One of the most common strategies in digital marketing is link building. However, links are not the central core of SEO, but they do play an important role when it comes to ranking factor. Gaining external links is not that easy after all.

There are always some do’s and don’ts of every strategy or technique. Here are some for Link Building.

Best Practices

Natural Links
The best way to generate external link is to produce a very high-quality content. Your content should have the right keywords and be attractive to gain natural links. Other pages will include your links only when you sound like an authoritative source on a particular topic.

Bloggers and Professionals
Initially, while entering the content game, you might not have the highest-ranking content. You can link with other bloggers and practitioners to grow up. It is evident that most of the time the content of the beginners hard to find organically. Therefore, it is advised to collaborate with other bloggers. You can link other’s content, and they can link yours. If your content is valuable, then you will get the required connections.

Be Careful with Paid Links
Often you find the opportunity to link your content using paid advertisements. However, you need to be careful to pay only sites that are relevant and highly authoritative. Buying links is a risk and not worth for most of the businesses.

Read Also: 3 Link Building Lessons For Beginners

Self-Built Link
Self-linking is always a good option for any content writer. You can comment on your blogs and interact with other relevant content. Google considers these relationships as low-value, but this doesn’t mean that the worth of the material is reduced. There is always a small value regarding some links on a page.

Earn Links with Authoritative pages
The primary goal of making links from the best pages can be strategized actually. All you need to do is identify the top sites based on keyword search and determine the backlinks generated using various tools, for example, Open Site Explorer.

Referrals
Apart from SEO, the other objective is to gain quality referral traffic. While strategizing the tricks to obtain an external link, remember to make use of sites and authoritative voices to drive as many relevant traffic as possible.

Take advantage of Top Clients
Clients are the best source for getting link building. For a B2B, the opportunity is vast from the companies who have used your product or service. Reviews and Testimonial are good for SEO but adding links take it to the next level. You can offer attractive offers or discounts to customers who link to you on your blog.

Read Also: 10 Clever Marketing Tricks Using CRM, Link Building and More

A blog is a MUST
If you have no blog on the website, immediately stop everything that you have been doing. A blog should be the on the top of your list. It is the easiest way to constant share, update and deliver content to your readers or customers. It helps a lot to attract natural links. Linking to a blog makes more sense when compared to linking the homepage or the product page.

Attract the NEWS or PRESS
It is well known that media is quickly drawn to a newsworthy content. Writing something relevant or controversial can easily generate links.

Things to Avoid

Cloaking
It is always a bad practice to show one content to search engine and a different content to the readers. It harms the SEO to a great extent.

Injecting Links
It is a very appealing black hat technique. It helps to generate a lot of links easily and in a brief time. But injecting links will harm your website in the long run.

“Trading” links
Trading links with high ranking sites are completely acceptable. But if you try to exchange a relationship with every possible website, Google will consider it as spam. Over time, Google has grown smart and can easily find spam links. If you engage in link trading, it is advised that you follow the best practices and standards to gain its benefits.

Manipulation
Google will penalize your rankings if you abuse your external links. Working hard for the quality links is the only option and beneficial for the long run.

The Bottom Line

Link building is not that you gain in a short time. It is something that you should do for a long term. It is important to understand that the readers are the key to everything. You need to think about users constantly. If you include a link that is not relevant to an article, then your story is not worthy for the readers.