Many studies have found a direct relationship between backlinks and rankings on Google. That’s why link building is essential to rank higher or at least rank faster on Google.
If it takes 6 months to see SEO results with backlinks, it will take longer without backlinks.
Even Google has now silently recommended building links in their new Google search essentials (formerly webmasters guidelines).
Tell people about your site. Be active in communities where you can tell like-minded people about your services and products that you mention on your site.
– Google
So to rank on Google, it’s in Google’s guidelines to be active in communities to share your website, services, and products (in short, build links).
But.
Most SEO freelancers and business individuals believe that link-building is hard.
But that’s not true.
After reaching out to hundreds of bloggers and businesses and answering tons of HARO queries and questions on relevant forums, I can confidently say that link-building is expensive, but it’s not difficult.
There are still over a dozen link-building strategies that you can leverage to acquire high-quality backlinks.
I have acquired over DA 90 backlinks with the following strategies without violating Google’s guidelines.
Like the recent top link acquisition was from this site:
And I also acquired many backlinks from well-reputed companies with the same strategy. For instance, you can look at these two link profiles that were naturally acquired.
You can also implement my easy link-building strategies to enhance your rankings.
The other best part about these easy link-building strategies is that I have personally implemented all of them on different websites and monitored the results. I am only sharing these strategies because I have achieved decent results from these backlinks.
Without any delay, let’s get started.
On this page
Get links from social media.
The first easy link-building strategy that solves most of your indexing issues and improves rankings is creating social and business profiles.
There are many great resources on the web that help you find relevant social and business listings sites.
Getting links from social media sites is not considered traditional link-building; they are more like signals.
But the reality is, these links work pretty well in SEO.
For instance, I started a YouTube channel, added numerous videos, and linked back to my original posts. It actually helped me improve my rankings, and the results were surprising.
You can check the videos here on the Sturdy Business YouTube channel.
Get links from business listings.
Frankly speaking, this is another great strategy that can get you amazing results.
It’s pretty simple to do business listings. You can search for business listing sites on Google and start creating profiles on them.
What you must consider is to use the exact same information everywhere.
There are two limitations to this strategy:
- You must have fully optimized content on your site.
- Use this strategy at scale.
It doesn’t matter if you build dofollow or nofollow links with this strategy; you will definitely see some decent results.
We created over 500 links and saw a massive surge. You can check one of the business profiles here on Crunchbase.
Reach out to competitors’ links.
It’s also an easy strategy to acquire backlinks. Because your competitors have already attained links from those sites. It means you are more likely to convince those webmasters or editors to link to your site.
Ideally, you should write more engaging content so that webmasters would enjoy it and link it happily.
If you are ready to leverage this strategy. Here is how to do it.
Go to your SEO tool. It can be Ahref or Semrush. Add your competitors’ links and go to backlinks.
Open each link and find webmasters’ email addresses with extensions like Hunter.
Now people use different strategies.
- Ask them to allow you to write a guest post on their website. (I do this.)
- Tell them you have more valuable assets so they should replace your competitors’ links with yours. (I don’t do this.)
- Find a broken link on their site, ask them to remove that broken link, and add your relevant link.
Here is how the last option works.
Reach out to broken links.
Would you mind getting a highly valuable backlink by doing an easy job? I believe it’s one of the hard-earned, natural backlinks that can even change your website’s fate.
I have experienced it. I got five unique links just emailing people about something wrong with their website.
However, most of them didn’t reply! But who cares when you get thousands of dollars worth of backlinks with little effort?
Now let’s get started. Let’s see how easy it is and why it’s the best link-building strategy!
You might already know that many domains are expired every time. Sometimes, some domains with authoritative backlinks also expire or at least change with time!
But the backlinks don’t.
Once you find those broken links on the authoritative sites, you can reach out and ask them to replace them with your pretty similar article.
You might not already have the article on your website. What can you do in that case?
You can pick the broken link, put it in the Wayback machine, and see what exactly that article was. You can create a pretty similar article with updated and more helpful information. Then you can reach out to the webmaster that one of the links on his site is broken. They should replace it because it can hurt their rankings.
I am sure they won’t mind replacing it with your article if it’s well written and on a clean website.
Brian Dean calls it the moving man method for link building.
Learn how to find expired links.
There are two methods that I have used to find these links.
- I used Ahref in the same way I mentioned earlier.
- I have also used the Broken Link free Chrome extension to find broken links.
If you don’t have any tools, you can invest time to find those links with Chrome’s free extension.
Acquire links with guest posting.
Guest posting is one of the most powerful and effective link-building strategies.
It’s not for no reason. Here is why guest posting is one of the effective link-building strategies.
Google wants you to get links naturally from webmasters with their natural intent. Those are called organic links.
In the guest posting, it’s all up to the webmaster how and where he will place the link in the content, and either it will be dofollow or nofollow.
Suppose you got some links with their natural intent. Say they believed in your content and offered you a link back to your website. That means they shared their website’s trust with your site.
Isn’t it great?
But you can’t get such authoritative links for free – most of the time.
Even you spend a lot of time researching, preparing a great lengthy guide, and then offering someone else a single backlink for your website. They can still reject your guide, or they might not provide you with a dofollow backlink without charging money.
It hurts.
There are two reasons clever webmasters would never offer your commercial website a dofollow backlink for free.
- Clever web admins are always working hard to keep their blogs growing. They spend energy, intellect, time, and money. And they do value their business if they can’t get a single backlink for free. How would they offer to your business website?
- They already know how beneficial it could be for your business.
So how to convince them?
Well, there is no shortcut to convince those who asked for money.
We reach out to hundreds of people and offer them high-quality free content but quite a few are convinced most want money.
So we keep searching until we find the right people.
For instance, we reached out to 345 people in these 19 days, and quite a few agreed on a free guest post.
Otherwise, 99% of responses clearly asked for editorial fees like this:
So it’s a long-term process to keep reaching out to people until you find people whom you can convince.
These days, I am offering a lot of value to businesses that I can’t disclose here.
So if you want to get free guest posts from people, your primary goal should be to solve one of their biggest issues.
In this way, you build relationships and get industry-relevant backlinks.
Try HARO
I have recently begun answering HARO queries, and I must say it’s a fantastic platform to be a part of.
If you consider yourself an expert in any field, I highly recommend joining HARO as a source (currently known as Cision).
On this platform, journalists ask questions, and as a source, you have the opportunity to provide valuable answers and receive attribution. If your response is deemed more valuable compared to others, you may even get featured and earn free backlinks.
The queries look like this:
You choose the most relevant ones and start answering to acquire links.
At last, you will start receiving emails to get accepted by the journalists.
You might need to wait for a few months to get a decent number of backlinks. But with HARO pitches you can get over DA90 backlinks for free.
Stay active on relevant forums.
Many people believe that forum links don’t work. But that’s not true.
I have used this link-building strategy and I saw some decent results.
For instance, one of my commercial pages was not getting any attention from Google (without backlinks). However, after creating over 10 dofollow relevant forum backlinks, it’s now on the second page (from nowhere to the 2nd page). That’s a great result.
There are two things to consider. The forum should be relevant to your industry and the topic on the thread should be relevant to your topic of the article.
Here is how I find relevant forums so you can:
Use the following phrases along with your keywords to find relevant forums for your link-building.
- Your keyword + inurl:forum/index.php
- your niche + inurl:threads
- your business type + intitle:forum inurl:threads
Once you create a profile on a forum, you add a link back to your website. But those links don’t add any value nowadays.
Your target is to get a link from the discussion.
Once you create a profile on a forum and get involved in discussions, you gain trust from the platform and Google (if the web pages are indexed on Google).
You make Google feel that you are an authoritative person on that topic. You know the niche, and people like your answers.
While adding links on forums, make sure to:
- Use Naked URLs
- Use generic words like Here, This blog, This piece, etc
- Use keywords
You can also use freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork to do it for you. Or you can also contact us to work for your business.
Leverage video submission as an easy link-building strategy.
As discussed earlier, YouTube videos brought me amazing results.
But that’s not the only reason to do video submissions.
The other best part is that in this way you can secure another place on Google SERP.
So, this strategy is a win-win.
Gain high-quality backlinks through Infographic Submissions.
This is a simple and easy strategy that all beginners can use.
Create infographics with a free tool like Canva. And share it on the major infographics submission sites.
- In this way, you get links from the websites where you are submitting your infographics.
- People who love to use infographics will use your infographics in their posts and you will earn links over time.
If you are not sure how to find infographic submission sites, you can Google the term “infographic submission sites,” and you will find tons of free sites.
Get high DA links with PDF Submission.
If a question arises in your mind, why do we need to submit PDFs? What’s the significance?
Here is the answer.
- PDF submission sites are authoritative websites.
- People still love to read PDFs. Hence, you will get traffic or at least branding.
Here is how I do it.
I write original content of up to 500 words. Add a link to my website in it. It can be a naked URL or even with the main keywords.
Hire someone on Fiverr to submit it on all the PDF submission sites.
After one or two such submissions, I only submit PDFs on two or three websites. Issuu is my top priority.
P.S.: If you are a business looking to have your SEO campaigns managed, you can take advantage of my SEO services. My SEO services at Sturdy Business are surely affordable. For instance, you can check my affordable SEO packages.
What is link-buidling in simple words?
In simple words, link building is getting links for your website from other websites.
For instance, your website is A, and other websites B, C, and D mention your website A on their websites.
Is link-building worth it?
Many studies have found a direct relationship between backlinks and rankings. That’s why link-building is worth investing in.
How do I learn to build links?
There are dozens of courses online teaching you to build links. You can enroll in any course, or start learning it on YouTube.
If you are looking for a simple link-building guide, this guide is easy and free for all bloggers and business owners.
What is the best backlink strategy?
The best strategy is to start from nofollow social signals, then move slowly to authoritative backlinks. I have discussed all the steps in detail in this guide.