For the last few years, Google has been treating links leading to a website as the main factor influencing its authority and ranking. Simplifying it a bit, the more links from high-authority resources lead to a site, the higher its ranking gets. In other words, acquiring new links from websites with good reputation has become an increasingly effective tactic for promoting your business’ online presence.
However, link building is not easy, not by a long shot. Normally it requires significant investments of time and money, and small business owners usually can afford neither. Fortunately, there are tactics that do not rely heavily on the amount of time and money you spend on them. You will find some of them in this article.
- Using broken links
The Internet is constantly changing, and a link that works today may not work tomorrow. Websites disappear, move do new domains, change their naming systems and so on. When this happens, all links leading to this website become broken – they lead to nowhere. Your job is to find such links, check what they used to lead to, create high-quality content similar to what it was and then offer those who link to a dead resource to link to your content instead.
The key to using this tactic effectively is finding broken pages with numerous links leading to them (e.g., with Ahref’s Site Explorer), creating impressive content and reaching out to all the owners of dead links.
- Guest posting
In case you do not know, guest posting means publishing an article on a third party resource (usually a post for a blog) under your name, referencing your business and giving a backlink to your website. Guest posting achieves a number of purposes in addition to serving a legitimate source of backlinks: it increases brand awareness by exposing your brand name to new audiences, establishes you as an authority in your industry, creates long-lasting connections with influencers and so on.
However, there is a catch. While guest posting does not cost you money, it is demanding in terms of time. Take a look at this guide to pitching your guest post to potential blogs on http://luckyposting.com. Now add to that the need to look for target blogs, research them, write posts, follow up and promote them. Multiply by the number of posts you intend to publish, and you will see that your average small business owner cannot expect to use this strategy while continuing with the core activities of his/her company. However, you have an alternative – hire a professional guest posting agency that will take care of the heavy lifting for you. Usually you can achieve the same effect at a relatively reasonable cost and without wasting time.
- Diversifying your link profile with community link building
A natural link profile consists of more than just followed links from high-authority websites. If you have a variety of links from blog comments, Reddit threads, message boards, Quora discussions leading to your website, it means that you are being talked about. Many of these links will probably be nofollowed, but it is not always a bad thing – again, it adds naturalness to your backlink profile. Moreover, some sources, such as Reddit, sometimes remove “nofollowed” status from links in highly popular threads.
- Outreach
Probably the most natural and valuable tactic of the bunch, as it not just builds you links but naturally exposes people to your content and earns you genuine interest on their part. Outreach includes all the ways of reaching out to people to get them acquainted with your content. It does not necessarily even have to be content per se: it may be a product, a service, a brand they may be interested in and so on. All you have to do is find people who may be interested in what you have and reaching out to them (e.g., with an email). They may be people who used a keyword related to one of your linkable assets or those who already linked to similar assets before.
As you can see, link building does not necessarily have to involve spending huge amounts of money. With enough ingenuity and determination you can start building links right now with zero budget!
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