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First and foremost, a good link will drive traffic to your site...

But did you know that in the past, link building focused solely on quantity over quality? Talk about a backwardapproach ! Today, link building is the complete opposite, placing quality leaps and bounds over quantity. However, it is also important to know that link building isn’t this magical, overnight process, nor is ita “set it and forget it” type of strategy. In fact, with time, backlinks can become less relevant, they can completely disappear, or become toxic. With that in mind, you must consistently be on the lookout for new opportunities to acquire new backlinks to maintain a high search engine ranking.

Remember, the goal of backlinks for SEO is to send visitors from the site they’re currently on to other relevant sites they may also enjoy. You must consider choosing the right SEO keywords specifically, which will require researching competitors’ backlinks, creating quality content, outreach, and more. But, of course, with every holistic link building strategy, there will always be a bad link building strategy. Bad link-building strategies can result in not only penalties and damage to your rankings, but it can cause your website to be completely removed from search engine results altogether! Ouch!

To prevent the opposite effect of what you want from link building, here are a few bad link building strategies to avoid.

• Adding links in blog comments: In the past, blog commenting was an effective way to gain backlinks. Today, this irritates blog owners and administrators of sites and might get you banned from the sites you are commenting on. Commenting on blogs with links are pretty much ineffective, as most of the links are changed to nofollow, so they won't "count" toward your inbound links.
• Paying for links: Buying or selling links to increase your results is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This involves offering free products or services in return for links, excessive link exchanges, or adding links to a site in exchange for linking to your site from their site all violate Google's policies and guidelines.
• Submitting to directories: Submitting to spammy directories hurts your search engine rankings. If you submit your site to a directory, be sure it is reputable and regulated. Directories with an approval process give search engines a signal that you're a legitimate business.

By avoiding these bad link building strategies link-building strategies your business could experience here at DevDigital.

1. Take advantage of your competitor’s SEO backlinks and replicate them

For one moment, stop and think about who your top competitors are. Now, go to Google and type in the keyword most prevalent to your business and search. In doing that, where do you rank on the search engine results pages? Better yet, where do your competitors land in the rankings? You want to particularly pay close attention to the competitors that show up on the first page of Google. Now, imagine having the same amount of traffic as your competitors coming to your website! It’s totally possible!

Finding out who links to your competitors is a major advantage for your business. You can be sure that a competitor's backlinks will be located on websites that are relevant to your industry, which means that you can count on them to provide you with high-quality backlinks for SEO.

This could be a large effort that requires hard labor, but there are tools, both free and paid, that can assist you in analyzing the backlink profiles of your competitors. Have a look at the backlink pages, select the prospects that seem to offer the most potential, and then contact the sites you have chosen to see if they would be open to linking to your website. Just remember that when you reach out to these sites, be sure to check to see if you already have a backlink from them; if you do, let them know before requesting another backlink.

2. Outreach/Write Guest Posts

Your credibility will increase, and you will be able to introduce your brand to a new audience when you add guest posting to your SEO link-building strategy; in addition, if you are able to include a link to your website inside the article itself, SEO will benefit from this tactic. Basically, you want to find websites that are relevant to your business and write a blog post for them. In order for your article to get published, you want to include a couple of links to different pages of the hosting site, as well as links to your site, and a link to an authority site as well. Site owners will charge you a fee or have specific guidelines to follow in order for them to publish, so make sure your content is of high quality and you meet all requirements, otherwise, they will not publish.

3. Get on a “Best of” or “Top” List

Appearing on "best of" lists is a great endorsement of your product or service while placing a link to your website on an authoritative, relevant website. To determine if you are a good fit for a particular list, check a competitor's website using a tool like Online Backlink Checker, and pay specific attention to the “dofollow” backlinks that contain words such as "best" and "top."

You can contact the site owner and inquire about how to be added to the list. Sometimes it is a paid placement, and sometimes it is the webmaster's editorial discretion. However, sometimes if you present a persuasive blurb, they may include you on the list to keep their content fresh and relevant to readers.

4. Publish Only Link-Worthy Content

Link-worthy content is content that people want to link to, has a wide audience, and is most likely at the top of the marketing funnel. Most editors want to link to pages that are relevant to their audience, therefore, the more relevant your page is, the more likely they will link to it.

Content that is worth linking to is also educational and informative. It solves problems or answers questions from the audience/readers. Many SEO experts, on the other hand, create link-worthy content by answering frequently asked questions. However, to gain backlinks, your content must also answer these questions and solve these problems in a unique way.

Here are some examples of link-worthy content:

• Content that is educational
• Conduct research that is beneficial to your industry
• Content that is evergreen
• Entertainment
• How-to guides
• Content that is inspiring
• Trends and data

When devising a strategy to create link-worthy content, you can conduct an SEO analysis (audit) on your existing content to identify gaps will help tremendously. This tactic in addition to the tactics listed above will help you determine which type of content to begin with and how much you'll require.

More Link Buildng Strategies to Come

There are many more link building strategies to implement that will boost your search engine rankings and build your brand; we’ve just listed four here. The important thing to note about link building is that it is not about how many links you can build but more so about earning quality links that are trusted and natural. Is the content you are providing helpful? Does it solve problems or answer questions? All these factors matter.

Here at DevDigital, we are link building experts, and have only listed a few of our strategies here. To learn more about our link building techniques, contact us and one of our SEO team members will be happy to assist you. Also be on the lookout for SEO Link Building Strategies Part 2!