Efficient Link Building Strategies to Boost Your SEO Efforts

What are the most efficient link building strategies to increase SEO?According to 99 Firms, 93 percent of all web traffic is done via search engines. With so much traffic coming from them, it’s essential that your website appears as high as possible among the results. In fact, 75 percent of people don’t even go past the first page. 

Google considers many factors when determining where to rank a site, but one of the biggest is the links pointing back to that site. The SEO statistics on this are clear – the more websites that link to your own, and the higher quality they are, the higher your site will appear. Below are just a few strategies you should use to get as many of these high-quality links as possible:

Create Amazing Content

The cornerstone of any link building strategy is amazing content. Other sites won’t organically link to yours unless you have something worth linking to. Your goal should be to produce content so valuable other websites can’t help but share it with their own audience. There are three types of content you should focus on producing.

Articles

The most common, and perhaps easiest to produce, type of content is an article. Articles, or blog posts, allow you to share knowledge with your readers in written form. If the article is helpful, people are likely to share it or link to it on their own website. 

For example, let’s say you are a local bakery. You could write an article titled “5 Great Cupcake Recipes” or you could write one called “50 Great Cupcake Recipes”. Which one do you think would be of more use to your readers? A list of 50 great recipes is more likely to get shared on other websites or social media feeds, providing you with links. 

Infographics

The second type of content you can produce is an infographic. An infographic is an eye-catching image that shares helpful information. Website managers love to find great infographics because it gives them something to share with their readers without doing any of the work creating it. If you can create an informative image, you’ll likely get plenty of other sites to share it, giving a boost to your link building efforts. 

Infographics have the additional benefit of appearing in image search results. If someone is looking for a good graphic to put on their website, they may browse for images on Google. This gives you another avenue for discovery and one that may have less competition for that keyword.

Videos

Finally one of the most unnderated and efficient link building strategies are are videos. Video production is often more time consuming and costly, but it can also provide some great benefits. Many people prefer to watch a video rather than reading an article, so you give yourself another avenue for discovery. Other websites may also embed your video within their site, giving you a crucial backlink. 

You can also upload your video to YouTube, one of the most popular websites in the world. If what you create is helpful enough, it can attract thousands, or even millions, of viewers from around the world. With so many viewers, it’s bound to get shared on other websites and social media feeds. 

Guest Post

The next strategy for link building is guest posting. As any website owner can tell you, producing a steady stream of content is a difficult process. If they can get someone to produce it for free, they’ll likely jump on the chance. This is where guest posting comes in.

With guest posting, you reach out to a site within your niche and offer to write an article for them. In exchange for them getting free content for their website, you get to include a link back to your own. It’s a win-win situation, one that millions of websites are taking advantage of every day.

If you decide you want to guest post, you should first research any site you’re considering. Start with the highest quality sites because the links from them are worth more. To learn more about how to develop a guest posting strategy, you can check out this guide.

Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool for promoting your business. And while the links on social media do not factor into your search rankings, they can still give them a boost. You’ll want to use social media to promote the content you create, whether it’s for your own site or another. Doing so regularly will help to establish you as an authority within your industry.

This is helpful for link building because other websites are more likely to link to you if you have some credibility. Once you start making a name for yourself within your niche, you’ll find that more reputable sites are linking to you. In addition, by promoting your content on social media, you get it in front of more eyes. The only way people can link to your content is if they are aware of it, and social media is the perfect tool to do this. 

Analyze Your Competition

Finally, you should look at what your competitors are doing. Using tools like Moz’s Link Explorer, you can see where your competition is getting some of its best links from. From there it’s easy to reach out to the same source and try to get a backlink for your own website.

For example, let’s say you’re a bar in New York City. After researching one of your competitors, you find one of their best backlinks is a guide called “The 50 Best Bars in New York City”. You could then email the writer and ask them to include you on the list. Or, if you know one of the bars is no longer open, you could suggest your bar replace them. 

By getting links from the same high-quality sources as your competition, and then adding a few of your own, you can jump ahead of your competitors in the search results. 

Link Building Requires Constant Work

Getting backlinks to your website isn’t something you can do once and then forget about it. Sure, getting a great website to link to you may give you an initial boost in the search results, but eventually, your competition will jump ahead of you. You need to make link building a regular part of your website marketing strategy, something that you pay attention to each month. If you can implement the strategies above, and keep on top of them, you should have no trouble moving up the search results. It may take time, but the results are worth it.