Link building strategies are essential to any successful SEO strategy. As Google’s algorithm continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, link building has grown beyond a mere tactic. It is now a critical component of SEO. In simple terms, link building involves acquiring links from authoritative domains to your website.
When search engines detect these backlinks, they perceive your site as more credible, which can help improve your rankings. Essentially, backlinks serve as endorsements of your content.
In this blog, we will explore four proactive link building strategies that you should consider to enhance your search engine authority and boost your online presence!
Disavowing Toxic Backlinks
One of the most important steps in any SEO strategy, but particularly link building, includes disavowing toxic backlinks from your website. This means manually removing links to your site. While disavowing backlinks is important, it must be used with caution. Google themselves say:
If you have a manual action against your site for unnatural links to your site, or if you think you’re about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate our spam policies), you should try to remove the links from the other site to your site. If you can’t remove those links yourself, or get them removed, then you should disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to 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!
