Link Building Tried and True Techniques

Link building is all but the black sheep of the SEO world, Google themselves even stating link building is not viewed favorably.

That being said, without link building, how are people going to find you? How is your site going to become a trusted authority? I say, let the links fly, just do so intelligently and selectively and you will come out on top. Today, we are going to go over a few link building strategies that can land you some powerful, traffic driving links.

1. HARO

You might not have heard of HARO but for building links, it could be a godsend. HARO or Help a Reporter Out, connects industry experts to reporters looking for information for their stories. Answer the right journalist and you could get your business links from sources like the Daily Mail or BBC News.

HARO allows you to sign up to receive emails covering various topics such as technology, health or business. Each email will contain a list of questions and will outline the layout for your response. Simply follow the guidelines set forth by the reporter and submit your responses to related queries and you can land some very strong links in the process.

2. Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of the most common ways websites owners build up their search ranking. It's a clever little SEO tactic and it works like this; first, you need to find an expired domain Web page. Once you've got that you can look at the links they've used. You'll be searching for ones that have received the highest rating. At that point, you can replicate the content and "fix" the broken link. Essentially, you will be replicating the success of someone else's linking campaign. It might sound simple but there are a few little details you need to get right.

How do you find an expired domain page? Well, there's a website for that. Try looking on a site like expiredomains.net and you'll find a whole bunch of different ones. But then you've got to sort through them. You need to play with the filters until you get the site with the TLD (Top Level Domain) as well as the keyword in the title. You can search for the keyword for the type of site that you're looking for. Specifically, the one that would be generating content that would fit well on your web page. When you used expired domains, you're going to get a lot of data that you don't need. Instead, focus on the number of links that site received.

After you've found some of the websites that have the keyword you searched for and a high number of links, copy the data. Now, you need to check that those links are of high quality. If they're not, they won't be worth the repair job. You can check this out on Ahrefs.com or Majestic, using the same process one would use to find an expired domain.

3. Outreach Link Building

Outreach link building is an effective way to gain numerous links to a content piece on your website. In order to use this technique that first thing you need to do is find an audience that is likely to be receptive to your content. Buzzsumo is a great tool to use in this process and as we discussed in "Brainstorming Great Content" identifying content ideas that are likely to be successful and finding people to reach out to is made simple using that tool. Once you have created a list of potentially interested parties, simply reach out to them via email or through social media. If you aren't sure how to craft a great outreach email, here is a quick email outreach guide I found useful.

4. Guest Posting

Guest posting has been killed off, reborn and is in limbo as I write this guest post. Regardless of what you have heard, are hearing, or will hear, it works. Forget about Google for a moment and ask yourself - if I publish great content about my niche to people who are interested in what I do, and I educate them - are they likely to contact me? The answer is YES! In the process, you are likely to land some great links as well. Create a list of sites where your idea clients congregate and reach out to them.

While many of the changes made by Google have left SEOs upset, I think they have done a great job of making quality link building more effective and simplistic. As an in-house marketer or SEO agency, we don't have to worry about our hours and hours of hard work being outdone by automated spam tools. Link building in 2016 is different than in the past but it has changed for the better.