Current.com: A High Level SEO Audit
November 26, 2020
How to Time Your Backlink Acquisition
December 2, 2020Link Building Guide
A Comprehensive Link Building Guide for Building Quality Backlinks
What is link building for SEO? In this ultimate beginner's guide to building links, you will learn everything you need to get started, including the best link building strategies and tactics that are needed to create a well-rounded backlink plan for sustainable SEO growth for your website.
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What is Link Building in SEO?
A Beginner’s Guide to Backlinks
You know you need to be building backlinks.
Backlinks STILL remain the single strongest factor in Google's ranking algorithm.
But, ugh building high quality links also happens to be the most difficult element of search engine optimization (SEO) as voted on by a survey we conducted of our 1K+ of our white label SEO agency partners.
Furthermore, unless you've been an active SEO for decades, you may not have a complete Rolodex of all the relevant websites in your niche from which to acquire a large volume of high-quality, relevant backlinks.
And, even if you had the connections, not all links are created equal. Some can actually hurt your rankings.
So how in the heck are you going to build good backlinks for SEO?
Let's dive in to our process, including a rundown of advanced link building tips!
Search Ranking Correlation
Quadratic Mean Spearman Correlation
All vs. Commercial vs. Informational Queries
Source: Perficient
Chapter 1: A Link Building Overview
Link building is a term referring to the practice of establishing links (hyperlinks) that point to your site.
It's that simple.
But, why would you invest time and money in link building?
Link Building is About Promotion
Link building is a promotional strategy that helps people find your site—and in a number of different ways, as we'll see.
Link building is most commonly known as a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. That's because it helps you increase your domain authority (DA). A higher DA means higher rankings. Higher rankings mean more traffic… and you already know why it's a good thing to have more traffic.
That said, link building is also a good strategy for generating traffic via other channels. Notably, if you build a strong link with a good publisher, you can generate a stream of separate referral traffic to your site!
So let's get crazy and start building high quality links right now!
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. "Correct" link building, or effective link building, requires you to research your audience, plan your strategy, exercise communication, create excellent content, and remain persistent as you face adversity.
There's a lot to learn and a lot to practice. But don't worry—we're here to help.
If you're ready to learn more about link building, just keep reading this guide. We're about to introduce you to everything you need to know—or at least the fundamentals.
The 3 Main Components of SEO
There are more than 200 ranking factors used by Google to determine web page trustworthiness and rankings.
That's a lot to juggle as a webmaster.
Fortunately, we can conveniently group these factors into three main categories. These three categories lead us to the three main components of any SEO strategy:
1. Technical optimization. Technical optimization is all about making sure your website works properly, and can be indexed by Google as intended.
2. Onsite content development. Onsite content development is all about writing high-quality content for your site—and optimizing it with the right keywords.
3. Offsite SEO. This is where link building comes in. Offsite SEO is all about establishing your website's trustworthiness, usually by calling upon the power of link building.
Technical optimization is mostly a one-time effort; once you have all the right components in place, maintenance is minimal.
Onsite content development is important, but it has limited power to boost your authority and encourage meaningful increases in website rankings.
Of the three, offsite SEO/link building is arguably the most important for your strategy to succeed.
How Google Generates Revenue
Google's parent company, Alphabet, has hundreds of projects and countless ways of generating revenue. But Google Search still generates revenue the way it used to.
Google has been around for so long as a free tool that it's easy to forget that it's still a profit-driven company. Its main purpose is to make money. So how does it do it? And why does this matter for link building?
The short answer is that Google makes money from ads. There are ads on nearly all search engine results pages (SERPs), sometimes at the top, and sometimes at the bottom. They may not take up much space, but they're responsible for generating tens of billions of dollars for the company every year.
These ads are only capable of generating revenue for Google because lots of people use Google.
Google is therefore incentivized to give users the best possible search experience. That means providing them with the most trustworthy, most relevant results.
Why Aren't More People Using Link Building
Sometimes misunderstood and sometimes neglected, link building is actually one of the most beneficial, cost efficient, and powerful strategies you can implement for your brand online.
So why is it that a whopping 38 percent of online marketers aren't using the strategy at all?
The way I see it there are three main reasons:
- Marketers misunderstanding link building, thinking of it in terms of archaic tactics that are no longer effective (or even safe).
- Marketers not seeing the true impact of the strategy, missing the potential value it holds.
- Marketers not knowing how to implement the strategy properly, leaving them unable to begin work, or leaving them with less-than-ideal results after pursuing the strategy for some time.
By the end of this guide, you should have a thorough understanding of modern link building services, with all the tools and knowledge you need to get started.
This is where you come in.
Google doesn't care about your site. It doesn't care about you. It cares about its users, and giving them the best possible experience.
Therefore, if your site can deliver users the best possible experience, you'll be a shoe-in to reach higher rankings.
Simple, right?
Chapter 2: The Purpose & Benefits of Link Building for SEO
At this point, you may not be convinced that link building is worth all that effort.
But link building is about far more than just increasing your search engine rankings.
Take a look at some of the ways link building can support your brand.
The Purpose of Links
Before we get too far into talking about link building, we need to talk about links.
But, what are links, anyway?
Intuitively, you probably know what links are, but it’s important to get an understanding of how the function for the web.Hyperlinks are designed as a navigational tool. If you click a hyperlink, you'll be automatically taken to another website—the website whose URL is housed in that link.
The main function of a link is to make navigation easier for users of the web, and to create the architecture between web pages responsible for the web's "web"-like connections.
This is fundamentally important, because there are only three ways to reach a web page. You can either click a bookmark, type in a URL, or click a link. Therefore, if you haven't yet discovered a web page, a link is the only way to discover it.
But there's another purpose for links, now that Google and other search engines exist.
In the eyes of Google, a link is a vote of confidence. It's a sign that this website inherently trusts the web page to which they're linking.
On a small scale, that's not a big deal. But on a large scale, you can use this principle to analyze the trustworthiness of millions of pages.
The short version is that the more links a web page has, and the more valuable those links are, the more trustworthy it’s going to seem—and the more trustworthy it is, the higher it’s going to rank!
Chapter 3: Link Building Strategy Considerations
You have the basic idea of link building, but how exactly do you go about building the links in the first place?
The phrase "link building" was actually coined in reference to an archaic strategy of stuffing links everywhere you could online, but modern link building takes place in two main theaters, or approaches: link attraction and manual link building/outreach.
Link Attraction
Link attraction, often referred to as link earning, is exactly what it sounds like.
In this strategy, you'll be developing pieces of content for your link building opportunities that you'll publish directly on your own website. The goal is to entice people to link to them based on their innate quality or "linkability."
This is advantageous because it circumvents the possibility of a Penguin-based penalty (more on that in the next section); all the links you generate in this method will be completely natural.
The downside is that it's difficult to control. You'll be relying on social syndication and users' natural tendencies to cite sources they've found valuable, which doesn't always pay off the way you think it will. Think about the strange articles and pieces of content you sometimes see in the trending sections of social media platforms.
In short, sexy content attracts the best links in both quality and quantity.
Manual Link Building
Manual link building sounds like it would be closer to the original practices of link building, which often involved spam-based tactics.
However, modern manual link building is more sophisticated, and revolves around producing content and performing backlink outreach to other sites (often for guest blogging) in your niche.
Essentially, you'll be producing material that these other websites find valuable for their own audiences, resulting in a mutually beneficial relationship. Within the content, you'll include a natural, value-adding link to one of your pages within that content, and each party will gain from the relationship.
As you gain more authority and produce better material, you'll be able to engage with higher-authority publishers, gradually increasing the traffic, reputation, and authority you get from the process.
But, link builder beware. This method is not without its own risks, as Ross Hudgens so aptly points out.
When it comes to building backlinks, working smarter is advised to working harder.
There is still a direct correlation between backlinks and SEO rankings.
Domain Authority & Page Authority
When it comes to earning higher ranks in search engines through link building, everything boils down to authority, but until now I've only referred to "authority" in the general sense.
In reality, domain authority and page authority are slightly different, and the way they're calculated is complicated—to say the least.
"Authority" is a subjective, unofficial score assigned to different websites based on how trustworthy Google deems those sites. This level of trust is determined by recognition throughout the web.
A guest blogging link from relevant websites Google knows to be trustworthy might pass a ton of authority to your site, while one from a decent site might pass a bit of authority.
Check your domain and page authority now using our backlink checker.
A link from a known untrustworthy site might actually drag your authority down.
Google used to publicly post its Pagerank method, but discontinued it. Other third-party tools like Moz, Ahrefs and Majestic now help give similar oversight into the quality of the links you’re procuring.
Whenever you link to a specific page of your site, that link increases that page’s “page authority,” which increases its likelihood of ranking in search results. However, you’ll also be increasing your overall “domain authority,” which applies sitewide.
There is still a direct correlation between backlinks and SEO rankings.
Also note that authority is probably only passed if the link is a "dofollow" (ie, non no-follow) link. Most links are "dofollow" by default, which means that search engines will actively view them and consider them as authority-passers. Some publishers, however, mark links with a "nofollow" tag, which essentially hides them from Google's view.
Nofollow links can still be valuable, as they'll increase your brand visibility and pass referral traffic your way, but they probably won't pass any authority to increase your search ranks.
Using the "nofollow" tag helps publishers remain in good standing with Google, as too many authority-passing links to the same source, or in the wrong context, can be a red flag.
Link Building Strategies vs. Tactics
People in the SEO community sometimes use the terms “strategy” and “tactics” as if they were the same. But there’s an important difference, and you’ll need to distinguish between these terms to build the right campaign for your website.
Your strategy is the overarching direction of your campaign. It will define your audience, your goals, and your general plan to achieve those goals.
Your tactics, by contrast, are the techniques and mechanisms by which you’ll secure links. In other words, your tactics will be the individual methods you use to pursue your strategy.
Without tactics, you won’t be able to build links. Without a strategy, the tactics you use to build links won’t have a direction or help you achieve your goals.
Chapter 4: How to Build Links the "Right" Way
We'll shortly talk about the two general methods for building high quality links (attract links vs. manual link building).
But before we get there, we need to talk about the general principles you'll need to follow to ensure your links function as intended—and don't attract a penalty.
In other words, there's a "right" way to build links.
White Hat Link Building
There can be a vast differential in the quality of the backlinks you acquire back to your website. Quality beats quantity every day of the week. This shortlist should help you determine the characteristics of a high-quality backlink.
Chapter 5: Black Hat Strategies (or, How to Build Links the "Wrong" Way)
Now that I've outlined the basic concepts of modern link building, as well as a high-level view of the strategies you'll need to be successful at it, let's take a step back and look at how link building came to be, how it's evolved, and why it has an undeserved questionable reputation in the SEO (and general marketing) industry.
In this chapter we will dive into the dark abyss of black hat link building for SEO.
Old School Link Building Strategies
Old-school link building (a technical term, I assure you) was nothing shy of atrocious.
Nobody liked it, even the people reaping the benefits of it.
Why?
Because Google's authority measurement algorithm was painfully simple. Links couldn't be evaluated in terms of quality, which meant that any link on the web passed roughly the same proportionate value to whatever site it pointed to.
As you can imagine, there was too much wiggle room for abuse in this model. Any webmaster with enough time on their hands could spam links everywhere they could—on blogs, forums, and so forth—and see their ranks climb in a linear and predictable fashion.
Irrelevant and low-quality sites frequently made it to the top of the SERPs, frustrating searchers, and spammy links were popping up everywhere on the web.
Even software was developed that could automate the entire process of signing up for sites, creating content with links in it, and posting that content. That's why Google stepped up its game in 2012, with an algorithm known as the Penguin update.
Google Updates
The Penguin update was released in April 2012, and even though Google had taken measures to improve its link evaluations in the past, this was the first real step toward the modern ranking system we know today.
Essentially, Penguin overhauled the way Google viewed the quality of backlinks to various websites. It became able to detect how "natural" a link was, and took a more natural approach to evaluating anchor text, which could previously be stuffed with keywords to improve a relevance score for those targets.
Penguin penalized sites that used these old-school, shady, "black hat" tactics, and instead rewarded sites that had a natural link profile. Any sites that had "bad" links directed to them (i.e., ones with keyword-stuffed anchor text, ones irrelevant or non-valuable to users, etc.), could have those links removed, or in extreme cases, disavowed in order to eventually restore their ranking to its previous levels.
Multiple iterations of Penguin have rolled out since then, including Penguin 2.0 and 3.0, both of which have added new ranking signals to the algorithm. However, most of these updates have been small, and have essentially been "data refreshes" that haven't overhauled Penguin's core system of evaluating links.
Black Hat Link Building Strategies to Avoid
It’s hard to say exactly what Google views as a “good” or a “natural” link, but we do have some pretty good indicators.
Still, it’s better to outline what Google considers to be a “bad” link in contrast, instead.
Avoid these types of link building strategies at all costs.
Link Spam
If your link exists by itself, with no context, it’s spam. There are many definitions of spam, and it can be quite subjective, but chances are, you’ll know it when you see it. Trust your gut here, and don’t build a link unless you have a good reason for doing so.
Comments & Forum Posts
Comments and forum posts used to be excellent opportunities to build links thanks to their easy accessibility. However, most forums these days carry low authority, or use nofollow links, or are too keen to link building techniques for this to fly. Avoid them.
Paid Links
Google explicitly forbids webmasters from paying people to post links to their sites. You can pay for consulting or help with executing a link building strategy, but the direct exchange of money for links between you and a publisher will put you at risk of being penalized.
Link Schemes
There are many types of general link “schemes,” most of which involve two or more parties engaging in tactics designed to increase the ranks of everyone involved. Link circles and article directories are just a couple of these. As a rule of thumb, if an opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Link Exchanges
Link exchanges are basic “post a link to me and I’ll post a link to you” deals. Avoid these; they are known as reciprocal links, which Google easily identifies and essentially ignores for ranking purposes. Too many of them can get you penalized for being manipulative.
Private Blog Networks
Links built on a private blog network or (PBN) are typically performed on owned sites that may be hosted on different IP addresses to make the backlinks appear natural.
Why Link Building Strategies Get a Bad Rap
To this day, there are search marketers who swear that link building is "bad," "risky," or flat-out "dangerous."
These are usually people who got hit by Google's Penguin update and never bothered to update their strategies, or people who mistakenly associate the term "link building" with these bad, black-hat practices.
However, as you now know, modern link building is quite different, and a much safer, more beneficial play for your marketing strategy.
Now, let's take a look at the two main approaches you can use to build more links to your site without ever risking the threat of a penalty.
Search Engine Optimization vs. Search Engine Manipulation
Google is acutely aware that webmasters want to game the system to get their site to rank higher. That's why Google's terms of service explicitly forbid "rank manipulation." And if you're caught running a scam or manipulating your rank, you could end up with a penalty that flat-out removes you from search results.
By contrast, nearly every successful webmaster admits to "optimizing" their site for search engines, including developing search optimized content and building more links.
So what's the difference between optimization and manipulation?
The question you have to ask yourself is: is this good for search users? If you build a meaningful link to your onsite content, housed in a well-written offsite article, users will find it valuable. They'll learn more information, and naturally be inspired to check out your site.
There's no manipulation in this scenario; you're just optimizing your approach to get better results—and make users happier at the same time.
By contrast, if you spam links, write bad content, or otherwise harm user experience to try and climb rankings or get more traffic, you could be accused of manipulation.
We'll delve more into the importance of optimizing—and avoiding manipulation—in our sections on white hat and black hat link building tactics.
Chapter 6: Attracting Links Naturally
This is the first main approach to link building you can take as a brand, and it involves the natural attraction of links to your site.
First: You'll create a high-value asset—one that people need for information or entertainment value, preferably both.
Second: You'll distribute that asset to the masses.
Third: People will naturally pick it up, sharing it and linking to it either as a citation or to show their friends and followers.
Advantages of Attracting Links Naturally
Create an impactful enough piece, and you could earn hundreds to thousands of natural links back to your domain. This very guide is an example of our “link attraction” strategy (so if you like it, please share it!).
More Safety
You won’t be building these links; your customers, followers, authors, columnists, and other industry stakeholders will. Accordingly, you’re guaranteed to be safe from any link-related Google penalty. After all, how can you be accused of manipulating your rank if your hands are “off” the proverbial wheel?
Viral Potential
If you create content that’s valuable enough, it can be shared virally, earning incredible levels of visibility from potentially millions of people. These events, while rare, are enormously valuable to your link building campaign.
Secondary Benefits
Don’t forget the raw value in creating good content—reputation, visibility, and of course, more leads, conversions and sales.
Disadvantages of Attracting Links Naturally
There are of course a number of disadvantages of attracting links natural. Here, we outline only a few.
Less Control & Direction
You’re trusting random strangers to build links for you. As a result, you’ll have far less control over which sites link to you, and less direction for your strategy’s growth. For instance, if you want to engage in broken link building, this will never happen without direct outreach and manual effort.
Wasted Efforts
There’s always the chance that your content, no matter how exceptional it is, won’t be noticed or loved by your audience, resulting in wasted content effort that could have been spent on a safer bet.
How to Create Link-able Assets
Your first job with this strategy is to create what’s known as a “linkable asset”—something that people want to link to. This can take a variety of forms, but must be on your site in some way:
- Content. This is by far the most popular choice, since it offers the most options and tends to have the most “permanent” value. Articles, whitepapers, eBooks, infographics, and videos all fall under this umbrella (as do a variety of other forms I haven’t even mentioned). Content is valuable because it provides information, or entertainment, or both, and it can be consumed and shared quickly between users.
- Data. In many ways, data is a form of content. After all, how can you express data if not through content—either in explanations, numerical projections, or graphical representations? Still, any form of data or data analysis you can offer is a strong opportunity to earn inbound links, mostly because it’s original and citable information.
- Gimmicks. There’s also room for some gimmicks in your linkable assets (though I dislike the term and what it usually applies to). For example, you might sponsor a contest that involves user participation on a page of your site.
- People. Server response time can make or break your site speed, so consider upgrading your servers or purchasing a more robust plan from your hosting provider.
- Functionality & Tools.You could also have some kind of functionality, or interactive tool that provides value to and draws in more visitors. The more practical this is, the better. Some examples include:
- This calculator that helps figure out the cost of installing new windows
- This bulk domain authority checking tool
- This mortgage calculator
- Website backlink checker
Source: InvestisDigital
Content Value & Share-ability
No matter what type of asset you choose to create (though again, I strongly recommend content here), there are two basic principles you’ll need to have in order to be successful: value and shareability.
What Creates Valuable Content
First, let’s explore the elements that constitute value.
What Makes Content Shareable
Now let’s take a look at some of the elements of “shareability” you’ll need to target to maximize the potential reach of your piece:
Provide an Initial Backlink Boost
The theory goes like this: if you create link-able assets that are valuable enough and shareable enough, they’ll start attracting links all by themselves.
There’s a problem with this theory.
You can write the best content in the world, perfectly valuable and shareable, but if nobody’s there to build that first link or push that first share, your content will never build momentum.
Accordingly, you’ll need to provide an initial “boost” to your link-able asset to get people seeing, reading, sharing, and linking to it.
If it’s valuable and shareable enough, your users will take care of the rest, and it will eventually start earning more popularity just because it’s so popular already. But you still need to provide that initial boost—and this is how to do it.
Your audience could be on multiple platforms, but the impact and effectiveness of your boost campaign is dependent on many factors, not just platform popularity.
If you do use paid advertising, be sure to set up a custom landing page so you can target your audience effectively.
Once you have created an asset that's valuable and shareable, and you've given it an initial boost, the rest should take care of itself. Unfortunately, this gives you little control over your final outcomes, which is where our next major approach specializes in compensation.
Chapter 7: Building Backlinks Manually
Now that I've covered how to naturally attract inbound links, it's time to take a look at the more manual, controllable--albeit a bit more risky--side of link building.
The concept here is pretty basic too, but the execution is a little trickier since it demands more precision control and more variables.
With each link you build, you'll develop a new piece of high-quality content, tailor-made for the audience of a specific publisher, and you'll "guest blog post" that content on their site.
The content will contain one or more links pointing back to your domain with high link quality. Over time, you'll target a wider diversity of different publishers, eventually inching your way up to bigger, more reputable sources.
And, for some of the best hyperlinks, we suggest focusing on broken links as a broken link building strategy can work wonders for massively quick gains in SEO.
Advantages of Building Links Manually
There are some readily visible advantages to building links manually. Here we enumerate just a few.
Refined Direction & Control
You’ll have much more precision and control with building manual backlinks. Rather than publishing a piece and hoping for the best, you can target publishers you know will link back to you, and seek sources closely in tune with your target audience.
Reliable Scaling
Link attraction is nice, but it’s almost impossible to scale—most of the sources from which you’ll acquire links using the “link earning” method are low- to medium-authorities. One link from a high authority website is worth dozens from lower authorities, so the long-term play is important here.
Secondary Benefits
There are a host of secondary benefits to manual link building strategies including personal branding, visibility, reputation, and relationship building. If you are sourcing broken links, you will find immediate page authority pass-through without having to wait years to achieve it from newly-minted links.
Disadvantages of Building Links Manually
Building links manually has its own disadvantages, including:
Building a Perfect Link Foundation
If you haven't already, design an amazing-looking website and take care of all your on-site optimization; this is going to serve as many publishers' first impressions of your brand.
After that, create a blog, and fill it up with as many high-quality posts as you can.
Back-date your posts so it looks like you've been at this for a long time, and do shoot for an impressive volume (at least 30 posts), but never sacrifice quality for quantity here.
Your first round of publishers will have nothing to go on except these posts to determine your level of expertise, so get ready to impress them.
Once your blog is established, start syndicating your posts on social media and build your audience. There are a number of ways to do this (and the topic itself warrants a separate guide), but here are some of the basics:
- Post Content Regularly
- Respond to Your Followers
- Engage New Followers in Conversations
- Participate in Community Discussions
- Engage Regularly with Influencers
Your goal should be to develop an impressive blog with a decent recurring readership and an active social media campaign to match. Once that's established, you can start shopping around for publishers.
Chapter 8: How to Find Backlink Opportunities
Every rung of the authority ladder is going to present its own challenges. But identifying and earning a guest posting spot on your first few publishers is likely the most challenging part of the process.
Once you have a handful of external presences under your belt, you can use those as a testament to your writing ability and overall reputation, but building that initial momentum is tough.
In addition, once you have a team and standard operating procedure (SOP) for acquiring broken links, your broken link building process will be much more effective and scalable as well.
Strategies for Sourcing Link Opportunities
1. Start with a niche.
The best way to get started is to choose a specific niche, as specific as possible. Why? There are a few good reasons. First, consider the fact that most "general" publications like The Huffington Post are quite discerning about the authors they onboard—they cover a lot of subjects and have a huge readership, so they want absolute experts on every subject they offer.
A niche blog on the other hand, is much more limited in the experts they have access to, and will be willing to take in a new voice. They tend to run smaller, which means you'll have an easier time getting in contact with a webmaster or editor, though this isn't always true.
But in any case, you can choose a niche very close to your own business, either in terms of industry or geographic location (such as a neighborhood blog).
2. Find several key options.
Don't just settle on the first place you find, however. Dig deep into your research by looking for niche blogs and contributors everywhere—go to Google and type in "[your niche] blog" to find blogs in your niche, and use BuzzSumo to find key influencers within that niche. Take a look at each niche blog you find, venturing into peripheral niches if you have to, and start categorizing them in terms of their advantages and disadvantages.
Some of the key traits you'll want to look for are notoriety within the industry, traffic volume, domain authority, and willingness to accept new material. If you're just starting out, you don't need super high authorities, but you do need someone who's going to accept your work—so consider setting aside your higher-authority or stricter publishers for later.
3. Search for contact information.
At this point, you should have at least one or two key blogs on which you're willing to guest post. From there, you'll need to find the contact information of the editor or webmaster so you can pitch a potential submission.
First, look for a "Submissions" or "Contributors" page—these aren't always there, but if they are, they'll give you everything you need in terms of contact information and content requirements. If not present, check out the blog page and see if you can find contact information for the writers or the editor. If that fails you, a Contact page or Team page may have individualized contact information you can use.
Try using LinkedIn or Twitter search to find the editor at each publication, too.
4. Make a pitch.
Once you have the contact information of the person in charge, whether that's an editor or a webmaster, you're ready to make a pitch. This is simpler than you might think, but it does require some strategic forethought. Remember that this is an exchange of value.
Present yourself in terms of what value you can bring to the publisher. Introduce yourself briefly, and state why you're an expert in the subject and why you think you'd be a valuable contributor. Don't get too fancy or go over-the-top here; I've provided a sample pitch below that has worked well for me:
While the broken link building email sample itself may seem fine, I would definitely do a bit more A/B testing on the subject. Also, be sure to proofread your work multiple times before sending. There is nothing worse than a broken link building outreach email with errors.
As you send outreach emails, we recommend using Pitchbox, Mailshake or Boomerang for Gmail.
5. Get published.
If the editor or webmaster accepts your outreach for links, they'll probably ask you for some specific ideas on what you'll contribute. Send along some ideas that fit the industry as well as their readership, and once you agree on an initial article idea, you can get started writing it. There are just a few more items you'll need to bear in mind during this process. Remember that each publisher is going to have their own formatting and writing requirements.
They may require that you adhere to a specific word count minimum and/or maximum, a specific number of images to include in the piece, or a different style of writing than what you're used to. Be sure to ask and clarify what editorial guidelines they have before you make your formal submission—this will help bring a smooth start to your relationship.
From there, it's a simple matter of getting your work published. Once published, you can start syndicating and following up on that post (commenting, etc.) to promote it even further.
6. Maintain a relationship.
Even one post on a new publication can be a valuable addition to your link building strategy, but if you can post more content through building a relationship with that editor or publication, by all means, do so. Try to maintain an ongoing relationship with your publishers, providing new pitches for approval every so often.
Ask them what types of content they'd like to see more of, what they think of your past pieces, how those pieces have performed for them, and how their audiences are reacting to the content they're currently publishing. Again, you want to bring each publisher as much value as you're taking from them, so remember that this is a two-way relationship.
Adding New Publishers to Your Link Building Arsenal
You'll probably start with two or three decent publishers, but those won't last you forever.
Eventually, you'll need to add more, higher-authority publishers if you want to be successful with your link building campaign in the long run.
This is due to the law of diminishing returns when it comes to links coming from the same external domain.
When you first earn a link from a new domain, that link will pass significant authority to your site. However, earning a second link from that domain will only pass a fraction of that original authority to your site.
Posting your 10th or 12th link will pass an almost insignificant portion of that original authority, and so on until each link passes almost nothing. This is because you've essentially already "won" that domain's third-party vote for your site's trustworthiness.
These links will still generate brand visibility and referral traffic, so they're often worth building, but eventually, this law will force you to seek out new sources or start forfeiting the long-term compounding results of your campaign.
This is how you're going to do it.
Chapter 9: Planning Your Link Building Strategy
No matter what approach you've picked, once you start, you'll need to take some steps to develop and improve your strategy over time.
Start with goals!
After reading this guide thus far, you may be tempted to jump right in and start working with new publishers.
However, before you begin a campaign, I highly recommend you take a step back and set goals, objectives, and targets for your team to pursue.
This is going to help you focus your campaign and give you something you can use to measure your success later.
For example, what are you more concerned about—building your reputation or attracting more referral traffic? Are you looking for fast results or long-term growth?
These types of questions will help you outline what publishers you're going to target and how much time, money, and effort you'll need to put into your campaign.
Keyword Analysis & Niche Analysis
It's also a good idea to conduct some keyword research. While keyword research is primarily used to direct the development of your onsite content, it can (and will) also inform your link building strategy.
We've discussed the importance of choosing the right anchor text. While natural anchor text should be your top priority, you can (and should) also include keywords from your campaign—where they make sense.
Similarly, you'll want to conduct a niche analysis. What types of content are your competitors publishing? What types of publishers are they using? How can you position yourself to be an expert in a niche without much competition? What did your SEO backlink audit reveal about your site's link profile relative to the competition?
Hedge Your Bets with Multiple Approaches
Most people tend to gravitate toward one approach or the other, but if you want to see the best results, it's a good idea to target all of them.
Use both link attraction and manual link building as elements of your overall strategy, and you'll be able to compensate for each of their weaknesses.
You can even throw in some of the peripheral link building strategies I mentioned in the preceding section.
Hedging your bets this way maximizes your potential return while mitigating your risk.
It's more to manage, but it's well worth the additional effort.
Measure Your Impact & Adjust
This is key. Don't just build links blindly and hope for the best; you'll need to measure the results of your efforts and determine what's working and what isn't.
If a certain strategy is working well, invest more time and energy into it. If something isn't working well, cut it out from your strategy.
Most of your measurements here can be done in Google Analytics, though there are dozens of online tools to help you measure your link building success.
Search Ranks & Organic Traffic
Take a look at how your search ranks and organic traffic develop over time. This should be one of your biggest indicators of success. Your organic traffic measures how many people found your site via search engines, and is the bottom-line measure of your success in SEO.
More organic traffic means more value to your business, so if you notice your organic traffic stagnating, it means your link building strategy has hit a plateau. You can find this information in the Acquisition section of Google Analytics, along with referral and social traffic.
Referral Traffic
Your referral traffic is a measure of how many people found your site through external links, which is perfect for determining the relative strength of each publisher you work with.
If you open the referral traffic section here, you’ll be able to see a list of all the external publishers you work with and how much traffic each is bringing to your site. Use this information to improve your relationship with your most valuable contacts and filter out the least valuable ones.
Domain Authority & Link Profile
You’ll also want to keep a close eye on your domain authority, and your link profile in general, and Open Site Explorer is one of the best ways to do this. Plug in your URL here, and you’ll get a breakdown of all the links pointing to your page and domain, which you can then evaluate in terms of authority and value.
You’ll get to see how valuable your current link profile is, where your heavy hitters are, and just as importantly, if there are any “bad” links that have cropped up that might be interfering with your authority score.
Gradually Scale Your Link Building Efforts
Remember one of the key principles to link building success, which I mentioned in the introduction of this guide—scale.
As you invest more time and energy into your link building campaign, and as you work with higher-authority sources, you'll start earning more value for every action you take. This is because link building is a strategy that compounds in value over time—but only if you scale your link building efforts upward.
Be careful not to become too complacent with your domain's position, even if you're doing well; keep pushing boundaries and moving yourself forward, even if you have to take baby steps to do it.
When it comes to links, it's less about rapid spikes...
And more about the slow climb...
Chapter 10: Link Building Return on Investment (ROI)
Link building can bring tremendous value to your organization, but try to keep your bottom-line focus on SEO link building ROI. Take all the benefits link building brings you—including organic and referral traffic—and try to reduce those to actual numbers.
How much money are these visitors spending with you? How much revenue have you received that you wouldn't have gotten without link building? And just as importantly, how much money and resources are you spending on your campaign?
You need to make adjustments so that you're earning more than you're spending. Your ROI will almost always be negative to start out with, but as you expand your efforts, your ROI should grow in turn.
Conclusion
We have essentially covered everything you need to know about link building—start to finish. With this guide, you can theoretically take even a brand new site to any level of organic search traffic and domain authority (given enough time). But there are a few more tidbits I want to leave you with.
Of course, if you would like SEO.co to create and execute a hands-off (or hands-on, if you like) link building campaign for you, please don't hesitate to get in touch!
Get in Touch
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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