A Couple Keys To Link Building

In today’s world, few variables impact your business more than your web presence. Activity on social media, videos on YouTube and a personal website are the obvious first steps into the online world, but standard content creation isn’t the only key to success. Without using the most effective content strategies, your business may fail to rank on the search engine results page.

This is why link building is perhaps the most important part of search engine optimization. Many marketers refer to the process of creating links as a difficult art which can only be learned through practice. While that may be true to an extent, there are effective strategies which can set you on the right track. These are a couple keys to link building.

Create ‘Shareable’ Content

These days, businesses go viral on a daily basis. If you can manage to position a single piece of your business’s content in the limelight, the growth of your visibility will be off the charts.

Creating shareable content comes down to three steps: you must create a blog for your website, decorate that blog with long-form articles, and assure that none of those articles include more than a subtle sales pitch for any of your products or services. Content that comes across as overly ‘salesy’ has almost no chance of going viral.

In fact, content that is both unique and subtle will often center on industry trends instead of anything relating directly to your business. If your byline is on articles that help your entire industry, your credibility within that industry increases dramatically. Before long, people will share your content on social media, and hundreds of new links will be built for your website.

More importantly, when the biggest players in your industry start noticing your content, they may reach out to you for an interview. In marketing, this is the moment of truth; when a popular blogger features you on their website, your business will never be the same. Subtle, useful and genuine content is the best way to make it to this point.

Build and Explore a List of Helpful Industry Websites

In the marketing process, businesses tend to either ignore their own website or focus on it with tunnel vision. For link creation, it’s clear that either of these two extremes does more harm than good.

Sometime during the creation of your website, it’s beneficial to create a list of other websites from businesses in your industry. These can be either direct competitors or businesses that fall within a similar niche. Eventually, you can establish connections with each of the companies on your list, or you can use them to gain information and find opportunities.

First of all, writing guest posts for other companies — and allowing them to guest post on your blog — is one of the quickest ways to build positive relationships within your industry. In this scenario, everyone wins: the receiving website gets great content, and the giving website gets a well-positioned link to their blog. Promoting others’ content on social media is also an effective route to put yourself on good terms with your peers.

After building relationships, you can begin exploring what else each relationship might bring to the table. For example, for various reasons, links across the internet occasionally stop working. There’s almost no avoiding it. Using simple marketing plugins in your browser, you can easily find any such links on a target domain. Target the websites with which you’ve built relationships, and ask them to replace their broken links with working links that lead back to your website. Again, this is another situation where everyone wins; broken links can hurt a website’s ranking on the results page.

Bonus: Blog and Forum Commenting

As a bonus and immediately actionable tip, blog and forum commenting is another great way to cultivate links to your site. In the process of building relationships, you can comment on other people’s blogs by making interesting comments and including links to your similar content. Always make sure, however, that you’re linking to content and not products. Linking directly to a checkout page is considered ‘spammy’ and will hurt everyone involved.

Popular forum websites like Reddit are another effective place to gain exposure. Here, you must establish a voice in your chosen forum. Once you have, the moderators of any particular forum may allow you to occasionally post content that links to your blog. After you’ve created your link, it’s considered proper etiquette to remain involved in the community and continue reacting with other people’s content.

Though link building is an art which can only be mastered through trial and error, these are great starting points. It all boils down to establishing a voice, building relationships, and providing value. With those keys out of the way, your website’s traffic and search rank should skyrocket.