9 High Quality Link Building Methods in 2011

By Jason Acidre
9 High Quality Link Building Methods in 2011

 

Links are the most valued currency on the web in terms of measuring site popularity and search engine rankings, and that’s one reason why link building is considered to be one of the most vital processes in online marketing.

The process of link building has evolved over time, given that the more that search algorithms, marketing practices and user behaviors change, the more the task of acquiring authentic web popularity encompasses other campaign objectives such as developing the domain’s brand presence as well as exemplifying trust and authority to users and search engines.

You can evaluate the quality of links using certain criterion, such as:

  • The visibility of the link that will be acquired; for example, in-content or editorial links can get clicks and are prioritized by search crawlers when parsing/accessing page data.
  • The topical relevance of the page hosting the incoming link, since contextual links pass more value and trust.
  • The strength of the hosting domain and its ability to pass through high amount of value to your site; this can be measured through site metrics such as PageRank, Domain Authority, TrustRank, mozRank, traffic data, etc.

There are a great many ways and techniques to building links to your website, but there are only a few that are certain to produce high quality links. Below is a list of link building methods that can help establish a site’s brand/authority, generate leads and, most importantly, improve search rankings:

Guest Blogging

Submitting guest blog posts to known authority blogs in your niche can benefit your site in many ways; besides getting high value links from authority domains, you are also able to showcase your expertise in front of their audience, which you can use to attract more traffic and, possibly, leads from your submitted content.

Consistently implementing this method in your campaign can also help build a strong brand presence for your site, as people who are really interested in your niche can see more of you from different blogs, where you can build and establish an authority figure for your site in the field.

In choosing the blogs to submit your guest posts to, it’s important to choose those that have strong following, high traffic and also provide high quality content to their readers.

News Pitching

If you have an exceptional story related to your industry to share, pitching or tipping your story to news websites is one way to acquire high-power links to your site. However, before pitching your story to these types of websites it’s best to create a “news source content” (that should be authentically newsworthy), as it will help ease the process for news reporters/writers when researching about the subject.

Offer this content as a resource when pitching your story, since this will make your angle more credible and may ensure coverage of the story. Host the content within your site, as the news write up will most likely link back to the content you have created as its original source.

You can use HelpAReporter.com to find reporters that might be interested in covering your story. Make the pitch concise and be sure to leave your contact details in case they need more information about the story or want to interview you.

Ego Bait

Another way to attract and acquire links from authority sites in your niche is through “ego baiting”. The most common example of this technique is by creating your own rankings or listings of top sites/blogs or individuals in your industry or location, and incentivizing the linking by offering an embeddable widget that can be installed in their sites (which naturally links back to your site).

Executing this method based on a large scale of list of ranking websites will enhance your chances of acquiring links from authority sites related to your industry, given that they were included on your list in the first place because of their site’s prominence.

Crowdsourcing

This method is where you can ask experts, leaders and specialists in your niche to answer industry-related questions that can give specific, practical solutions to known problems in your industry. Compile their answers and publish it as a blog/article hosted in your site. Those who participate in this kind of survey usually share the resulting content to their own followers through various social networks and sometimes do promote it through linking.

The outcome of this method can do well in terms of social visibility, since the experts that you have interviewed may voluntarily share the content, which increases the content’s linkability with the help of their own networks.

Content-based Link Outreach

Manual link request through email outreach has been a method used by many SEOs for a very long time. However, this technique has been losing its effectiveness due to the continually evolving competitiveness of the online industry, which now highly depends on the quality of the site requesting the link placement.

Nowadays, to truly make your manual outreach worth the time, it’s best to offer highly linkable materials/content instead of offering your homepage for other sites to link to, given that it provides greater value than your site’s homepage. Below are some steps on how to efficiently implement a content-based link outreach:

  • Create content that can naturally attract links (high-utility, comprehensive resource or link bait type of blog post).
  • Find sites/pages that have probabilities of linking to that content. You can easily search for link opportunities from similar content from your competitors that had succeeded in obtaining links. You can start with Google search, and tools like Open Site Explorer or Yahoo Site Explorer in tracking the links that your competitors’ content has acquired.
  • Make a list of link prospects using Excel and segment the list of sites, gauged by the level of difficulty in acquiring the link (like for .edu, .gov or industry blogs’ resources page). You can also include other sites in your industry that you think might be interested in sharing/linking to your content.
  • Craft an email template that can be easily personalized when you start sending the link requests. It’s also best to keep the email copy short and concise.

Relationship-based Links

Building relationships in this online marketing age is very essential, since it scales the ability and velocity of a site to grow in terms of lead generation as well as link, business and brand development. Constant interaction (through social networking sites, blog comments, emails, offline events, etc…) with online entities that are thematically related to your site can help you build high-value links that can refer traffic, improve rankings and establish trust/authority.

You can eventually utilize these relationships to acquire in-content citations, leads and blogroll links; they may even serve as social sharing multipliers.

Brand-driven Links

Monitoring brand mentions can help produce more high quality links to your site. You can use tools like Google Alerts, Social Mention, Trackur and Twitter Search to track mentions of your site, name, brand and/or products on Twitter or from external blog posts/articles with no proper link attribution.

Keep track of positive mentions about your brand as well, since you can contact them and request for more links, like offering your other products/services for free to be reviewed.

Dead-link Building

There are lots of resourceful links pages on any industry over the web, and some of them might be hosting a link that directs to a defunct website. Here’s a guide on how you can search for dead-links and in requesting for the link replacement:

  • You can simply search for this kind of link opportunity through manual Google search (sample queries: "link building resources" or "SEO blog links").
  • Install the LinkChecker addon for Firefox to detect dead links when skimming the links/resources pages that you have found.
  • List all the pages that you’ll find that host dead and forbidden links in an Excel spreadsheet. Include each site’s contact details on your list as you will use these when you start contacting them.
  • Email and notify the webmasters about the dead link, and offer a relevant page on your site that fits the theme of the target resource page as an alternative or a replacement for the dead link instead.

Strong Internal Linking

Internal linking is quite an important process in link building that’s usually underestimated. To efficiently employ a robust internal linking structure for your site, it’s important to identify the strong pages on your domain using page-level metrics like PageRank, mozRank, Page Authority, number of incoming links, bounce rates and organic search rankings.

Once you have distinguished the individually strong pages in your site, you can then make them internally link to your site’s important landing pages using its targeted keywords as anchor texts. Allow your strong support pages to pass through the link juice they are receiving from other linking domains to improve your landing pages’ search rankings.

You can also improve these strong support pages’ calls to action and conversions by referring the traffic they generate to your target landing page.

79 Comments

View all 79 comments (Currently displaying latest 50)

neil stewart 13 years ago
Ok, usually with internetmarketing you come across rehashed nonsense. BUT this was a great post, TIL "dead link building". I'd never heard of that before. One this that was not mentioned, that I had done with some success is page-rank sculpting by using no-follow tags to link like disclaimer, privacy, etc. pages that I don't want to have any weight
small business SEO
Evelyn G 13 years ago
Thanks so much for the post. I had no clue there were these different methods of link building. I better get busy now!
CAPerez 13 years ago
Thank you, Jason

Very useful information. I am also impressed by the fact that you did not use the term interlinking to mean intralinking when referring to internal links. Hats off to you!

Carlos
Joshua Mady Fernandez 13 years ago
Ego baiting I Kind of get but can u explain what u mean without using the word widget?

Like after you suck up and say how good certain websites/blogs/experts are ranked in order then wat?
Jason Acidre 13 years ago
Well, the trick in making a successful ego bait is by letting those sites/experts that you have listed to know about the list. Once they see the page it's easier to make them act on sharing it or linking to it (with or without widget), knowing that the content is amplifying their credibility in the industry :)
David 13 years ago
Thank you - good suggestions.
Ray Burton 13 years ago
@msb1040

I believe that unless a site is over pr5 the pr value is not much importance. Relevance is also of little importance.

What matters is the the site rankings in the serps. Relevance, pr, video inclusion, seo etc etc are all aspects and indicators of what really matters - the ranking of the site your linking from.

Just my 2 cents worth.
Jeffbd 13 years ago
Great post. Link building can be the most laborious thing to do but also the most worthwhile. I am starting to see some of my sites getting hit by the Akismet spam filter even though I am leaving what I think are good relevant comments. Any tips?
Jason Acidre 13 years ago
Akismet has been very inconsistent and unreliable in detecting spam, and I've personally experienced this before. I guess the best thing to do is to create a new email account that you can use for blog commenting. It's also best to use an avatar (Gravatar), as this increases the chances of having your comments approved.
James Pruitt 13 years ago
One problem with sites still using Akismet is that if one person hits the spam button (which some people do on ALL comments because they dont want to moderate them) you will be tagged as spam on all blogs using Akismet.

I have gotten away from using them on my blogs, and most of the GOOD blogs I know have as well. they used to be the top dog, but they didn't keep up with the crowd.
Seth Stairs 13 years ago
This is great information Jason, but since I have such a specialized niche which provides information as its "product", several of these techniques really don't apply. I can't brand it, I really can't have a guest blogger as very few people fully understand the complexity of auto appraisals. So I guess I'll have to beg for links and continue to provide articles to news and industry related sites.
Hey, if this was easy everybody would to it!
Mado 13 years ago
Hi Mark thank you for the link cheker tool and all the tips great post!
13 years ago
Jason,

This is another great article. I had to Google Plus 1 this article. I am getting more familiar with SEO. I look forward to more of your valuable information. Thank you for being so helpful.

Stacie Walker
WomanInLeadership.com
Jason Acidre 13 years ago
Thanks for the +1 Stacie! :) Really glad that you found this post useful.
Mark Ling 13 years ago
Hey, sorry to those of you who don't see your comment posted here. We are testing our new spam filtering over the next couple of weeks, all non-spam comments will be posted, there just may be a delay as we need to leave some unapproved in order to test our comment spam filtering.
Mado More 12 years ago
Hi Mark why dont you make it possible for us to link on your blog post? since you are our mentor I think it will just be fair if you let us practice our link building skills here like anchortext links you can always delete them if we did it wrong . just a thought
Thanks
Hanns Paul 13 years ago
Thanks Jason,

Some great ideas I haven't seen before. I like the dead link building method and will start to search for dead links :
Helen Croom 13 years ago
Thanks for taking the time to share such great training about back linking. I'm pretty new to internet marketing and this information is greatly appreciated.
Koki 13 years ago
This a great article, I am reading a lot of SEO material and some how got stumble on this site which I love the ideas shared in here. Great work....Keep it up.
Katerina Gasset 13 years ago
Jason, Very well written post in language that most can understand :) The link building tips were very easy to understand and people can actually follow the steps. Thanks for sharing!
craig 13 years ago
Great resource this one! I'm still learning, and this guest blogging issue; doesn't the owner of the blog have to accept my link for it have any value? Can they refuse to do so?
Newerth Guide 13 years ago
Hey Jason,

I've seen your email and I thought this is worth reading. Loved the ideas and would love to share it as well. Cheers!
Techmug 13 years ago
Great post mate
Thanks for sharing
stacy 13 years ago
Very informative! I'm still learning on this stuff. Thanks for sharing!
Agnes Embile Jimenez 13 years ago
Very useful. I've been bored reading the same link-building tips from various blogs. This one really stands out. Thanks mucho. (:
Rosendo Cuyasen 13 years ago
If I will be thinking about what are the high quality link building methods which we will do.. I would prefer your post or article.

Thank you and hoping to hear from your more.
James Pruitt 13 years ago
definitely guest posting is at the top of my list, but you have to do quality, original content. most people who have tried to guest post on my blogs have been rejected for submitting spun (some of them from ajp) articles.
Mado More 12 years ago
Hi jmpruit may you please explain what exactly is guest commentig?
Thanks
Shaishav Sood 13 years ago
Nice way to explain backlink strategies ... Now quality back links which Google recognize is like getting links from the sites which share same interest .. We can not treat every link as a backlink ..

Would like to suggest you to open your link in new window instead of opening in the same .. just my two cents ...
vietnam tours 13 years ago
thanks very much
Chad Wilgus 13 years ago
Thanks for the insight, I have started linking building for my affiliate marketing site.
Richard @ Affiliate income 12 years ago
Most people use forum marketing these days. I think it's also helpful when done well.
joy otto 12 years ago
great tips .it helpful to increase my link building strategy ..
thanks for sharing such good information
Timberland Earthkeepers 12 years ago
A lot of useful tips. I find link building very tedious and time consuming. Guest blogging sounds good. Thanks for all the great info.
furniture hire 12 years ago
Thanks for the great tips, i have needed some new link building tips for a while now.
Jeromy 12 years ago
Perfect article on Linkbuilding! This is something that is sooooo tuff to stay on top of. It is worth while to build a linking plan and weekly schedule to devote to linking. I have found it is easy to do one or two activities, and forget other methods. Build a sheet that identifies each process, method of linking and use that as a guide for each time you do linking. Save each new link that you create as you work and process them all during your weekly scheduled time.
Allison Birr 12 years ago
Fantastic post! We were just discussing some of these tactics to help build our link strength and SEO, so these tips will definitely come in handy. Always appreciate some free help when it comes to increasing our online foot print.

www.brandedbusinessapps.com
Patty Adams 12 years ago
Guest blogging continues to be a strong technique if implemented correctly; good insight on this tactic in particular. link building continues to be a challenge for many people trying to enhance their organic SEO efforts. Appreciate the valuable info and suggestions.
Tim B 12 years ago
Thanks for the insights... I learnt a lot and now and slowly climbing the rank in google ! Thank you !!
Nicholas Bryant 12 years ago
relevant is best... hands down... even if it wasnt better for your seo .... you could still get targeted traffic from that link... where as the other link might not even get traffic and if it did... well the visitors wouldnt be targeted at all...
Jim 12 years ago
Thank you for sharing some of the best link building methods ever, the other effective link building strategies are: writing great content, relevant blog commenting, forum posting, Wordpress theme sponsorship, writing guest post, running a contest and much more...
12 years ago
Link building can be very tedious but it worth it.
Amit 12 years ago
Thanks a lot for article. I think its not only for 2011. We should follow this for 2012 also.
Shashank Gupta 12 years ago
Thanks JasonAcidre for your article about '9 High Quality Link Building Methods in 2011'. I find the methods very helpful.
12 years ago
Thanks. I hope, guest blogging will work for me as well.
How do you search relevant blogs? Do you ping those posts via your social media accounts?
furniture hire 12 years ago
This is a really good list, but i would suggest not to forget about SEO press release's they are an old method but still a great way to generate good quality back-links.
Articleteller 12 years ago
Very impressive output, full information for link building methods. It’s hard to come by experienced people about this subject, but you seem like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks
Steve Lee 12 years ago
Thanks for this awesome post.. I guess I'm going to try out guest blogging! Hope I rank up : P
Yassin Madwin 12 years ago
No method outrank Guest posting you get all the metrics right from it !
Michelle 12 years ago
I'm a newbie and have set up two seo sites. I had thought setting up the sites were heard until I started to try and create backlinks. This is taking up so much time and at this point I can't farm it out. I was told that I needed Scrapebox so I got it but it is showing creating backlinks in bullk and all I have been reading about doing that is Google will throw you under the bus for doing that, am I wrong?
Mark Ling 12 years ago
No you don't need scrapebox, that will bring you poor quality links that could hurt you. Start by making great content and adding social media buttons so that it is easier for people to share your content via facebook, twitter and google+. Build further links by guest blogging on other people's blogs.
Cacey Taylor 12 years ago
Such an awesome link building resource. Thanks for the outstanding advice.
Chris Webber 12 years ago
I find generateanchors.com very useful to generate a huge list of natural anchor texts.
It mixes everything pretty well.
Jakub Bednar 11 years ago
Worst thing that you can (DON'T!!!!) do is hire an SEO guy from India and sit back and watch your site disappear entirely from Google ranking for a long time. You can't cheat Google.
Satrap 11 years ago
I think internal link building is one of those things that lots of people over look. Its amazing how much you can effect your ranking with the right internal linking strategy.
liza mathew 10 years ago
Great Post in there.I really like your post and already bookmarked it.I am a newbie starting out in the field of SEO
and I have a doubt regards link building.I have searched a lot on various sites but could not get a valid answer.
I just started a new website

gamescracksandhacks.com

And I have made this post which links to

Clash Of Clans Android Hack

So Which one should I get backlinks to.The main site or to the individual posts
baby games 10 years ago
Worst thing that you can (DON'T!!!!) do is hire an SEO guy from India and sit back and watch your site disappear entirely from Google ranking for a long time. You can't cheat Google.

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