Advanced Techniques for Link Building as a Future SEO Strategy

The exact details of Google's search algorithms are not known to the public, so it's a bit difficult to know exactly what the search giant is looking for on high-quality websites.

One of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of these quality rankings is the importance of "white-hat" link building as part of a sound SEO strategy. The term refers to the desire to create a good product or service that people want to link to and that over time can increase your search ranking.

The confusion about the "white hat" was sparked during a Google hangout in February 2015 with John Mueller, one of the search company's webmasters: Mueller warned against the practice of "spammy link building," which means that companies violate Google's policies by buying links from sites or making irrelevant sites link back to theirs.

In November 2015, Google helped alleviate the problem by publishing a comprehensive 150-page guide explaining the company's search quality rankings. The aim was to enable webmasters to proactively create relevant websites to avoid the penalties associated with frequent updates by Penguin and Panda (Google algorithms that troll for violations such as duplicate or low-quality pages).

For those of you who haven't had time to read the extensive Google Handbook and all the subsequent forums, blogs and comments that Google has produced, here are some tips on how to get high-quality inbound links that will move your website up in search engine rankings.

Explore what your competition is doing

The first step in creating a link building strategy is to understand what works for others. No matter what you are looking for online, there are already a number of results for it. If you want to compete with these existing sites, you need to play the same game as them.

One of my favorite tools for examining the incoming links to any website is the Common Backlinks Tool (my blog lists more of my favorite backlink tools).

With the Shared Backlinks tool, you can enter up to 10 websites to see what backlinks they all have in common. If everyone has an inbound link from a specific website, that website is likely to be a trusted and respected source for your industry.

You don't want to be the only website that focuses on entrepreneurs and you don't want to be found on big websites like Entrepreneur (you know the others). It is an indication that you are not a trusted source on this topic.

Once you understand what the competition is doing, you can develop a targeted link building strategy that will put you in the top tier of the business community.

Establish business relationships

Now that you know who to turn to, it's time to build business relationships with these influential companies.

Journalists and other business people hate spam and often ignore requests from people they do not know. To get their attention, you need to get involved in their communities.

On a website like Huffington Post, it's as easy to get the blogging team's attention as linking to your Facebook account and leaving relevant comments on articles. HuffPo is a community-oriented blogging site that values and encourages its members' contributions. You can also reach out to employees by finding their names and email addresses, either on individual articles or in the company's imprint.

Each company has contact information that can be found on the company's website. Start a conversation with the company, introduce yourself and give the employees valuable information and tips. This puts you and your company in front of the right people who are more likely to notice when you post relevant content on your website and use you as a source.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is another great place to register as a source (and even as a blogger, if that's true). When you sign up for this service, you will receive targeted emails three times a day with a list of stories that journalists are looking for sources that are currently being researched. If you provide relevant information, these authors will often provide a back link to your site when they quote you for their stories.

Guest article with relevant content

If you want something done right, it is of course best if you do it yourself. A guest report directly on relevant websites is one of the best ways to consolidate your status as a professional. Unfortunately, guest posting is such a common practice for marketers (and fortunately for readers as well) that publishers are becoming increasingly selective about what content they will accept from whom.

To successfully offer a guest post on a blog, you need to understand the tone and voice of a publication. Then you can create specific, actionable and relevant content that complies with the site's guidelines.

To use guest posting effectively as an SEO strategy for link building, you need links within the content with a varied anchor text that shows Google that your site is a relevant source for one to five word keywords on the subject.

Think about how you see a television program compared to an advertising spot. Although a commercial is an effective marketing tool, you want your content to be part of the show. Instead of selling directly, demonstrate a value that leads readers to you when they have problems that you can solve.

Look for dead links

There's nothing more frustrating than clicking on a link to find more information, only to be presented with a 404 splash page (a "page not found" notification). However, as an experienced online marketer, you as an online marketer have the opportunity to get a valuable backlink to your site when others fail to keep the links up to date.

Whenever you come across a broken link while researching information about your industry, contact the publisher of the publication to point it out and offer an alternative within your website.

If you can successfully explain to the publication why this backlink is affecting their web traffic and how your information can help readers, you will not only get a backlink, but you will also build trust in the publication. This is also a great opportunity to suggest a guest blog and even win an editorial column, since you have just proven your worth as a trusted source.

Use schema markup

Since 2013, Google has focused on including infoboxes in search results and using the knowledge graph to display relevant semantic information for the search. Instead of having to click through to a website, users could find general answers to frequently asked questions on the search page itself.

While this may seem like a wasted effort at link building, it's actually an easy way to draw attention to your site, as snippets of pages within your site appear right at the top of Google search results. You can't pay for this kind of ranking, which is superior even to sponsored posts.

The relevance of the site is an important assessment factor for SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) rankings, and Google will obviously see itself as the most relevant site on the Internet. Best of all, you don't have to be the top search result to be displayed in the info box.

To be part of the knowledge graph, you need to implement schema markup in your website. Google defines this as "code that you insert on your website to help search engines deliver more informative results for users". Schema.org, sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandax, provides everything you need to know to get started using schema markup.

Use social media

On the way to the future, social media are becoming more and more important for determining search results. Gaining backlinks in social media shows search engines that you are creating content that people actively share within their social groups.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to include social media sharing buttons on every piece of content you create. It's a call to action for every reader to share your information and helps a post or page go viral.

When Google's algorithms detect that a page resonates on social media networks, that page is indexed and presented to search quality rankers to determine why. This pulls the URL out of the unknown ambiguity of page 175648 of the search result on page 1.

Conclusion

SEO experts have debated the effectiveness of link building as an online marketing tool for as long as search engines have existed.

Although Mueller and other Google webmasters have warned against link building as an SEO strategy, experienced marketing experts know that they are actually warning against spammy black-hat techniques.

Just spamming the comment section of any website or creating fake websites to reinforce your inbound links will punish your site.

Instead, focus on creating content that is relevant to the real-life questions and problems people encounter. Become a subject matter expert and provide valuable and factual information backed up by statistics to attract readers and prove your worth.

By building relationships with trusted sources, you can become a trusted online source yourself, increasing the visibility of your brand to both readers and search engine robots.