10 Easy Link-Building Strategies Even Individuals Can Use

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.

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.

I simply solved others’ problems and received attributions.

You can also implement my easy link-building strategies to enhance your rankings.

Without any delay, let’s get started.

Get links from social profiles and business listings

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.

For instance, here are social media sites and 10 business listing sites to get started.

Getting links from social media sites is not considered traditional link-building; they are more like signals.

However, incorporating social signals can be beneficial when working on a new website or any other site without established trust and authority.

Based on my experience, actively managing your social media pages and clearly indicating that you, as the site owner, are running those social pages can contribute to building authority.

For example, when I started posting regularly on my LinkedIn, I noticed some fluctuations in Google rankings.

While it could be a coincidence, but I believe Google favors sites associated with real authoritative individuals.

So establishing yourself as an authority or expert on a social platform can potentially boost your rankings.

The same principle applies to business listings. If you can convince Google that you are a legitimate business and engage with people through your listings, such as receiving reviews, it can give you an advantage in rankings.

Get links from forum profiles

With social signals, you make Google realize that you want to interact with people, and their positive response will pass trust juice.

After that, you want Google to realize that you have a grip on your subject and are a part of this niche.

How can you do that?

You can do it by joining relevant forums and communities like Quora, Reddit, and other relevant forums.

Forums and communities are often public and indexed in Google. Google is noticing everything on all those platforms.

Once you join the relevant forums to your niche, you get double the benefits.

As you create profiles on forums and add your website’s link in your profile, most of the time, you get a dofollow backlink.

Indeed, such links’ value is comparatively low compared to hard-earned dofollow backlinks, but these links still pass link juice.

Although, the most critical thing for joining a forum is that it should be relevant to your niche.

For instance, it doesn’t make sense if you have a laundromat business and join a laptop forum. Isn’t it so?

Now, the question is, how to find forums?

Here is how you can find forums for your niche.

There are three methods to find forums to create links.

1. Find with SEO tools
2. Find forums from free lists
3. Search manually on Google

Find relevant forums with SEO tools

If you use SEO tools, almost all of those tools provide you with a list of your competitor’s backlinks. You just put the URL of your competitor’s website in it, and it will give you most of the available data in their database.

You can download that list. And search for forums available in the list easily.

For instance, if you open Sturdybusiness.com’s backlinks on Ahref, you will find forum profiles like this:

As you can observe, the forum has a domain rating of 70, and it is relevant to gadgets, which aligns with my reviewing niche.

Find forums from free lists.

Lists of forums for SEO are also publicly available. Here is how to search those lists.

Search any of these queries on Google.

• forums list for SEO
• (main category) forums list for SEO
• (relevant keyword) forums list for SEO

You will get tons of lists available on many sites.

Most of the forums in those lists will be irrelevant to your category; pick the relevant ones from that list.

Even you could find 20 to 50 forums; those will make your day.

Search forums manually on Google.

Well, this is one of my favorite methods that I use to find forums for link building.

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

Even the first phrase will help you find many forums. You can use many posts on different topics for different blog posts.

In this way, you can tons of relevant dofollow forums.

Create web 2.0 backlinks

Once you make Google realize that you are an expert in the field and answer questions, what should be the next thing?

Definitely, beginners should start loving you. They should talk about your website.

Most beginners use free platforms in the beginning. Even I used Blogger.com in the early days until I realized the benefits of using WordPress.

Those free blogs are called web 2.0 blogs.

If they like your website, they will use it as an external link on their blogs.

However, in the beginning, this won’t happen.

You do it yourself.

You create web 2.0 blogs and link them back to your website.

Broken Links Reach out – the best way to ask for link insertion

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 personally experienced it for my previous blog. 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 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.

How to find those expired links?

There are two methods that I have used to find these links.

1. I used Ahref in the same way I mentioned earlier.
2. I have also used the Broken link free chrome extension to find broken links.

If you don’t have any tool, 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 for my link building campaign.

So if you want to get free guest posts from people, your primary goal should be solve one of their biggest issues.

In this way, you build relationships and get industry relevant backlinks.

HARO – the easiest way to acquire high DA backlinks

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 like this:

I got a response after answering 12 queries. But I only answer highly relevant queries.

So 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.

Be active on relevant forums

Once you create a profile on a forum, you add a link back to your website. That surely does pass link juice. But if you could get a dofollow backlink from a discussion page, it would make your day.

Here is how to do it.

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.

The next step is to add a link to your website once needed.

For instance, after a month, you see someone curious to learn about a topic you have discussed on your website. You can share the link in the discussion.

If there were a positive response to the link, it would pass link juice and build trust.

The same question again arises: how to optimize anchor in this link-building strategy?

Here is what I do.

• 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.

Video submissions is another easy link building strategy.

We can see that Google has started giving value to videos in search results. There are many video results these days.

But mostly, it’s YouTube.

Thus focusing on YouTube can give us better results than focusing on all (that you can’t do without a team).

Infographics Submissions will also get you high quality backlinks.

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.

Here is the reason why I believe it’s worth investing in.

Visitors now want quick solutions. They don’t have time to read all of your articles. They now prefer watching short videos and reading infographics for quick and easy answers.

The second reason is that videos and photos have a dual impact on the mind. They have not only information but also more engagement.

That’s why we now see more videos and images in the search results than earlier.

You can google the term “infographics submission sites,” and you will tons of free sites.

PDF Submission also get you high DA links.

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. Why should you miss a chance to get free link juice to get authority?
• People still love to read PDFs. Hence 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.

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.