Link building, or off-page optimization, is one of the most powerful things you can do to increase your rankings.
In simple terms, this means convincing other websites to link to your pages.
Links were the base of the original Google algorithm back in 1998—and they are just as relevant today.
I’m not going to lie, link building is one of the hardest parts of SEO.
But there are a few tactics you can use to gain easy links (see the easy link opportunities below).
Understand Authority Metrics
To determine which pages to rank above all others, search engines rely heavily on the authority of pages and websites.
In SEO, authority is mainly determined by links—more specifically, links from other sites to yours. Here are a few general rules for how the authority is calculated:
● More links > fewer links
● Links from sites relevant to the topic of your site > links from completely irrelevant sites
● Links from sites with high authority > links from sites with low authority
● Links from several sites > several links from a single site
● Links in the body > site-wide links (e.g. header, footer, or sidebar)
Search engines don’t publish authority metrics, but several tools have developed their own metrics.
For example, here’s how authority metrics look if you’re using ahrefs
UR is short for URL Rating and DR is short for Domain Rating—ahrefs’ own metrics for the authority of a page and a website, respectively.
In general, here’s how you should think about authority:
● A page with a higher UR is more likely to rank higher than a page with a lower UR
● If two pages have similar UR scores, DR can break the tie.
Of course, you’ll find this is often not the case—just use authority metrics as a broad guideline, not a hard fact.
Easy Link Opportunity #1: Reach Out to Friends/Colleagues
Do you have friends, family, colleagues, or previous employers who run a website? If it makes sense, you can reach out to them and ask them to add a link to your site.
A lot of people are too afraid or ashamed to ask—get over that and just ask! In my experience, this is one of the easiest ways to get links to your site.
Easy Link Opportunity #2: Unlinked Mentions
Once your business (or yourself) start being noticed, you’ll often find people including mentions to your business without links.
Just reach out to these people and ask them to include a link along with the mention.
To find unlinked brand mentions:
1. Start with doing a search for all your current existing unlinked mentions using a tool like ahrefs and reach out to all of those.
2. Implement alerts on Google Alerts or ahrefs for on-going mentions of your brand (and related terms like your own name or names of products) and reach out to new mentions as they happen.
Here are some resources to help you build links from unlinked mentions:
● ahrefs
● Google Alerts
Easy Link Opportunity #3: Fix Broken Inbound Links
If your site has been around for a while with no one paying too much attention to SEO…
…you’re going to find broken links.
If the destination of a link returns an error code, that’s a broken link.
From a technical SEO standpoint, it’s a good idea to fix these URLs.
But it’s urgent to do this if other websites are linking to those broken URLs. You can use ahref’s broken backlinks report to find these:
A URL might be broken for several reasons:
● The content was removed
● The content was moved to a new URL
● There is a technical issue
Your options can be:
● Redirect the broken URL to a working URL
● Update or republish the missing content
● Fix the technical issues
Do whatever you need to do to avoid having broken backlinks.
Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Links
Finding people who will be willing to link to your content can seem challenging. But there’s an easy way to do this.
Your competitors (aka people who are already ranking for the keyword you’re targeting) already managed to get people to link to them.
Why not start there?
For example, let’s say you want to rank for “how to make apple pie”:
1. Look for the top pages ranking for that keyword
2. Copy and paste the URLs into ahref’s site explorer
3. Open the backlinks report
Every one of those is a link opportunity for your site.
Click on each opportunity and reverse engineer the backlink:
● Did your competitor get interviewed by the site? Try to get an interview yourself.
● Did they post as a guest? Check if you can do that too.
● Is your competitor’s post outdated or not that good? Pitch your content and explain why it’s a better resource.
Then, reach out to these people with a meaningful and compelling reason to link to your content.
Guest Post on Relevant Sites
Back in 2014, Google cracked down on spammy guest posting as a link building practice. Does this mean guest blogging doesn’t work anymore?
No.
If you write valuable guest posts on relevant websites and add links to your site in a natural (not spammy) way, guest blogging can be a great way to build links.
For example, here’s a post I published a while ago in the Moz blog:
I included a link to this site in the body.
It’s a helpful post, published in a relevant site in my industry, with a non-spammy link to my site.
An easy way to find guest posting opportunities is to search Google using advanced search operators.
Try these searches for your target keyword:
● “[keyword]” “write for us”
● “[keyword]” “become a contributor”
● “[keyword]” “submit guest post”
● “[keyword]” “guest post by”
● “[keyword]” “guest post”
● “[keyword]” inurl:blog “contributor guidelines”
● “[keyword]” inurl:blog “write for”
Reach out to the blogs or websites that make sense, it may be a good idea to have a few post pitches prepared beforehand.
ProTip: if you have already guest posted on other sites, send over examples along with your pitch to build some credibility.
Use Resource Page Link Building
Resource pages are curated lists that link to helpful content, resources, or tools. In other words, they are designed to provide links to other sites.
Just reach out to authors of these resource pages and ask them to include your content or page in it.
You can find these opportunities in Google by using advanced search operators:
Try these searches for your target keyword:
● “[keyword]” inurl:resouces
● “[keyword]” intitle:“resources”
● “[keyword]” intitle:“useful resources”
● “[keyword]” inurl:links intitle:“link resources”
● “[keyword]” intitle:“useful links”
● “[keyword]” inurl:additionallinks
Get Interviewed on Podcasts
Podcasts are growing in popularity and many people are jumping into the channel.
What most people don’t realize is that this is a massive link building opportunity (credit to Brian Dean from Backlinko, who wrote about this tactic on his blog).
Aside from Spotify, iTunes, and Stitcher, people usually publish their podcast episodes as posts on websites, along with the show notes.
So whenever you appear on a podcast, you’ll likely get a link back to your site
Come up with a compelling story that’s relevant to podcasts in your niche and pitch it to them. You can use Chartable’s charts to find podcasts in your industry.
Get Media Mentions With HARO
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a daily newsletter that will send you requests from reporters, authors, and publishers who want to write stories.
This is how a request might look like:
If you can’t afford or don’t have time to do PR, this is an easy way to get media mentions. Check out this link we got via a HARO request:
Provide Testimonials for Your Favorite Tools, Services, or Companies
Convincing someone to link to you is always a challenge—it’s particularly hard to not come off as trying to use other people’s websites to promote your own business.
That’s why I like this tactic.
Instead of being self-promotional, this tactic is about helping others promote their business.
If there’s a tool, service, or company you like that includes testimonials on their site, you can write a review for them to publish it.
Often times (not always!) you’ll get a link to your site along with that.
Use Broken Link Building
Remember how I mentioned “Fix Broken Inbound Links” as an easy link opportunity?
When other websites don’t fix their broken inbound links, and this happens a lot for larger websites, that’s an opportunity for you.
There are several approaches to finding these broken links:
Approach #1: Use a Chrome extension
Approach #2: Find broken inbound links to your competitors
Grab your biggest competitors and use ahrefs to find all their broken inbound links.
Approach #3: Find broken outbound links on authoritative sites in your niche
If there’s an authoritative website in your niche you want to get links from, you can scrape their site to find broken outbound links.
ahrefs is also a great tool for this, but you can also use something free like Screaming Frog.
Once you’ve identified the broken links, you need to provide websites with an alternative to link to.
You can use Wayback Machine to find what the content of a broken URL was before it was taken down or removed.
Understand what the content was, create something better or more up-to-date, and reach out to people linking to it letting them know they have a broken link (and you have something they can easily substitute it with).
In simple terms, this means convincing other websites to link to your pages.
Links were the base of the original Google algorithm back in 1998—and they are just as relevant today.
I’m not going to lie, link building is one of the hardest parts of SEO.
But there are a few tactics you can use to gain easy links (see the easy link opportunities below).
Understand Authority Metrics
To determine which pages to rank above all others, search engines rely heavily on the authority of pages and websites.
In SEO, authority is mainly determined by links—more specifically, links from other sites to yours. Here are a few general rules for how the authority is calculated:
● More links > fewer links
● Links from sites relevant to the topic of your site > links from completely irrelevant sites
● Links from sites with high authority > links from sites with low authority
● Links from several sites > several links from a single site
● Links in the body > site-wide links (e.g. header, footer, or sidebar)
Search engines don’t publish authority metrics, but several tools have developed their own metrics.
For example, here’s how authority metrics look if you’re using ahrefs
UR is short for URL Rating and DR is short for Domain Rating—ahrefs’ own metrics for the authority of a page and a website, respectively.
In general, here’s how you should think about authority:
● A page with a higher UR is more likely to rank higher than a page with a lower UR
● If two pages have similar UR scores, DR can break the tie.
Of course, you’ll find this is often not the case—just use authority metrics as a broad guideline, not a hard fact.
Easy Link Opportunity #1: Reach Out to Friends/Colleagues
Do you have friends, family, colleagues, or previous employers who run a website? If it makes sense, you can reach out to them and ask them to add a link to your site.
A lot of people are too afraid or ashamed to ask—get over that and just ask! In my experience, this is one of the easiest ways to get links to your site.
Easy Link Opportunity #2: Unlinked Mentions
Once your business (or yourself) start being noticed, you’ll often find people including mentions to your business without links.
Just reach out to these people and ask them to include a link along with the mention.
To find unlinked brand mentions:
1. Start with doing a search for all your current existing unlinked mentions using a tool like ahrefs and reach out to all of those.
2. Implement alerts on Google Alerts or ahrefs for on-going mentions of your brand (and related terms like your own name or names of products) and reach out to new mentions as they happen.
Here are some resources to help you build links from unlinked mentions:
● ahrefs
● Google Alerts
Easy Link Opportunity #3: Fix Broken Inbound Links
If your site has been around for a while with no one paying too much attention to SEO…
…you’re going to find broken links.
If the destination of a link returns an error code, that’s a broken link.
From a technical SEO standpoint, it’s a good idea to fix these URLs.
But it’s urgent to do this if other websites are linking to those broken URLs. You can use ahref’s broken backlinks report to find these:
A URL might be broken for several reasons:
● The content was removed
● The content was moved to a new URL
● There is a technical issue
Your options can be:
● Redirect the broken URL to a working URL
● Update or republish the missing content
● Fix the technical issues
Do whatever you need to do to avoid having broken backlinks.
Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Links
Finding people who will be willing to link to your content can seem challenging. But there’s an easy way to do this.
Your competitors (aka people who are already ranking for the keyword you’re targeting) already managed to get people to link to them.
Why not start there?
For example, let’s say you want to rank for “how to make apple pie”:
1. Look for the top pages ranking for that keyword
2. Copy and paste the URLs into ahref’s site explorer
3. Open the backlinks report
Every one of those is a link opportunity for your site.
Click on each opportunity and reverse engineer the backlink:
● Did your competitor get interviewed by the site? Try to get an interview yourself.
● Did they post as a guest? Check if you can do that too.
● Is your competitor’s post outdated or not that good? Pitch your content and explain why it’s a better resource.
Then, reach out to these people with a meaningful and compelling reason to link to your content.
Guest Post on Relevant Sites
Back in 2014, Google cracked down on spammy guest posting as a link building practice. Does this mean guest blogging doesn’t work anymore?
No.
If you write valuable guest posts on relevant websites and add links to your site in a natural (not spammy) way, guest blogging can be a great way to build links.
For example, here’s a post I published a while ago in the Moz blog:
I included a link to this site in the body.
It’s a helpful post, published in a relevant site in my industry, with a non-spammy link to my site.
An easy way to find guest posting opportunities is to search Google using advanced search operators.
Try these searches for your target keyword:
● “[keyword]” “write for us”
● “[keyword]” “become a contributor”
● “[keyword]” “submit guest post”
● “[keyword]” “guest post by”
● “[keyword]” “guest post”
● “[keyword]” inurl:blog “contributor guidelines”
● “[keyword]” inurl:blog “write for”
Reach out to the blogs or websites that make sense, it may be a good idea to have a few post pitches prepared beforehand.
ProTip: if you have already guest posted on other sites, send over examples along with your pitch to build some credibility.
Use Resource Page Link Building
Resource pages are curated lists that link to helpful content, resources, or tools. In other words, they are designed to provide links to other sites.
Just reach out to authors of these resource pages and ask them to include your content or page in it.
You can find these opportunities in Google by using advanced search operators:
Try these searches for your target keyword:
● “[keyword]” inurl:resouces
● “[keyword]” intitle:“resources”
● “[keyword]” intitle:“useful resources”
● “[keyword]” inurl:links intitle:“link resources”
● “[keyword]” intitle:“useful links”
● “[keyword]” inurl:additionallinks
Get Interviewed on Podcasts
Podcasts are growing in popularity and many people are jumping into the channel.
What most people don’t realize is that this is a massive link building opportunity (credit to Brian Dean from Backlinko, who wrote about this tactic on his blog).
Aside from Spotify, iTunes, and Stitcher, people usually publish their podcast episodes as posts on websites, along with the show notes.
So whenever you appear on a podcast, you’ll likely get a link back to your site
Come up with a compelling story that’s relevant to podcasts in your niche and pitch it to them. You can use Chartable’s charts to find podcasts in your industry.
Get Media Mentions With HARO
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a daily newsletter that will send you requests from reporters, authors, and publishers who want to write stories.
This is how a request might look like:
If you can’t afford or don’t have time to do PR, this is an easy way to get media mentions. Check out this link we got via a HARO request:
Provide Testimonials for Your Favorite Tools, Services, or Companies
Convincing someone to link to you is always a challenge—it’s particularly hard to not come off as trying to use other people’s websites to promote your own business.
That’s why I like this tactic.
Instead of being self-promotional, this tactic is about helping others promote their business.
If there’s a tool, service, or company you like that includes testimonials on their site, you can write a review for them to publish it.
Often times (not always!) you’ll get a link to your site along with that.
Use Broken Link Building
Remember how I mentioned “Fix Broken Inbound Links” as an easy link opportunity?
When other websites don’t fix their broken inbound links, and this happens a lot for larger websites, that’s an opportunity for you.
There are several approaches to finding these broken links:
Approach #1: Use a Chrome extension
Approach #2: Find broken inbound links to your competitors
Grab your biggest competitors and use ahrefs to find all their broken inbound links.
Approach #3: Find broken outbound links on authoritative sites in your niche
If there’s an authoritative website in your niche you want to get links from, you can scrape their site to find broken outbound links.
ahrefs is also a great tool for this, but you can also use something free like Screaming Frog.
Once you’ve identified the broken links, you need to provide websites with an alternative to link to.
You can use Wayback Machine to find what the content of a broken URL was before it was taken down or removed.
Understand what the content was, create something better or more up-to-date, and reach out to people linking to it letting them know they have a broken link (and you have something they can easily substitute it with).
Here are some great resources on how to build links through
broken links:
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