Relevant link building strategies in 2023

Linkbuilding is the process of creating backlinks from other resources to website pages in order to receive referral traffic and improve search engine rankings by improving authority and trust indicators. Therefore, obtaining backlinks is one of the most important elements of search engine optimization.

In recent years, the priorities for ranking sites in Google have changed from the number of links to their quality, which means that link building strategies must also change. Now it is necessary to search for relevant sites (platforms) to post and create content that is useful and interesting for the target audience.

How to Create a Link Building Strategy

To create a successful inbound linking strategy for your own website, you first need to learn a few things.

Analyze your web resource to determine what it lacks and how it is useful for visitors.

Determine the target audience of your site – By understanding your audience, you can determine the other sites they visit. What worries your audience, what answers are they looking for, what interests them that relates to your product or service.

Perform an audit of your site’s existing content. What pages on the site can other resources link to? Most sites do not publish links to product or service pages; such links look like advertising or spam. You need to look for interesting pages that are educational in nature.

It will also be useful to research the content of the resource’s competitors: if you find gaps in your content, create those pages.

Create a list of target sites that match your content, business, and target audience. Prioritize authority and relevance to ensure your most important sites are processed first.

Best Link Building Strategies and Tactics

It is a mistake to consider that strategy and tactics are the same thing; they have fundamental differences, although they are closely related. Strategy is the overall plan. And tactics are the means used to achieve a goal.

It is important to create a strategy based on the end goal as this will require time, effort and patience. As your campaign progresses, you must re-evaluate your strategy to understand what really works and what doesn’t.

Create link-worthy content

The content they want to link to has broad appeal and is most likely educational and informational and at the top of the marketing funnel. It solves a common problem or answers common questions that the audience might have. Your content should not only answer questions and solve problems, but do so in a unique way.

Examples of content that should be linked to:

• Research that benefits your industry.
• Data and trends.
• Articles with instructions.
• Educational content.
• Entertaining content.
• Inspiring content.
• Evergreen content.

If your strategy is to create content that gets more links, you can audit your existing content to understand where your gaps are.

Outreach

Outreach is an appeal to a site with a request to place a backlink. Having backlinks from authoritative sites is one way to tell search engines that your site is an authority on a certain topic. Additionally, backlinks from different sites can help expand your target audience, bringing new potential customers to your site.

There are many different tactics that can be used for an outreach strategy:

• Press releases to obtain links from relevant sites.
• Promotion of new content.
• Look for links in existing content.
• Correction of mentions without links.

While outreach may seem like a simple strategy, there are best practices you should be aware of:

• Personalize all your communications.
• Write briefly and to the point.
• Explain why your link to the site or article will be useful to them.
• Provide anchor text for them.

Make news-worthy posts

This strategy may seem confusing, but getting links from news sites has many benefits. New products have a large audience, some of which can go to your site, many of them are authorities in their field, and a backlink from them will have a lot of weight in Google.

Let’s look at the tactics for this strategy:

• Creation of new products or solutions.
• Offer a scholarship.
• Host an event.
• Announce your partnership.

Once you’ve decided on your newsworthy tactics, you must pitch your idea to reporters, publications and other relevant media contacts, convincing them that your story is important to them and their audience.

Technical linkbuilding

One way to build links is to conduct a technical audit of your backlinks. By analyzing the backlinks of your site, you can find backlinks for technical problems in time and restore your backlinks.

Some tactics in this strategy:

• Restoring broken links
• Troubleshooting 404 errors
• Fixing redirects
• Fixing links from HTTP to HTTPS

A redirect or link to a 404 page has almost no value; It is important to restore these links to increase organic traffic to your site and, in addition, make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.

Ideological growth

An influencer is someone who is considered an expert in their field, they constantly publish new content and come up with new ideas regarding their industry. A thought leadership content strategy can also help your Google rankings. The more people point to your content as a resource, the more Google will perceive you as an authority.

To become a successful opinion leader, use the following techniques:

• Guest blogging.
• Information from readers about industry news.
• Publishing answers on question-and-answer sites.
• Creating content on social networks.
• Create online classes or certificates.
• Conducting webinars or podcasts.

It’s important to remember that thought leadership starts with original research and staying informed about industry news.

Link Building Strategies to Avoid

Trying to get every link available to you is neither sustainable nor natural. The tactics used by this strategy are considered spam by Google, and if you use them, your site may be penalized:

• Buying links.
• Bribing others to post links.
• Spam the link in the comment fields.
• Link schemes.
• False redirects.

Google prefers relevance between links, instead of trying to get a large number of links, try to find authoritative and relevant links for your site.

Thus, link building takes time and patience. With a well-thought-out strategy from the list above and implementing tactics to support it, your site could be on its way to gaining a large number of backlinks within the coming months.

Oleksandr Romanenko

Team Lead/Senior SEO specialist

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