With only around six percent of people ever clicking onto a second page of search results, getting onto that first page is essential if you want your business to be noticed online. For a long time, one of the key factors that helps websites rank highly in search results has been backlinks. These are links from other websites to your content. Search engines use this as a measure of your authority on a topic and the helpfulness of your article. But how do you get other websites to link back to you in the first place? This article shares a few tips for doing just that.
Replace your competitors’ broken backlinks
This method requires a bit of research, but it can be very effective. You will first need to find web pages that contain links to your competitors’ content. There is software you can use to do this. Specifically, you want to look for links that no longer work; they send you to an error page. You can then create your own content that contains the same information. Send this to the owner of the site with the broken link, along with an email explaining that you spotted the broken link and why your article is a good replacement for it.
Create ‘skyscraper’ content
The skyscraper technique is just the industry term for a very simple concept – find a competitor’s piece of content in your niche that has lots of backlinks and write a better version. Just bear in mind that the second part is crucial. This will not work if you just reword what they wrote. You can then contact the sites that link to your competitor’s article and explain why yours would be a good replacement.
Look out for people mentioning your brand
People might write something about your brand without linking to it. There is software you can use to help you find these mentions, but you could even do it with a web search. Once you have found some which mention your brand in a positive or neutral context, send out a polite email to the creator and ask if they could link back to your site.
Conclusion
Effective link building is a cornerstone of any SEO strategy. These kinds of strategies are employed by the experts at SEO agencies like King Kong, but there is nothing stopping you from trying them out yourself if you are new to content creation.
