SEO Simple Link Building Tips for 2017

Published on 12/24/2016 3:26 pm

Link building has been dead for years, for those who failed to adapt to the ever-changing rules and increased requirements on skills, tools, details, and perseverance.

There has been much talking about links being a ranking factor. Many SEOs have only focused on content and On-Page SEO and neglected links saying: "We already know everything about links". But do they really know everything about links?

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Links are important since Google confirmed that links are the #1 ranking factor, alongside great content. Ranking without links is really hard, and why would anyone try to rank without links in the first place? Google cares about links more than anything, and so should you.

Although proper link building is not an easy thing to do, there are still many white hat SEO techniques you can start with even today, without considerable efforts or expenses.

1. Ask For Backlinks:

This is a good way to start, especially if you are a beginner in this job. Think about your friends, relatives, colleagues, partners, clients that have a blog or a site. All you have to do is ask for a backlink. Ask for in-content links instead of links in the sidebar or footer.

But be careful and make sure that the backlink comes from a website that is relevant to your niche, otherwise, it will not have too much of an impact and may even be harmful.

2. Build Relationships:

For good link building, you need to build good relationships. There are plenty of opportunities to build new contacts. You should start with niche-related communities: forums, blogs or social groups, such as the Link Building Experts Group on Facebook, for example.

Make the first step and start contributing with interesting and relevant comments and posts, providing contextual value to each discussion.

By actively participating in these online communities focused on your niche, you will not only gain some good backlinks, but you will always have access to the newest industry news and be able to connect to some interesting people that share your passions.

3. Give a Testimonial:

Testimonial link building is a win-win scenario. Many businesses offer you the chance to say a few words about your experience using their products.

On one hand, this is a perfect way for them to build customer trust. On the other hand, it’s a great opportunity for you to get a backlink and potential traffic from that site and it usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request e-mails.

Companies get another testimonial to place on their site, while you get a new backlink.

If you’re a LinkResearchTools or Link Detox user and love our tools, Our Testimonial here. We will gladly link back to you.

4. Start a Blog:

Don’t make a blog with one post and one backlink to your site. If you do, you not only wasted your time but probably also just created another risky link for yourself. If you want to have your own blog, you need to keep it alive.

Write posts on a regular basis. Focus on your industry and on your client’s needs! In time, it will most likely gain authority. Make sure that your content is relevant, useful and well-structured.

This is the only way to ensure that the world will want to link to it again and again. That’s how you get great backlinks, you earn them!

5. List Your Site in Trustworthy Directories:

There are many online directories that provide no real value to the Internet users and Google has excluded them from its search results. You don’t want your website to be listed on such pages.

But not all online directories are bad. A directory that not only gives you the chance to post a link to your website, but also provides useful information for your potential customers is a directory you want to be listed on.

Niche directories and directories attached to informative websites for a specific industry are a good choice. Having your business listed with such directories makes it easier to get indexed in the major search engines and helps people find you online.

6. Write a Good Guest Post:

There are many sites and blogs that will accept to publish your article. Before you write an article somewhere, make sure that:

the website or blog is relevant to your topic;
the article is NOT about how great you are/ your company is;
you have a focus on quality (well written, professional, and interesting);
you keep in mind that a poor article can bring bad reputation.

It’s important that you build links that help your website and not links that can negatively impact your website’s ranking in search results.

7. Discover Competitors' Common Backlinks:

If you research your competitors, you will probably notice that they have some backlinks in common which you don’t have yet. Well, if they managed to get these backlinks, why shouldn’t you too?

All you have to do is analyze these backlinks and try to get them as well. The Common Backlinks Tool (CBLT) is a tool especially made for this. Enter up to 10 competitors and start your report. CBLT will help you not only find common backlinks, but also discover competitor’s sources and techniques.

8. Get an Indirect Backlink From Your Competitor:

It is quite common that some of your competitors link to the same sites. Link Juice Thief (LJT) finds places where your competitors commonly link to. These sites are usually big authorities in your industry.

The Link Juice Thief (LJT) has a similar results matrix to the Common Backlinks Tool (CBLT). In many cases, you will find that the pages your competitors link to are authoritative sites in your niche.

link-juice-thief-common-links-uk-newspapers-example

A link from such a place would be very helpful as to the powerful link juice your website would receive. But there is something else: if you manage to get your backlink here, your competitors will indirectly link to you.

The Link Juice Thief (LJT) tool helps you get backlinks from high authority pages in your niche.

9. Recover Your Dead Backlinks:

Sometimes you might find broken links to your website. This may be the case if the location of your page changes or if another webmaster misspelled your link. In both cases, these backlinks will return a 404 error.

Such issues may also commonly occur after a site was re-launched or migrated to another domain. You should then redirect these backlinks to some other page.

The Link Juice Recovery Tool (LJR) helps you find the backlinks that your site has, that are linking to a non-existent page (HTTP-code 404). You should try and recover this power and trust those links have either by recreating the page, or redirecting the link to another existing page.

LJR doesn’t only detect HTTP-code 404 errors, it also detects timeout errors (504) or invalid access errors (403) for example. When re-launching your website, you want to look at all these errors, find the root problem and fix it before you get in trouble.

10. Find the Most Relevant Link Building Opportunities

There are many opportunities for link building on the Internet. There are many forums, blogs or sites where you could place your backlink, but usually it is not so easy to find them. Whether you want to find a strong relevant site or blog where you can place a guest article or thematic forum with Follow links – the SERP Research Tool will help you. SERP is designed to help you find the most relevant and strongest results.

After you get your results, you can sort them by strength, theme or any other metric you want. The best thing about SERP is that you know these links are relevant and high authorities in your industry.

Here's an example on how to use the SERP tool to find great guest post opportunities for the bodybuilding and fitness industry.

Search operators:

inurl:submission-guidelines + muscle building,