Link building is an essential element of search engine optimisation. To put it mildly, ranking high in Google search results without links to your website – preferably from the most popular sites – is quite difficult. We’ve already shared some useful link-building tips in a quick read, but now we’re launching a series of articles to dive deeper into the tricks of the trade. Here’s part two!
In the first part, we highlighted that a website gains authority in the “eyes” of Google’s algorithms if it has links pointing to it. There are essentially two ways to achieve this: by producing content that others find worth mentioning – and linking to – and by encouraging other website editors to link to you, both directly and indirectly. We began exploring link building techniques, starting with the “linking internally” method – now, here’s the rest.
Requesting Links From Other Sites
Once you have identified a site that you would like to link to, you need to ask ourselves “Why would it be worth it to the creator of that site to link to ours?” You don’t have to think of money as the answer – there are a variety of ways to make it worthwhile for the other party.
- You can sign up as a guest author on the site where you want to publish a useful article, linking (also) to your site.
- If you have a great blog post on a topic, but the selected site links to another site on that topic, you can suggest to its editor that your content is more worthy of linking to.
- You can also recommend other links that are useful to them, and thus draw attention to yourself.
- You can also appeal to the ego: you can mention and link to the selected site in a positive light in your content.
- You can also give positive feedback to the site, praising its content by email, in comments, in person, etc.
- Offer to exchange links – it’s mutually beneficial if both parties link to each other’s websites.
- Sometimes links may become inaccessible over time – if you notice such links on the selected page, report it to the editor. In such cases, it is a good idea to recommend another working link on the subject, even your own. In this scenario, you can create a blog post on your site specifically for this purpose before flagging it, and only after publishing it do you suggest a new working link here with content worth linking to on the topic.
- If your graphic or photo is used by a site, you should indicate it and ask for a link in exchange for further use.
- If your brand is mentioned on a website, ask the editor to link to your website at the mention.
- It is worth checking for blog posts that need updating on the featured page. You can politely mention this in an email with useful information for the update – of course, it helps if you have content worth linking to on the topic, and if you indicate this.
- If the page you are targeting has content that you are an expert on, you can ask for an expert quote in exchange for linking to your page, which is mutually beneficial.
- Give a great idea for a new post, and ask only to link to your site in return.
For more useful tips, read parts three and four of our article series!