Link Building: 6 Simple Tried and Tested Methods

Penalty free link building methods can be hard to come by in these ever complicated times. The methods listed here work really well in most niches and have little chance of incurring penalties with the major search engines such as Google and Bing.

Link Building using Graphics

One of the most visual way to build links is by using graphics. Here the website owner creates a graphic (such as an infographic). This is then shared with other users within the industry. Whilst it doesn’t just apply to infographics, these are generally shared more than other types of graphics and are useful for other blog users for inserting into blogs. As this technique uses images, there is no need to worry about anchor text diversification.

Visually oriented content such as this can easily be shared on image sharing sites such as Pinterest, thus generating lots of social signals and shares. Other graphical sharing sites also pick images up from Pinterest which create backlinks automatically without you having to do anything.

As you can see, it’s relatively straightforward to use visual assets such as these to easily build links to quickly improve your search engine rankings.

Blogger Outreach for link building

Getting backlinks from other bloggers is a no-brainer. This is because the links will usually appear in an article which is within the context of your blog. This is manna from heaven for getting listed on Google as long as the backlinks are indexed.

For example, imagine that you run a blog that sells t-shirts and you ask another blogger to write an article about you. Their article includes the keywords “t-shirts” and a link to your blog. Google and co. will like this as it will have a link to your site, within the context of your site’s niche with the keyword as the link.

You can easily build up relevant backlinks from industry related bloggers using this tactic. Simply email a blog owner letting them know that you have released link-worthy content that they may want to mention on their blog.

To get the most from this technique, its best to build up a relationship with the bloggers in your industry over time. This is virtually guaranteed to work if it is done correctly, even though Google is purportedly cutting back on guest posting.

Broken Link Building

While you may not want to base your entire link strategy on this, broken link building is a useful tool to build up your backlinks. The way to approach this is to find web pages that have broken links on them; i.e. their link returns a 404 (page not found) error. When a 404 error on a website is discovered, just contact the webmaster and let them know about the error whilst at the same time letting them know about a similar page on your site that they can link to to replace their broken link.

In order to do this, you’ll need similar content to the link that is broken. This isn’t a problem as you can usually create this content quickly if the opportunity is worth it and the owner of the site is open to you doing this.

This strategy is simple but effective and can be relied upon to generate leads for some time to come.

Reverse Engineering competitors backlinks

An SEO tactic that has worked for many years and will likely work for years to come is the idea of reverse engineering your competition to find their best links and see whether you can earn the same.

Tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs make this tactic easier than ever, and it’s the kind of ploy that’s impossible to defend against due to the ever-growing transparency that these tools can provide.

Ultimately, this link building method is so important that many SEO experts greatly rely on these tools to reverse engineer their competition to understand why they are ranking so well and how their methods can be duplicated.

Link building through social media

Social signals and their influence on the search engine results page (SERPS) is a fact of our digital lives. Even though social media links and likes are time limited, they are a measure of website authority as the majority of highly ranking websites are popular on social networks too.

Therefore, building relationships with social media experts in your realm is an important tactic in your link building strategy. Having a relationship with an expert in a particular field in life makes it a lot easier to get stuff done when you want it doing. This is equally true when trying to earn high quality links from social influencers.

List-Based Link Bait

Nothing gets more traffic, social shares, and bookmarks like a good resource list. The reason this type of content generates such interest is that they are a one-stop shop for information that people want to know. And the longer the list, the better. A high-quality list-based post can create the kind of linkbait that attracts a wide range of bloggers and social media fanatics to read your content, talk about you, and ultimately drop high-quality links that point directly to your website.

You may be surprised to know that list-based posts are often the most linked to content for any popular website, so it’s definitely wise to use list posts as part of your overall link building strategy. Additionally, they serve as the ultimate outreach tool when you are aiming to show off your best content.

Link Building Help

As you have seen, these powerful link building methods will go a long way towards giving your website a powerful and resilient link profile. This, along with your onsite SEO work, will help you to develop a sound SEO strategy that will work now and into the future.

However, when link building, there are several practices that can be counterproductive because they are considered bad practices by search engines like Google. If you are unsure in any way about whether your link building techniques are going to have a positive or negative effect then why not try my link building services. I have over 20 years of experience as a Freelance SEO and have a good understanding of what works and what doesn't.