To become a leading brand in your industry, you need to have some visibility. The visibility comes naturally as your traffic increases and your website ranks high in search engine results. So basically, if you wish to stay profitable, you need to improve your traffic.
One of the key parts of increasing your online presence are good link-building strategies. They help generate a higher traffic influx to your site and help you thrive online.
Just to recap, link building is a process in which you try to get hyperlinks from other websites to your own website. It is used by both users and search engines while they crawl your site and decide on your SERP position.
And here, in this article, we will list the top strategies for link building you should try using to improve your traffic.
Guest blogging
As a guest author on someone’s blog, you can add backlinks to your site. However, don’t make it obvious that you are doing this just to get the links. Instead, write on a relevant topic and offer something of value to the readers.
If you don’t know what backlinks (also called inbound links) are, well they are links that originate on one site (different than your own) and link to your website. Using them can also build relationships with key influencers in your market or industry so you can have genuine advocates of your business if you keep doing your job well.
On top of all this, guest blogging is also good for referral traffic.
Competitors’ Backlinks
There are other backlinking options, too. You can check out your competitors, see where they backlink, on what sites they place their links, and use this as an opportunity to provide more valuable content to your audience.
Basically, what you are doing is checking to see if your competitors are offering more relevant content.
You can also check what your competitors are writing about and what links they use so you can get inspired and utilize this information to increase your traffic.
Blog commenting
This used to be a good link building strategy, but today is often debated as many marketers now look down upon it and most blogs have no-follow links in their blog comments. This means that any link you build on that site will be ignored in page ranking.
However, this strategy is effective when it comes to building relationships through comments, which can add more traffic to your site as well.
But remember, don’t make it a mass commenting strategy. Instead, comment with value and genuine interest to show that you are an active member of a community, industry, or niche.
Internal links
Internal linking is a strategy in which you are linking from one of your pages to the other as a way to show your readers there is more valuable content and that they should stay on your site to check it out.
Not only does this portray you as an expert, but it also decreases your bounce rate. However, be careful not to have any broken internal links as those can harm your SEO ranking and make it more difficult for search engines to rank your pages higher.
You can also add links from your older posts that do well and have higher traffic in order to make your current post rank better.
Link intersects
This term basically means that you should try to find out which sites link to your competitors and not you. That way you can try to build a better relationship with them and create more valuable and high-quality content that will then be linked.
Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you find links to your competitors, so research those a bit.
Link reclamation
This strategy can be explained as finding broken links that point to your site, finding unlinked brand mentions, and finding uncredited copyrighted material.
First, if there are broken links that are pointing to your site, you could be losing some potential traffic. So you need to redirect such links and make them point to a correct and working site/page.
Then, unlinked brand mentions are great because you know there is someone who is mentioning you already and is engaged with your business.
So ask them to include a link to your site and offer something in return or just start building a relationship with them.
Lastly, if someone used your material on their site, you can either ask them to remove it or ask them to include a link that will point to your site.
Paid links
This strategy is the most expensive one but is also arguably one of the best ones. And besides paid links, you can also have paid promotions for linkable assets, such as any tools you have, informative blog posts, infographics, etc.
By using paid campaigns, you can let your target audience know you exist and show them useful information that you have. However, when doing this be sure you pick the best site or the best blog to show and promote yourself on.
Link baiting
This is a pretty broad strategy and the goal of it is to make content with value and make your links clickable.
Basically you need to be aware that there is so much content out there and that you need to make yours stand out by offering something that will capture your audience’s attention.
Also, you should create content with good quality and make it useful and helpful to your target audience so that they would click on it as soon as they see it.
Social media
Social media links are no-follow links, which means, they are not going to help you build and increase your page rank. However, that is not the goal, nor it should be.
Instead, the goal of linking on social media is to get more people from different social media platforms to come to your site and increase your traffic. And social media can also be used for community building and gaining a loyal following.
Conclusion
Link building is very important, especially for building your online presence and as part of your digital marketing strategy.
So besides just creating high-quality content, if you want to improve your link-building, you should also check the factors we mentioned in this article since they can influence how much visibility your site is getting.