Link building by itself is already a very challenging process, but for startups and lesser-known websites, the challenge of getting high-quality backlinks can be multiplied: it’s obviously more difficult to outreach to authoritative sites and influencers when your brand isn’t (yet) well-known.

Also, link building is a very demanding process that can involve various skillsets from content creation and promotion to relationship building. This is why in this guide, we will discuss all you need to know about link building for startups. By the end, you can use the knowledge and insights in this guide to develop a comprehensive link building strategy for your startup.

Let us begin from the very beginning: the basic concept of backlinks.

What Are Backlinks?

Backlinks, or also known as “inbound links” are any hyperlinks from other sites that point to your site.

In the internet real estate, we can think of a backlink as a vote of confidence. When someone links to your site, it’s basically saying that your site is trustworthy and credible and that the specifically linked page contains something useful. Backlinks will obviously bring people to your site besides, as mentioned, it is a very important SEO ranking factor whenever you do SEO for SaaS, SEO for Technology/IT or SEO for B2B company.

This is why backlinks are arguably the most important online commodity.

Just like in the offline world, a vote or recommendation letter coming from relevant and famous individuals will pack more weight. So, the quality of the backlinks is also important: it’s better to get just five links from high-quality sites than getting hundreds of links from low-quality, spammy sites.

Google themselves have admitted that getting more high-quality backlinks is among the most important ways of improving our site’s SERP rankings, and this is why link building is very important in SEO for startups.

Link Building For Startups: Best Practices

Before we discuss various techniques we can use in link building for startups, let us first discuss several principles and best practices in executing effective link building:

• Content Quality is King

The most important thing to understand about link building is that the quality of your content is everything. If your content is good and promoted well, you will always get backlinks sooner than later. On the other hand, no amount of promotions and link building tactics can help low-quality content.

So, before anything else, work on your startup content marketing strategy: research your competitor’s content, check their approach and develop better or unique content compared to your competition.

• Dofollow VS Nofollow Links

Above, we have discussed that links are votes of confidence.

With that being said, we can technically link a site without giving our “vote” for SEO purposes by adding a rel=nofollow attribute to our link. Just like the name, the nofollow attribute tells Google not to follow this link, and so this link won’t give the “vote” or equity.

A standard link (or dofollow link) looks like this:

<a href=””>Example</a>

While a nofollow link looks like this:

<a href=”” rel=”nofollow”>Example</a>

So, in general, we’d want more dofollow links, but links from major legitimate places (i.e. Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are mostly nofollow links.

While a nofollow link might not pass a “vote” it could still send valuable traffic to your site and can still produce more dofollow links in the future. For example, a link to your website from your Twitter account will be a nofollow link, but it’s still an effective practice to bring qualified traffic to your site.

• Alignment With Your Marketing Objectives

Different content (and so, different pages) should have their unique objectives which will be related to the target audience’s search intent. With that being said, you should aim to get links that can support this objective, and so can also provide more value for your target audience.

For example, if your content is designed to be informative, then you should aim to get backlinks from authoritative sites that can support this content’s credibility as an informative source.

Remember that link building is not and should never be solely about ranking, but these links’ main purpose is to send qualified traffic to your site. This is why it’s very important to acquire links from websites whose audience would also find value in your site.

• Relevancy of Backlinks

Not only you should pay attention to the quality of backlinks, but we also need to consider the relevance. That is, links from websites that cover similar topics to yours are generally preferred than links from sites that aren’t relevant to your site.

For example, if your site mainly covers digital marketing, then getting a backlink from another marketing blog matters much more than another link from a golf website. In fact, if you get too many links from totally irrelevant sources, it may confuse the search engines and in a worst-case scenario, you might get penalized for this.

• Optimized Anchor Texts

A proper anchor text will tell Google what the content of your page is about. If, for example, you get 10 links to a page that uses roughly similar anchor texts (with similar meaning or contexts), then the page has a higher chance to rank on phrases related to this anchor text.

However, too many backlinks with exactly similar anchor texts could indicate manipulation, and if you are not careful, your site might get penalized for this.

In most cases, how optimized the anchor texts pointing to your site would depend on the relevance and quality of your content. That is, if the content is focused on a certain topic with great relevance, you’d most likely get anchor texts related to this topic. You can reach out to sites who’ve provided you with backlinks and suggests changes to these anchor texts if necessary, but be careful of overoptimization.

What You Should Avoid In Link Building

A very important thing in approaching your link building is a healthy link profile. While there can be various factors determining the health of our link profile, in general, we can call a link profile healthy when it indicates that the links are earned fairly and naturally. That is, we didn’t steal or manipulate the links.

So, unhealthy, or often called spammy link profile is built unnaturally and consists of low-quality sites. Not only these spammy link profiles won’t really help your SEO performances, but Google might also penalize your site for this.

In general, you can avoid having an unhealthy link profile by avoiding the following practices:

Avoid Purchasing Links in Any Forms

Here is the golden rule: there are no such things as working link-building “hacks” or SEO holy grail tactics.

Yes, some of them might work for a couple of months or three, but Google will crack down on it and penalize your site, probably permanently. In fact, in most cases, Google actually knew about these exploits sooner, but just waits a bit and hit it with a huge update to make sure that the manipulation is destroyed completely, which has always been the case so far.

Google, Bing, and other search engines are working really hard to continuously improve their algorithms to recognize paid links from legitimate ones, and they are getting better at this.

Here are some of the common link-building tactics offered by so-called SEO “experts” that actually no longer work:

• Links from personal blogging networks or PBNs, we’ll discuss more of this below.
• Links on the blog comment sections
• Links that appear near phrases like “promotional content”, “paid content”, and similar ones, Google is getting much better at recognizing this
• .edu or similar links earned through scholarships and discounts from educational institutions
• Backlinks generated from link exchange schemes

Some PBN strategies still work if you do it carefully. However, thousands of real human employees are employed by Google and actively comb through various websites every day. This is how you might get impacted by manual penalties. Once a site included in a PBN is flagged manually, then all the websites it links out to might be penalized permanently, and at the very least might suffer a significant ranking drop.

In short, these link building tactics are simply not worth it, especially if you need to pay a hefty price for these “secret hacks”. Avoid them at all costs, and embrace the fact that organic ranking is a long-term game.

Not Diversifying Your Link Sources

It’s very important to ensure that your link profile is diversified enough in several different aspects:

• Backlink types (i.e. editorial backlinks, links from directories, etc.)
• Variety in anchor texts, which we have discussed above
• Variety in referring domains

In general, Google and other search engines prefer that there are as many different sites linking to your sites, so they can objectively assess the consensus on your site’s quality.

Also, you should diversify your link quality. One of the most common mistakes made by many website owners is to aim straight to top-quality websites and only getting these top-tier links throughout the link building process. This is actually a major red flag for Google and the other search engines.

Instead, build your links naturally, as we’ve repeatedly stated throughout this guide. Build genuine and valuable relationships with important sites and influencers in your industry, give them your links, and get them in return while ensuring a good flow of high-quality content. This is the only valid way of link building, harsh but true.

This is even more true for startups. It is very unnatural for a startup site to get links exclusively from top-authority websites. Instead, startups should stick with backlinks that are natural for your current position (i.e., other startups, influencers in the industry, one or two high-authority sites, etc. ). Just add valuable links every now and then to build a natural-looking link profile.

As discussed, diversification in anchor texts is also very important. You can contact some link sources and get exact-match anchor texts, but avoid over-optimizations.

In short, diversify everything and aim for a natural profile. Diversification is also very important in defending your website from future algorithm changes. If you put all your eggs in one basket, you can lose everything if your current tactic is affected by the next algorithm change.

Getting Your Links Too Fast

Google, Bing, and other search engines are especially sensitive to how fast you acquire your backlinks (and obviously it’s very easy for them to track this). The technical term for this is link velocity and in general, you’d want a natural-looking link velocity where you get more links gradually over time.

So, make sure to grow your number of backlinks as the site itself grows (where more content is added).

There are two main types of unhealthy link velocity: Google will grow suspicious if you get a reduced number of generated links after several months, but on the other hand, Google will also take notes of sudden spikes (especially if the surge is very significant).

The best way to avoid this is to not include too many link-building tactics at any given time. Stick to just one or two tactics that produce backlinks gradually (not produce many backlinks at one time) like guest-posting, influencer outreach, and other ‘natural’ tactics.

It’s a common misconception that startups should begin with a strong link profile. In fact, this could be a huge problem if when there’s a significant algorithm change (again, don’t put your eggs on just one basket).

Build your links with natural velocity, and don’t forget to diversify your sources.

Effective Link Building Techniques

Improve Your Content Quality and Consistency

We have discussed how important the quality of your content is as a core of your link building tactic. However, another key aspect here is that you’d need to be consistent,  both in quality and quantity.
Keep a regular schedule to publish your content. You can plan an editorial calendar so you can keep track of when, where, and how you are going to publish the content, and it’s also important to be consistent in maintaining quality.  That is, avoid publishing low-quality or ‘filler’ content just for the sake of meeting your schedule.

It’s very important to embrace the fact, as soon as possible, that there’s no shortcut in getting backlinks besides your content quality. If your content is good, sooner than later you’ll get these precious backlinks, and again, no amount of tactics can help spammy low-quality content to get more backlinks.

Reclaiming Brand and Product Mentions

You’d be surprised how many people might mention your product name or brand name without linking your site. In most cases, this is an omission by accident and not on purpose, meaning, if you ask them to include your links, most likely they’ll be willing to.

So this is actually a fairly simple and effective link building opportunity, and there are various tools from the free Google Alerts, Mention, and others that can help you monitor brand mentions quite easily. You can set up individual alerts for your brand name, product/service names, and key company stakeholders’ names and check for mentions that might generate backlinks.

Link Hook Method

Another important thing to consider in our link building method is to give them a reason to link your site.

Let’s ask ourselves: why did we link other sites in our content in the first place? In most cases, we link sites because they provide useful information that we “cite” in our content, to say that we are providing credible information (backed with the linked website).

With the same principle, if we want to build more links, we can also publish high-quality content that contains this “linkable” information such as:

• Useful and original data or information. For example, research reports, white papers, case study, and testimonials, etc.
• Something really unique, or at least covered from a unique angle
• Visually appealing assets like infographics, photos, well-made designs, etc.
• Emotionally engaging content like great stories, photos, etc.
• Location-specific information (news about certain events in certain regions, etc. )
• In-depth informative content that can act as a resource

In short, give them a “link hook”, a reason for them to link your page. This can be a very effective approach to attract a lot of backlinks to a certain page. The more specific you can develop the page to contain this hook, the more effective this method will be.

Build Lasting Relationships

Remember that in its purest essence, a link is a relationship between two websites. These relationships can be an endorsement, reference, citation, or other forms. When a website links into another site, it’s essentially telling the audience that the website’s owner trusts the site and the audience should too.

Since links are inherently relationships, then one of the best ways in getting these links is to actually build a lasting relationship.

Sometimes, all it takes to get that valuable backlink is to simply reach out to the website’s owner (i.e. sending an email) and ask for one, especially if your content is already good quality. A simple outreach email can be a great start to a fruitful relationship.

Here are some important principles in attempting effective outreach:

• Keep it short and concise, don’t give any indication that it’s a spammy email, and you might get flagged/discarded immediately
• Communicate how you can give them value right away. For example, let them know that they have a broken link on their site and that your content might be relevant to replace this broken link
• You can always approach them by asking an authentic, engaging question and/or contribute to their conversations

There are also other approaches besides email outreach you might want to try:

Guest Posting

Guest posting is, to many people, the best method of link building, mainly due to the fact that this method gives you the most control. That is, control over the link placement, the type of link you’ll receive, and especially the anchor text (since you are the one who’ll be writing the article).

However, as a startup, we’d recommend a more strategic approach in pursuing your guest posting opportunities. As before, aim to build your guest posts naturally, but avoid low-quality post exchange sites and focus on authoritative websites in your industry. It doesn’t have to be really big blogs and company websites but choose respective ones.

Obviously this would mean that getting featured might be more challenging, but it will translate into a healthier link profile.

Being Featured on Podcasts/Youtube Videos

Many podcasts and Youtube channels might target the same audience as you, and many of those continuously look for contributors and guests to feature on the show.

Review podcast lists on iTunes, Spotify, or other podcast platforms, and look for shows relevant to your product. Do the same on YouTube. They might list the show’s website in the description, and some of them will even show their contact email address.

Send a personalized outreach email to the channel’s owner, and ask for an opportunity, probably by suggesting what you’d like to talk about  on the show.

The idea is, once you get featured, the host/channel owner will link your site in the show’s note or description. This can be a valuable backlink especially if it’s coming from the channel’s website.

Submit Your Site To CSS Galleries

Beautiful websites are a standard for startups nowadays, and the aesthetics quality of the website itself can be a link building opportunity.

Many CSS galleries offer the opportunity to showcase your website’s design to others, which will also give you a valuable backlink when your site is featured. You can check this list and start submitting your site to these CSS galleries.

Content Repurposing

One of the biggest challenges in link building can be the content creation process itself. Creating original content from scratch can be time-consuming, and even then, there’s no guarantee that the content will succeed in capturing the audience’s attention and generate those valuable backlinks.

With that being said, we can recycle and repurpose our content into other forms. For example, we can combine and repurpose different blog posts into a video or a podcast show, or even into a different blog post.

We can then link back to the original content from this repurposed content, and we can also drive up the reach and the total number of backlinks that we can generate from a single content.
In short, we can maximize the potential of every single content.

Broken Link Building

We have briefly discussed this above, but broken link building is definitely an effective link building method that deserves its own discussion.

Broken links are in a nutshell, links that are no longer available for one reason or another. It could be that the original linked page went down, it could be due to algorithms update, or other reasons.

The thing is, broken like are bad for the site’s SEO and also for user experience, and this is where it can be a great link building opportunity.

So, broken link building is where you try to find these broken links in websites in your niche or industry, and then reach out to the site owners to notify them of these dead links while offering your content for them to link in return for the help.  So, suggest content that is similar to the original broken link.

Fortunately, there are various tools that can help you find these broken links, so it shouldn’t take too much of your time. You’d be surprised how, when done correctly, this method can bring in links in a very quick manner.

Utilizing Social Media

First, it’s important to note that although links generated from social media (tweets, Instagram posts, Facebook posts, etc.) are nofollow links, they can bring a lot of traffic which can indirectly boost your SERP performances.

So, don’t underestimate promoting your content on social media: Tweet your content, engage influencers and aim to get those retweets and link back to your site.

Also, hosting giveaways can be a great link building tool. You can run a competition that is designed to engage your audience and generate the number of links going back to your site. For example, you can exchange a prize for a direct link to your site, or you can also ask your followers to share your social media posts.

Don’t stop the link building campaign after the contest ends, and there are many ways to ‘prolong’ the link generation. For example, you can show who the winner is on your site, and the winner might link to it again to show off.

Monitor Your Backlinks Profile

Now that you’ve executed your link building campaigns using the various techniques we have shared above, it’s very important to trank your backlinks and see how they are performing so you can optimize each backlink according to your SEO objectives.

The two most important thins to check about your backlinks are whether the link is still functioning well (i.e. it’s not a broken link), and the overall quality/authority of the incoming link. However, you can also check for other factors like click-through rate (how many people actually clicks on your links), ROI from each link (if you spent any money in link building), and so on.

There are various tools you can use in monitoring your link profile and each individual backlink’s performance. Tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush can help you monitor various metrics in just one dashboard, so we’d recommend one of them if you are really serious about your link building.

Also, you should check your competitor’s content and find out who’s giving them backlinks. You can ask these sources to also give you their links, for example by asking for a guest posting opportunity or via link-building method.

So, monitor your link profile and also your competitor’s links. This can help significantly in optimizing your backlinks and overall link building strategy: you can determine which one to optimize and which that already performs well. Also, you can identify various new opportunities and use them in future link building campaigns.

End Words

Backlinks, even after the COVID-19 crisis will remain one of, if not the most important ranking factor in SEO, and is a surefire way to boost your SERP ranking.

However, the quality of the incoming backlinks is now even more important than ever, and we all know how hard it is to get these links from high-quality, authoritative sites. So, a performing link-building strategy is now more important than ever. You can also work with a startup SEO agency or go for SEO services.

It’s important to note that any link building strategy should begin with your content’s quality and be a part of your overall digital marketing strategy for your startup. No amount of tactics and methods can help low-quality, spammy content in getting links, and on the other hand, informative and relevant content will always get links sooner or later. You can discuss your strategy with a marketing consultant to make sure you are not missing important tactics.

Don’t forget that it’s also very important to track all your incoming backlinks to monitor the overall health of your link-building profile and also to monitor the performance of your competitor’s link building approach.

The post Link Building For Startups: How To Improve Your Rankings and Organic Traffic appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Thus, link building is still one of the most important tactics in SEO and should be the core focus of a high-performing B2B SEO strategy.

However, link building can be easier said than done and can involve several different skillsets from content creation to relationship building to sales and general marketing knowledge. That is why in this guide, we will discuss all you need to know about link building, from the basic concept of inbound links to advanced link building tactics.

Let us begin.

What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important?

Backlinks also known as inbound links, are HTML hyperlinks on third-party sites that point to your site.

Links are the “vote of confidence”, a recommendation letter of the internet, and arguably the most valuable online commodity. When someone links to your site, that’s telling Google—and the other search engines—, as well as your audience that your site is credible and trustworthy, and the linked page/content contains reliable information.

Just like in the “real world”, a recommendation letter coming from famous people and relevant individuals will pack more weight, and so the source of the inbound links is also important. Links coming from authority sites that are related to your niche/industry will provide more value to your SEO.

According to Google themselves, we can improve the rank of our sites by increasing the number of high-quality backlinks.

How Can We Determine Backlinks Quality?

According to the latest Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (a book of guidelines provided by Google to human evaluators that manually evaluate websites and SERPs), a high-quality page is determined by its projection of E-A-T quality:

• E for Expertise: referring to who is the creator of the main content (MC) on the website. If the content creator is someone with credible expertise, then the site is regarded as high-quality. The standard for expertise depends on the page’s topic. For YMYL content (more on this later), “expertise” here will translate to formal training, education, or credible experience on the topic.
• A for Authoritative: in general, authoritativeness here refers to how acceptable the site—and the content creator—are as a good, reliable source of information.
• T for Trustworthy: how trustworthy the site is in providing honest and factual information.

More About YMYL Site

YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life, and is Google’s term referring to content or topics that can impact the consumer’s (reader’s) future financial stability—their money—, health, safety, and overall happiness.

Pages covering YMYL content are observed more strictly than non- YMYL content and are the subject of one of the latest major algorithm updates. In general, Google would prefer that an actual expert with formal credibility is the one behind YMYL content. This will obviously mean a lot to your SEO if you are in a YMYL niche, such as:

• Finance: pretty obvious, the M in YMYL. Investments information, retirement planning, loans, insurances, banking-related content, etc.
• Shopping: probably the most controversial, content related to research or purchase of online products/services, especially eCommerce sites and sites that involve transferring money online
• Important News: news about international events, politics, science, technology, and global business are considered YMYL, but lifestyle news including sports and entertainment are not considered YMYL
• Government and Law:  such as information about voting, adoption, creating a will, child custody, government agencies, etc.
• Health:  and safety, information about hospitals, drugs, emergency, how dangerous a particular activity is, medical issues, etc.
• Groups of people: information related to race/ethnic, religion, age, nationality, gender identity, etc.
• Other: fitness/nutrition, job-finding, college information, housing information, etc.

Simply put, if you are in the YMYL niche and are mainly publishing YMYL content, you have to pay extra attention to building and presenting your credibility, and some niches (i.e. civics information) are more difficult than the others.

So, E-A-T and YMYL are the two most important factors in determining the quality of the sources of your backlinks.

Dofollow VS Nofollow Links

Above, we have discussed how an inbound link should act as a vote of confidence. However, the site giving the link might “bypass” this voting function, by turning this link into a “Nofollow” link.

This is done by adding rel=”nofollow” HTML tag to the hyperlink code, for example:

<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>

A backlink without a rel=”nofollow” tag, on the other hand, is deemed as a Dofollow link, and it’s very important to note that only Dofollow links have value in SEO.

On the other hand, in some cases, you might also want to use Nofollow links to maintain a trustworthy internal linking structure. For example, in content discussing link building practices like this, you might link to a site using black hat link building practice as an example, but in this case, you can use Nofollow tag to link to this site without telling Google that you trust this offending site.

So, Do We Only Need Dofollow Links?

First, it’s important to note that backlinks from popular sites tend to always be Nofollow, such as inbound links from Medium, Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, Twitch, and so on. Also, links coming from these sources tend to be Nofollow:

• Links from a forum post (or other platforms allowing user-generated content)
• All major social media platforms
• Blog comments
• Certain news sites and blogs
• Press releases
• All paid links should be Nofollow, according to Google’s guidelines (or you might get penalized)

Links from these sites can still provide value to your business in the form of valuable traffic —although might not directly provide value to your SEO results—. For example, a link to your website from your own Instagram account is a common and effective practice to bring traffic to your site.

It’s generally wise to maintain a good balance between Dofollow and Nofollow links on your backlinks profile (more on this later), but when the Nofollow link is coming from a source where a Dofollow link is possible, you should always pursue it.

For example, if you get linked by a relevant third-party site in your industry, but the link is Nofollow, you might want to reach out to this site’s webmaster and pursue a Dofollow link (and build a relationship in the process).

Your Backlinks Profile

In general, your backlinks profile—or just “link profile” —, is an analysis or assessment of all the inbound links coming to your site, considering factors like:

• The total quantity of links coming to your site
• The quality of each link (based on the factors discussed above)
• Diversity of backlinks sources (i.e. if a site links to you 10 times or 10 websites are linking to your site individually).

Various SEO tools (like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz Pro) offer features to analyze your site’s backlinks profile.

In general, here are several considerations in maintaining a healthy backlinks profile:

• Paid/purchased links are a big no

All search engines and especially Google and Bing absolutely despise paid links, and they are getting better at detecting these frauds. When you are caught buying and selling backlinks, you will be penalized right away. At the very least, the penalized site will drop in ranking significantly, and in severe cases, the site might be permanently banned (as in, can’t rank at all).

• Avoid excessive link exchanges

Working together with your business partners and linking to each other’s sites are pretty normal, and should be okay when these are done naturally—that is, you are linking using proper content and the anchor text is relevant for the external link, and vice versa.—

If, on the other hand, the practice is done excessively, it can get you penalized. How many is too many, then? In general, if the links are natural and relevant to the content, the quantity shouldn’t really matter. It will, however, mean that you’ll need to put at least some content development efforts for this link exchange purpose.

• Low-quality directory links and private blog networks will get you penalized

These two used to be fairly popular grey-hat (or probably black-hat) tactics. In general, these sites (used to) allow you to pay for semi-legitimate links. Some were successful, some weren’t but in most cases, the site will get caught sooner than later.

In short, to have a healthy backlinks profile, it’s necessary to maintain an honest practice in getting your inbound links, as we will discuss in the next section.

Building High-Quality Backlinks

While there can be various different approaches in building backlinks, there are two main principles we should always hold on to:

1. It’s first and foremost, about the quality of your content

Really good content will always get links, period. That is, after all, the purpose of backlinks or inbound links is the online vote of confidence.

We shouldn’t really overthink it, and on the other hand, there’s no shortcut around this principle. That is, no amount of link-building tactics and efforts can help low-quality, thin, and irrelevant content. Link-building tactics will only amplify the performance of already performing content.

2. Your link building tactics should always align with your objectives/goals

Different content might—and should—has a unique objective, which will be related to the audience’s search intent.

That is, if your content is designed to fulfill informational intent, then you should mainly aim to get backlinks from sites that can support this content’s credibility as an informational source.

With those two principles being said, here are some examples of effective link building tactics in 2021 and onwards:

Healthy relationships as your link-building ecosystem

One of the best and the most effective ways to get high-quality inbound links consistently is to have business partners, media, and even loyal customers that you work with regularly. This way, we have a healthy “link-exchange” ecosystem where you can get a consistent, natural, and high-quality source of backlinks.

This approach, however, will require both parties to actually produce relevant and high-quality content that can link to the other’s site naturally, and it will require at least a little bit of time and effort for each backlink.

Outsource to an SEO expert

SEO expert/agency typically has relationships with high-authority sites and publishers and can publish content on these publishers as guest posts (technically). An expert can help get backlinks to your (the client’s) pages by using the following approach:

• Publishing a pair of content: one content for your site (your content), and another content to publish on a high-quality site as a guest post. The SEO agency can develop both of these content pieces, or your content creator team (if any) can work on them. There can be various approaches to do this, but the principle remains the same
• The “guest post” will be the key to this link building approach. It has to relate well with the target content. The placement for the backlinks (as well as the anchor text) should be thoroughly planned.
• This will create a (mostly) win-win situation, the publishing site gets high-quality content from you (or the SEO agency), while you get a Dofollow, highly-optimized link.
• Timing is important. On average it can take 2 to 5 weeks after the publication of the “target” article to get one published backlink.

This is arguably the most effective and safest approach to build high-quality backlinks for most startups and you can hire an SEO expert or link building consultant you need help with acquiring new links.

Consistent publication of high-quality content

We have addressed the fact that the quality of your content is the key to generating backlinks.

That is, we have to consistently—both in quantity and quality—publish relevant and valuable content. Maintain a regular schedule to update your blog, YouTube channel, or any other platforms, but also maintain quality.

Remember, however, that you should avoid delivering low-quality content just for the sake of regular publication. Google is strongly against this practice and you might get your site penalized.

Publish link “hook”

We tend to link to another site when they provide useful data or information—as a “citation” in our content—, or when they provide unique resources (i.e. unique infographic, original research report, etc.).

So, if we want to get more links, we can also publish high-quality content that includes unique and relevant data/information, such as:

• Something really unique or communicated from a unique angle
• Something visually appealing (good infographics, well-taken photos, royalty-free design/photo, etc.)
• Emotionally engaging piece (great story, great photo, etc.)
• Location-specific information
• Useful data/information (research report, case study, etc.)
• In-depth “resource” content

We call this type of content piece “link hooks”, and can be an effective approach to attract a lot of inbound links to a specific page. The more specific you can create these “hooks”, generally, the better, although broader resource pages that can target various different websites can also be useful.

Effective Outreach

Sometimes—a lot of times, even—, all it takes to get a backlink is to simply send an outreach email and ask for one.

However, since we can imagine a popular, high-quality, authoritative site’s webmaster can get hundreds if not thousands of emails every single day, a custom, genuine, and personal outreach email is necessary to capture their attention.

Here are some important principles in attempting an authentic, personalized outreach:

• Keep it short and to the point, any indication that it is a spammy email, and you will be discarded immediately
• Let them know how you can provide value in the opening section of your email outreach. For example, let them know when they have a broken link on their site, and how your content can be relevant to replace this broken link
• If you can mention something really personal (i.e. you both went to the same school, mention the person’s current project, etc.) without being creepy, you can create an immediate connection
• Another approach is to build a genuine relationship first, for example by asking an authentic, engaging question.

Link Building Best Practices

In general, your backlinks should always:

• Come from high-quality, authoritative pages—as we have discussed further above, based on E-A-T principle—.
• Earned links are always better. Avoid self-created, traded, and paid links.
• Aim to get high-quality links “slowly” but consistently, rather than creating links in bulk. It’s better to get 1 high-quality backlink every month for a year rather than 12 links at one time and never grown again.
• The links must come from sites that belong in your niche/industry, or at least topically relevant to your content. For example, if you are a digital marketing site with digital marketing content, it wouldn’t make sense to get a backlink from a site discussing football.
• Use relevant and natural anchor texts for both your outbound and inbound links.
• Remember that the natural purpose of backlinks is to bring relevant traffic to your website, and not only as a ranking factor for the search engine. Thus, links should be earned and on the other hand, strategically given, not just randomly generated for ranking purposes.

End Words

Backlinks—or inbound links—have been and still are the most important factors in determining your site’s ranking on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). It’s true, however, that Google’s—and the other search engines’ — algorithms regarding inbound links have significantly changed over the years.

Nowadays, the quality of backlinks is more important than quantity, and getting links from authoritative sites can be easier said than done. The main principle, however, remains the same: if your content is good, you will always get linked in one way or another, sooner or later. Focus on consistently publishing high-quality content, and the backlinks will come.

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