Link Building Tactics

There are lots and lots of ways to get links. The right tactics for you depend on the resources you have at your disposal as well as the industry that you're in. Industries that are more established and competitive often require you to be quite aggressive with link building, and you might find earning those links more difficult. Other industries, often the newer industries that are quickly growing, are full of opportunities to engage with bloggers and build a community. With that in mind, this section reveals a few link building tactics that can be applied to most all types of websites.

Some of these you've already learned about in the chapter on building a link building campaign, so we'll try not to repeat ourselves here. The basic premise is that you create an asset that you use to try and get links. This takes the form of a piece of content and can include something like:

• An infographic

• A data visualization

• A white paper

• A how-to guide

• A video

• A study or report

• An image gallery

You create these assets through the lens of earning links to them from people who find them relevant, interesting, funny, informative, etc. You then reach out to these people in an attempt to actually build those links. Over time, you aim to reach a point at which you don't need to ask for each and every link that you receive. Instead, you should be able to seed the content with a few key influencers in your community who can help spread the word on your behalf. This can take a long time to achieve and requires a lot of investment in exceptional content, but it’s certainly possible.

Examples of content-based link building campaigns

In this section, we’ll look at some examples of successful link building campaigns along with some analysis of what made them successful. One thing to note here is that the primary goal of the following examples may not have been links, but they were very successful, nonetheless, so there is something we can learn.

Salary by State: Where Can You Really Earn the Most?

Originally started within the marketing department, this piece has developed into a genuinely useful tool for students to use when trying to understand how salaries for roles can differ by state. At the moment, the piece has over 100 linking root domains pointing to it from a range of authoritative sources:

• It’s a genuinely useful tool for students, requiring minimal input in order to be useful and help make career decisions

• It’s very relevant to Rasmussen, a college that is looking to engage with students

• With the data being updated, it continues to be relevant, meaning that it can get links over and over again

• The execution is very simple, as is the headline which can be understood very quickly

If you printed off all the Instagram photos uploaded in a year, how far would they reach?

This piece is a few years old now, so the data may not quite be up to date, but the idea and execution is excellent, showing what would happen if you printed all photos uploaded to Instagram and stacked them on top of each other.

This piece currently has just over 30 linking root domains pointing to it and worked for a few reasons:

• It’s super relevant to the brand: a photo printer

• The execution is very easy to understand quickly, and encourages interaction from the user who will keep clicking and clicking

• Even if you’re not an avid Instagram user, you probably know what it is and how it works, which makes the topic relevant to many people

In addition to the examples above, I wanted to include some examples of content that have generated plenty of links, but were almost certainly not created with link building or SEO in mind. This is important because you’ll find that you can get inspiration from places outside of SEO, and these pieces are great examples of this.

The UK’s Best Home Bar Competition

This one is included because it’s a little different in that the content that has been created is actually by users, rather than the brand, and is a competition:

This competition generated over 20 linking root domains despite being relatively simple — a blog post entry form and then picking of a winner. There are a few reasons why this competition picked up links:

• It was launched during the UK summer when people were thinking about spending time outdoors and revamping their spaces

• The competition was very relevant to the brand who provide equipment and games for home bars

• It was very easy to enter — just a photo was required

• The competition could be promoted when it was launched and again when the winner was picked, allowing for a slew of outreach to take place

Using data to determine if “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie

I’ve included this example because it shows that you don’t necessarily need complex visuals or interactive elements in order for a piece of content to be successful. This piece currently stands at 117 linking root domains and uses a data-informed approach to answering the question: is “Die Hard” a Christmas movie?

This piece was successful in terms of links for a few reasons:

• It’s very resonant with movie fans. Anyone who has seen “Die Hard” (a very popular film anyway) will probably have had a conversation with someone else about whether it’s a Christmas film or not

• The debate isn’t a one-off thing: It will come around every Christmas and whenever “Die Hard” is shown on TV outside of Christmas

• It’s clear that the author has used a methodical approach to answering the question, which draws you in, keeps you engaged, and makes the piece feel very credible

Based on a True True Story?

This was put together by some data journalists and shows which parts of well-known movies claiming to be based on true stories are actually true or not. They add a new film every so often and right now, the piece has just over 200 linking root domains.

What made it successful?

• The visual is very easy to understand quickly and you can see at a glance just how true or false any of the films are

• The level of detail provided is huge, with every scene broken down into chunks and explained

• Films are very resonant with many of us, and we’re often more bought in when they’re based on a true story

• The execution allows for very quick and easy scanning of scenes that movie fans will recognize and interact with, leading to high engagement

Guest blogging is the process of approaching other websites to see if they’ll publish a piece of content that you write on their blog. While it’s often an effective way to earn links using high quality content, Google has cracked down on marketers who abuse this tactic with low-quality content and over-optimized anchor text.

As guest blogging became an increasingly common tactic, it became increasingly automated and the quality of the posts declined considerably. Google noticed. Matt Cutts, the ex-head of Google's webspam team, wrote a post in 2014 declaring that we could "Stick a fork in it: Guest blogging is done." This still holds true today in that if you’re producing content at scale and pitching it as guest posts at scale, you’re unlikely to see long-term success.

At the same time, focusing on quality and taking time to write content for third-party websites where your audience hangs out online is valuable. If you’re doing guest blogging this way, then the value can go beyond the link itself and include things such as brand exposure and click-through traffic to your website.

This Whiteboard Friday from Garrett French gives you a detailed look at how to approach guest blogging the right way.

The Internet is filled with broken links. Often, these broken links exist on valuable, high-quality pages. Broken link building is a very popular practice that works on the premise of helping webmasters fix their broken links by providing a superior alternative for them to link to.

Although the specifics can vary, the basic process looks like this:

1. Research broken links and find good targets

2. Create content to replace content that no longer exists

3. Outreach and pitch this content

Here’s an example. You run a dairy testing company and want to build links to your scientific resource pages. A university in your area happens to have an older page on dairy resources, but many of the links are broken. You kindly reach out to the webmaster to point out the broken links, and helpfully suggest your newer and up-to-date resource as an alternative. The university webmaster then links to your dairy resource page.

This process can be repeated over and over again. Sometimes you use your existing content as a suggestion to replace broken links, other times you create new content specifically for this purpose.

Slightly different than broken link building is the practice of link reclamation, where you fix or “reclaim” links that once pointed at your site, or point to your site but fail to provide any SEO value.

There are many different types of link reclamation strategies.

404 pages

These are links that point to pages on your website that no longer exist. Link Explorer is a good tool for finding these. (Perform a "Top Pages" search and sort for 404s). You can either 301 redirect or fix these links on your end, or ask the webmaster to change the link.

To find valuable 404 pages with the most broken links:

1. Go to Link Explorer

2. After logging in, navigate to the Top Pages tool

3. Enter the site you want to analyze. Be sure to select "root domain" metrics.

4. For the Status Code, select "4xx - Broken"

5. You will now see a list of all the top 404 pages on the site, sorted by the number of broken links pointed to each page

6. Click the "View Links" search icon next to each URL to see all the broken links pointing at each URL

Non-linking brand mentions

It’s sometimes common and easy to find others writing about your site without linking to it. Often a simple email to the author is enough to secure a link. For example, if someone has written a blog post containing this copy:

“The toolset that Moz provides for SEOs is second to none and is a great value for the money.”

This is great, but if there is no link to Moz, there is an opportunity to ask for one.

Tools like mention.net and Google Alerts are great at digging up mentions.

Non-linking images

It’s common to find websites that have posted your own images without attribution. Instead of filing a copyright or DMCA takedown notice, this presents a terrific opportunity to earn a link instead.

The way this works is to contact the website who has used the image, tell them that the image belongs to you and that you love that they’ve used it, but would they mind giving you a credit link in exchange for using it.

You can use Google Reverse Image Search to check for other websites that have used your images. Britney Muller goes into more detail on using images for link building in this Whiteboard Friday.

In years gone by, trading links with other websites was a good way of getting links. It also became known as "link exchanges" or "reciprocal links" as a tactic. However, like a lot of link building tactics, it was often abused and pushed to the extreme. Instead of trading links with other relevant, good quality websites, many SEOs would just trade links with anyone they could. Therefore, the link was no longer being given because of the quality of the website, but more because the webmaster would get a link in return.

This led to some websites having pages that were set up specifically for trading links. These pages would have URLs similar to “www.example.com/links.html.” Such a page would consist of a huge list of links to websites that were often unrelated to the website itself and were not always great quality.

Because of this, Google seeks to devalue links that are only given because a link is being given in return. They can even penalize for excessive link exchanges and have a section in their Webmaster Guidelines for it:

When it comes to link building, Google wants to see links that you've earned. They want to see links that you deserve because you have something of good quality to offer — not because you're happy to take part in link exchanges.

Having said that, Google has no problem at all with websites linking to each other for legitimate reasons. It’s a natural occurrence on the web if a news story on the BBC cites an article on CNN, then a few weeks later CNN cites a story on the BBC. This is technically a reciprocal link, but do you think Google penalizes it? No, because there are genuine reasons for these websites to link to each other and they are doing it in a natural way that is good for users.

Contrast this with a page that has thousands of links on it, all going to unrelated websites with no relevance at all, and you can see the difference in what Google does and doesn't like.

Link building can be quite tough, particularly in the early days when you're still trying to build your reputation, find the right people to connect with, and create great content. It’s quite understandable that SEOs look for shortcuts to help make the process a little bit easier, and one of those shortcuts is often buying links.

Buying links is directly against one of Google's Webmaster Guidelines:

Google cares so much about this because buying links can change how search results appear for users. They want companies to perform well in search results because they deserve to, not because they have deep pockets and can buy links. Also, note that Google explicitly says "links that pass PageRank.” This is where the difference between buying links and buying advertising comes into play.

Buying advertising that links through to your website is fine and can be a great practice for building awareness of your business. However, Google does say that if you're going to do this, then you should make sure that the advertisement doesn't pass PageRank to your website. There are a few ways you can do this:

• Adding the nofollow attribute to the link

• Going via a redirected page that is blocked in robots.txt

These techniques mean that the advertisements will not affect how much PageRank your website receives and, therefore, will not affect how you perform in organic search results.

In general, buying links is a risky business, and for most companies is not worth the risk. The short-term gains often outweigh the long-term benefits, and if you're building a legitimate business that plans on using organic Google results as a means to get customers, then buying links can put that at risk.

A world of link building tactics

This chapter only describes a few of the hundreds of different link building tactics you can use (or even invent!). The specific tactics you choose will depend on your resources, creativity, niche, audience, and available time.