During your link building campaign, you will realize that there are several ways to acquire links.
Depending on your resources and industry, you will have to use the correct tactics to get your hands on those links. Established industries require strong link building and a competitive streak. With these companies, you could find it hard to earn those links. Newer industries, however, will give you several opportunities to interact with other bloggers and also create a community. You will have to develop tactics to build links that will help you with all kinds of websites. Here are some of them.
Content-based link building
The concept behind this tactic is to create content that will lure in people who will want to link to your work. Your content can take any one of several forms such as a how-to guide, an infographic, a video, data visualization, or even just an image gallery. You have to focus on acquiring links from people who are interested, find them informative, funny, etc. You approach these people, your industry’s key influencers, with an aim of earning those links. With a few key people, you will be able to spread your content along your community and wider. You will need to remember that you have to be patient as results do not appear overnight. It can take a while and also requires quite some investment, especially in exceptional and unique content.
Guest blogging
This is a practice where you approach other websites and check if they would publish an article or some content that you have written on their page. You serve as a guest blogger on their website. This is considered to be an effective method of earning links since you use high-quality content, but Google has penalized marketers who have abused this method. They used low-quality material and over optimization.
Guest blogging soon became a very popular method. As it became more common, it also became automated. The posts were also of poor quality. Most reputable websites will accept guest posts if
they are of superior quality. They would prefer that content is not be created solely to acquire links.
Google has become an expert in locating these kinds of links, so it is recommended you do not create links in this manner.
Ego bait
Ego bait can be defined as content that impresses the people who are mentioned in that page. The intention is to impress these people enough to get them to share your work. With this technique, you get these people to notice you. This is a strong way of receiving high-quality links and directing traffic to your work. The process of ego baiting involves a few steps. They are:
Concept and research targets: The first thing you will need to do is create an interesting
concept for you work. It has to be relevant to your website’s theme. Choose a relevant idea that complements your website nicely. Once the idea has been finalized, you will need to conduct some research to identify whom you plan on featuring in your page. There are some factors you will need to focus on before you pick the right person.
o Search for blogs that are currently active and have posted recently.
o Look for blogs that have a large amount of followers on social media.
o Ensure that you can locate the bloggers’ contact details.
When you are filling out your content, you will need to make sure that the person or people or website you plan on adding to your work is genuinely deserving of being featured in your content. Do not feature people or websites with the only intention of locating people who would be willing to share your work. This could easily become obvious to the people you are looking to bait and to your readers.
Create content: This part requires that you create original and high-quality content. In your content, include details about the featured people and websites. This will help you attract the bloggers’ attention, who will then share your post and link you. Ideally, it would good if you could include details such as a picture of the person or a screengrab of the website, a link to their websites and social media profiles, and most importantly, reasons why they have been featured in your work. Explain what makes them or their work exceptional.
Outreach: Once you have published your content, you should contact the bloggers or website to let them know that they have been featured. Keep the email simple because the people you are writing to are busy. You could include more details if you would like.
Follow up: This is the most important step. Once you have sent them a mail to inform them of your post, always make sure you follow up. Even if you receive a negative response, consider it as constructive criticism.
Broken link building
The Internet is a vast, never ending ocean of data. It has millions of websites, and each of these websites contain broken links. Very often, high-quality web pages contain these broken links.
Webmasters have to fix these broken links, which is why broken link building has become a very popular task. This practice offers them high-quality alternatives that they can use to fix these broken links.
The steps in this practice can differ, but the basic methods are as follows:
Research and identify the broken links and locate good targets
Create content
Outreach
Once you have identified the broken links, you can add newer links or up-to-date resources as a replacement. This process if efficient and can be repeated if necessary. While you can use existing material to fix broken links, you can also create new material for the same purpose.
Link reclamation
This process is slightly different compared to broken link building. Here, you repair or “reclaim” broken
links. These links could be the kind that used to direct to your website or are inefficient and do not boost your SEO value.
There are several kinds of tactics you can use to reclaim links. Here are a few of them.
404s: These are broken links that appear to direct to your web pages, but they do not exist have to do is send the author an email. There are tools available online such as Google Alerts, Fresh Web Explorer, and mention.net that can help you locate these mentions.
Non-linking images: Sometimes, you can also find that websites have uploaded your images
without your permission. This is common practice and a lot of people do it without being aware of copyright infringement or other malpractices. You could consider this a blessing in disguise. Instead of bringing the law in and filing for a copyright takedown notice, you should realize that you have earned a link on another website. You have tools like Google’s Image Search and TinEye to help you locate your images. Politely seek attribution instead of
threatening with copyright infringement.