for 2020.
When you write this content (or revise what’s already there), you’ll get the chance to include a link back to your site in some way.
Guest speak
If you know who to talk to, you can easily find guest speaking opportunities in your city. If and when you do, take them.
Guest speaking gives you a chance to speak in front of like-minded professionals and show off your expertise.
You’ll also get the chance to present your blog posts to a new audience.
Assuming you spend some time networking after, this can easily lead to a new influx of people reading your onsite material, and possibly new opportunities for publishing or content collaboration.
Our boy Samuel Edwards is the most prolific on our team for speaking engagements:
Create and sustain a community.
One of the best things you can do for your link building strategy is create and sustain a community.
You want people to actively engage with your content, sharing it, commenting on it, and reading it no matter which site owners you use.
The more active fans you have, the easier it will be to find new publishing opportunities, the more links you’ll earn, and the faster your online presence will grow.
The best ways to build a community are to engage with your readers directly, give your readers a platform for comments and discussion, and network with new people constantly.
Building a community is more about old-school tactics of building a brand and this is what link building is all about.
Ready to Start Building Backlinks?
Are you interested in using link building to improve your site’s visibility, and get more organic traffic than you ever thought possible?
These strategies will be a good start, but if you want reliable, long-term results, it’s in your best interest to work with a seasoned SEO company.
Get in touch through one of our various locations, and we’ll set you up with one of our dedicated account managers, who will provide you with a free consultation and an assessment of your current needs.
From there, we can put together a custom link building strategy that works perfectly for your brand.
And, for agency resellers, we also offer you the opportunity sell SEO to resell SEO or white label SEO solutions.
Tim holds expertise in building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.
When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
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