5 Essential Link Building Strategies to Get Quality Traffic

Driving quality traffic to a website is perhaps the major goal of any SEO practitioner. Beginning with the very first days of Web 1.0, there have been a lot of strategies that brought a 15-second fame after which you had to recover after search algorithms hits.

However, one tactic remained unchanged and still gets a huge number of quality links to your website.

Although the Panda and Penguin updates produced many changes as to the way we look at off-page and on-page SEO, Hummingbird makes it compulsory that we get Google-proof link-building strategies if we don’t want to get into the dark cage of the second page and beyond a SERP.

Before launching your link-building campaign, it is essential to get your link-building strategy right. Here are the most important steps that will help you select the perfect tactics to implement.

How to Understand Google’s Quality Rules

There are several distinct guidelines to show what you should do:

·         Don’t use content that is scraped from well-ranked websites.
·         Avoid poor guest posting;
·         Don’t syndicate your own content for popular blogs;
·         Forget about doorway websites;
·         Don’t run affiliate programs.

Relevance Matters

While the quality of the websites that link to your website is of crucial importance, it is equally essential that these websites are relevant to your business. You page rank strongly depends upon how useful users find a search result.

Here is a four-step test to figure out if a link is relevant:

·       Ensure the link you’ve earned come from sites in the same field as yours;

·       If the website is not related to yours, find a section that has to do with your business;

·       Links from website that don’t relate to yours will work only if the content on the page that gives the link is related to the content on your webpage directly;

·       Your earned link should be relevant to the overall context of the page that gave you the link.

Diversify Your Link Building Strategy

Don’t pick and stick to one single link-building approach. By narrowing your tactics, you are more likely to lose importance in the eyes of Google.

Here are the link-building strategies that still matter in 2014:

• Producing high quality content;
• Getting recommendations and citations from trusted websites;
• Syndicating your content;
• Becoming a popular guest blogger;
• Etc. 

Rand Fishkin of Moz said that a clear shift in link-building tactics has been noticed in 2014. See the illustration below.

Don’t Use the Strategy Your Competitors Do

Many SEO practitioners today forget about on extremely important thing: brand building. The greater brand awareness, the stronger your brand image. Thus, it won’t take much effort to get quality links.

The only way you can get a unique identity is using your own tactics and not copying the ones your competitors use. Analyze the two brands illustrated below. They both target the same audience, but use two different approaches. 

Make the Anchor Texts Natural

The idea here is simple. Stop using keywords as anchors for each link you create. Your readers are smart enough. Make your links natural and don’t worry if your anchor text doesn’t match your keywords. As long as the link is relevant, you work is done.