Basic Link Building Strategies

Some link building tactics may be considered a violation of Google’s Webmasters Guidelines [53]. Avoiding those, there are still a number of respectable link building strategies that can drive some high-quality links to our website.

Here are the most basic ones all webmasters should know about:

Focus on content

Ideally, Google expects us to earn links rather than build them. Links are earned when people link to our pages without asking them to do so. People should want to link to our page. Even when we do ask webmasters and editors to link to our page, they should see something on our page that gives value to their audience.

Links earned naturally, also called editorial links, come through producing link-worthy content. Content that’s good enough to drive traffic is typically good enough to earn high-quality backlinks. As long as people see interesting content, chances are high that at least some of them will want to link to it.

Certain types of content are more linkable than others. The audience wants to see them and websites want to link to them. These are called linkable assets or link baits. Infographics, how-to guides, list posts, beginner guides, charts, maps, videos and whitepapers are some popular link baits.

Even with link baits, the key is to create original, awesome content. If there are already hundreds of blogs on the same topic and we’re only reproducing the same with no juicy, new, attractive bits of our own work, we’re doing it wrong. Create something that visitors consider a source of authority on the topics and we’ll automatically generate links over time.

Follow competitor’s backlinks

If we can find competitors that are ranking for our targeted keywords, we know that their link building strategy must be working since it has got them to the top of SERPs. The idea is to investigate where and how do competitors get their links from and then follow the same plan.

Step 1: Finding where competitors get links from

Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Moz all have their own tools to check competitor’s backlinks. If we don’t already know our competitor’s, we’ll first find the ranking websites for the keyword using our preferred SEO software (Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, etc.).

Once we have the list of competitors, let’s pursue their backlinks. Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool generates a list of link sources with other important details, including page authority, anchor text, target URL, and date it was first and last indexed. We can download the data as a CSV. The analysis page looks like the following if we open the "Backlinks" tab: