Keyword strategies get the most attention for SEO, but link building is another SEO strategy that Digital Marketing Managers can utilize to increase website rankings on search engine results pages. Today’s SEO Monday blog post talks about 7 link building strategies.

7 Link Building Strategies:

1. Manual Link Building
2. Competitive Link Building
3. Links via Embedded Content
4. Linkbait & Viral Campaigns
5. Content, Technology & API Licensing
6. Partnerships, Exchanges & Trades
7. Link Reclamation

Whatever link building strategy you decide to employ, just keep in mind that you should create relevant links for your content to increase the trust with your customers and search engines. The more relevant your links, the higher the quality of your links, the more value search engines will place on your content, and ultimately, the higher you will rank on search engine result pages.

Before starting your link building strategies, create a profile of websites and social media sites where your target audience spends time. Then, think about how you can build links from those sites to you site.

7 Link Building Strategies Details

1. Manual Link Building
Create a list of relevant non-competitive sites and pages, and then, make a request for a link with the website. Try to find an actual person who manages the site to make a request for displaying your link. This form of link-building is the most time consuming, but it produces high quality links.

2. Competitive Link Building
Complete a search of places where your competitor has links and see if you can post links on those same pages. Examples of where you and your competitor might both have links include industry directories or associations. This process doesn’t produce links with the highest quality, but it isn’t time-consuming like the Manual Link Building Strategy.

3. Links via Embedded Content
By offering widgets and embeddable forms of content, you can earn links back to the page of your choice when other websites include your work in blog posts, articles, or webpages. For example, you can use scribd.com to upload one of your PowerPoint presentations and embed a mini graphic of the PowerPoint on your website. When someone clicks on the graphic, scribd.com earns a link. This link building activity is not time consuming and produces high quality links.

4. Linkbait & Viral Campaigns
Find industry bloggers or content hobbyists that offer relevant content to your website where you both have similar audiences. Contact these individuals and ask them to post your content on their site with a link back to your site. It may take time to develop relationships with industry bloggers and hobbyists, but if both of you share each others content, you can build high quality links.

5. Content, Technology & API Licensing
With this strategy, you syndicate your content or create licenses with other websites to post your content.  Then, who ever distributes your content produces a link back to your site. Producing these types of links my take time, but once the relationship is formed the opportunities for building high quality links is limitless.

6. Partnerships, Exchanges & Trades
These types of links include reciprocal links, discounts, or invitations to events.  To maintain the quality of these links, don’t sell links. Building these types of links can be simple as long as both parties are happy, but the quality isn’t as high.

7. Link Reclamation
Find all potential broken links, out-of-date resources, and 404 pages, and then, redirect them back to your homepage. While this takes time, this strategy produces high quality links. Plus, this strategy is just good practice and can help build a relationship with customers.

Good luck utilizing one or many of the above link building strategies. Just remember to build relevant links for your content. For every link you build, ask yourself if the link feels natural or not.  If the link doesn’t feel natural rethink the link.

Visual of alternative Link Building Strategies

Strategies in the above graphic are list from hardest to easiest to implement. However, think about implementing a combination of these strategies to reap all the benefits for your websites SEO. The source of the graphic is from Brands Exposed.

Related articles

• Link Building is a Combination of Online and Offline Networking: Interview with Roger Montti (searchenginejournal.com)
• How to use Social Media as a Link-Building Tool (searchenginejournal.com)
• Why Bad Linkbait Needs to Die: How Linkable Assets Deliver 10x More Value (moz.com)

Learn More about Digital Marketing Manager, Cindy Plough