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If you speak to anybody doing link acquisition for their SEO campaign, they will all agree that securing valuable links is becoming more challenging. With SEO becoming a mature industry, webmasters have clocked onto the value that links provide and will either demand payment for the link (which is against Google’s terms of service), add a rel=nofollow attribute to the link or even add a sneaky redirect onto the link so it doesn’t pass any link juice to the linking site.
A lot of SEO, unfortunately, hammer away with link building tactics that yield them a very little reward. However, there are other tactics that are often overlooked and can be acquired in a fairly timely manner.
We’ve shared some of the top tactics that we use in the list below.
Author mentions
This is typically in the author bio. If you want to be taken seriously in the online space, you need to be seen as an author in the industry that you are in. The quickest way to do this is by publishing guest posts or contributing columns to other web media.
The quickest win is to find guest blog posts or author contributor opportunities in your industry. For example, if you run a fashion retail business, you can find fashion sites that are looking for regular contributors to their blog or online magazine.
Bloglovin or CommentLuv
Blog comments are often dismissed due to many of the links having the rel=nofollow attribute and the spammy nature from black hat SEO blasting sites with spammy comments. When blog commenting is done well, it is actually easy to get links back to your site from the platform. If the post gets traffic, it is also a good way to generate more inbound traffic to your website each month.
If your site maintains a WordPress blog, you are able to use the feed from your blog to acquire a link to your latest blog post. When the comment is approved, the blog that uses the CommentLuv or Bloglovin plugin will automatically link back to your website.
Influencer outreach
Thanks to the advent of social media, there are literally millions of people that have their own niche audience that they can influence. There’s an audience for almost any niche and you only need to focus on securing a few links from the relevant niches to really make a positive impact on your link building activities.
For example, if you run a dog walking business; you can reach out to those influencers who are passionate about dogs. You can delve deeper and see if there are any specific topics or themes that they cover. Then you can see if there is a potential match between the content, product or value that you offer and the audience that they are promoting it to.
Some of the places where you can research influencers include:
- Facebook Fan Pages
- Instagram accounts
- Twitter accounts
- Snapchat accounts
- Pinterest groups
- Bloggers
Link reclamation
At least once a month, you should do a check for any mentions of your brand, products or services across the web. If so, you can reach out to the web publication that has provided the mention to see if you can secure a link back to your site.
This is usually a quick win since the web publisher has already mentioned something associated with your business. As long as you approach the publisher in the right way, there is a very good chance that you will be able to secure the mention as a link.
Resource: Moz
Posting expert answers on Q&A websites
You are the expert in your field. And there are many people on the web that are seeking the answers from experts in their field. The easiest way to do this is by finding the questions that people are searching for online and identifying those sites where the sites are seeking contributors for those answers.
Typically, these will be Question and Answer websites or they will be web forums.
Interviewing experts
This is a great way to secure links and to also build meaningful relationships in your network. You can simply reach out to those individuals who willingly participate in video and podcast interviews.
Typically, the interviewee will share their feature with their own network and it may result in you securing a link from their own site or even a natural link share from their network.
Regularly publishing useful content to your audience
As obvious as this seems, many website owners don’t publish valuable content for their audience. If they did, they would find that their content would be shared naturally and that over time, they would start attracting links naturally back to their website.
The simplest way to do this is by publishing blog posts regularly. As long as this is done as a part of a content marketing strategy and people start to find the resource use, you should start attracting natural shares and links to your website.
The posts don’t have to be done in high volume. It is more important to align the content topics with the interests of your audience. The content can then be published in different forms, which can help to increase the exposure on other web media platforms.
For example:
- A blog post can be turned into a PDF and submitted to PDF submission websites.
- A blog post can be turned into an infographic and submitted to infographic websites.
- A blog post can be turned into a video, which can then be shared with other content creators in the industry.
Share testimonials with suppliers who are known to link back to sites
You already work with several suppliers in your business. If you are happy with the service that they are providing, then provide them with a positive review that they can share on their website.
Make a list of all of the suppliers that you have worked with in the past. Then identify those ones that publish the testimonials on their site and link back to the company.
Once you have identified them, you just need to reach out to them with your testimonial.
Image sharing
You can create a repository of images that can be uploaded to sites like Shutterstock or Flickr and you can generate links back to your site. When website owners are asked to credit the author of the image, you can ask them to attribute the link to your website.
Another way this can be managed is by creating and sharing images on platforms such as gif sharing platforms. You can then share credit the source of the image back to your website.
Award recognition
You can reach out to website owners who are known for publishing links when they receive a reward. This tactic involves a bit more research since you will need to find and qualify those websites who are known for linking out and that has the authority that can be passed onto your site. Additionally, the content that features them will also need to be developed.
Once the content is published, it is a matter of reaching out to those sites to let them know that they have been featured and to see if they will consider linking back either to the main part of your website or to the content in which they are featured.
Resource: Ego bait link building
What kind of success rate can you expect from implementing these link acquisition activities?
You can expect to secure at least 10 authoritative links per month using these tactics. Depending on how well you scale the activities, you can potentially secure more.
If you aren’t currently implementing any of these link acquisition tactics, introduce them into your outbound link building strategy. It will make a drastic difference to your site’s link portfolio and the organic search performance.