Advanced Link Building Strategies
Learn advanced link building strategies, including guest posting, resource link building, and broken link building.
Here are some advanced tactics we can use to earn good backlinks and raise our site’s ranking.
Guest posting
Guest posting started out as a robust technique to spread our voice, but its overuse to generate backlinks in bulk quickly turned it into a spammy tactic, scorned by Google. The famous blog by Matt Cutts, “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO” tells us what went wrong with the technique [50]. However, if we’re thinking guest blogging is dead, that’s far from the truth.
Matt Cutts added a paragraph to the same article that will shed some light on Google’s current stance on guest posting. A part of the paragraph reads,
"There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there.”
In light of the above statement, as long as we don’t write poor-quality guest posts on low-quality sites just to get back thousands of links, guest blogging still works.
How to find guest posting opportunities
Guest posting opportunities are easy to find if we just know what to type into Google. Here are some search strings that can help us find websites to pitch to:
Keyword “write for us”
Keyword “guest post”
Keyword “guest post by”
Keyword “guest article”
Keyword “submit post”
Keyword “submit content”
Keyword “submit your content”
Keyword “contributor guidelines”
Keyword “contributing writer”
Tips for successful guest posting: Here are some tips for successful guest blogging to build high-quality links to our domain:
Pitch to only authoritative sites, relevant to our niche.
Create a personalized, impressive pitch that the editor won’t ignore.
Develop well-researched, well-written, in-depth articles that grab the attention of the readers and entice them to click on our site’s link.
Avoid using exact match anchor texts.
Make sure that we’ll get a featured bio with the guest post. It should include our name, picture, byline, and a link to our site.
Follow the post even after it’s published. Connect with readers by replying to comments on our post.
Resource pages
Resource page link building has been around for a long time, maintaining its reputation as one of the most effective techniques for SEO professionals.
A resource page gives us a list of resources on the topic. Here’s a snippet of a resource page:
The above page gives us a list of resources on ML models. If we have an awesome piece on an ML algorithm that could add value to the resource page, the owner of that resource page will want to link to us. Here’s where resource page link building has an edge over many other link building strategies where the linkerati usually don’t have any solid incentive to link to us.
Step 1: Find resource pages
To get links from resource pages, our first step is to find relevant resource pages. Some simple Google searches will take us to the right pages. Here are some suggested search phrases:
Keyword “best resources”
Keyword “useful links”
Keyword “useful sites”
Keyword “suggested sites”
Keyword “best blogs”
Keyword “recommended sites”
Keyword “recommended resources”
Step 2: Submit resource
Once we’ve shortlisted the resource pages, the next step is to pitch to them. All we have to do is write an outreach email telling them how our resource makes a good fit for the page. As long as we have quality content relevant to the theme of the resource page, they won’t need much convincing to include our page on their list.
Some of these pages even include a submission form like the one below, showing us just how willing they are to offer a link.
Broken link building
Think of broken link building as an additional step to resource page link building discussed above. Adding this additional step makes resource page link building even more effective. This is because even if the resource page editor isn’t looking to expand the list, they’ll surely be willing to replace a broken resource on the list.
With broken link building, the goal is to reach out to quality resource pages, look for broken links on the page, and pitch to the site administrator, offering them our resource to replace that broken link.
Step 1: Find broken links
We can use the same search strings suggested above for finding relevant research pages. To find broken links on the page, we can either open each link manually or speed up the process using a Chrome extension called Check My Links. It scans the page for us, identifying all the broken links, as shown below.
Note that if a page has too many broken links, avoid pitching to them since the page probably isn’t maintained anymore and it’s unlikely that we’ll receive a positive response from their end.
Step 2: Reach out to the site with broken links
Once we have potential resource pages with broken links, pull out the contact details of the webmasters and send out convincing outreach emails. Start off by some nice personalized sentences praising their work. Let them know that we spotted a broken link on their page. Suggest a comparable resource on our site that could replace it. Wrap it up.
Step 3: Scale the strategy
While the above practice helps us secure some quality inbound links for our website, we can include one more step to scale it further.
Once we have identified a broken link, we can pull out a list of quality sites linking to that page. Pop the broken link into Semrush or any other site analysis tool to get a list of pages linking to the broken page.
Pitch to all the high authority sites in the list, letting them know of the broken link and offering our resource as a replacement.
Test your knowledge
Drag and drop the blocks on the right to the left, placing them in the correct order of steps for broken link building.
Choose the correct answer for each of the following questions.
What is a key consideration for successful guest posting?
Submitting generic pitches to as many websites as possible
Using exact match anchor texts in our guest posts
Writing in-depth, well-researched articles
Pitching to low-quality, irrelevant websites
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