What are your link-building strategies?

[rachaelpracht]

Link-building seems to be the biggest SEO item that still remains foggy to me. I was wondering what this community's thoughts and strategies are around in for your own personal projects. I think if I can hear some real life success stories, it might make more sense to me in the long run.

Anything, good or bad, is welcome!

[DavidKonigsberg]

1.-Creating Great content and then doing outreach , guest posting and social promotion on it

2.- Use digtial pr - Give out samples, high res images,  provide expert advice , create relationships , Find interesting angles to pitch blogs and sites

3- Create deals and promotions and then promote it

4- Create link bait: create Crazy products like unicorn meat, Be controversial , create amazing tool

• To sum up provide value to the web in return for exposure and eyballs - value comes in many forms

You asked for an example so here is one we did - when we saw 3d printing was all everyone talked about - we took our sample ring sizer and made a 3d printable ring sizer

- https://www.brilliance.com/services/3d-rings it got tons of links

And here is an infographic we did that got over 400k repins on pinterest

http://site.pishposhbaby.com/blog/2014/03/12/keeping-track-baby-habits-infographic/

Best of luck

[localwork]

I've had pretty great results using HARO. If you're unfamiliar with HARO it's a platform full of journalists, editors, bloggers that are looking for sources to the current stories they're working on.

By crafting a unique pitch, making it very informative and providing sources, I've had decent luck getting backlinks. You have to spend the time scouring the stories, and often from large publishers you won't always get a response, but I've had a small handful of amazing wins from high authority sites (MSN, USA Today, universities).

Might be worth a shot. For less than $20/month, it's worth it to try and see if it could work for you.

[Deacyde]

In niche industries, I've found guest posting to be best.

You search for blogs that relate to your content, you read through their site because if you don't you cannot be personal in your request and that well look automated and you wont get an answer.

Tell them that you want to write for them and have a link back to your site and that you'd like them to write for you and include a link to their site. Then go about explaining why they'd even want a backlink and how it can help them.

This method has worked so far 10 out of 10 times.

Another method I've heard is to try to sponsor a local team, pitch an internship to a college, look for broken links to related content resources.

[Joe.Robison]

The one thing I've learned, is that every industry is different. Some are easier than others.

For example, if you create a design infographic and pitch it to bloggers, this works well in the design and tech industry. If, however, you create a travel infographic and pitch it to travel bloggers, 90% of them will ask for payment or will ignore you. The difference is depending on the person's goals of the receiving end of your outreach.

Travel bloggers want to make money through their blogging, they get hit up by international travel companies constantly, and they want their blog to be a personal expression of themselves, which makes it tough.

Design and tech blogs have a strong sharing community, where they are trying to build audiences and discussions and their own visibility, and they most often are not trying to get advertising for their blog posts, but rather want to offer customized consulting services.

Those are just two examples of differing industries. Some are tougher than others, and the same link building methods will work in one but not another.

I'd recommend taking the stair-step approach where you start with the most guaranteed method and work your way up. For example, you can generally find guest posting opportunities for most industries, I'd start with that. Don't put to much pressure on posting on the most amazing site ever, just start with a decent one and work your way up the ladder. After you get a lot of those under your belt, move up to infographics and more shareable content, then create tools, reports, etc.

You can make good progress in about an hour a day to start! Good luck!

[GlobeRunner]

Typically, we recommend making sure that you're listed where you think you should be listed and linked--like on industry-related websites. Then, the typical social media websites are where you should have a presence, as well. Analyze your competitors' links and see where they have important quality links (see if you can get those links, as well).

Concentrate on generating good shareable content on your site--then share that content on social media and work on social media engagement. That will get you the natural links that your site needs.

[LoganRay]

Hi Rachael,

Spending time pursuing links these days is a pretty futile task. You'll spend hours prospecting and doing outreach, and then most site owners won't respond to you.

The best thing you can do to generate links is create high-quality, unique, trustworthy, and linkable content. Get your content in front of the right people, and it will acquire links naturally. The best type of link to have is one that no one asked for, the content was just good enough for someone to say 'hey, this is useful stuff, I'm going to reference it on my site'. Of course now, the tricky part is getting your content in front of the right people. You can leverage most of the usual channels for content amplification; social, organic, email, etc. etc.

Hope that's helpful!