Professional SEO services are quite expensive.
For small bloggers, it’s more practical to take matters into their own hands and launch their SEO campaign.
Often such a plan starts with on-page SEO strategies followed up by off-page SEO strategies, which is primarily about link building.
This leads to the question, what are the best strategies on how to get backlinks as a blogger?
Buckle up and read on for the top link building strategies that I personally use.
Link Building Strategies
Roundup posts
They can still get you truckloads of website traffic.
I know that some marketers and business owners are against using roundup posts because they find them to be “too mainstream.”
However, when you think about it, so is sending outreach messages.
How about video marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and blogging? All of these can also be considered as “mainstream” at this point.
In a world where information floats around freely online, every effective content marketing strategy can’t be kept a secret.
The image below should tell you the full story:
The truth is, just because a good number of people are using a certain marketing method doesn’t mean that it’s no longer effective.
Just like in most things in the marketing space, whether your roundup post succeeds or not depends on how well the content is crafted and what you do after the post is published.
We’re going to look into the nitty-gritty of both.
After all, if you’re thinking of using a roundup post to get your audience to flock to your website, then you need to get both elements right.
Do you like what you’re reading so far?
If you answered with a “yes,” then buckle up and put your learning cap on.
We’re going to look into several actionable tips to helping you create a stunning roundup post that can get you boatloads of website traffic.
Writing One-on-One Interview Posts
New and unsaturated ways to build links are always welcomed with a smiling face in the link building world. At a time where large scale guest posting and infographic embedding campaigns have become pretty mainstream, you can leverage a heavily under-utilized way to earn high-quality, editorially given links to your site.
By publishing expert interviews on your site, you can not only leverage the existing following of reputable people in your industry but also satisfy readers with useful and unique questions and answers. This satisfaction will effectively have a great chance of converting into backlinks and social shares.
It’s no secret that infographics are popular. Chances are you’ve seen at least one in the last week.
Well-known websites all over the world use infographics, and they often go viral on social media. More importantly, a good infographic can help you build quality backlinks and enhance your website’s SEO.
If you are searching for new methods to build backlinks from authoritative domains, infographics might be the solution for you. Keeping reading this post, as I’m about to show you how to build links using infographics. It’s one of the hottest and best ways to drive one-way backlinks to your website.
Local Business Citations
If you have a local business, then local link building is an ideal back-linking opportunity for you. You can get great links and you can draw additional traffic from the many people who routinely use local searches to find businesses near them.
Local Business Citations are key factors if you want to improve your positions in local search results. Local citations have the three terms named “NAP” i.e. Name, Address, and Phone number.
While creating your local business citation, make sure to add the same address you feature on the website. These citation links are important for local rankings and help search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) to verify your business location.
Links from Yelp, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Bing Local, etc. create authority for your website, build trust, and can help improve your rankings in local search results.
How to find citations sources
There are multiple ways you can easily use to find citation sites. Here are some of them:
- You can start with Whitespark’s List of Top Citation Sources and you can also head over to this comprehensive list of niche citation sites for 41 business categories including Automotive, Accounting, Marketing, Real estate, Health & Medical, and more.
- You can also find city-specific and keyword-specific citation sources by using the following:
- (city) business listings
- (city) business directory
- (city) directory
- For keyword-specific citations:
- (keyword) business listings
- (keyword) business directory
- (keyword) directory
Do take advantage of these sites and feel free to search for more sites as well.
Building Links from Trusted Sites
The internet has a ton of spam sites and Google has committed itself to weed them out and only showing trusted sites within their search results pages.
Building links from trusted sites is one of the most important steps to establishing your site’s authority and elevating it to the top spot of search results. When a website has backlinks from a trusted site, it tells search engines that they are an authority on that subject.
For instance, there are many websites and blogs that mention Wikipedia within their content. A mention from these websites to Wikipedia increases its backlink count and site authority. Search engines consider Wikipedia a highly relevant source and it shows up high within search engine results.
On the other hand, search engines also take into consideration links from spammy sites. These do not benefit websites and mark them as untrustworthy, leading to adverse effects on your search rankings.
Search engine algorithms do not provide recognition to a website that has links on sites that have nothing to do with their products or business. A car parts website doesn’t want a link on a cooking website. The two have no relation and will not get any benefit from the link.
Building too many links too quickly will be considered spam by search engines. If a business has too many poor links pointing to it, then the performance of that website will go down in results rather than moving up. Therefore, always pay attention to how you build your links.
Social bookmarking sites where users can easily add, edit, and share content across the web help you get high-quality backlinks that drive traffic to your website.
In order to learn how to build links with social bookmarking sites that help you get quality linkage to the next level, I have put together some of the bookmarking sites that you can consider:
Reddit is a social news bookmarking, web content rating, and discussion website that can be used to drive huge traffic to your website within a few weeks.
It is one of the most popular websites in the social bookmarking category and it is divided into different subreddits where registered users can post links, add infographics, post text, and users can vote up or down for their favorite submissions.
To get the most out of the platform, first, you need to create a free account and subscribe to the subreddits in your niche.
Once you’re done with the above steps, you can easily post the links. Before posting anything to Reddit, be sure to check the quality of the link that you are submitting and do read all the rules on the right-hand sidebar of each subreddit.
Some of the popular subreddits:
- /r/news/ (14,438,507 readers)
- /r/Entrepreneur/ (278,560 readers)
- /r/SEO/ (39,817 readers)
- /r/videos/ (16,212,000 viewers)
- /r/business (249,957 readers)
- /r/startups/ (160,038 readers)
The basic idea for Reddit success and a few tips:
- Make your titles eye-catching and be descriptive by choosing subreddits that are relevant to your website or audience.
- Create your very own “front page” by subscribing to various subreddits.
- Read up on the Reddit Content Policy.
- You must be an active user and contributor.
- Build up your Reddit Karma quickly by adding the new links or comments to your own submissions and to others’ posts.
- Build your brand by adding links or comments. Find relevant posts to comment on like “I Am the Blogger at _. AMA.”
- Follow some people by clicking on “preferences” and then click on friends.
- You can also create a slideshow of all pictures in a subreddit by adding “p” in the URL
- To use Reddit efficiently, find the best time to add links, post text, or infographics.
Medium
Medium is an online publishing platform where users can read, write, and share long-form content. Getting started with Medium is easy.
You can create an account in less than a minute by using the different sign-up options available: Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Sign-up with email. Personally, I like to sign up using Twitter.
By signing up using Twitter, your existing connections from Twitter who are on Medium will automatically follow you.
Here are a few tips to using Medium:
- You must go for short headlines instead of long headlines to convey the best message. Here are some examples that work well on Medium:
- Use negative words like stop, never, and don’t ever.
- Create emotional headlines. CoSchedule listed 180+ power words for writing emotional headlines that you can find here.
- Use numbers, since people like seeing numbered lists. Use digits rather than words: You can easily repost your blog content to Medium and this will help you get additional visits with little effort.
- When you repost or write new content, you have the option to tag your content. So always choose proper tags because on Medium tags are like topics.
- Track your visits by adding UTM parameters on the URLs that link back to your blog content.
- Mention people within the post; this will send them a notification message and your content will get more attention.
- It is recommended to upload only high-quality photos that should be at least 900 pixels wide. Add only horizontal images.
- Interact with Medium content by recommending, sharing & bookmarking. It’s a great way to engage with your followers on this platform.
GrowthHackers
GrowthHackers is basically a group where you can share and learn more about online ethical marketing techniques. This allows you to drive the effective growth of your organization. The main objective of GrowthHackers is that marketers can easily share their stories and drive customer acquisition growth across all levels.
Benefits of GrowthHackers:
- Use your data to improve customer engagement.
- Have valuable discussions with industry experts.
- Easily find lots of useful, actionable content.
Find Proven Linkable Assets
A linkable asset is the foundation of any successful link-focused content marketing campaign (including this one).
I’m not sure who coined the phrase “Linkable Asset”, but it’s the perfect description of what you want to create: a high-value page that you can leverage for links over and over again.
Keep in mind that linkable asset is not “12 Things Spider-Man Taught Me About Social Media Marketing” link bait nonsense.
It’s content so awesome, so incredible, and so useful that people can’t help but login to their WordPress dashboard and add a link to your site.
But how do you know if your linkable asset is going to be a huge success…or a total flop?
That’s easy: find content that’s already generated a ton of links.
Here’s how:
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging also called “guest posting,” is the act of writing content for another company’s website. Generally, guest bloggers write for similar blogs within their industry in order to:
- Attract traffic back to their website
- Boost their domain authority using external links to high-authority domains
- Increase their brand credibility and awareness, and
- Build relationships with peers in their industry.
Almost always, guest blogging offers mutual benefits for both the guest blogger and the website hosting the guest content. In other words, guest blogging is a two-way street — so when you decide to hop on the guest blogging bandwagon, you should consider featuring posts by guest bloggers on your own website, too.
Why Is Guest Blogging Important For Your Business?
Guest blogging offers a number of benefits for any business. By sharing your expertise on other companies’ websites, you can establish yourself as an authority figure within your market, build relationships with other thought leaders in your field and expose your brand to an entirely new audience.
Additionally, featuring guest posts on your own blog will help you deliver new perspectives and fresh content to your audience. We’re all guilty of falling victim to a routine and growing tired of the same old stuff, so featuring guest posts is a great way to keep readers engaged — not to mention the promotional boost that occurs when your guest bloggers share their blogs with their personal network.
Some blogs, like OpenView, source the majority of their content from other leaders in their industry. Even if you don’t have the resources to stick to a robust blogging cadence, guest bloggers can help you offer new content to your readers without much additional time and effort needed by your team.
Do Link Exchanges
Link Exchanges, Reciprocal Linking, Swapping Backlinks – You’ve probably heard the term in some shape or form. It’s all the same thing. Whether Google likes it or not, there are thousands of webmasters out there looking to give and receive a link exchange from fellow bloggers and website owners.
The perceived purpose or benefit of the link exchange is to gain an advantage on Google, using the logic that receiving a quality backlink will give you a ‘trust’ signal that may give you an advantage over the competition. Read more about the benefits of backlinks here.
Being at the forefront of link building & outreach, I’ve come across literally hundreds of instances where webmasters have openly asked us to exchange links, and trust me, it’s not only smaller bloggers who are actively practicing this. I’ve seen websites with millions of visitors per month happy to exchange content-based links.
Link Reclamation
Link reclamation is the process of reclaiming lost links. You had a link. You lost it. You want it back. So you take steps to try to reclaim it.
What steps, I hear you ask?
It depends on why you lost the link in the first place.
Here are four common reasons for link losses:
- The author removes your link from the linking page;
- The linking page no longer exists (404 error);
- The linking page gets (301) redirected;
- The linking page is no longer indexed in Google
Claim Unlinked Brand Mentions
Use Fresh Web Explorer and Google to find fresh brand mentions.
If you haven’t checked out Fresh Web Explorer, you really should. This is a gold mine to find information about sites mentioning your brand. Put in –yourdomain.com in fresh web explorer along with your brand name and you can find sites that mention you but don’t link to you. Yup that’s right, FWE allows advanced search commands – pretty cool!
Have a thorough understanding of advanced search commands. For this strategy along with others, it’s highly recommended that you spend time getting to know your way around advanced search commands/operators. A book on the subject called “Google Power Search” by Stephan Spencer is a great read for all link builders if you’re interested in diving deeper.
Advanced Link Building Strategies
An Interesting Experiment and a Problem to Resolve
“Is there an effective link building strategy for companies and solo businesses on a shoestring budget?”
That question touched me personally as a business owner with little resources to spend on link building, and it became the drive that led me to try interview-based link building opportunities.
The lack of time and outreach potential that small companies and solo businesses have when it comes to link building is real, and it can often mean the loss of online business leads.
Besides, even smart companies with bigger budgets might still want to spend as little money and effort as possible on link building.
So, a strategy that involves simply responding to existing requests for quotes by journalists and bloggers looking for experts on a given topic sounds like the ultimate solution. It could free them (and me) from the added burden of having to seek out websites to get backlinks from and actively reach out via email.
And now, we come to HARO…
While I’ve experimented with platforms like MyBlogU and SourceBottle before, rarely have I found a significant number of opportunities to get cited by big blogs or online magazines that are relevant to my niche. There are some opportunities on these platforms, but not as many as I’ve found on HARO.
So the next question was:
“Can I build good backlinks from reputed outlets using only HARO?”
That looked like an interesting experiment to set up.
And a safe one in the eyes of Google, too.
The premise is that since all you’re doing on HARO is responding to writers’ queries, you are not actively building links, but sharing knowledge. It’s up to the publication to credit you with a backlink and to choose whether to make that backlink followed or nofollow.
Ultimately, these are all-natural and editorial backlinks, and Google could never have anything to complain about if you get some while you’re out there giving expert quotes to blogs, media outlets, and other publications.
