Best link building strategies to boost your SEO efforts

Let’s be honest, link building it a vital part of off page SEO – you simply can no longer ignore it and exclude from your strategy. The unfortunate thing is, link building is highly regarded as the most difficult component of SEO to perform.

This is mainly due to the fact that you can’t simply create a high level of ineffective and irrelevant backlinks and improve your SEO, those days are long gone. Link building is now more about creating relationships with other websites that are relevant to you and actually have some credibility.

Link building takes a significant amount of work. It takes time to earn and build links of a high quality and authoritative website. And these are the links you need to actually improve your ranking. All other efforts in off page SEO are virtually worthless without these types of links.

If you can manage to step outside the realm of what everyone else is doing this can work very well to your advantage. This article will give you some out of the box tactics that will help to improve your link building strategies in ways that many others hopefully haven’t thought of yet.

#1 create “best of…” type post

This tactic is so easy to implement, especially if you have a blog section to your website. Usually listicles preform quite highly and act as a great opportunity to get a solid number of backlinks.

With this tactic choose the best person, thing or place and create a list with the best of them. Think about creating content that others would want to link too. Put yourself in the other website’s shoes. If they saw your article would they want to link to it?

Take a look at some examples that can be reworded to suit any industry and situation:

  • Best Social Media Podcasts to Listen to in 2018
  • Top 10 Fashion Influencers to Follow on Instagram
  • 7 of the Best Online Budgeting Tools to Help you Save Money
  • Best 11 Places to Eat Lunch in Sydney

Remember, once you have created and published the post you actually need to contact the websites and show off the blog you have created. They will they hopefully put a link on their site so they can show off that you listed them as one of the best.

#2 create something newsworthy

While the days of creating a press release to build more links are over, there is another way that is similar, which is still effective. Press releases are no longer effective because it relies on the article having links embedded in it and these days the links are nofollow.

As well as this, Google has algorithmically devalued this link building tactic. What you need to do instead is create something that is actually newsworthy. This certainly takes more time then simply creating a press release, which is why some people look to steer clear of this.

Instead of creating your stock standard press release, think of it as a journalistic article. This article needs to have evergreen content meaning that in six months time or even a couple of years, it is still relevant.

#3 write articles on products/ services that complement yours

Link building can be difficult because earning high quality links that are relevant seem to always be your competitors (and they obviously aren’t going to link to your website!).

So instead of wasting your efforts on something that you can never capitalise on, think about products or services that complement your business. It is actually quite easy to earn these types of backlinks because it becomes a sort of partnership and it benefits both parties.

Let’s say for example, you own a plumbing business you could write content about:

  • Piping products
  • Water saving shower taps
  • Toilet system products

Then once you have created this content you need to get in touch with the people that are relevant and earn links that way. This tactic can be applied to any business. No matter what industry you are in there are always other business products/ services that will compliment.

#4 create engaging content

Too often people try to over complicate link building. But if you just go back to the basics it can actually turn out to be quite effective. Quite simply, if you want to earn quality links then your content needs to be engaging. Readers have to love your work and see the value in it enough to want to share it with others.

It needs to be powerful and thought provoking. If it has those two things, then it is more likely going to be shared socially. You could even end up with a viral piece of content if you are lucky!

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
Executive Editor at Best in Australia. Mike has spent over a decade covering news related to business leaders and entrepreneurs around Australia and across the world. You can contact Mike here.
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