The Definitive Guide (2017 Update)

According to a recent analysis, links affect the ranking of your pages on Google more than any other factor. However, thanks to recent updates to Google’s algorithm, it’s not just the quantity of links that matters but also the quality of the link.

Why link quality matters?

High-quality links will result in your page shooting up among the rankings but low-quality links will cause your site to get penalised.

Some of the factors that will let you know the quality of a link include the authority of the page and the site. The page also has to be relevant to the content linking to it. The type of anchor text you use will also matter.

Contents that attract links

Now that we know, what constitutes a good link, how can you get these types of links? One way of doing this is to use visual assets such as infographics, charts, diagrams and images. When a person shares your image on their site, they will automatically link to you.

List posts are also quite popular. Link posts give people the information they need in quick, easy-to-process sizes and according to a recent study, list posts generate more backlinks than any other type of content.

The world loves new information and this means that any new research and data will be highly linkable. Any time someone will need to make an argument that will rely on your data, they’ll link back to you and this can quickly increase your link numbers.

In-depth guides are also quite popular because they put all the information a person may need on a topic in one place.

Building links with email outreach

You can also build links by reaching out to people who are likely to link via email. This means you have to find people who are likely to link back to your content, sending them a personalised email letting them know about your article somewhere so they can read it. If the article catches their attention they could link to it as they write their own content.

Three link building strategies you can use:

1. You can build your links through resource pages. These are pages that link to content that provides a lot of useful information on a particular topic.

2. You can also build links by replacing broken links. This method is quite easy since you just have to provide a replacement for the broken link and let the page owner know you have a good replacement for a broken link on their page.

3. You can also use the skyscraper technique which involves finding content that people like to link to and making a better version of the same.

Advanced link building techniques

There are other methods that you can use to build links such as link reclamation and using reverse image searches. This means finding sites where your brand has been mentioned or where your image has been used without attribution respectively and asking the owner of the site to link back to you.