Growth Hack Your Way to The Top with Link Building Opportunities in Your Industry

April 20, 2016 12:36 pm // Author: David Moceri

You start by Showing Value

Your actions of giving first, and showing them that you’re paying attention will get you on the radar of people you want to connect with. Some of my most wonderful business relationships and even friendships have grown over time from a single blog comment or social media mention.

But how does this get you more inbound links? Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

Relationships —>> Radar —>> Referrals

First, you need to work on cultivating relationships. Identify influences you follow, who inspire you, whom you learn from, and start engaging and interacting with them to get noticed and get on their radar. Link to them in your blog posts and send them some traffic.
Second, you need to create your own great content — compelling content that is share-worthy. You must consistently create quality, relevant, helpful, valuable content that demonstrates your expertise and positions you as an authority in your niche.
Third, you need to make it easy for others to discover your content. If no one knows your content exists, they can’t share it. It’s up to your to promote it, share it, and link to it … and to do so without crossing them spam line.

via The Secret to Building More Inbound Links | Bourn Creative

Now why does this matter?

Like most online businesses, you are likely wanting to increase your search engine ranking. Doing so increases your organic traffic and, if you are able to reach the number 1 or 2 spot on Google, it will also lower the amount you need to spend on advertising. All in all, it’s a win-win for brands to increase their rankings.

But, it isn’t just on-site search engine optimization that helps to boost your site to the top of search results. You also need to build credibility –– and you do that with backlinking, also known as generating inbound links.

Links are extremely important for improving organic search visibility. According to Moz’s 2015 SEO Ranking Factors Report, link metrics are the two most influential factors in Google’s algorithm.

via Tracey Wallace, Managing Editor at Bigcommerce states that,

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Source: Moz’s 2015 SEO Ranking Factors Report

There are two different ways to think about generating links: earned links and outreach links, and both are important to Google’s SERP

via How to Generate Choice Inbound Links for Your Online Store

So Where do I Begin?

While guest blogging is very much a legitimate form of link building, it shouldn’t be your sole focus. When contributing to other blogs, you want to be sure that the content that you are creating is high value, not just something you pump out for the sake of a link. To ensure success, look to the following guidelines before getting started:

Does the site have high authority? One way to check this is to look into the website’s backlink profile to make sure they have ethical standards and are not at risk of a penalty.
Who is their audience? Make sure they are relevant to your industry.
Is it a reputable source? Audit the content to ensure that everything is supported and up-to-date.
Do they have a strong following? Look to their social media followers and shares to gauge their popularity.

Again, this is a strategy that you don’t want to neglect nor exhaust. A good rule of thumb is to focus your attention on writing a couple of strong, well-aligned articles, and then move on to something else. Don’t forget, you can always revisit it if it delivers a high reward.

via How to Build Inbound Links the White Hat Way

Final Thoughts on Link Building

But just having a lot of links isn’t all you need to consider. The quality of your links is also important. While your goal is to build a good mix of inbound, outbound, and internal links, those links have to be relevant to your content, business, industry, and audience — and you can’t forget that the basic, naturally occurring links are extremely powerful too.

via 10 Ideas To Build Quality Inbound Links and Increase Website Traffic | Bourn Creative