32 Link Building Strategies

Link building is an integral part of an effective search engine optimization because it’s a major factor in search engine rankings. Effective link building however, is not about building as much links as possible, which is a common mistake done by both newbies and experienced bloggers.

The days of link farms and massive link exchange programs are so over. Search engines have evolved to be more complicated in their ranking and assessment systems, which is why using inappropriate link building strategies can easily result to your blog booted out of the search engine results.

What search engines are looking for are quality links that are not artificially generated and they have a good system in place to make sure that happens. Search engines want links from relevant and authoritative websites, which is what this article aims to teach you. I have gathered and compiled a list of link building strategies to help you get started.

Benefits Of Link Building

• Improves search engine ranking of your blog/website.
• As a result of improved search engine ranking, your blog will receive more traffic from search engines.
• Your blog/website will also receive more traffic from websites linking to yours.
• Link building is not only an effective search engine optimization technique but a great promotional strategy.
• As link building increases your traffic, you will also notice an increase in your readership (feed subscribers), community, comments and opportunities.
• Link building improves search engine trust to your blog/website. But more importantly, it improves your readers’ trust and confidence of your blog/website.
• Link building adds value to your blog. The more quality links points to your blog/website, the higher its value.

Effective Link Building Strategies

Before you start link building, I highly recommend that you take a look at Google’s, Yahoo’s and MSN’s link building guidelines. Violating their prescribed link building guidelines have serious drawbacks.

Without further ado, here are the link building strategies I’ve been using for clients that I personally recommend:

1. Build useful, informative and quality posts. Need I explain more?
2. Promote your blog/website. There are plenty of ways to do this and social media are good websites to start with. As your posts circulate and get more exposure, your chances of getting more links increase. The logic behind this is simple, how can people link to your blog if they don’t even know it exists.
3. Blogroll link exchange. Although the value of link exchange has depreciated over the past years, it could still be a good link building strategy provided you exchange link with quality websites/blogs. You should also limit your blogroll to a certain number of blog (10 at most).
4. Submit your blog/website to relevant, quality and established directories.
5. If you have other blogs, use them and link to your main blog.
6. Create accounts on Dofollow Social Media. Link to your blog/website from your account.
7. Bookmark your blog posts with Dofollow Bookmarking Sites.
8. Leave comments on Dofollow Blogs.
9. Become a Top Commentator.
10. Link to your own posts or automate internal link building with a WordPress Plugin.
11. Become a guest blogger. Choose blogs that are ranked well on search engines and are relevant to your blog.
12. Join forums and use a signature whenever possible.
13. Organize contests and giveaways. Then submit your contest to contest blogs for more exposure. This creates a buzz, which will result to more links to your blog. Try to come up with really good prizes. Or at least, make your contest unique.
14. Create unique images and share them. Some bloggers using your images will link to your blog in attribution.
15. Submit unique contents to article directories. Include a link to your blog at the bottom of your article. When others repost your article on their blogs, you’ll get extra links to your blog.
16. Join blog contests and blog events like BlogCatalog Bloggers Unite and Blog Action Day. You’ll get a link from Blogcatalog and BlogActionDay when they compile a list of participating blogs.
17. Issue press releases and submit them to pr sites. This is a very powerful link building strategy especially if your press release is controversial and timely.
18. Link to posts from other blogs. Most bloggers will return the favor by linking to your blog posts.
19. Build links using Squidoo lenses. Link to your blog from your Squidoo lenses.
20. Build links with Hub Pages. Works like Squidoo. Link to your blog from pages you create.
21. Participate in blog memes. This is a time consuming but effective link building strategy.
22. Post classified ads to sites like Craiglist. Link stays for as much as 45 days.
23. Create multiple blogs. Blogger and WordPress allow you to do this for free. Publish unique and quality contents. From these blogs, link to your main blog.
24. If you’re life, blog or business is “Wikipedia Worthy”, create a Wikipedia page about it.
25. Submit your testimonials on products you’ve used online. When owners publish your testimonials, they’ll usually link to your blog.
26. Create a link page on your blog. Using this page, exchange links to relevant and quality blogs.
27. Provide answers to questions related to your blog (Yahoo Answers and Google Groups). Offer your posts as answers and include a link to them.
28. Be the first to break a news and let other bloggers/webmaster know about it. They’ll usually credit you as the source of the news.
29. Create templates for Blogger, WordPress etc. and give them for free! Don’t forget to include an attribution linking to your blog.
30. Use a professionally designed theme for your blog. Believe me, some bloggers will link to your blog just so because your blog looks professional and credible.
31. Publish fresh content on your blog. This is a simple strategy of getting fresh links for your blog.
32. Establish your blog as an authority in your niche. Other bloggers and webmasters are more likely to link to your blog when it’s an authority in a particular niche.

That’s all I can come up with at the moment but there are tons and tons of ways to build links for your blog. You just have to be creative and make sure you comply with the search engines’ link building guidelines.

Still hungry for more link building strategies? I would recommend you to check these sites:

• 101 Link Building Tips To Market Your Website
• Expert Link Building Strategies
• 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies
• Link Building Guide

If you have other tips that were not mentioned in this post, you might want to share them in the comment.

Thank you for your time and like always, your comments and suggestions are most welcome!