As CEO of a full-service digital marketing agency, I’ve seen too many marketers and website owners subscribe to outdated link building techniques to improve their SEO. These practices can actually have the opposite effect unless the bud is plucked early on.
The truth is that many link building tactics are either useless or completely detrimental to your SEO performance. Most marketing professionals know better than to employ black hat SEO tactics, but not everyone understands the difference in value of backlinks.
While one backlink can do wonders for ranking performance, the other 12 links can move the dial slightly. That’s why we’ve put together this simple guide to improving your SEO link building strategy while complying with Google’s updated Webmaster Guidelines for 2020.
Below, we have compiled a list of the top link building tactics for 2020 that will have a noticeable impact on your ranking performance and won’t penalize your website.
Start locally.
Local SEO should be the starting point of any successful link building strategy. Mentions (or “quotes”) from local businesses tend to work very well in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And according to 2014 Google data, 18% of local searches (requiring download) on mobile devices lead to sales within 24 hours for him, which can greatly help improve your bottom line.
Local citations are references to company details on the web, such as name, phone number, website URL, address, and zip code. If your website is associated with a physical address or physical store, collecting local quotes helps Google understand who your website or store serves In other words, citations help search engines build trust in your business’s physical presence.
Building local SEO backlinks is easy as there are many registries and directories where business owners can enter their business information. Here are some great places to start creating local citations.
• Google My Business.
• Apple Maps.
• Foursquare.
• Yelling.
• Bing.
• Axiom.
• Facebook.
• Better Business Bureau.
• Yellow Pages.
Invest in value-oriented content.
Promoting links to your website’s landing page can help boost your page’s domain authority, but it won’t have as much of an impact on your revenue as a blog post in your marketing funnel. Invest in creating good SEO content before creating links and guest posts to publish at least 30-50 search engine optimized blog posts on the web that offer real and unique value to your niche audience. Place it on your site.
With a solid base of blog posts on your website, you can create backlinks to articles that direct readers to your money page. Creating backlinks to reviews of the treadmills, ellipticals, and exercise bikes you own can increase your sales. However, the blog you link to should always match the user intent of the searcher. In other words, if your readers simply want to learn more about a particular product, don’t link to your sales page.
Start a guest post.
Contact the host or administrator of a high authority domain within your website niche about writing guest posts for your website. Be sure to include a link to your website’s landing page in the About section of your article, and provide links to relevant and informative blogs on your site. These links pass more “link juice” to the website, depending on the authority of the host platform.
Guest posts are mutually beneficial and therefore an effective part of your link building strategy. On the one hand, it benefits website hosts by adding free content to their websites. Guest posters, on the other hand, get a free backlink or two to your domain. This will help boost her SEO performance by delegating domain authority.
Fix broken links.
If you delete a page on your website, any inbound links to that page will generate a 404 error. Running a link audit using his SEO software from a third party like Ahrefs or SEMrush can easily find these broken links.
Once you have identified the broken links to your site, you can redirect (“301”) the destination of each broken link to the new associated location on your site. Don’t leave error 404 links on your website. Instead, pass PageRank to another property on your site.
Use HARO or Qwoted.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and Qwoted are services for journalists to connect with industry experts. It’s also one of the easiest ways to get quality backlinks from major publications like The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and more.
Reporters with tight deadlines can create questions (“source pitches”) on these platforms, and users can share their expertise in their answers. Experts whose answers are used in the final article are often given a backlink to their web property. This is a technique that my agency has used successfully for years.
Remember to keep it real.
The key to a successful backlink strategy is creating unique, value-driven content that your readers can’t help but share with their networks. Without great content, a domain with a significant PageRank would be unlikely to try to link to your girlfriend’s website.
It’s equally important to keep your backlink strategy reliable at all times. If you buy backlinks or use a private blog network (PBN), you will almost certainly be penalized by Google for violating our webmaster guidelines.
The truth is, there are no shortcuts to successful SEO. Instead, you should be willing to create content worth sharing, and not be intimidated by the possibility of pitching your content to authoritative domains and thought leaders within your niche, who will eventually put his PageRank on your domain. Next thing you know, you’re going to be a thought leader.
