How to Link: 9 Link Building Tips for Better SEO

In the ever-changing world of SEO, many strategies that were once impactful are now obsolete. But link building, even though it has been around since the very beginning of SEO, remains one of the most important SEO strategies there is.

Of course, link building itself has gone through some changes since the beginning. It’s possible your link building knowledge isn’t up to date.

That’s why we’ve come up with this link building 2018 guide. Read the tips below to learn how to link build like a pro.

Ask Your Friends

Chances are, you already know some people who have websites.

If the websites of your friends and family members are relevant to your niche, see if they will link to your site. They could post a review of your site or use you as a source in an article.

Reach Out to Influencers

“Influencer” is fancy SEO-speak for an authority in your niche. Building relationships with influencers will get the people who trust them to also trust you. So get your schmooze on.

You can contact influencers to ask if they will post a review of your product or service. “Unboxing” videos and product comparison videos are popular review types you can pitch to them. But the easiest way to get an influencer backlink is with a guest post.

Guest Post

Guest posting is one of the best link building tools you can use. It’s easy, it’s legitimate, and Google won’t get mad at you for doing it.

Guest posting for backlinks means writing a post on someone else’s site and including a link back to your website. However, as easy as it is, there are still rules. Follow these tips for maximum backlink effectiveness/not getting rejected by the website or Google.

First, be sure your post is high-quality. Second, use ONLY ONE link back to your site. Stuffing your post with several backlinks will make the host site, the readers, and Google hate you.

Third, choose your anchor text wisely. You’ll need to do some keyword research for this. You want your backlink/anchor text to:

sound natural
be relevant
use highly-rated keywords

Backlinks with proper anchor text are like rocket fuel for your search rankings.

You can easily contact certain websites in your niche to find out if they’ll let you write a guest post. Or, even more easily, guest post on sites that actively invite guest bloggers. Huffington Post and Lifehacker.com are good examples of guest-post-friendly sites.

Write Awesome, Shareable Listicles

One way to get tons of backlinks is creating awesome content that people will want to link to. List-style articles are great for this purpose.

For one thing, listicles are hugely in right now. People are addicted to listicles and click/share them like crazy.

That’s because listicles always give people the best of whatever they’re talking about. They have titles like, “The 5 Best Ways to Whiten Your Teeth,” and, “The Top 10 Marketing Strategies of 2018.” Readers are promised only the most important content on the subject matter.

They are also great for listing facts that people would want to share. Example: “The 10 Most Viewed YouTube Videos of 2017.”

Use listicles to write fresh, irresistible content that people will want to link to. Use facts so people will link to you as a source.

Infographics

Everything we just said about listicles is doubly true of infographics. If listicles are like internet crack, then infographics are like internet heroin… mixed with crack.

People link to infographics even more than listicles because they are even more informative. Infographics are pure, concentrated truth. They take all the top facts of the subject matter, cut out everything else, and make them even easier to read.

Repurposed Content

Here’s an even better idea: Make listicles and infographics! Who says you have to do one or the other? And then, make it a video!

The best way to maximize your backlinks is to maximize your content. And the easiest way to do that is to make your content in multiple formats. Also, you can repurpose any content you have already made into other formats.

Repair Dead Links on Other Sites

Often, a webpage will have a number of links that don’t work anymore. Using specialized software or browsing manually, you can find these broken links. Then, ask the site owner if you can help them out

Let them know their link is broken and that you have an article on the same subject they can link to instead. This is an older strategy, but it works even today.

Reach Out to Your Audience

Don’t underestimate the power of subscribers, as so many companies do. Digital marketing software and YouTube make it so incredibly easy to market to subscribers that there’s no reason not to.

It takes almost no time or money to make a 30-second YouTube video and say, “Click to subscribe.” And marketing software makes sending newsletters a breeze. And yet, keeping up with these super-easy subscriber marketing tactics will spread brand awareness like wildfire.

Subscriber marketing gives your brand a permanent address in your public’s brains. Then, every once in a while, those subscribers will give you a shoutout on their own website.

Don’t Forget About Internal Links

This has a smaller effect on your search rankings than external backlinks. But internal links are still a good (read: easy, necessary) way to boost SEO.

When linking internally, be careful to follow the same rules you did for guest post links. Post high-quality content, sound natural, use relevant, highly-rated keywords for anchor text.

The one exception is that you are fine to use more than one internal link on the same post. But you still shouldn’t overstuff your post with links or it will hurt your search ranking.

Knowing How to Link Build Makes You Number 1

Now you know how to link build the right way. Use these tips to make your website shoot to the top of the search rankings!

Want to make link building even easier?

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