Link-Building Tactics For PROs To Win In 2020.
While modern marketers have been crying out “SEO” at the top of their lungs to confirm its importance in the world of Digital Marketing, we’re here to talk about one single aspect of SEO — Link-building tactics.
Link building is as important as the concept of SEO itself. To put it in simple words, link building is the SEO technique wherein you get other websites and pages to link back to your site. But why do it?
Essentially, link building helps drive referral traffic and increase a website’s authenticity. Links help search engines crawl and index your site, and in fact, backlinks are still a crucial determinant of how search engines rank sites and pages. Google maintains that links, along with high-quality content, are two of the top three ranking factors for SEO. Links act as a signal of sorts that let search engines know that your site/page is a quality resource worthy of citation. Hence, the more relevant backlinks you have, the higher will be your site’s visibility and ranking.
When done right, link building can help uplift your SEO strategy to great heights. It can improve your rankings while also boosting your web visibility. Now, the question is how to do it right?
Here’s how! We’ve listed the best link-building tactics that will make you a winner in 2020.
1. Write quality guest posts
The first of the best link-building tactics on the list has to be guest posting. Guest posting is an excellent way of building and expanding your backlink portfolio. It helps increase the visibility of your website on someone else’s blog by placing your website link in it. You can either place your links in the text body or in “About the Author” section with a No-Follow feature (that is, if the blog owner lets you). To show your reciprocation, you can attach a link of that person’s site in your blog to boost their visibility as well.
However, before you write a guest post for another site/blog, make sure that the blog/site you write for is relevant to your domain. Also, keep in mind that the articles you write as guest posts are not explicitly for your promotion — they should depict you in a professional light where you focus on the topic of discussion at hand.
2. Offer testimonials
Although not known to many, testimonials are an excellent link building tool that can serve a two-fold purpose. Nowadays, many businesses ensure that they have a dedicated testimonial section to highlight the experience of their customers.
When you write a positive testimonial on a brand’s site as a customer, not only does it add to their credibility, it also provides you with the platform to promote your site. You can get a backlink from this brand’s site and expand your potential list of customers. The backlink will drive the traffic from this brand’s website towards your site. So, it’s again a win-win situation for both platforms.
3. Add “using resource pages” to your link-building tactics list
You can use resource pages and link lists to your advantage and grow your link building prospects. In this link building tactic, you provide another blogger or website with your high-quality content to be used as a resource page for a specific domain. Say, for instance, you create exclusive content on fans. So, you can approach sites that deal with fans and ask them to use your content on fans as an informative resource page.
This is a perfect example of an informative resource page dedicated to SEO:
A quick tip for finding relevant websites for link building via resource pages is to use the following keyword combinations:
- Keyword + “resources”
- Keyword + “useful/helpful resources”
- Keyword + “links”
- Keyword + “useful/helpful links”
4. Use social media backlinks
Social media backlinks are pretty handy link building tools, particularly when you are focusing on brand promotion. Needless to say, active social media presence has a significant impact on your brand’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) integrated with unique SERP features.
By creating your brand’s profile on social media, you are not only encouraging conversation about your brand but also expanding your brand’s community of loyal members. This allows you to leverage your loyal traffic to spread awareness about your brand.
5. Discover the common competitor backlinks
This has to be one of the simplest and best link-building tactics of all. All you have to do is figure out the link building strategies of your competitors and see which are the backlinks they have in common. If your competitors are using it, you should also probably use the same or similar approach to stay ahead of your competition.
The Common Backlinks Tool (CBLT) is just what you need for this. In this tool, you can enter up to ten names of your competitors and generate a report.
The report will not only highlight the common backlinks of your rival brands, but it will also show the backlinks that you don’t have (but they have). Additionally, the tool will also show the sources of links of your competitors and the techniques they use to acquire those links. Using the right tools is in itself one of the great link-building tactics that you must take very seriously.
By discovering the common backlinks used by your competitors, you can get a peek into their link-building strategies. You also gain insights as to how you can increase your website traffic like them.
6. Acquire indirect backlinks from competitors
Yes, you can acquire indirect backlinks from your competitors! As we discussed in the previous point, your competitors have numerous backlinks in common. Usually, these common links are authoritative websites (big names) in your domain. While obtaining a backlink from such a trustworthy site in your industry is a definite win, it has a dual benefit — when you acquire links from the big names, your competitors will indirectly link to you. You become a part of the link building chain.
The Link Juice Thief (LJT) is a nifty tool that helps you obtain backlinks from high authority pages in your domain.
7. Bring your dead backlinks to life again
It is natural to have dead backlinks on your website over time. Broken or dead links usually occur when a site is re-launched or migrated to another domain or if a webmaster misspells the site’s link. In any case, the backlinks depict a 404 error.
You can find the broken links in your site/pages using the Link Juice Recovery Tool (LJR). This tool can detect HTTP-code 404 errors, timeout errors (504), and even invalid access errors (403). To use the LJR tool, you need to input your site URL and run it. The tool then generates a report showing all the dead or broken backlinks in your site. This falls under the category of some of the more technical link-building tactics that you can try.
It also provides you with a “.htaccess” code that you can insert into your .htaccess file.
According to the report, you can look into the errors and fix them before re-launching your site.
8. Convert your brand “mentions” into backlinks
Social media mentions are an excellent brand promotion tool. Why not use it to gain new backlinks?
When people mention your brand or your product/service on digital platforms, it is already promoting your brand. The only thing missing here is the link to your website. All you need to do is request the page admin/webmaster to convert those mentions to backlinks.
The Backlink Profiler (BLP) is a tool that helps you find your brand mentions. You can also use the SERP Research Tool (SERP) and LinkResearchTools for the same purpose.
9. Discover new linking opportunities by monitoring competitors
Monitoring your competitors is crucial to discover the new backlinks they are using. This way, you can use the new backlinks for your advantage and keep pace with your competitors as well.
You can use the Link Alerts (LA) tool for this. The tool helps monitor the link building activities of your competitors and informs you about the new backlinks they are using.
The tool lets you set up e-mail notifications to notify you of the new backlinks, so you always remain posted. This can help you find new backlinking opportunities while also highlighting new sources and techniques for the same. This is one of the proven link-building tactics that must definitely use.
10. Create high-quality infographics, case studies, and lists — Probably the best link-building tactics.
Designing attractive and informative infographics, case studies, and lists is a proven way to earn backlinks. Infographics, lists, and research reports/case studies make for highly engaging content that many people find extremely useful. In fact, our brain is tuned to love lists and facts. (That’s why the Internet is filled with informative listicles!). Quite obviously, creating high-quality content is one of the best link-building tactics that you try out in 2020.
When you create such high-quality, engaging, and interactive content that is valuable to users, you will rank higher in the SERPs. As a result, people can easily find you, and when they see that your content is rich, they will link to your site — getting these link-building tactics to work for your advantage.
While these are ten of the best link-building tactics you must adhere to in 2020, you should also take care of spam links. Make sure to find them and disavow them so that they don’t impact your backlink profile negatively. On a concluding note, link building is a pivotal part of SEO, so the upcoming year’s resolution should be to make the most of it! Have any amazing link-building tactics that you think everyone should know of? Feel free to let us know in the comment box.
