1. Link Building Fundamentals
As a general rule, pages with more backlinks tend to rank higher in search results. If you have built a lot of links to your page but it still ranks poorly, investigate other factors that might be preventing you from ranking.
2. How to Build Links
Add Links
- Submit to business directories
- Social media profile pages
- Blog comments
- Post on forums, communities, and Q&A sites
- Create job search listings
Ask for Links
- Guest blogging — create useful content for their website.
- Skyscraper technique — show them a better resource than the one they are currently linking to.
- Link insertion — show them a resource that provides more information about something they have mentioned.
- Ego bait — mention them or their work in a positive light in your own content.
- Testimonials and case studies — give positive feedback on their product or service.
- Link exchange — offer to link to them if they agree to link to you.
- Resource page link building — show them a resource that fits well with their existing resource page.
- Broken link building — help them fix broken links on their pages by providing a replacement link.
- Image link building — request proper attribution when your images are used.
- Unlinked mentions — ask them to make mentions of your brand “clickable.”
- Link changes — request modifications to existing links pointing to your site.
- HARO and journalist requests — provide an “expert quote” for their articles.
- PR — give them a remarkable story.
Buy Links
Earn Links
Maintain Links
- Fix 404 pages that have high-quality backlinks.
- Monitor your lost backlinks and contact the site owner when an important link is lost (also known as “link reclamation”).
3. What Makes a Good Link
Authority
Relevance
Links from sites in the same niche as yours are considered to carry more value than links from unrelated sites.
Anchor Text
“Anchor text” is the clickable text snippet that links to another page. In many cases, it concisely describes the content of the linked page.
Nofollow vs. Follow
Generally speaking, you want to acquire “follow” links (i.e., links without any nofollow-type attributes), since these links should carry the most voting power. However, if you see an opportunity to get a “nofollow” link from a relevant, high-authority page, you should absolutely go for it.
Placement
Destination
When building links to your site, there are three types of destinations:
- Your homepage
- Linkable assets
- The actual pages you need to rank well in Google.
4. Best Link Building Strategies
Pursue Competitor Links
Create Linkable Assets
Study your competitors’ websites to see if they have any linkable assets you can draw inspiration from.
Content Promotion
- Influencers and communities
- Advertising
- Build an audience
- Ask them to subscribe to your email list
- Ask them to follow you on Twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram/TikTok
- Invite them to join your private community on Slack/Discord/Facebook
- Retarget them with Facebook/Twitter/Google ads
Guest Blogging
5. Link Building Tools
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools — shows all links currently pointing to your own site and lets you sort and filter them by many important SEO metrics.
- Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker — shows the top 100 links pointing to any website or URL.
- Google Alerts — notifies you whenever a specific word or phrase is mentioned on a newly published page. This is a great way to find quality link opportunities.
Original source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/zh/link-building/
