Editor's note: This post first appeared in December of 2015, but because SEO (and Google) changes so quickly, we figured it was time for a refresh! 

The link building world is in a constant state of evolution. New tools are continually introduced to the market, with SEOs ready to discover what works best.

In 2015, I wrote an article for Moz about how our team switched over to a new email automation tool that drastically improved our overall outreach system — we increased our email reply rates by 187 percent in just one month. Which meant that our number of attainable backlinks also drastically increased.  I wanted to see what's changed since I last wrote this post. Because in 2019, you need a lot more than new tools to excel in link building.

But first...

Looking back, it was pretty ingenious: Our link building program had automated almost every step in the outreach process. We were emailing hundreds of people a week, guest posting on numerous websites, and raking in 20–30 links per week. If anyone has been in the game long enough, you’ll know that’s an insane amount of links.

With its success at my first company, I took the concept and applied it to several freelance link building projects I was working on. It proved to work for those sites, too. Later on, I built out a similar system for the second startup I worked for. And again, it proved to be just as successful. Every link building project I took on, my thinking was: How can I scale this thing to get me 10x the number of links? How can I email 5x the number of people? How can I automate this as much as possible so I can create a link building machine that’s completely hands off?

Well...at least for a period of time.

While I had the best of intentions, this thinking is what ultimately got me in trouble and lead to the inevitable: I was hit with a manual action for participating in link schemes.

I remember opening up Search Console and reading that message. At that moment, I felt like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar. My stomach was in knots. I had heard of people getting manual actions before but didn’t think it was something that would happen to me.

In hindsight, this was probably one of the most important moments of my SEO/growth career. It sobered me up and pushed me into thinking about outreach in a whole different light, and taught me the most important lesson to date: building links isn’t about using automation to create processes that scale. It’s about building relationships — and value — that scales.

What outreach looked like in 2015

I’m not surprised I got away with what I was doing for so long. From 2015 to 2017, it seemed like everyone and their Mom was guest posting. During that time, this is what I noticed:

1. It was a numbers game

Most of the SEOs I talked to from 2015 to 2017 were using a similar strategy. It was all about finding tools that could help scale your guest posting program and contact as many people as possible. Most companies had some arbitrary link quota for their outreach teams to hit every month, mine included.

2. It promoted somewhat decent content that was templatized

In our outreach program, we were pitching the same three to four topics over and over again and while the content we wrote was always original, there was nothing novel about the articles we were putting out there. They were cute, engaging — but none of it was on the cutting edge or had a solid opinion. It’s what our friend John Collins from Intercom calls Happy Meal content:

“It looks good from a distance, but you’re left feeling hungry not long after you consume it.” 3. It idolized automation and processes

At the time, most outreach programs were about leveraging tools to automate processes and scale every step of the way. We were using several tools to scrape websites and hired virtual assistants off of Upwork to find email addresses of just about anyone associated with a company, whether they were actually the ideal person to contact or not.

This process had worked in 2015. But in 2019, there’s no way it could.

What outreach looks like in 2019

Since joining the team at OG Marketing this last fall, I’ve vastly altered the way I approach outreach and link building. Our strategy now focuses on three main concepts.

1. Helping editors cite good sources

The link building relationships I’ve built this year are almost entirely centered around editors and content managers of notable sites who only want to link to high-quality, relevant content.

And luckily for us, we work with some of the best content creators in the B2B SaaS-verse. We don’t have to go out and beg for links to mediocre (at best) content: We’re building authority to pages that truly deserve it. More importantly, we’re actually fulfilling a need by providing great sources of information for other quality content.

2. Understanding backlinks are only one piece to the puzzle

Link building is only one lever and shouldn’t be your whole SEO strategy. Depending on the site you’re working on, building links may be a good use of your time — or not at all.

In our strategy, we account for the fact that sometimes links aren’t always necessary. They will definitely help, but it’s possible to excel without them.

For example, Hotjar recently published an article on 5 ways to use scroll maps. Looking at the backlink profile for the top three results for “scroll map,” CrazyEgg has more referring domains than Hotjar, but is currently in position three. Omniconvert has zero backlinks and still ranks above CrazyEgg in position three. With only three referring domains, Hotjar has earned the 1st position and a coveted featured snippet.

2015 me would’ve had a knee jerk reaction to kick off an outreach campaign as soon as we hit publish on the new article. But considering the fact that you may not even need a ton of links to rank well, you can actually spend your time more efficiently elsewhere.

3. Creating quality content that earns links naturally

There’s definitely a tipping point when it comes to generating backlinks naturally. When your article appears on page one for the query you’re targeting, your chances of having that article cited by other publications with zero effort on your part just naturally goes up.

Why? Because people looking to add credible citations to their article will turn to Google to find that content.

This prompts our team to always ensure that each piece of content we create for our clients satisfies searcher intent. To do this, we start off by researching if the intent behind the keyword we want to rank for has purchase, consideration or informational intent.

For example, the keyword “best video conferencing camera” has consideration-based intent. We can determine this by looking at the SERPs. In the screenshot below, you can see Google understands users are trying to compare different types of cameras.

By seeing this, we know that our best bet for creating content that will rank well is by writing a listicle-style post comparing the best video cameras on the market. If we had instead created an informational article targeting the same keyword about why you should invest in a video conferencing camera without a list of product comparisons, the article probably wouldn’t perform well in search.

Therefore, if we start off on the right foot by creating the right type of content from the very beginning, we make it easier for ourselves down the road. In other words, we won’t have to build a million links just to get a piece of content to rank that wasn’t the right format, to begin with.

What we’ve found with our outreach strategy

Centering our strategy around creating the right content and then determining whether or not that content needs links, has helped us prioritize what articles actually need to be a part of an outreach campaign.

Once this is determined, we then call on our friends — or our content partners — to help us drive link equity quickly, efficiently, and in a way, that enhances the source content and makes sense for end users (readers).

A few months into building out our homie program, there are several things we noticed.

1. Response rates increased

Probably because it’s not as templatized and, generally, I care more deeply about the email I’m sending and the person I’m reaching out to. On average, I get about a 65–70 percent response rate.

2. Opt-in rates increased

Once I get a response, build the relationship, then ask if they want to become a content partner (“friend”), we typically see a 75 percent opt-in rate.

3. You get the same amount of links, using half the amount of work, in half the amount of time

I’m gonna repeat that: we generate the same, if not more, backlinks month over month with less effort, time and manpower than with the process I built out in 2015.

And the more partners we add, the more links we acquire, with less effort. Visually, it looks like this:

I (somewhat) paid attention during economics class in college, and I remember a chart with this trajectory being a really good thing. So, I think we’re on to something...

How our outreach process works (and how you can create your own)

Our current link building program still leverages some of the tools mentioned in my post from 2015, but we’ve simplified the process. Essentially, it works like this:

1. Identify your friends

Do you have friends or acquaintances that work at sites which touch on topics in your space? Start there!

I got connected to the CEO of Proof, who connected me with their Content Director, Ben. We saw that there was synergy between our content and each needed sources about what the other wrote about. He was able to connect me with other writers and content managers in the space, and now we’re all best of friends.

2. Find new friends

Typically we look for similar sites in the B2B SaaS space that we want to partner with and are relevant to our client sites. Then, we use several tools like Clearbit, Hunter.io, and Viola Norbert to identify the person we want to reach out to (usually SEO Managers, Marketing Directors or Content Managers) and find their email.

This step has been crucial in our process. In the past, we left this to the virtual assistants. But since bringing this in house, we’ve been able to better identify the right person to reach out to, which has increased response rates.

3. Reach out in an authentic way

In our outreach message, we cut to the chase. If you’ve identified the right person in the previous step, then they should know exactly what you’re trying to do and why it’s important. If the person you outreached to doesn’t get the big picture and you have to explain yourself, then you’re talking to the wrong person. Plain and simple.

Compared to 2015, our lists are much smaller (we’re definitely not using the spray and pray method) and we determine on a case by case basis what the best method for outreach is. Whether that be email, Linkedin, or at times, Instagram.

Here’s an example of a simple, straightforward message I send out:

4. Share content priorities

Once someone expresses interest, I’ll find a place on their website using a site search where they can reference one of our client’s content priorities for the month. In return, I’ll ask them what content they’re trying to get more eyes on and see if it aligns with our other client sites or the other partners we work with.

If I think their content is the perfect source for another article, I’ll cite it. If not, I’ll share it with another partner to see if it could be a good resource for them.

5. See if they want to be a "friend"

Once we have that first link nailed down, I’ll explain how we can work together by using each other’s awesome content to enhance new blog articles or article contributions on other sites.

If they’re down to be content friends, I’ll share their priorities for the month with our other partners who will then share it with their wider network of websites and influencers who are contributing articles to reputable sites and are in need of content resources to cite. From there, the writers can quickly scan a list of URLs and cite articles when it makes sense to help beef up new content or improve existing content with further resources. It’s a win-win.

If the site is interested in being friends, I’ll send over a spreadsheet where we can track placements and our priorities for the month.

Here’s the link to a partner template you can download.

Unlike the guest posting programs I was doing over the last few years, with this process, we’re not leaving a digital footprint for Google to follow.

In other words, we don’t have our author bios mentioning our website plastered all over the internet, essential saying “Hey, Google! We guest posted here and inserted these links with rich anchor text to try and help our page rank. Oh, and we did the same thing here, and here, and here.”

With this process, we’re just offering a list of resources to well-known writers and other websites creating badass content. Ultimately, it’s their choice if they want to link to it or not. I’ll definitely make suggestions but in the end, it’s their call.

6. Grow the friend list

Now, if I’m looking to drive link equity to a certain page, I don’t have to build a new list, queue up a campaign, and kick off a whole automation sequence to an ungodly amount of people like I did in the past.

I just hit up one of our partners on our friend's list and voila! — quality citation in 0.45 seconds.

And on a personal note, waking up to emails in my inbox of new citations added with zero effort on my part feels like the Link Gods have blessed me time and time again.

Results

With our friend network, the numbers speak for themselves. This last month, we were able to generate 74 links. In 2015, I was hitting similar monthly numbers, but link building was my full-time job.

Now, link building is something I do on the side (I’d estimate a few hours every week), giving me time to manage my client accounts and focus on everything else I need to do — like drive forward technical SEO improvements, conduct keyword research, optimize older pages, and use SEO as an overall means to drive a company’s entire marketing strategy forward.

Building out a friend network has also opened up the door to many other opportunities for our clients that I had never dreamed of when I viewed my link building relationships as one and done. With the help of our friends, we’ve had our clients featured on podcasts (shout out to Proof’s Scale or Die podcast!), round-ups, case studies, video content, and many, many more.

Final thoughts

As an instant-gratification junkie, it pains me to share the honest truth about building a friend network: it’s going to take time.

But think of the tradeoffs — everything I mentioned above and that in a way, you’re acting as a sort of matchmaker between high-quality content and sites who are open to referencing it.

I also believe that this type of outreach campaign makes us better marketers. Spamming people gets old. And if we can work together to find a way to promote each other's high-quality content, then I’m all for it. Because in the end, it’s about making a better user experience for readers and promoting content that deserves to be promoted.

How has your link building program evolved over the years? Have you been able to create a network of friends for your space? Leave a comment below!

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Link building continues to be one of the most important SEO strategies. There is still a great correlation between the number of links and high organic rankings. This is why any SEO strategy could not be complete without link building.

Search engines, especially Google, have made link building a lot more difficult. This makes link building campaigns a lot more complicated. It requires careful planning and takes a lot of time and patience to execute.

It could quite be frustrating to launch a link building campaign for months and see no increase in your website’s traffic or rankings and one of these might be the reason why your link building efforts are not working.

Your Links are from Irrelevant Websites

Just like for content, relevance is important for any link building campaign. If your website’s niche is business and finance, it wouldn’t make sense for search engines if you get links from a medical website.

Link relevance is just as important as authority. Both of these are strong link-related ranking factors.

If you find irrelevant links on your Search Console Link Report, don’t disavow it just yet! If Google thinks a link is irrelevant, they are smart enough to devalue it. So unless you receive a manual action, don’t disavow immediately.

If you have guest blogging on the list of your strategies, plan it out and don’t just send emails to random webmasters. Create a list of websites in your niche that are not direct competitors where you could contribute articles that will provide value.

You’re Not Getting Referral Traffic

If you’re building links for the sake of just getting a backlink, then you’re stuck in the old ways and you need to catch up. Link building today goes hand in hand with content marketing. You create great content to get people to go to your website and read your content.

Before you build a link on a website, you need to ask yourself: “Would people click on my link?”. The more likely a person clicks on your link, the more a link is valued regardless if it’s NoFollow or DoFollow.

If you’re doing a link building campaign, check your Google Analytics account and go to your Acquisition report. Monitor and identify the websites you are getting clicks from to better plan your strategy.

Imbalance Between Links Built and Links Earned

Do you want to know the best way to build links? Earn them. The reality is, Google hates link building because it’s too manipulative that is why they have taken steps to make it more difficult. If all of your links are built and none of them are organic, then you have a bad link profile.

While a lot of common link building strategies still work, to Google, nothing beats more than acquiring links because of great content. That is why the most successful link building campaigns involve great blogs.

There is no doubt that to Google, content is king. Building links to your website is good but you need to have a balance in between. Create good content that people would love to read and link to and links will come without forcing it.

Not Enough Referring Domains

A backlink profile with thousands of referring pages might look great but what matters to Google more is the number of referring domains. Even if you get 10 links because you contributed 10 guest articles in a website, it will only count as one referring domain.

This was once abused before that is why link directories and link farms became a business in the 2000s. You place a link in a website and that website scatters your link in different pages inside giving you hundreds of referring pages from just website.

You could use Google Search Console’s link report to check if you have a good ratio between incoming links and linking website/referring domains.

If you’re building links, make sure you don’t get links from the same websites just because it’s easier. Focus on building relationships, connect with different webmasters, and refrain from buying links from link farms or PBNs because they just don’t work anymore!

Slow Link Velocity

Acquiring a link in a day is one thing, acquiring more links over time is another. Link velocity is about how slow or fast your website is acquiring backlinks. If you’re losing more links than your gaining, it might be a sign that people are losing trust on your website. At the same time, if you’re gaining links too fast, it might be a sign to Google that you’re doing something fishy.

You could use Ahrefs to check how the growth of your links looks like. Here’s what a great link velocity look like:

Make sure that you build links as natural as possible. You don’t have to build a thousand links in a month just to relax the next month. Never sacrifice quality for quantity. It is better for you to build 5 to 10 high-quality links in a month than produce a thousand random links.

Lost Backlinks

Losing backlinks can be caused by different things. It might be the website closed for good, the page was deleted, or maybe the webmaster decided to remove your links from a post. If you want to check for lost backlinks, you could use Ahrefs.

You could either check for Lost Backlinks or Lost Referring Pages. I usually prefer checking the Lost Backlinks report because it specifically says what page I was linked before.

A loss is a loss but you could still try to get them back. If you lost a backlink from a blog post that linked to you as a source, you could reach out to the webmaster and ask why your link was removed. It might be because your page was outdated or it returns a 404 Error. This could be an opportunity for you to update your content or fix errors and ask webmasters to link back to you again.

Competitors Have Better Links

If you’ve been building links for months and still haven’t overthrown your competitor who is at the top spot, then most likely they have better, more high-quality links.

Take note of “high-quality links”. Even if you check Ahrefs or other backlinks checker tools out there and see that you have more links than your competitor; quality will always have more value than quantity.

Do research on what your competition is doing. Competitive link building is one of the best ways to build links. Find out who is linking to your competitor and try to get them to link to you.

Other SEO Factors are Not Optimized

Link building is great but it is not everything. Google uses more than 200 ranking factors and links are just one of them. No website gets to be successful by relying on links alone so don’t give yourself too much headache.

There is always room for optimization. Aside from acquiring links on a regular basis, you should also focus on regularly producing high-quality content, making your website mobile-friendly, improving site speed, and many more.

Always remember that SEO should be holistic. Try to find a balance in everything. While you can’t do all ranking factors perfectly, try to find what works for you.

Key Takeaway

Link building has evolved and it continues to evolve. In my opinion, links will continue to be relevant. It might not be as powerful as before but to rank high organically will always involve high-quality links.

A great link building campaign is the one that follows Google’s guidelines and it goes hand in hand with other SEO strategies. If you see that your link building campaign does not work, learn how to step back, investigate, and restrategize.

Read more: seo-hacker.com

There’s a lot of material out there, on this site and others, about the importance of link-building. Normally, its effectiveness is either taken for granted or viewed as implied by ranking factor studies — the latter of which doesn't necessarily show that correlated factors actually drive performance. The real picture is one in which links clearly remain important, but where their role is nuanced.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to dig a little deeper into an individual link-building campaign that takes place over a relatively short period of time. I wanted to see what results (besides just link-based metrics) could be attributed to it.

In this post, I will try to pin down the effects that came from the campaign and show that yes, getting a bunch of links from the success of some highly visible “big content’ can drive improved rankings

The reason you don’t see more posts like this one is noisy data — so much goes on with a website’s performance that it can be difficult to draw a hard and fast connection between a campaign and its results for a business’s bottom line. This is especially true for link-building, for three reasons:

Websites are naturally accruing links anyway — both the target of the campaign and their competitors To some extent, we anticipate a domain-wide effect, which will as such be proportionately small and hard to pin down vs. noise from the algorithm and competitor activity Links do not have such a step-change impact as technical fixes or creation of new landing pages

However, at Distilled we recently had an opportunity with a particularly strong piece on a niche site to analyze a situation where the impact of our work ought to be more clearly visible among the broader noise. Take a look at these graphs, which show the linking-root domain acquisition of a client of ours over the last two years, as measured by Majestic and Ahrefs respectively:

See what I mean about noise? And I’m saying this is an unusually clear cut case. We actually built nine creative pieces, with link acquisition as one of the goals, for this client, over a two-year period. We’ve talked before about the campaign as a whole, here. There’s one that stands out in both graphs, though which is the one that launched in March 2018.

This gives us a rare, valuable opportunity to see which other metrics, which might have more direct business value, had noticeable changes around that time.

What might we expect to happen?

The theory is simple: Links remain part of Google’s algorithm, and so more links to a site mean better rankings. However, the reality is more complex — in our experience, creative pieces as link-building assets tend to result in two types of links:

Links to the creative piece, which in turn links, typically, to the site’s homepage Links directly to the homepage of the client site — e.g. “Research by client (client.com) indicates that…”

The interesting thing here is that for many sites, the homepage is not a core landing page. I’ve written before about how it’s almost impossible to have a good mental model for internal link equity flow, which makes the actual impact of the piece on core pages almost certainly not zero, but otherwise hard to predict. On the same subject, I’d also recommend this video by Dixon Jones at Majestic.

In a similar vein, we also know that the complexities of PageRank are themselves only a part of the unknowable complexities of Google’s ranking algorithm, meaning we can’t guarantee that adding links always moves the needle. I recently recorded this Whiteboard Friday where I mention some recent research by my colleague Tom Capper, which shows how unpredictable these effects can be.

The particular client example I’ve been referring to in this post had two things going for it which, again, brought unusual clarity to these effects:

The homepage was, in fact, a core ranking URL It was struggling to make its way onto page 1 for many reasonable target terms

Both of these ought to make it an ideal candidate for clearcut benefits from high-quality link building. (This isn’t to say link-building cannot work if these criteria are not met — just that the results will be harder to analyze!)

1st order results

Precisely because of the difficulty in analysis mentioned above, we find clients normally prefer to assess the performance of link-building campaigns in terms of 1st order benefits — by which I mean the performance of the actual creative piece, rather than their commercial landing pages.

The particular piece that stands out in those link acquisition graphs above earned the following 1st order benefits (and I’ve included graphs from our internal tracking platform so you can get a feel for the pace of acquisition):

228 LRDs peak (204 “fresh” index shown below), of which ~145 within a month of launch:

2,140 Facebook shares at the peak, of which ~1,750 within a month of launch:

82,584 landings in Google Analytics, of which ~67,000 within a month of launch:

I mentioned above that not all links tend to be directed at the piece itself, with journalists instead often referencing the homepage. 145 (domain-unique) links were directed at this piece by mid-April, but you’ll notice that March beat an average month by ~200 LRDs, and April also outperformed by ~100. By my back-of-the-envelope maths, you might want to claim as many as 300 LRDs driven to the whole domain by this piece, but your opinion may differ!

Showing the ways it worked

Right, I did say I’d link this at least to rankings, didn’t I?

Remember: This was part of a campaign of 9 pieces, and it launched mid-March, with most 1st order metrics, or leading indicators, coming through within a month (and no major technical changes around this time). There is some signal in among the noise here. Check out this graph, showing the number of keywords ranked for, according to Ahrefs:

Notice that change in gradient after the launch? (And, for the cynics among you, the piece itself only ranks for 20 keywords itself according to this same data source — that wasn’t a primary goal with this content).

Here are the rankings for the client’s (fairly ambitious!) target keywords:

I’d particularly draw your attention to the movement from the “11–20” to “4–10” group, which is consistent with the research by my colleague Tom Capper that I mentioned above. (Sidenote: it was nice to see the client’s Domain Authority increase relative to their competitive set in the recent update. The improvements to DA, aimed at making it better at predicting ranking ability, appear to have worked in this sample-size-one case!).

You can see this pattern more clearly in this graph, which we presented to the client when the campaign concluded late last year:

This effect is surprisingly clear-cut, but it might well be that to continue moving up the SERP, from positions 4–10 to positions 1–3, a very different type of work is needed — perhaps one emphasizing brand, or intent matching.

How can I do this for my site/client?

Here are some useful resources to help when starting on your creative campaigns:

Mark - How to make sticky content

Hannah - What is content strategy

Leonie - How to make award winning creative content - Part 1

Leonie - How to make award winning creative content - Part 2

Conclusion: Big content for links can work

As I mentioned above, it’s surprisingly unusual to see such a clear and obvious case of link-building work moving rankings in a lasting way. This has certain similarities with other such cases we’ve seen in recent years, though:

The site started fairly small (if nothing else, this makes the signal bigger relative to the noise) It had target terms that were on the cusp of first-page rankings Some search competitors had far stronger domains

The reports that “links are dead” have, apparently, been greatly exaggerated — instead, it’s just that the picture has gotten more complex.

Obviously Distilled clients are only a finite sample, however, so I’d love to hear your experiences of successful link-building, and, crucially, the kind of situations in which they moved rankings, in the comments below!

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That’s why it’s on you to regularly audit your link building strategy, and figure out if you’re really getting the best backlinks for your brand.

In this article, we’ll cover some of the ways that link building has evolved, and some of the best strategies to get quality backlinks in 2019.

The Best Backlinks in 2019: Big-Picture Link Building

Let’s start with a big-picture perspective on link building, including why it’s important and how it’s developed in recent years.

Backlinks are just hyperlinks on the internet that point to your domain (and the various pages within that domain). They’re important because they’re considered as a marker of trustworthiness in PageRank, the algorithm at the heart of Google Search. Basically, Google wants to rank its most trustworthy results above its less-trustworthy results, assuming relevance is equal. It uses the number and quality of inbound links to determine how trustworthy a site is; in other words, if you get quality backlinks from many different high-authority publishers, your own domain authority will increase. The higher your domain and page-level authority, the higher you’re going to rank in searches.

In an ideal world, links would naturally be distributed according to which content is best—but this rarely happens unprovoked. Link building is a strategy meant to help companies generate inbound links intentionally, earning domain authority as well as direct traffic.

Google hasn’t tinkered with the link-relevant side of its algorithm much in previous years. The last major addition to Penguin (Google’s link-centric algorithm) occurred in October of 2016. Throughout 2018 and 2019 (so far), there have been a few important updates, including carousel changes, mobile layout changes, unconfirmed rollouts resulting in ranking fluctuations, and a core update in March of 2019. None of these updates have had a substantial impact on how links are evaluated in Google Search, but it’s still important to review and audit your link building practices in 2019 to ensure they’re up-to-date—and getting you the best backlinks possible.

How to Get Quality Backlinks

It’s not effective to build links indiscriminately. In fact, Google actively cautions webmasters against these activities. Built into Google’s search algorithm (via Penguin) is a system that gauges the relevance, value, and “natural” qualities of each link on the internet. If it seems unnatural, out of place, or intentionally built to boost your authority, it may not pass authority to your domain. In some cases, it may actively hurt your authority score with a Google penalty.

So how can you get quality backlinks?

We’ll go over individual strategies to get the best backlinks for your brand in the next section, but it’s best to start with a high-level overview. Google wants to see links that are contextually relevant, valuable for readers, diverse in nature, and featured on the best-quality publishers available. The best way to achieve these criteria while still controlling your campaign enough to guarantee placement is through active offsite guest posting.

You’ll start by creating linkable assets on your site (i.e., high-quality onsite articles with strong facts, statistics, and/or quotes). Then, you’ll develop offsite articles, fine-tuned for specific publishers that are ideally both relevant to your brand and authoritative overall. These articles will each feature a link back to an article or resources on your home domain. Over time, as you grow your network of publishers and work your way up the ladder of offsite authority, your authority and rankings will grow.

Get Links in 2019: Top Strategies for Expert Link Building

With that core architecture in mind, these are the best link building strategies to help you develop your campaign in 2019:

Get quality backlinks with a link building agency. Building quality backlinks on your own is challenging for many reasons. You’ll be in charge of selecting links, developing content, and establishing new relationships with a wide range of different publishers. But if you work with a link building agency, you’ll be able to tap into their already-experienced network of content writers, and their already-established network of publisher relationships. There are many types of link building agencies out there, some of which may try to offer link schemes or low-quality services, so it’s important to verify you’re working with an agency that’s reputable and committed to getting quality backlinks for your brand. That said, if you can find a valuable partner, your link building agency should be able to build better backlinks and build them more reliably, consistently, and cost-efficiently than you can on your own. Focus on topics more than keywords. Keywords are a divisive topic in the link building community because while they do serve an important purpose, they also need to be considered in context. In the old days of SEO, you could optimize both your offsite content title and the anchor text of your link to include specific keywords and phrases identical to the ones you want to rank for. These days, thanks to the semantic capabilities of the Hummingbird update and Google’s zero-tolerance policy for keyword stuffing, things are more complex. It’s certainly fine to optimize for specific keywords in your link building strategy, so long as they remain contextually relevant and “natural” in the article, but it’s usually better to focus on high-level topics. That way, you’ll naturally optimize for a wide range of phrases synonymous with your target phrase. Remember the best backlinks point to quality content. Strong backlinks should point to strong content. If the link leads to a well-written, well-researched piece of content on your website, it will be less likely to be removed by publishers and more likely to be valued by readers. Accordingly, your link building strategy should always start with onsite content. This is counterintuitive to many link building newcomers, who want to jump into the offsite content game as soon as possible. But if you want the best backlinks in 2019, you need to have these valuable anchor points. Get links from big publishers. It’s true that both the quantity and quality of links pointing to your site will play into your site’s perceived trustworthiness, but they aren’t on equal footing. A single link from a high-profile, authoritative publisher is going to be much more valuable than several links from mid-tier or low-tier publishers. You’ll need to rebalance your link building strategy in 2019 according to this rule. Obviously, you won’t be able to get to high-tier publishers right away (especially if you don’t have much existing brand credibility), but you should be able to optimize your strategy in a way that helps you climb that authoritative ladder. In other words, strive to get featured in bigger, better publishers, expanding vertically, rather than spending your effort expanding horizontally. Get links from lots of publishers. Building additional links on a single domain will yield diminishing returns. When you get that first quality backlink, you’ll receive a ton of authority for your domain (and the page you’re pointing to). When you build the second, you’ll receive a small boost, but not a very noticeable one. Subsequent links will continue to decline in authority passed. Accordingly, one of the best ways to expand your link building strategy is to try and build links on as many new publishers as possible. Maintaining relationships with your previous publishers can be valuable, especially if you’re interested in the secondary benefits of link building, but the best backlinks will always be those built on a publisher for the first time. Don’t skimp on link placement standards. When you’re building lots of backlinks, it’s easy to get lazy and start churning out half-hearted content. But every link you build deserves your full attention and your highest standards—even on lower-tier publishers. Scrutinize each new link to ensure it makes sense in the body of the article, is placed in a way that’s valuable to readers, and is surrounded by similar links to other authorities. This will help you maximize the long-term health of your links and improve your reputation with publishers of all levels. Mix up dofollow and nofollow links. In case you aren’t familiar, “dofollow” links are standard hyperlinks, followed by Google’s web crawlers and valued as passers of authority. Nofollow links are marked with a special tag that prevents web crawlers from considering them. Nofollow links are often used by publishers as a way to preserve their reputation or ensure their writers aren’t creating content meant to manipulate search engines. While dofollow links are inherently more valuable in some ways, that doesn’t mean you should neglect nofollow links. Nofollow links can still pass traffic to your site (just not authority), and can be valuable ways to increase your brand exposure and build relationships with more publishers. Choose dofollow when you have a choice, but don’t pass up a valuable nofollow opportunity. Avoid link schemes at all costs. There is no justification for using a link scheme. Intentionally placing links in a way that violates Google’s terms of service is inevitably going to result in a penalty, or at the very least, a marred reputation. Many cheap link building services masquerade as legitimate link building practices, but don’t be fooled; if content isn’t a core part of their campaign to get quality backlinks, you should immediately be suspicious. Link schemes may seem like a quick way to get a cheap boost, but they’re always going to harm you in the end. Mimic your competitors’ link building strategies. If you’re stuck on where to build links, consider looking at the backlink profiles of your competitors. Chances are, there are dozens, if not hundreds of companies much like yours also trying to get quality backlinks as efficiently as possible. If you study where they’re building links, you’ll get a powerful hint for the publishers you should go after next—or at least inspiration on how to think about the future possibilities. It’s not a good idea to copy your competitors’ strategies directly; you’ll find it hard to outpace them, and besides, you probably have subtly different goals. However, it’s worth taking a look to learn more about your competitive environment. There are many backlink profile tools you can use to perform this evaluation, including Ahrefs’s Backlink Checker and Moz’s Link Explorer. Evaluate your best backlinks (and repeat the process that got them). While you have your backlink checker of choice pulled up, take a look at the backlinks you’ve built for your own domain. You can also check out how much referral traffic they’re generating by consulting Google Analytics. If you’re building links on multiple publishers, it will soon be obvious which posts were definitely worth the effort and which ones fell short of a favorable return. This information should be dictating where you choose to build links next; are there publishers that serve the same niche as your most valuable ones? Are there editors or webmasters of valuable domains who have access to other prominent domains? Is there a particular content topic or linking strategy that seems to be generating disproportionately high interest? Optimizing Your Link Building Strategy

If you’re interested in getting the best backlinks, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed. In addition to understanding the nuances and complexities of link building and search engine optimization (SEO), to get quality backlinks, you’ll need to go through the effort of producing, editing, publishing, and distributing content.

That’s why it’s in your best interest to work with a link building agency, which can get quality backlinks for your site much more efficiently—and in many cases, for less time and money than you’d spend on your own. If you’re interested in learning more about our link building strategies, or if you’re ready to get quality backlinks for your site, contact us at SEO.co today for a free consultation!

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