Before we start talking about link building strategies let’s define what link building is. Basically when you are looking to rank organically through search engine optimization, mainly you are optimizing for Google, because Google is the biggest search engine at least in US.

Now if you are in other countries such as Russia or China it’s a different story there, but for the sake of this post we’re gonna be talking about Google.

Google’s algorithm is based of links. If you want to rank highly when people are searching for your keyword, the ideal ranking in the search result is always the first, second or third in the rankings. You want this positions because they have the highest click through rate.

Google mentioned a while back that the top two factors for ranking and performing well in organic search results is: number one content, number two links. Now the questions is how do you go about acquiring this great links. The links are essential votes of confidence, just keep in mind even though you are building links not all links are created equal they are still votes of confidence, but the links from websites with higher authority have more weight. Google knows how to discern the authority of each website out there and each website is weighed differently. A link from entrepreneur.com will be very different from a blog that is first starting out. A lot of nuances around link building but for the sake of this post we are gonna talk about how to go and acquire great links.

Reach out

One of the strategies you can use to build links  is going to ahrefs.com, put in my competitor’s URL and see who links to them. Ahrefs.com then ranks those links based on the domain authority. The higher the domain authority, 100 being some of the best websites and 0 being a site with no domain authority. The domain authority is like a Richter scale there is a huge difference between a 4.0 and a 5.0 and even a bigger difference between a 5.0 and a 6.0, the difference is exponential.

The next step is head up to each one of those sites manually and send the owner an email telling them that you have noticed the link on their website and that you have a similar product or service worth checking out. If you use this tactic and you send out 100 of email and it really takes 100 of emails to start seeing results. If you are emailing relevant sites, for every 100 sites that you are emailing out, roughly 3 in the low end and 7 in the high end should link back to you.

Sending such a large number of emails can be a daunting task. There are tools out there, one of them is called outreach.io and persistiq is another good one.Thise tools basicaly send emails out for you, and the whole process is automated, it will stop if somebody replays to you but if they don’t they continue to move them further down the sequence.

Keep in mind whenever you are using one of this tools you don’t want to automate to much of it. You want to have a sense of personalization because everybody can sense it when the process is automated.

Guest posting

Guest posting is another way to acquire great links.  If you follow any SEO blog you probably heard of guest posting. Guest posting is just a matter of posting on sites that are relevant to you.

You don’t have to aim for the highest ranking sites or the biggest site. You can go for sites that are a little smaller. Reach out to them say that you will love to contribute with some content to their website. Everybody loves new content, you may event send a post that you have witter already, that shows that you have done the work. So ultimately when you are reaching out to people you are asking for a favor and you want to make everything easy for them.

The key thing for any type of link building is not to think about it as just  a process of acquiring links, but think about it as relationship building process instead. Once you are thinking about it at a higher level, you will be able to get links back to your website more easily.

You can use a tool like Google Search to look for sites that are a good fit for your guest posts. There is a lot of different sites out there that need more content and guest posting is just an other way to get it.

One thing you should keep in mind about guest posting is, if you use guest postings to manipulate Google rankings you won’t do well. Don’t just guest post to build links. Guest posts can also be used to drive signups and boosts your brand.

Broken links

The third strategy is based on broken links, if you think about how the web works and how thousands of sites go down every single day, probably not as many but still. This are sites that are not renewing their domain, and a lot of those sites have links pointing to them. You can use a broken link checker, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you find broken links within your space.

Let’s say you are into the travel niche you go and find broken travel links, you then take those urls that are broken and  put them in archive.org way back machine. What archive.org does it allows you to view sites that are no longer around. You can then take that page make a better version of it  and put it on your website. You don’t want to just copy it verbatim, but you want to improve up on it, use your own words, make it better, and then you can email each of the sites with broken links. It’s that simple if you do it in quantity you will get a lot of links.