Businesses benefit from a strong online presence, but that barely comes easy in these times of stiff competition. For every genre that you pick, you are bound to come across at least a dozen other websites and brands catering to similar audience pools. Some fields see an unprecedented volume of competitive players.
This is why it becomes all-important for brands to ensure that they are ranking high on search engine result pages. After all, 75% of internet users never scroll past the first page of search engines. While several factors contribute to higher rankings, one of the most important happens to be Backlinks.
Link Building for Better Rankings
If you thought content creation and publishing are adequate for improved online presence, think again. The next and equally important step is content marketing. On the internet, which might have a hundred posts even on a unique keyword, you must master the art of promoting content on multiple platforms for people to see, get curious and visit your website. This is the basic concept behind backlinks.
Some people might tell you link-building services are obsolete now and are nothing more than link spamming. However, this does not always hold. You can effectively build backlinks without spamming other sites if you make the right moves. There are several ways to do this – social media marketing, guest posting, resource pages – just take a pick or pick all of them. Let us show you eight ways you can do this to outshine even the biggest websites.
Keep track of your competitors
Having so much competition is not always bad, especially when you learn to use them to your advantage. It is easy to get a list of competitor’s backlinks with the help of appropriate search hubs. What you can do next is replicate the best-performing backlinks of your top competitors to get the same leverage for your own.
This approach not just helps you improve SEO at the moment but also gives you tips and ideas for future campaigns, so you are always a step ahead. At the same time, it becomes easier to analyse where your campaign is lacking, what the scope for improvement is, and so on. You must also ideally try to understand the mentions of your competitors across the internet and how they managed to achieve them. Deploying the same or similar strategies for yourself can help you stay on top of the game.
Use infographics
Infographics have gradually turned out to be one of the most important link-building methods. Google uses over 200 factors in their algorithm for ranking websites, and quite an impressive number revolves around content quality, readership and uniqueness. Well, infographics give you all that and more.
It will not cost you much to either hire a graphic designer or get to work on some infographics yourself. You can also utilize free resources like Canva for the purpose and come up with interesting infographics that can not just be published on your site but also submitted to popular infographic directories. You can use social media platforms to both promote the infographic and also keep track of shared infographics in the part of market research.
Broken link building
One strategy that is not very well-known but has proven to be quite effective when it comes to backlink creation is broken link building. For this, you need to first take a look at 404 errors or similar issues on the site of a blogger of choice. Next, you politely inform them about the issue and offer link building to third-party sites – which you can suggest your website can do. The idea is to research and reach out. Being a win-win situation for both, there is no harm in giving it a try.
Guest blogs for link-building
One of the most effective ways to create backlinks is by utilizing guest posts for the best. You can reach out to the target audience you are targeting, or even a more expansive one, by utilizing already established platforms. This is a time-tested technique for building a greater social media following, driving traffic to your website as well as generating effective backlinks.
Resource pages for more backlinks
If your content is resourceful and has the potential of being used/displayed by other websites as well as readers, you are already taking care of backlink creation. This is because people would like to refer to your site for such useful information. No matter what your genre, if you can create resourceful content, people will be using it in more than one way. Studies show that companies who engage in blogging receive 97% more backlinks to their site than before.
Making the process easy for others
While creating quality content is key, also providing the opportunity for others to link to your website in their content is always recommended. You can arrange for HTML ready snippets beforehand, use tools that automatically link back to your site when anyone copy-pastes your content on their platform and so on.
Content promotion is key
Eventually, the best and also the least you can do is promote your content across platforms. You need to ensure that people like your content, but that will happen only if they know it exists. Therefore, it is a great idea to invest both time, energy and probably some money into content promotion. Social media is a great place for all of this, only if you know how, when and with whose assistance to promote your content. Influencer marketing is on the rise these days – something you can leverage.
Final Words
Creating backlinks continues to be one of the smartest ways to improve search engine rankings, often leaving even the biggest websites behind. Besides, the process is cyclic and reciprocal. An Ahrefs study shows how the no. 1 ranking page in search results often gets an additional 5%-14.5% more do-follow backlinks from new websites each month. Therefore, triggering the link-building game can help you escalate results without escalating efforts at par, making it one of the most crucial aspects of search engine optimization.
