The Ultimate Guide to Link Building in 2022
What Is Link Building?
Link building is the process of creating one-way hyperlinks to your or your client’s website. Most SEO guides refer to these hyperlinks as ‘backlinks’, which is the commonly used term for them. The overall goal of link building is channeling traffic to the target website, getting it in front of as many eyes as possible. Your traffic can come from directly those websites where the link is placed or indirectly from your improved search engine rankings. If your link is placed on several high-authority websites, it tells the search engine your content is valuable and relevant. Therefore, your page will rank higher for people who search for your keywords.
How to do link building properly?
When it comes to link building, there are many ways to go, and many strategies to consider. We are sharing with you three methods that work best for us at Bitbooms and our clients.
Summary: Link building is the process of creating hyperlinks to your website to improve search engine visibility.
1st Strategy: Resource Page Link Building
Link building doesn’t get easier than this. Placing your links on resource pages is a fundamental, easy-to-do strategy to get relevant backlinks to your website. If you are unfamiliar with resource pages, those are the kinds of pages that collect links to websites on a given topic or category. These sites’ sole purpose is linking out to relevant content, consequently, they are perfect for link building.
Moreover, resource pages are very easy to find. Just open Google (or any other search engine that is relevant to you) and use the following strings:
“Keyword” + inurl:links
“Keyword” + “helpful resources”
“Keyword” + “useful resources”
“Keyword” + “useful links”
Once you found relevant resource pages, filter them by relevancy, authority, and usefulness. A great way to do that is by checking the site’s URL rating and domain rating. Authoritative domains will have higher ratings and you can quickly filter out pages not worthy of your time. Also, pay attention to where your link will appear on the page. You want your link to be placed on the body of the page. Search engines rate body links higher than header or footer links.
Once you identified a resource page that fits your content, it is time to contact them and ask for your link to be featured. Send an email which shows why your link is relevant to them and how it is unique and different from the resource links they already have. Make sure you communicate in a friendly, assertive manner, don’t be too pushy and you won’t have trouble getting a new link pointing to your webpage.
Summary: Find high-authority resource pages with a relevant topic to your content, get in contact with them, and place your link on their website.
2nd Strategy: Broken Link Building
Broken Link Building is another fast and easy method to get more backlinks to your website. If you have high-quality content, you won’t have a hard time finding success with this strategy. With well-written articles and blog posts, not many website owners will refuse to place your link, as you’re not just asking; you’re providing value to someone’s website.
Robert Herjavec, a Canadian investor once said: “Don’t start a business. Find a problem, solve a problem, the business comes second.” This is exactly what you’re going to do. You identify a problem (a broken link) on a high-authority page that is relevant to you, and you solve that problem (by replacing the broken link with your link).
You can start searching for broken links manually, but we advise against it, as it is relatively time-consuming. Instead, we recommend using a browser extension such as Check My Links or LinkMiner. If you’re using Safari on macOS, you can use Integrity alternatively.
First, find relevant, high-authority pages, preferably with lots of outbound links. The more link a page has, the more likely you will stumble upon a broken link you can use. All these extensions can quickly identify broken links on any page, so you really shouldn’t have a problem finding one that can be replaced.
Once you have what you need, just send an email to the person that runs the page, telling them about the broken link and how your link could perfectly replace it, providing the same, if not more, value.
Summary: Identify broken links on relevant websites. Contact the website owner and have them replace the links with a backlink to your page.
3rd Strategy: The Skyscraper Technique
The skyscraper technique was invented by Brian Dean, an SEO and backlink expert. The strategy is built around content creation and incorporates elements from the aforementioned two strategies.
First, you need to select your keywords (if you haven’t already). Now go on and analyze the top-ranking content for your chosen keyword. You can find great tools for keyword analysis for free such as ahrefs.com or SEMrush, but the best is to use Google itself. If you want to learn more about keyword analysis, read our keyword guide.
Now that you know what the top-ranking content for your niche is, it is your time to shine. Pick out a blog post that is ranking high for your target audience and simply write a better post/article on the same topic. We know, it is easier said, than done. Writing a quality blog post that is even possibly better than an already top-ranking article is an extremely challenging task. Here are a few tips on how you can evolve your content making it more thorough, easier to understand, and better for the algorithm:
- Make a more enticing meta description for the SERP
- Make your content more visually appealing by including relevant images, videos, and charts.
- Update outdated information compared to the results you’re competing with
- Make the text easy to follow. Use short, structured paragraphs, inline summaries, and bullet points like this one.
Now you finally published your new blog post. You’re crushing it! Go back to the resource page and broken link strategies and find high-authority sites to get backlinks from. In addition, do outreach to other high-authority websites in your niche. Collaborate with fellow content creators, make partnerships, exchange backlinks, or do guest posting. Once again, the idea is to get your high-quality content in front of as many eyes as possible.
If you have any questions, requests, or suggestions, feel free to reach out to us through our contact page.