Link building is one of the hardest parts of SEO that most people want to avoid.
But the fact is, link building is also one of the crucial parts of SEO that moves the needle.
So even if you want, you can’t ignore link building at any cost if you want your website to rank higher on the search results.
But the most burning question right now is: why do people hate link building?
The reason why people hate link building is because they don’t know the right way of building links.
And they are still using those old tactics that just don’t work anymore.
That can be really frustrating for anyone, to be honest.
But you don’t have to suffer like this.
In this post, we’ll be showing you some of the best and most effective link building strategies that work a charm.
So without wasting any further time, let’s dig in.
8 Best Link Building Strategies That Works
1. Broken Link Building
Broken link building is a tactic that involves finding 404 pages or dead pages on a website and asking the website owner to replace that dead link with your content as a replacement.
It’s one of the best strategies to build quality backlinks at a scale.
But before you go ahead to implement this strategy, we want to give you a disclaimer.
It might sound easy to build backlinks using this strategy, but it’s actually not.
Broken link building is a lengthy process, and you would have to put in a lot of hard work for this strategy to work for you.
But you have to understand – every good thing demands effort.
So if you’re okay with putting in a bit of effort, this strategy can do wonders for you and move you up to the top of the ladder.
But the question is: how can you build backlinks using the broken link building strategy?
To make it easier, you can divide broken link building into a three-step process:
- Find the broken links opportunities.
- Create or identify the content that is worth linking
- Outreach and offer your content as a replacement.
You can look up at your competitor’s websites, websites in your niche, or even web pages around particular topics to find out broken link opportunities.
This is by far the most challenging task of the process.
You can use tools like Ahrefs and Check My Links to make this process super easy and quick.
Pro tip: Use the tool Ahrefs and enter one of your competitor’s websites in the Ahrefs search explorer.
After that, click on best by links and filter the backlinks based on 404 not found errors.
Now look for the referring domains of each dead page (If any page has more than 20 referring domains, it’s an excellent point to start).
Then, figure out if your website already has some similar content (if not, create one) and send an outreach email to those websites that are linking to that dead page.
In your outreach email, let them know that they’re linking to a dead page and offer your content as a replacement for that.
Generally, people would be more than happy to do that because it serves their readers too.
2. Skyscraper Technique
The Skyscraper technique is an excellent link building tactic developed by famous SEO expert brian dean.
Using this technique, he grew his website traffic by 110% in 14 days.
The name “Skyscraper technique” might sound like a huge deal, but it’s one of the easiest link building strategies you’ll ever find.
The strategy is simple.
You find a popular piece of content on other websites that have received a lot of backlinks and create 10x better content than those.
And once you create 10x better content than the existing one, reach out to the websites that have already linked to your competitor’s content and show them why your content deserves to be on that spot.
At this point, you might need some negotiation skills. Still, generally, if your content is unbeatable and far better than your competitor’s content, they would be happy to link to your content.
If you use this strategy, your main goal should be to create 10x better content than your competitor.
Go as in-depth in your content as you can and cover everything around the topic.
But keep in mind, 10x better content doesn’t always mean longer content. Don’t stuff words just for the sake of making it longer. It will hurt your readership negativity.
Instead, focus on solving your reader’s problem by providing in-depth knowledge around that topic.
3. Unliked Brand Mention
Unliked brand mention is by far one of the easiest link building strategies you’ll ever find.
There are a lot of websites over the internet that might mention your brand without linking to your website.
And you just have to contact those website moderators and ask them to add a link to your website where they’ve mentioned your brand.
That’s it.
9 out of 10 people would probably say yes because they’ve already mentioned your brand, and adding a link to your website won’t hurt them.
But if you have a small website and you’re just starting out, this strategy might not work for you that efficiently.
When you’re starting out, generally, people won’t mention your brand because they don’t know who you are.
In the beginning, you won’t have any press coverage or tremendous brand value. So it’s unlikely that people would mention your brand on their website.
However, this strategy can be an absolute steal for you if you have a decent brand presence over the internet.
4. Outreach
Outreach is basically the act of reaching out to any other organization for a specific purpose.
In our case, the purpose would be “Getting a backlink.”
No matter what link building strategies you use, outreach will be a crucial part of everything.
But the fact is, you can even use outreach as a solo link building strategy.
You can’t just reach out to anyone and ask them to link back to your website.
It just won’t happen.
Instead, you can use outreach to build strong relationships with other creators, entrepreneurs, or influencers in your niche.
And when you first build a relationship with them, it would be far easier for you to get backlinks from their websites.
Sometimes they would even link out to your website even if you don’t ask them.
That’s the power of building relationships and networking with others in your industry.
Outreach is a powerful tool that can open up a new world of opportunities for you.
But the only condition is you have to use it the right way.
5. Guest Posting
First of all, let’s understand what “guest posting” actually is.
Guest posting means publishing content on someone else’s website.
Many people speculate that guest posting is dead and doesn’t work anymore.
But the fact is it’s still one of the proven strategies to get quality backlinks, build a brand and get website traffic.
If you want to get quality do-follow backlinks to your website, guest posting would be one of the best strategies for you.
However, just like most link building tactics, guest posting isn’t easy either.
Yet, if you do it the right way, it can bring enormous results for your website.
But the question is: how can you find out sites that accept guest posts?
Well, this isn’t that hard.
Using some Google search operators, you can easily find thousands of websites that accept guest blogs.
Some of the search operators that you can use are:
- Your keyword + “write for us”
- Your keyword + “guest post”
- Your keyword + “submit content”.
- Your keyword + “submit post”
- Your keyword + “guest article”
- Your keyword + “contribute to our site”
For example, we have searched for the term marketing + “write for us” and you can see the search results have pulled up a lot of websites that are currently accepting guest posts on their website.
And you can do the same thing repeatedly using different search operators we’ve mentioned earlier to find out an infinite number of websites that accept guest posts.
Once you find out the prospects, list them in a spreadsheet and collect their email addresses.
And then, it’s time to outreach.
Reach out to the website moderators and pitch them your guest post ideas. If your post ideas are appealing and it also resonate with the prospect’s audience, they would be happy to let you publish a post on their website.
There’s no hard and fast rule in guest posting.
You can even reach out to the top blogs or websites in your niche and casually ask them if you’re accepting guest posts (even if they don’t have a separate guest posting page on their website).
6. Create Link Bait Content
Link bait contents are those contents that you create for the sole purpose of generating backlinks.
The goal is simple: you create in-depth content pieces and use them as a tool in your outreach to get website backlinks.
Some link-bait content examples are data-driven content, statistics, ultimate guides, and controversial content.
You can even create some free tools or courses as your link-bait content.
For example, at Zutrix, we have plenty of free tools like SERP checker, keyword planner, YouTube tag generator, and more.
And these tools have generated a bunch of backlinks to our website, completely free of cost.
We haven’t spent months building relationships with other website moderators, or we didn’t spend a single penny on running massive outreach campaigns.
Since our tools are helpful and it’s free at the same time, people linked and mentioned the tools in their contents naturally.
But should you create a free tool as well?
Well, it totally depends on your business.
It’s not necessary to create tools or free courses as link-bait content.
Even helpful guides, statistics, or data-driven content can also do wonders for you.
But the thumb rule is: whatever link-bait you create, make sure it’s super helpful for their audience.
7. Copy Your Competitor’s Backlink Strategy
Link building is complex.
But if you want to build links in the simplest way without spending too much time on creating and implementing new strategies, you can just copy what your competitors are doing.
Yes, you heard it right.
Copying your competitor’s backlink strategies is the easiest and most popular way to get backlinks quickly.
Just go through the backlink profile of your competitors and find out how they are generating backlinks.
You have to dive deep into their backlink activities to figure out the strategies they are using to get backlinks on their website.
And once you find out how you’re competitors are generating links, you just have to use the same tactic.
For example, if your competitor is doing guest posting on a website, you can just approach the same website and ask them if they’re accepting more guest posting opportunities.
The bottom line is simple: you just copy what your competitors are doing.
That’s it. No fancy strategy.
8. Infographics
Although Infographics doesn’t work for link building as it used to be, there’s still some scope available.
People say a lot of things.
Some say guest posting is dead. But it still works.
Some argue that broken link building doesn’t work anymore. But it still does.
So stop thinking about what people say and start doing the thing you believe works.
If you can create valuable and beautifully designed infographics, you can generate a ton of backlinks that you can’t even imagine.
You just have to be a little creative and approach the prospects the right way.
Conclusion
Link building is tough.
Maybe that’s why 94% of content never gets a SINGLE backlink.
But if you use the right approach and implement the link building strategies we’ve mentioned the right way, you can build hundreds of quality backlinks effortlessly.
Some strategies might work for you, and some might not. You have to try and test out to figure out what works for you the best.
Along with building backlinks, monitoring the backlinks is also crucial. Using Zutrix backlink monitoring feature, you can easily monitor your backlinks from one dashboard.
