From keyword research to link building, effective SEO strategies help increase your company’s exposure in search engine result pages. While there are many different facets of a well-thought-out SEO strategy, it’s important to understand and determine which aspects of SEO will make the greatest impact on your organization. To execute an in-depth SEO strategy, link building is critical. In fact, 58.1% of SEO specialists believe that backlinks have a big impact on search engine rankings. In this article, we’re going to discuss the importance of link building and the top 5 best practices to achieve SEO success.

What is Link Building?

Link building is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of inbound links to your website. For example, when another blog refers to a page from your website that’s called a backlink. The more backlinks a page has the more authority it gains. Although, backlinks are especially impactful when a high-quality page links back to your blog or site.

For instance, let’s say Gartner, a highly recognized website, backlinks to a blog of yours. Similarly, a site that’s only been running for 2 months hyperlinks to the same blog of yours. Both are great ways to improve the quantity of your backlinks, however, the Gartner article is much more credible. Therefore, the Gartner backlink will be the most impactful in boosting your domain authority.

Essentially, link building is extremely helpful in maximizing your SEO efforts. A recent study by Backlinko found that the first result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2-10. To amplify your SEO efforts, consider implementing link building into your strategy to gain referral traffic, grow page authority, and increase SERP rankings. Now, let’s dive into the 5 best practices for link building.

1. Develop Consistent Quality Blog Posts

The first step in link building is to ensure you actually have web pages and/or blogs for other organizations to link back to. But writing consistent blog posts is not enough to earn a backlink. You need to create useful and educational content that is worthy of sharing. Developing consistent blog posts that showcase your authority and knowledge on a given topic positions your organization as an expert and thought leader in your industry.

For example, try writing in-depth and valuable blogs such as “The Ultimate Guide to SEO” or “Everything You Need to Know About SEO” to prove that your organization is a trustworthy source of information. Keep in mind, if a blog’s title is “The Ultimate Guide to SEO” it is not sufficient enough to earn a backlink without the quality information to back up that claim. It’s also important to be cognizant of clickbait — titles that are specifically written to attract attention and encourage visitors to click through while the content itself has no merit on the title’s topic. Ultimately, it’s the unique insight shared within the blog that will entice other organizations to cite the page in their web content.

2. Link to Your Previous Blog Posts

We’ve all heard the saying, “if you want something done, you have to do it yourself." While it can be applied to most things in life, this saying is also relevant when it comes to link building. You can actually increase the domain authority and consequently the search engine ranking of two of your own blogs by backlinking.

Internal link building is a great SEO tactic to gaining domain authority. In fact, 51% of SEOs say blog posts should include 2-3 internal links. For example, let’s take a look at two of our very own Möve Marketing blogs. The first blog is How to Write Effective & Catchy Email Subject Lines and the second is 5 Common Mistakes Email Marketers Make Before Reading This. Since both blogs discuss the main topic of email marketing, it’s easy to find a common place to connect the two. In this case, blog #1 backlinks to blog #2 in the section “A/B Test Subject Lines”. This connection between the blogs boosts domain authority for BOTH blogs — the blog being linked and the blog linking out.

How is this possible? Since blog #2 is hyperlinked in blog #1, its domain authority is automatically augmented. On the other hand, blog #1 also gains authority as it is now linked to a valuable and trustworthy, authoritative web page.

3. Create Case Studies

Case studies are a great way to highlight your organization’s success. Often, case studies are used in sales pitches and sent behind the scenes via email. We recommend posting a few of your organization’s case studies to your website as landing pages. Why? Not only do case studies showcase your organization’s work, they also make great backlinks! Think about it. What better source to gain valuable, accurate, and original information than from a case study?

Here’s an example. Let’s say your organization develops technology that helps app developers create a better UI design. And so, you create a case study about an instance where your DevOps team helped a company improve their customer’s user experience by 25%. During your conversations with the decision-makers at that company, you both decide it would be a great idea to create a case study surrounding the success of your collaboration. Now, the company you helped is in a position to share their user experience progression with their customers via the case study and your organization secures a backlink to your site. It’s a win-win!

4. Write Guest Blog Posts

Guest blog posts are a great way to earn backlinks to your business from another authoritative site. Finding the right outlets to write guest blog posts for is no small feat, however. It takes a lot of research and relationship-building to execute. But don’t worry, there are many ways you can go about writing guest blog posts to improve your brand’s credibility and awareness to increase your SERP rankings.

One example is to apply to be a contributing writer for certain media outlets like Forbes or Entrepreneur. Another way to earn guest posts is to develop relationships with other organizations, quality blogs, and media outlets and inquire about writing a guest post. Again, here is where the research aspect comes into play. It’s necessary to obtain some background information on the outlet you’re looking to guest write for — do they even allow for guest posting?

Ultimately, there is no one way to carry out a link building strategy. Yet, writing a guest post is a surefire way to earn backlinks to your website’s content. And that’s because you’d be the one adding them!

5. Identify Broken Links

Broken links are detrimental to your SEO. You could have 10 sites backlink to your blog but if your link is broken, there is no way for Google to crawl or index your site. This means Google cannot rank your page in search results at all. It’s extremely important that you check and regularly monitor your links. This includes any outbound links you hyperlink to in your blogs as well. For instance, if your blog links out to another website but that link is broken, your domain authority is lowered. This is due to the poor quality of the link.

The best way to identify broken inbound and outbound links is to use site-crawling tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush. But, identifying broken links is just the beginning. Next, you need to fix and update them. This is actually fairly simple. Broken links typically occur when a page is moved or deleted. If a page has moved and you have access to the updated link, you can simply swap out the broken link for the new one. However, if the page was deleted, you’ll have to remove the broken hyperlink from your site altogether.