14 Link Building Essentials

The web is a massive online popularity contest. When someone likes your site, they may link to you to tell others how interesting or cool you are. Think of this as a vote being cast for you in this contest.

Link building now works hand in hand with social media marketing so that not only are you getting “votes” from the authority sites that the search engines trust, you are also (and perhaps more importantly) getting links from real people who care about your brand enough to want to talk about it.

Link building is about getting topically related and (ideally) authoritative websites to point back to your website pages using keywords (and your brand name so it appears more natural) in the actual text so that users can click from one page to another.

Link building techniques include (but are not limited to):

1. Directory submissions (Now largely devalued and poses significant risks when abused)
2. Reciprocal linkage
3. Press release creation and submission
4. Article creation and submission (Now must be done only on high-quality sites)
5. Links from authority and hub sites
6. Content building and “link incentivizing” to help generate natural links
7. Viral links or “link bait”
8. Forum link building (Now largely devalued and poses significant risks when abused)
9. Social media links (Mostly for the indirect benefit)
10. Updating existing links with varied anchor text
11. Fixing broken links you already have
12. Recreating content people still want to link to
13. Comments on other blogs (not your own) that are in your niche
14. Guest blogging

What are some of your link-building techniques?

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