Elijah Masek-Kelly — May 11, 2019 — May 11, 2019
Let’s face it – we all want some of that ever-loving link juice!
It’s no secret that backlinks are a critical element of any solid content marketing plan, particularly if you are hoping to find referral traffic or build search traffic against your content.
But wait!
Not all backlinks are created equal. There are good links and bad links!
This is your fair warning: stay away from black hat link building practices!
That being said, this wouldn’t be a very good article if I didn’t provide you with some healthy alternatives!
In this article – I will share a few of the best white hat link building techniques and tools including:
- Irresistibly Linkable Content
- High Quality Guest Posting
- Broken Link Building
Plus I will share a few awesome tools to make your link building life even easier!!
So put on your white hat – and let’s jump in!
1. Irresistibly Linkable Content + Outreach!
The best practice that truly aids any link building campaign is to start with solid, top-shelf, high grade, never-boring and always-valuable content!
Everything that Google does to prevent poor link building practices boils down to one goal, which is to make the internet experience better for users.
Weird, cloaked links that try to trick people for clicks and live in strange nether regions of the web are only attempts to manipulate search engines.
Google doesn’t want to be manipulated – and neither do people!
Instead, focus your efforts on creating valuable content that people actually want, or even better, need!
People will naturally gravitate around high quality content because it serves a purpose.
The more the content is shared, the more it is referenced, the more backlinks will appear to help drive up your rankings.
The types of content that are highly linkable include:
- Data Driven Content
- News or Trending Topics
- Resource Content
- Actionable Advice
- Industry Insight
Don’t Forget The Outreach!
Let’s say you’ve got a real masterpiece of content on your hands.
Something well-crafted, compelling, and extremely useful for your audience.
Congrats! Step one is done!
But even the best content in the world will have zero impact if it is never viewed.
Don’t let it collect dust on your blog and fail to bring you any ROI.
Instead, build a comprehensive content promotion strategy that will boost the amount of exposure you can get and of course, increase the odds of getting you some sweet backlinks!
Go out there and bang on some digital doors!
**BONUS TOOL TIP
Check out Link-able as a really easy way to connect with authors and content creators who may want to link to your content.
This is not for spammy link building! This is for connecting high-value content with authors who need a source!
2. High Quality Guest Posting
This is a tried and tested method for link building.
There’s a hundred ways to start guest posting, so I won’t dive in too deep, but success in this strategy is directly in line with creating high-quality content.
The internet isn’t your personal link bank. If you treat like one – then you’re going to end up with no backlinks or with really spammy garbage links.
Instead, you need to focus on creating great content for your guest posts. Top tier publications require top tier content, so focus on the concept driving your content instead of obsessing over the backlink you are seeking.
But wait!
Even if you have incredible content – this doesn’t mean you get free reign to stuff whatever backlinks you want into your guest post.
In a guest post, backlinks should always lead to other valuable resources for the reader.
Here’s a few types of bad backlinks:
- Product / Services Pages
- Home Pages (Sometimes!)
- Sales Pages
- Affiliate Links
Of course, I am not debating that you may want these types of links on some quality websites.
What I am saying is that adding those types of links into your guest post strategy is not a recipe for success.
You would need to make a very strong case to an editor as to why they should allow one of the links above.
In addition, if an editor doesn’t provide any pushback on the more promotional-type links you embed in your content then you should really ask yourself: ‘Is this a quality publication?’
It’s all about making the internet a better place! Use guest posting as a way to help your audience instead of trying to trick them into a click!
***BONUS TOOL TIP
Not sure where to get started with guest posting?
Check out GuestPostArticles for a free and easy way to find and share guest posting opportunities.
3. Broken Link Building
The internet is constantly changing.
Web pages go live and die every day. Updates happen. Links that were once active become inactive.
When these changes happen – sometimes links that were used to reference another web page become broken.
This means that the links are no longer able to lead to where they were originally intended becoming what is known as a ‘broken link’.
These broken links are a gold mine for creating new backlinks for yourself.
All it takes is a little research and a bit of outreach.
Identifying broken links and letting editors know is super helpful for them! They might not know that it’s a problem on their page and they will be appreciative of the notice!
This is even better if you have a great piece of content that would be a perfect replacement for that broken link!
So how do you find broken links?
Of course, you could do this manually by reading tons of content and clicking on every link to see if it’s active – but who has time for that?
Luckily, tech has made this way easier!
Basically every SEO tool has a feature that will help you find broken links. Ahrefs might be my favorite, but there are also some free options although they come with more limited functionality and results.
However you want to find your broken links, the next step is to do some friendly outreach!
Let the editors of the world know that their content has broken links – and that you have the perfect replacement!
***BONUS TOOL TIP
The folks over at JustReachOut just released a new feature called ‘Link Love’ that makes it super easy to find broken links with an easy keyword search.
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