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Link Building 2024: How to Get Powerful Links For Your Website

Link building is a huge part of off-site SEO. But […]

link building

Link building is a huge part of off-site SEO. But after countless updates to Google’s algorithm, people started doubting the efficiency of building links.

Google themselves have stated that excessive link building (more specifically, reciprocal link exchanges) to manipulate your page rank is considered as a “link scheme”, and if Google catches you doing it, all of the links you built that way will be devalued.

But that only applies to excessive link exchanges. Organic links are still very much a ranking factor and an important one at that.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the most popular (and effective) link-building strategies that you can use to boost your SEO in 2024.

Before we start, here are a few things you should keep in mind if you’re planning to start link building. The email outreach process can get quite tedious if done manually, so it’s best to use some kind of email outreach software to automate a large chunk of the processes.

The most important asset you have for link building is your content. It needs to be informative, fresh, and linkable.

I would also recommend using Ahrefs. 

In no particular order, let’s kick off the article with the simplest strategy, and the most widely used.

Editorial (Anchor Text) Link Building

The premise of this strategy is extremely simple: you pick one of your articles you wish to build links for, look for other articles that mention your target keyword, and send your pitch to the SEOs, editors, and owners of those blogs.

One common mistake a lot of inexperienced link builders make is sending link pitches to competing articles. For example, nobody is going to link to your article about SEO from their own SEO guide.

Your keyword needs to be only briefly mentioned in the article rather than be its main topic. 

I use Respona for all of our link building. Its built-in search engine makes prospecting very simple. 

Some helpful search operators for finding relevant content for your link building campaign are “instreamset:url:blog”, “inbody”, and “intitle”.

These allow you to reveal pages that are part of a blog and have very specific words or phrases in their body and title.

So, for a hypothetical anchor text campaign for an SEO guide, the search string would look like this:

instreamset:url:blog inbody:”link building” intitle:”SEO”

They should work in other search engines as well.

Competitor Backlinks Strategy

This one strategy is my favorite. The reason for it is that the prospecting part is already done for you, and it is the most time-consuming part of the anchor text strategy.

In short, you’re going to be looking at your competitors’ articles, their backlink profiles, and pitching people who have given them a backlink to give it to you instead.

For this to work, you need content that is better than your competitors’ (longer, more informative, touches on topics they didn’t, etc.), and a strong value proposition in your pitch.

Let’s take a closer look at how to find prospects. For this scenario, let’s imagine that we are building links for this very article, a link building guide.

Let’s fire up Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and enter in “link building guide” as the keyword.

Let’s sort the results by referring domains to have the juiciest opportunities on top. The first result has approximately three thousand backlinks, which is potentially three thousand prospects, right there, at a snap of the fingers.

Let’s take a closer look at that page’s backlink profile. Copy the URL and paste it into the Site Explorer tab. 

Then, click on “Backlinks”.

On this page, let’s apply four filters: one link per domain, Dofollow, blogs, and English so that we’re only left with Dofollow backlinks from unique english blog posts. 

Hit “Export” to download the sheet. What I also do is clean it up even further. Once it’s downloaded, import it into Google Sheets or Excel and delete all of the websites that have a Domain Rating lower than 50 since I only go for higher-quality domains for our link building campaigns.

You can also use conditional formatting on the “Domain Rating” column to highlight all prospects with a DR lower than 50 to make the process easier and quicker.

Once the email list is cleaned up, I import it into Respona to find contact information and reach out to them in a highly-automated fashion, but you can use it with the software of your choice.

Broken Link Building

Broken link-building is another one of the most popular and highly effective link building strategies. Its advantage over the others is the fact that even though you’re still cold pitching prospects, your chance of getting links is significantly higher?

Why is that? Because if someone is already linking to a page (that doesn’t exist anymore), they are much more likely to link to your content because it helps fill the gap that was created by the 404.

The tricky part here is finding opportunities that are relevant to your existing content. In fact, it is often easier to find prospects first, and then create custom content to build links to.

Yes, it is time-consuming, but it is also very effective. Let’s take a closer look at the prospecting process. Once again, you will need the help of the mighty Ahrefs.

In site explorer, type in the URL of one of your competitors. Let’s do Neil Patel, just as an example. 

Then, go to the “Best by links” report and select the “404 not found” from the HTTP code drop-down. 

Now you can see your competitor’s pages that do not exist anymore but still have links pointing to them. Pick one that you like most (or the one that has the most links pointing to it) and start writing your own content to replace it!

Even though the titles say “not found”, you can still see the article names in the URL slug. Most URL slugs of high quality blogs have the main keyword of the article in it, so it is pretty easy to guess what the content was about.

Once done, pitch your prospects and inform them that they have a broken link on their page, and you have just the perfect content to replace it.

Here is a simple template you can use for your pitches:

Subject: Found a broken link on [Site Name]

“Hey [First Name],

This link directing to [Site Name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

By the way, we have just released an article that could plug that hole quite well:

[insert URL to your page]

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Sign-off]”

.EDU Link Building

It is no secret that backlinks from .edu and .gov resources are extremely authoritative and can make a huge impact on your site’s rankings. 

This is because .edu and .gov domains are only owned by government and learning institutions, and even though they might not have the best content in the world, those are real places where respected professors work, and Google knows this.

University websites don’t usually engage in link building, so how do you get on their radar? The answer is actually quite simple: with scholarships.

Most universities accept scholarships, so if you have some money to spare, why not offer them yours? The advantage of this strategy is that you will be receiving extremely authoritative backlinks from institutional websites and it’s very good for your local SEO.

The downside is, of course, that scholarships are not cheap. Typically, the smallest scholarships start at around $500. Also, keep in mind that you will need to come up with the rules of participation for the students, and the fact that you will need to go through all of the submissions once they start coming in.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is very much alive, even today, in 2024. The premise is as old as link building itself: you find resources that accept guest submissions, write articles for them and have a link back to your resource included in the author bio.

You can either look for sites that have a “write for us” page or try your luck pitching editors of blogs that don’t have such a page. It might come as a surprise, but blogs that don’t have a “write for us” page are often better guest posting opportunities that do. 

This is because blogs that receive submissions through a form usually have a less intense QA process, and if you’re pitching your post directly to an editor, you both get a chance to talk to each other and discuss the finer details of the content.

Conclusion

These are the top five link building strategies that are guaranteed to get you results in 2024. In fact, this article is a guest post in itself, which is proof that the strategies are working. 

Author’s Bio:
Managing brand partnerships at Respona, Vlad Orlov is a passionate writer and link builder. Having started writing articles at the age of 13, their once past-time hobby developed into a central piece of their professional life.