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
Before we begin, one of the most important steps in any SEO and link building strategy is disavowing unnatural backlinks from your website. This means manually removing links that are in violation of Google’s spam policies to prevent penalisation.
What is an unnatural link?
As mentioned above, an unnatural link is any link that violates Google’s spam policy. This can include:
- Low-quality directories
- Spam listings
- Link exchanges for the purpose of manipulating search rankings
- Injected links
Using Google Search Console, you can find any unnatural links listed in manual actions. A list of these domains and/or URLs can then be collated and uploaded to the disavow tool.
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.
You should disavow backlinks only if:
- You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site,
AND - The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.
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!
