Link building strategies are a cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy. Google’s algorithm is becoming smarter and more nuanced, so link building is becoming more than just an advantageous tactic.
If SEO isn’t your thing, you might be wondering what link building actually is. If so, read our blog: SEO 101! Put simply, it’s the practice of gaining good authority domains to link to your website. Search engines subsequently view your website as more authoritative, improving your abilities to rank higher. Basically, backlinks are seen like endorsements.
In this blog, we’re going to explore 4 of the more proactive link building strategies that you should be considering to improve your search engine authority and enhance your digital presence, as well as why disavowing should be a top priority!
Disavowing Toxic Backlinks
One of the most important steps in any SEO strategy, but particularly link building, includes disavowing toxic backlinks from your website. Using Google Search Console, you can find your backlinks, including any with a high spam score, which Google uses to analyse how trustworthy your website is. Toxic backlinks will negatively affect your visibility and will be suggestive of spam activity, so dealing with them should be a top priority as failure to do so can result in your website being removed from search results.
What causes a link to be toxic?
- Links that are paid for
- Exchanged links
- Link building bots
- Links listed on low-quality directories
- Unnatural links
So, onto the link building strategies!
1. Create Linkable Assets
One of the more accessible link building strategies to engage in involves creating linkable assets. In essence, this involves publishing blogs, thought pieces, in-depth guides, and reports. These pieces become useful sources to cite, encouraging external companies to link to your website.
It’s important to note that this process may still require some outreach, so continue reading to find out more…
2. Outreach Link Building
Although an increasing amount of marketing is carried out online, developing and engaging in relationships can contribute hugely to link building strategies. Networking, forming professional relationships, collaborations, personalised outreach, and follow up strategies are great ways of expanding your networks for link building outreach.
You might want to consider digital PR for this strategy including influencer collaborations and creating newsworthy content.
3. Analyse Competitor Backlinks
There are a huge range of SEO tools out there that are created to support your strategies. Semrush’s competitor backlink tool is one of the ways you can view competitor activity. You can use this to see the type of content that gets good backlinks, and who is linking to their website, and then utilise this information to influence your content strategies.
4. Reclaim Lost/Broken Backlinks
Sometimes links become broken or lost through website updates, deletion, or redirected pages. Reclaiming these links is arguably one of the easier link building strategies, given it is easier to change what already exists than start from scratch.
To carry out this strategy, you need to find links that don’t work and persuade the website to replace with a relevant, working link. Again, Semrush have a great set of tools for this, including their broken backlink checker!
