2015 is less than a month away. 2014 saw one of the most devastating Penguin updates getting released. As it’s expected from it, the update literally crushed hundreds of thousands of sites that used link spam to rank as it started rolling out. Not only traditional link spam, the update targeted numerous forms of low-quality links that had become mainstream.
This makes genuine webmasters, small businesses and anyone else dependent on Google for organic traffic wonder, what are some of the best, safe link building strategies for 2015 and further? I list out and discuss about 7 such strategies in this post.
1. Use Pillar Contents to Earn Links
Pillar contents are one of my best bets for earning links to a site that I’m really serious and passionate about. I’ve tried this strategy with TechTage, my marketing blog, and came up with a very extensive guide (over 11,000 words) focusing on increasing domain authority. With a bit of outreach, the post went on to become the most successful post of the site in terms of links acquired.
It doesn’t have to be textual content all the time. The basic idea here is to provide more value than all the other current resources about the topic. The form isn’t the most important thing as long as that holds the value. Gareth Bull leverages this strategy mainly by producing super-detailed infographics, and he is successful too.
2. Leverage Content Curation for Earning Links
Content curation works and it works super well. Brian Dean from Backlinko is seen leveraging this tactic often and that’s how he came up with some of his most popular blog contents like the definitive guide to link building which has earned links from over 100 high-quality domains as of now.
This strategy is especially suitable when you just start a blog and you need some solid content to start with. At that point, referring to a lot of your own content won’t be possible, and that’s where content curation comes into play.
3. Utilize Press Contacts to Gain Links
Though it doesn’t always produce the highest success rate, helping a journalist with your own data or input to back his/her claims is an excellent strategy to get some links on very high-quality authority sites. The more exciting thing is that nothing is needed apart from your experience about a certain subject and some outreach skills. There are two exciting services that makes utilizing this technique easier. They are, ResponseSource and HARO.
4. Give Out Testimonials in Exchange for Links
Another way to use your existing popularity or authority in your own field is by giving out testimonials in exchange for links to your site. Patrick Coombe from Elite Strategies is seen on the front-page or the “what our customers say about us” pages of a lot of reputable services and companies in the SEO field like Ahrefs and Advanced Web Rankings.
5. Scale Broken Link Building
Broken link building is not just about you, it’s also about fixing the web. If you can scale your broken link building efforts, you can see much better results from it, earning links from reputable sites in your niche on aged, powerful pages. One of the best ways to scale broken link building is using Ahrefs’ Incoming Broken Links Checker and Outgoing Broken Links Checker that I wrote about more than a month ago. Alternatively, you can use SEO crawlers like ScreamingFrog. You can run it from your desktop or from a server, and crawl authority sites in your niche (that you’re well aware of) and find pages that contain broken links. You can then reach out to the respective sites notifying them about potential replacements from your own site.
6. Curate Quotes from Top Personalities in Your Niche
People are always interested in quotes from top personalities in a certain field. According to Troy Shanks (expert SEO known for utilizing this strategy), “The almost-obvious thing is to target influencers with the most social following in your niche. A better way is to manually look up the search volumes of the names of those influencers in Google Keyword Planner. People with the most search volumes for their names surely have more interest about them and thus have a better chance of attracting links if their quotes are featured”.
Neil Patel of QuickSprout got a lot of links and gets a ton of traffic to his post about 101 motivational business quotes.
7. Use Engaging Quizzes to Build Links
Using engaging quizzes is a great way to collect emails. Did you know that it can be used to earn links too? Engaging quizzes are still engaging content, and like other forms of engaging content, have the ability to acquire links naturally. If you use some content promotion strategies or outreach strategies on top, you can easily maximize the results obtained from this tactic.
Conclusion
Now that you know about 7 future-proof link building strategies, it’s time you start trying some of them out. You don’t have to worry about these strategies harming your site, as they’re pretty safe for your site.
What other future-proof link building strategies are you aware of?
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