“The Key to ground breaking, and business rapturing, SEO Success is Backlinks!”
If you are well-versed in Search Engine Optimization, you have likely heard about the importance of backlinks. Marketers and SEO experts place great emphasis on the power of backlinks for boosting website traffic and improving ranking on search engines.
While there are many factors involved in a successful SEO campaign, backlinks remain a crucial element. However, acquiring high-quality backlinks for your website can be a challenge.
To help you out, we are providing a comprehensive guide to link building for 2023 and beyond.
In this guide, you will find strategies to enhance your website traffic, and overall SEO ranking.
What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks, also known as backlinks, from other websites that lead to your site. The goal is to increase the relevance and authority of your website, resulting in improved visibility on organic search engines. Link building provides SEO value through referral traffic and authority signals.
What Benefits Does Link Building Offer to Websites?
Link building is an SEO tactic that helps website owners improve their ranking on organic search engines by providing relevance cues and authority to their site. A high volume of quality backlinks shows Google the credibility of a website.
Here are several reasons why link building is essential for SEO:
- Ranking: Having a high volume of high-DA backlinks will improve your website’s keyword ranking, making it more visible on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
- Credibility: Quality backlinks serve as a vote of confidence from other websites, indicating that your website has accurate, helpful, and engaging content. This enhances your website’s favorability to search engine algorithms.
- Traffic: Backlinks from other websites can drive more traffic to your site.
- Revenue Generation: An increase in backlinks results in more opportunities to generate revenue from referral traffic.
- Performance: Link building contributes to better performance metrics for your website, including keyword positions, site DA, organic impressions, and more.
- Partnerships: By practicing link building and outreach, you can establish valuable partnerships and relationships with other bloggers and business owners in your niche.
- Authority: By creating great content and earning links, you can build the authority of your website in terms of DA and voice.
- Content Marketing: Link building often involves creating blog posts, conducting email campaigns, sharing content on social media, and more. These techniques come together to support your overall content marketing strategy.
Types of Links You Should Know About
There are various types of links in SEO, and not all of them can be referred to as backlinks. Before developing a link building plan, it’s essential to understand the different types of links and how they impact your website. Here are some of the most common types of links:
- Backlinks – These are links that originate from other websites and direct to your site. For instance, if a blogger writes an article and includes a link to a page on your website, it’s considered a backlink.
- Internal Links – These are links added within your content that lead to another page within your site. For example, including links in a new blog post to related content on your blog is a good way to create internal links.
- Broken Links – These are links, both internal and backlinks, that were initially connected to a source but the source is no longer available or has been deleted, resulting in a 404 error.
- DoFollow Links – “DoFollow” is a term applied to the link source, either on your site or an external site linking to your site. This descriptor code informs search engine crawlers to follow the authority of the link to the end source, counting it as providing authority to the end destination.
- NoFollow Links – Conversely, a “NoFollow” link has a coded descriptor telling search engine spiders not to count the link or consider it as providing authority to the end source. Websites use the nofollow property on outbound links to preserve their own authority instead of transferring it to the linked site.
- External Links – These are outbound links on your website that direct to another website. Regardless of who creates the link, whether it’s you or someone else, any link pointing to another domain is considered an external link, and you can choose whether to set it as “DoFollow” or “NoFollow”.
- Editorial Links – These are backlinks to your site that come from an editorial source. In other words, the source website links to your site organically, not through paid means. Editorial links are gained through the publication of high-quality content or marketing your content on other platforms, such as social media.
- Referring Domains – “Referring Domains” is an SEO term used by tools to measure the number of individual domains pointing to your website. It doesn’t indicate the number of unique domains but instead, shows the overall domains directing to your website, allowing you to assess the relevance and authority of each domain.
- High Quality Links – These are links from relevant websites with high-quality content and a high domain authority. These are the types of links search engines prefer to see, and having high-quality links from popular, high-authority websites is more beneficial than having a large number of low-quality links.
- Relevant Links – “Relevant Links” is a term you may encounter in link building guides. Relevance is challenging to quantify, but receiving links from relevant websites and blogs covering topics related to your site is a great indicator. These links tell Google that a similar website finds value in your content and that it matches what users in your niche are searching for.
Steps to Take When Creating a Powerful Link Building Strategy
When developing a link building strategy, there are several important features to consider.
- Utilize Website Analysis – Conduct a Site Audit
To start, perform an SEO audit on your website using tools such as Ahrefs and Moz. These tools will give insights into your current backlink profile, including the number of backlinks you have, your website’s DA, fluctuations in backlink volume over time, and other relevant metrics.
By using these tools, you can also identify broken or lost backlinks, domains linking to your competitors, pages on your website with the highest number of backlinks, low quality or spammy backlinks, and new keyword opportunities.
These tools are crucial for leveraging your existing backlink profile and discovering new link building opportunities.
- Understand Your Niche
An effective link building strategy requires creating quality content that will attract both your target audience and referring websites. To do this, it’s important to have a deep understanding of your niche and your target audience, so you can create content that resonates with them and earns you links.
Conduct market research to gain new insights into your target users and brainstorm topics that you think will interest them. Use SEO tools to find keywords that your target audience is searching for.
Additionally, perform competitor research to identify backlink and content opportunities they may have overlooked.
Focus your link building efforts on creating highly targeted content, conducting outreach campaigns to other websites in your niche, and forming partnerships within your niche.
- Leverage Guest Posting
Despite varying opinions on its effectiveness, guest posting remains a powerful way to obtain high-quality backlinks. Avoid massive guest posting campaigns and posting on irrelevant or low-authority sites, as these efforts will not have any significant impact on your site’s ranking.
According to a survey conducted in 2021, 60% of respondents wrote one to five guest posts per month. To see the best results, be deliberate and focused when writing guest posts.
Make sure the content is unique and the guest site has high authority, relevance, and an audience interested in your products or services. By being selective in your guest posting, you will achieve better rankings, higher traffic volume, and more qualified leads.
- Maximize the Use of Infographics
Infographics have proven to be an effective tool for online businesses, with 84% of those who use them reporting success. They are a great way to attract traffic and backlinks to your website without having to request them.
To create infographics, hire a graphic designer or use tools like visual.ly. Infographics are ideal for conveying complex concepts or ideas, especially when displaying data, statistics, research, or other findings.
However, keep in mind that the niche is saturated with infographics, so ensure that your design stands out to increase its chances of going viral. Infographics can be expensive, but you can consider making a “Gifographic” instead, which contains animated gifs to catch the eye of your target audience.
- Utilize The Benefits of Social Media
Social media is a well-known tool for gaining backlinks to your website.
A recent study by Ahrefs found that they received links from 5 different states without doing any outreach, simply by creating content on social media.
Social media has revolutionized Internet marketing and can significantly enhance your backlink strategy and boost your guest posting efforts. If you’re not active on social media, you’re missing out on a valuable resource for building editorial backlinks to your website.
Start sharing posts, updates, and images on social media to increase engagement with your target audience and help them find what they want to see and read. The more your content is shared, the more visibility and links you’ll receive, ultimately improving your link profile and SERP visibility.
- Maximize The Advantages of Trusted Site Resource Links
Getting resource links from trusted sites is crucial for building backlinks. A resource link is like a guide for your target audience. The best resource links come from trusted websites such as Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Forbes, Social Media Examiner, CopyBlogger, and Jeff Bullas.
If there’s a trusted site within your niche that has a resource link to blogs in your niche, their visitors will easily find the information they’re looking for. Creating large resource articles can earn you a high number of quality backlinks from trusted sites.
Reach out to the websites listed on your resource link and request backlinks to your page. This approach is likely to result in a better response than a typical “broken link” request, as the fact that you’ve already linked to their site in your article will encourage them to link back to yours.
By establishing trust through resource links, these websites will be more likely to link back to any future relevant content you create.
- Make The Most of Broken Links
A study by SEMrush found that 42.5% of websites have broken links, providing an opportunity for backlinks from authoritative sites.
The broken link strategy is a great way to get backlinks if you’re too busy to create new content or guest blogs. The strategy is straightforward: find pages on other blogs with broken links and ask the owners to replace those links with links to your website, especially if your content is relevant.
If a blogger has a broken link that leads to similar content as yours, they will be more likely to link to your content to eliminate the broken link.
This strategy can be especially useful if you’re just starting out and need a high number of quality backlinks.
For more information, check out the article “A Step-by-Step Guide to Modern Broken Link Building” by QuickSprout.
- Personal Branding: The Key to Successful Link Building
Building a strong personal brand is an effective way to attract high-profile backlinks. Your brand is a reflection of your thoughts and values, and as it evolves, so will your reputation.
When it comes to creating a successful link building strategy, it’s important to understand that as your personal brand grows, people will naturally link back to your content.
In the world of natural link building, there are many opinions about what it entails. Typically, a natural link is:
- Obtained through editorial means.
- Contextually relevant to the content it appears in.
This type of link should not be bought or influenced by any form of sponsorship. Natural links give credibility to your content, something every blogger aspires to.
Many established bloggers will attest to this fact: when they publish a new blog post, they receive several natural backlinks from trusted websites within a few days, simply because these websites trust the content they publish.
Your personal or business brand plays a crucial role in this. Your brand represents you, and you represent your brand.
Consistently publishing authoritative and helpful content is one of the best ways to build your brand. This will earn you the trust of your audience and lead to more authoritative backlinks to your website.
By being dedicated to the quality of your content, you can expect to receive 97% more inbound links, which will improve your search engine ranking and visibility.
- Backlink Hunting: Uncovering Your Competitor’s Secret to Success
If your competitors are outpacing you in search engine results, they must be doing something right. By replicating their tactics, you can achieve the same results.
Backlink hunting involves investigating your competitors to see where they’re getting their backlinks.
By analyzing your competition, you can discover the keywords they rank for, find their best links, and uncover the “secret” to their success.
This process is known as “Competitive Analysis”.
You can use a tool like Ubersuggest to check your competitor’s backlinks.
- Go to the tool and enter your competitor’s URL.
- Look at the results page and click on the “backlinks” box.
- Scroll down and view the list of websites linking back to your competitor.
By knowing the types of websites linking to your competition, you’ll know which websites to target when conducting outreach for backlinks.
- Replicating Competitor Backlinks for Success
In the previous step, you discovered the websites where your competition is getting their backlinks.
So, how do you replicate their success?
For example, if you find that your competitors have received several backlinks from related blogs through author bios, this means they are likely guest blogging.
If the links are from corporate sites, they may be performing a lot of networking and outreach.
If the links are from top sites such as Entrepreneur, CNN, Huffington Post, Forbes, and others, this indicates they may be paying for editorial content that links back to their site.
Using a tool like Ubersuggest, you can determine which of their backlinks come from pages with high domain rank or page authority.
Aim to replicate efforts that bring in natural editorial links, which are highly valued by both Google and your industry peers.
- Maximize The Benefits of Topic Roundups
Topic roundups are an effective way of obtaining high-quality backlinks to your website. In one instance, a blogger received 20,000 page views in just 6 days from a single topic roundup post. To attain these types of results, you must understand the principle of reciprocity. When you provide a link to another website first, they are more likely to return the favor.
To create a topic roundup, start by choosing a topic and then compiling a list of relevant blog posts. For instance, if you are a fashion blogger, you can create a list of the top fashion influencers in your niche. Search for these posts using Google, using a search query such as “intitle: roundup fashion influencers.”
Additionally, pay attention to your traffic and link profile. If there are blogs that are already linking to your site, prioritize these when writing your topic roundup. Reward those who have already linked to your content.
Avoid making the mistake of only creating internal links in your topic roundup post. Instead, strive to make external links as well, as this will encourage others to link back to your site.
- Harness The Power of Earned Editorial Links
Earned editorial links are not gained by chance, but rather through providing valuable content. This is something that Google values, as seen in its Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, and Mobile-First updates. These types of links are highly sought after in the marketing world as they are given freely without any expectation of return.
To earn editorial links, it is crucial to have a strategy in place before creating content. Your content should aim to meet the needs of your audience and help them move from one point to another. Consider creating more tutorials and pillar content, and include accurate data to build trust and credibility.
Avoid using sponsored or manually acquired links, as they can be difficult to maintain and may result in penalties from Google. Instead, concentrate on producing engaging content that will naturally attract editorial links.
- Utilize The Power of Social Mentions for Link Reclamation
According to SEMrush, more than 2% of external links from websites across the world are broken. In search engine optimization and social media, link reclamation is a popular topic. You can look for broken links and unlinked mentions of your brand and redirect them to an active, relevant page.
However, in this section, we will focus on link reclamation through social mentions. Instead of using Google Alerts, you can reclaim links from social mentions by following these steps:
- Conduct a search on Google Image Search using the full title of your infographic.
- Find the page where the image is hosted and check if it has been properly attributed to your site.
- If not, reach out to the website owner and request that they add the proper attribution.
Reclaiming links from social mentions may seem time-consuming, but it is necessary for obtaining quality backlinks to your site.
This is something that you can do where your brand name has been mentioned on the website and social media platforms.
It may seem tedious, but if you want quality links back to your site, then roll up your sleeves and start reclaiming links from your social mentions.
- Utilize the Potential of Strong Content
Creating impactful content is vital to establish credibility and attract natural links back to your website. Every online business requires compelling content, regardless of the products or services offered. By providing value through helpful content, your audience will be more likely to share and promote your brand.
However, it can be challenging to determine the optimal frequency for publishing content. Overloading your audience with too many posts could lead to confusion and result in them avoiding your content altogether. To address this issue, you have two options:
- Survey your audience
- Develop a pillar article
The first option involves gathering varied opinions from different sources, including blog readers, existing customers, targeted prospects, and email subscribers. This may prove to be difficult to fulfill all the requests for new content.
The second option involves creating a pillar article that addresses the majority of questions or concerns your audience may have. This reduces the need for frequent content creation and allows your pillar content to continue driving traffic to your site over time.
A pillar article is a comprehensive and informative article, often over 500 words, that offers practical tips and advice to teach your audience. This style of writing has a long-lasting appeal and provides real value and insight, as explained by Yaro Starak.
“How to” articles and roundups are great formats for pillar content. By creating pillar content, you can improve your link profile, increase referral traffic, organic traffic, and conversion rates, which in turn improves your overall search engine ranking.
- Maximize the Benefits of Monitoring Your Backlinks
Acquiring new links is a common strategy for boosting online visibility, but it’s important to also track their performance. Failing to monitor your backlinks can lead to not knowing when to add more or when to pause. Additionally, links may be removed or broken without your knowledge.
To mitigate this risk, it’s crucial to monitor your backlinks regularly. A tool like Ubersuggest can make this process easy.
- Visit the Ubersuggest page and enter your website or blog’s URL.
- Click on “Search”
- In the results page, click on the “backlinks” box.
- Scroll down to see a graph displaying the links gained and lost over time.
- See who is linking to your website or blog, the anchor text being used, and the Domain Authority and Page Authority of the site.
The graph displaying your backlinks over time is a crucial aspect as it helps you to evaluate the effectiveness of your link building strategy and make necessary changes if required.
Link Building Strategies You Should Avoid
Apart from knowing the above link building strategies, which you should do, you also need to know the strategies that you should avoid and forget.
There are black hat link building strategies that could get your site penalized on the search engines.
Here are some of the main ones to run away from:
- Steer Clear of Purchased Links
Purchasing links is a tactic to manipulate search engine algorithms, which goes against Google’s Search Essentials, formerly known as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
This can result in penalties or even a ban from search engines. Most paid backlinks come from sites with many outbound links, which are monitored by Google’s algorithms and often of low quality, negatively impacting your SEO performance.
Additionally, your competitors can also buy the same links, rendering your investment worthless. If your main focus is not on paid marketing, or you are buying links for the purpose of building brand authority, then purchased links may be beneficial for you.
In such cases, make sure to add the “nofollow” or “sponsored” attributes to the paid links so they don’t get flagged and affect your SEO ranking. However, using purchased links solely for the purpose of boosting search engine ranking results in a red flag and not good for your business.
- Avoid Artificial Link Building
If you are placing links just to increase the number of backlinks to your site and rank higher on search engines, this can have negative consequences.
The links you add should add value to the website and its audience. They should either enhance the search engine algorithm’s understanding of the content or provide the reader with relevant information.
Links that don’t meet these criteria will be flagged as spammy and may lead to penalties from search engines.
- Stay Away from Private Blog Networks
Private Blog Networks are groups of websites created to generate a large number of links. These websites tend to have no authority and are used to drive traffic to money-making sites. They pass link juice to these sites to unethical boost their ranking on search engines.
Google dislikes Private Blog Networks because they trick the search algorithms into giving sites higher rankings through unfair methods. Using a PBN to improve the ranking of your website or blog on search engines is a temporary solution, as Google will eventually penalize you once they discover it.
Here are a few reasons why PBNs are bad for effective link building:
- Risk of penalties: PBNs are often used to manipulate search engine rankings and violate search engines’ guidelines. This can result in penalties or even a complete ban from search engines, which can severely impact your website’s visibility and traffic.
- Decreased credibility: PBNs are often comprised of low-quality, spammy websites that can harm your website’s credibility and reputation. The links from these sites are unlikely to be seen as credible or trustworthy by search engines or users, which can negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings.
- Lack of scalability: PBNs are often limited in scale and can be difficult to manage and maintain over time. As your website grows, it may become increasingly challenging to build and manage a PBN, making it difficult to effectively scale your link building efforts.
- Reduced effectiveness: PBNs are often less effective than other forms of link building, such as earned or organic links. This is because search engines are becoming more sophisticated in detecting and penalizing manipulative link building practices, making it increasingly difficult to use PBNs to achieve high search engine rankings.
Private Blog Networks (PBNs) are a bad option for effective link building. They carry the risk of penalties, decreased credibility, lack of scalability, and reduced effectiveness, making them a poor choice for building a healthy and effective SEO strategy.
Instead, it’s recommended to focus on building high-quality, organic, and natural links through content creation, outreach, and other ethical link building methods.
- Avoid Overoptimizing Anchor Text
Overoptimizing anchor text can harm your website’s search engine rankings and negatively impact your overall SEO strategy. Here are a few reasons why you should avoid overoptimizing anchor text:
- Penalty from search engines: Overoptimizing anchor text can trigger a penalty from search engines, particularly Google, which can significantly lower your search engine rankings. Google’s algorithm is designed to identify unnatural or manipulative link patterns, and overoptimizing anchor text is one such pattern.
- Decreased credibility: Overoptimizing anchor text can make your link profile appear spammy, which can decrease your website’s credibility in the eyes of search engines and potential customers. Search engines want to provide their users with the most relevant and trustworthy information, and an overoptimized anchor text profile is not seen as credible.
- Missed opportunity for branding: Anchor text provides an opportunity to build your brand and communicate your message. Overoptimizing anchor text by using the same exact keywords repeatedly can limit your ability to showcase your brand and communicate your unique value proposition.
- Reduced diversity in your link profile: A diverse link profile, including a variety of anchor text, is a key factor in building a healthy and natural link profile. Overoptimizing anchor text reduces the diversity of your link profile, making it appear more artificial and potentially triggering penalties from search engines.
Overoptimizing anchor text can harm your search engine rankings, decrease your credibility, limit your branding opportunities, and reduce the diversity of your link profile.
To maintain a healthy and effective SEO strategy, it’s important to avoid overoptimizing anchor text and instead focus on building a diverse and natural link profile.
- Do Not Use Automated Link Building Tools or Services
Using automated link building tools or services can harm your website’s search engine rankings and hinder your overall SEO strategy. Here are a few reasons to steer clear of these tools:
- Threat of penalties: Automated link building often contravenes search engines’ guidelines, leading to penalties or even a complete ban from search engines. This can significantly reduce your website’s visibility and traffic, making it difficult to achieve your desired search engine rankings.
- Diminished credibility: Automated link building typically results in low-quality, spammy links that can damage your website’s credibility and reputation. Such links from these sites are unlikely to be seen as credible or trustworthy by search engines or users, which can negatively affect your website’s search engine rankings.
- Limited control: Automated link building tools do not offer control over the quality and relevance of links, making it challenging to maintain a high-quality link profile. This can lead to a link profile filled with irrelevant or low-quality links, which can harm your website’s search engine rankings.
- Scalability challenges: Automated link building tools are often limited in scale, making it difficult to scale your link building efforts effectively. As your website grows, maintaining a high-quality link profile may become increasingly challenging, limiting your ability to achieve desired search engine rankings.
- Missed relationship building opportunities: Link building involves more than just getting links. It’s also about building relationships with other websites and communities. Automated link building tools lack the ability to build relationships and engage in meaningful communication with other websites, missing out on valuable opportunities for link building and relationship building.
Avoiding automated link building tools or services is essential for a healthy and effective SEO strategy.
The risk of penalties, decreased credibility, lack of control, limited scalability, and missed opportunity for relationship building make automated link building a poor choice for building a strong and sustainable link profile.
Instead, focus on building high-quality, organic, and natural links through content creation, outreach, and other ethical link building methods that prioritize relationship building and high-quality link acquisition.
Successful Link Building Case Studies with Implementable Strategies
In this article section, we will highlight some of the most inspiring link building case studies that offer practical strategies for you to learn from and be motivated by.
- Pat Ahern Leads a B2B Company to Triumph
A hosting provider, after evaluating various SEO agencies for SaaS, chose to hire Pat Ahern and his team to handle their link building. The company was having trouble establishing itself online and competing against big players like GoDaddy and HostGator.
The Beginning
This was a challenge for Pat Ahern and his team, as they had a limited budget and were operating in a highly competitive industry. However, they eventually succeeded in boosting the online presence of the client.
The SEO team started by conducting a competitive analysis, which uncovered a content marketing opportunity for the B2B website. They found that over 10,000 of their target audience were seeking information about DDoS attacks.
This led the team to shift their content’s top keyword from general terms like “Web Hosting” to a more specific one, such as “Secure Web Hosting”.
They then optimized the website’s content to follow this trend and focused on security in web hosting. They then moved on to creating engaging premium content, which formed the foundation for their link building approach and techniques.
The Middle
After the website’s content was optimized, the team began building links to support the website’s backlink profile.
The main strategy was to write and publish guest posts. The skilled writers on the team produced original guest posts for reputable blogs and websites to obtain high-quality backlinks that they could control.
To establish the B2B company as a leading provider of secure web hosting, the team used tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to identify the best topics related to protection against DDoS attacks.
These tools were also useful in finding other relevant links that had articles about such attacks.
They created a list of over 1,000 authoritative websites and shared a relevant premium article about DDoS protection from the B2B website with each of these websites.
They asked those who appreciated the content to create a backlink to the site.
The Outcome
By sending the premium article to more than 1,000 bloggers, the B2B website received over 43 backlinks from 15 different sites.
The figure does not accurately reflect their success, as it does not take into account the high number of social shares that the content received.
Today, the premium article is one of the top-performing pages on the website, attracting more than 700 visitors every month. It has increased the average time people spend on the website to 4 minutes.
This campaign lasted for 3 months and resulted in a 55% increase in organic traffic.
Actionable Strategies to Take Away
There is a crucial actionable tactic that you can learn from this case study, even though it may seem similar to others you’ve heard of.
The tactic is to find a unique positioning and then adjust your link building strategies to fit that positioning.
Instead of seeking backlinks from general websites and blogs related to hosting, they targeted bloggers and websites primarily focused on online security.
This ensured that the target audience of the article aligned with the audience of the platform used for guest posting.
It also demonstrates that you can still improve your links even with limited funds by creating premium content, using an effective SEO tool, and conducting a focused outreach campaign.
- “Boosting a Client’s Website’s Link Building Campaign by Chris Tzitzis”
Chris Tzitzis is a well-known SEO expert who recently assisted a client in improving their link building campaign. The client’s website was in the government and business niches.
The Beginning
To kick off the effort, Chris conducted a thorough site audit of the client’s website. The results were promising, revealing potential for successful link building.
Using an SEO tool, Chris identified key strengths of the website including:
- Straightforward and uncluttered backlinks from guest posts, PBNs, and directories.
- Ranked keywords on page 6.
- Most backlinks directing to the homepage.
While the audit showed promise, it also revealed that there was room for improvement in terms of optimization.
The Middle
The team had a limited budget of $5,000 for the link building campaign. To maximize the impact of the budget, the team started by enhancing the credibility of the website with “natural” links in the first month. This was achieved through niche edits and guest posts, with all backlinks directed to the homepage.
After seeing positive results in the first month, the team continued with this strategy for the next three months, focusing on building the authority and relevance of the homepage. In the fourth month, they added more links of lower authority to diversify the website’s anchor profile, which was previously based on URL and branded anchors.
The Outcome
Five months into the campaign, the client’s website had achieved a number one ranking for its primary keyword and a number one overall SERP. This was accomplished with low-quality links, outperforming other top-ranked websites.
Actionable Strategies to Take Away
Here are some key strategies to take away from this case study:
- Diversify your link portfolio to cover all angles.
- Quality over quantity is important when it comes to links.
- Linking back to the homepage can be a successful technique, as it can increase conversions.
- Try to focus on building the authority and relevance of your website over a prolonged period of time.
- David Farkas’ Experiment in Adventure
Instead of relying on link building case studies presented by industry experts, David Farkas decided to test the effectiveness of link building for himself by creating an experimental website in the health industry.
The Beginning
David and his team created 26 pieces of high-quality and uniquely optimized content over a 6-month period without promoting it or creating any links to it. This served as the control environment for their experiment. After the initial 6 months, the team waited for another 6 months to see if the website would receive any traffic just based on the content. To their surprise, the traffic wasn’t as high as they expected.
The Middle
After a year with no significant traffic increase, the team began building links to the website. They evaluated each piece of content on the site and asked themselves two questions: “What content on my site deserves a link?” and “Why would another website want to link back to mine?” This approach helped them identify the most valuable content for their target audience.
As the experimental website was in the health niche, David decided to use its unique perspective to educate the audience. The content was designed to be informative, precise, and helpful.
The team then conducted a comprehensive outreach campaign, targeting relevant and authoritative websites in the health industry that could benefit from linking to their site.
The Outcome
The result of their link building effort was a traffic increase of over 2,000%. Today, the website ranks on the first page of search engines for 2,245 keywords.
Actionable Strategies to Take Away
Here are the key link building strategies to take away from David’s experiment:
- Ensure that the content you create is linkable.
- Leverage your niche and expertise to establish credibility with your target audience.
- Don’t underestimate the power of outreach. Conduct thorough research and reach out to relevant websites that would be interested in linking back to your content.
What’s Next for You?
If these three successful case studies have inspired you, it’s time to take action. Implement the strategies outlined in these case studies to improve your own link building campaigns. You never know, your website could be used as a case study for successful link building in the future.
Remember, link building is an ongoing process with no end goal, but the effort put in will pay off in the long run with substantial rewards.
