SEO Link Building: 11 Expert Tips to Drive More Traffic

For your online business to succeed, your target audience must be able to easily discover your website in search. To accomplish this goal, you need to optimize your link building strategy, which is a vital part of any effective SEO plan.

Links are the backbone of the web, but not all links are created equal. The right kind of links can enhance your online reputation, but the wrong kind can tank it. That’s why link building strategies are so vital for digital marketing and content marketing. You need to have a plan for getting high-quality links to boost your SEO.

In preparing this article, I spoke with 2 link building experts:

• Frank Spear, Link Acquisition Team Lead at Awesome Motive
• Cole Phan, PR Specialist at Awesome Motive

Frank and Cole have helped me put together this guide, which explains link building for SEO from start to finish. You can use these tips and examples to create your own successful link building strategy that drives traffic, so you can boost your lead generation and sales.

• What Is Link Building? (& Why It’s Important)
• Types of Links That Matter for SEO
• 11 Steps & Tips for Your Link Building Strategy
• Black Hat Link Building: Tactics to Avoid

What Is Link Building? (& Why It’s Important)

Link building is primarily the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your site. These links from other sites are called backlinks. They not only drive traffic to your site, but they’re also one of the top SEO ranking factors. Google uses backlinks to help gauge your site’s authority and relevance for particular search terms.

Here’s what Frank had to say about the importance of link building:

“Link building is crucial for your SEO strategy and connecting with your target audience. We’ve found that well-positioned backlinks send positive signals to Google, which helps position you in the SERPs (search engine results pages) as a high-quality, trustworthy resource.”

– Frank Spear, Link Acquisition Team Lead at Awesome Motive

Here’s an example of how backlinks work. Let’s say you have a gardening blog, and one of your posts is a DIY guide to building raised beds. Over time, other gardening blogs start linking to that post when they mention raised beds. Eventually, you get backlinks from several major industry publications, such as Better Homes & Gardens.

These backlinks signal to search engines that your post is high-quality and that you have authority and expertise on the topic. You start ranking high in Google searches for keywords like “how to build a raised bed,” and your blog traffic skyrockets.

Don’t Forget About Internal Linking

Link building also includes your internal linking strategy. Internal linking is when you add links to other pages within the same website. Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your site. Plus, they encourage engagement and keep visitors on your site for longer, which also boosts SEO.

Cole had this to say about the importance of internal links:

“Remember, internal links are just as important as external ones. Implement strong internal linking practices to create a well-connected network of pages, enhancing your overall SEO strategy.”

– Cole Phan, PR Specialist at Awesome Motive

Let’s go back to the gardening blog example. Your backlinks have helped you drive traffic to your raised bed post. Now, Google is starting to see you as an authority on raised beds and overall gardening DIY.

In your raised bed post, you link to several other related blog posts, such as building window boxes and a guide to raised bed soil. These internal links help search engines understand which other pages on your site cover similar topics. Slowly, these posts might start ranking higher on Google for their own keywords.

Types of Links That Matter for SEO

Before we explore the link building process, let’s define the different types of links you’ll be working with:

Internal Links

Internal links are the hyperlinks that connect one page on your website to another page within your domain. They help guide your visitors around your site, keeping them engaged and exploring. From an SEO perspective, internal links also improve page authority throughout your site and make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content.

Here’s an example of internal links on one of my own OptinMonster blog posts:

Internal links help search engines understand how your pages relate to one another and which pages are most important.

Outbound Links (or External links)

Outbound links take users from your site to an external website. These external links make your content more valuable by providing additional helpful information. They also show that you’ve researched your topic, especially when you provide outbound links to cite statistics, quotes, or case studies.

For example, I was recently updating our OptinMonster blog post about email unsubscribe rates. Throughout the article, I included outbound links to the original sources of statistics:

By linking to trustworthy external sources, you show search engines that you’re providing quality information. Just be sure to link to reputable sites, as low-quality outbound links can hurt your SEO.

Inbound Links (or Backlinks)

Inbound links, or backlinks, are links from other websites that point back to your site. As I mentioned above, backlinks tell search engines that your content is credible and worth mentioning. Good backlinks from reputable sites can boost your site’s authority and improve your search rankings. Building a strong set of backlinks should be a top priority for your SEO link building strategy.

Here’s an example of a backlink from Forbes to OptinMonster. In their article about crucial skills for small business owners, they quote our co-founder Thomas Griffin and linked to OptinMonster’s website:

Because backlink building requires the most planning and strategy, the majority of this guide will focus on backlinks.

Important Link Attributes for SEO

For your outbound links and backlinks, you also need to consider link attributes. Link attributes are special HTML tags that inform search engines how to treat the links. Essentially, these attributes determine whether the link contributes to the authority of the page it links to.

Here are the 2 most important link attribute categories:

1. Dofollow links are standard links that allow search engines to follow them and pass link authority from one site to another. If you don’t add a specific attribute, then the link defaults to being dofollow. When reputable sites link to your content with dofollow links, it signals to search engines that your site is trustworthy and relevant. When you include outbound links in your own content, you also have to decide whether you want to leave them as dofollow.
   
2. Nofollow links include a specific HTML attribute, rel=”nofollow”, that tells search engines not to follow the link. Therefore, nofollow links don’t pass on link authority. However, they still drive traffic to your site and can improve brand visibility. The link attributes rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc” (which stands for user-generated content) also do not give link authority.

If you use WordPress, you can easily add any necessary attributes in your link settings:

11 Steps & Tips for Your Link Building Strategy

Now that you understand the basics of link building, let’s explore specific steps and tips. This advice comes directly from Awesome Motive’s link acquisition team and is full of proven tactics that Frank and Cole have found successful.

These 11 link building techniques will help you develop an effective strategy to drive traffic to your site and improve SEO:

1. Create High-Quality Content to Start Earning Backlinks
2. Optimize Your Internal Links
3. Choose a Backlink Tracking Tool
4. Nurture Existing Relationships (& Build New Ones)
5. Get Backlinks Through Reviews
6. Use Guest Posts for Link Building
7. Try Broken Link Building
8. Always Follow Up With Link Partners
9. Check the Value of Existing and Potential Backlinks
10. Pay Attention to Link Diversity
11. Conduct Regular Link Audits

1. Create High-Quality Content to Start Earning Backlinks

The first step to link building is the most foundational one:

You need to create high-quality, helpful content that other sites want to link to.

These links are often called earned backlinks for organic backlinks. They’re the links that you earn naturally, just by other sites discovering your content and liking it enough to link to it.

Frank Spear says that valuable content is the cornerstone of link building:

“One of the best ways to organically build backlinks to your website (without having to do a lot of outreach) is to write high-quality content on your website. Cover a new angle, share in-house statistics, and offer something that brings true value to your target audience. If you do this enough, other writers will take notice and naturally link to you in their own work.”

– Frank Spear, Link Acquisition Team Lead at Awesome Motive

Cole seconded this tip and gave even more ideas for earning backlinks organically:

“Conduct thorough research to understand what people in your industry are focusing on, analyze their top-performing pages as well as their referral backlinks, and develop similar high-value content. Some examples include statistical posts, how-to guides, and product round-ups.”

– Cole Phan, PR Specialist at Awesome Motive

Want to learn how to improve your content to earn more backlinks?

Here are a few resources to help:

• Build a comprehensive content marketing strategy that caters to your target audience.
• Conduct and apply SEO keyword research to create content based on what your audience is searching for.
• Write great headlines to describe content to search engines and get more searchers to click.
• Follow these blog writing tips to drive more traffic.
• Include appealing calls to action (CTAs) to increase engagement.

Essentially, you should focus on creating relevant, helpful content that others can find through search. This strategy can naturally lead to other sites linking to your content.

2. Optimize Your Internal Links

While I’ll mostly focus on building backlinks, internal linking is also vital to user experience and SEO.

One of the best ways to build an internal link strategy is to create content clusters. A content cluster is a group of blog posts related to a broad topic. Usually, each cluster has a pillar post that covers the topic in a general way, along with several other posts that explore more specific ideas under that larger category.

Content clusters allow you to naturally add helpful internal links. These links are not only helpful to readers, but they also help search engines understand how your web pages relate to each other. These links signal to Google that your site has expertise on the topic, which helps your link authority throughout the cluster.

For example, OptinMonster’s blog has a large content cluster on the topic of SEO. This topic is highly relevant to our target audience because OptinMonster helps online businesses convert their SEO traffic into subscribers and customers.

In fact, the post you’re reading right now is part of our SEO cluster. The pillar post for this cluster is our beginner’s guide to SEO.

When I updated that pillar post, I made sure to include internal links to other posts in our SEO cluster. I included links naturally throughout the post and also added a related resources hub at the bottom of the article:

Additionally, we link to our pillar SEO post within all other posts in the cluster. This internal linking strategy helps keep readers engaged, provides helpful and relevant information, and improves SEO for the entire cluster.

3. Choose a Backlink Tracking Tool

In order to plan and monitor your backlinking strategy, you’ll need a tool that lets you discover and analyze the sites that are linking to you. Your software should also help you find link building opportunities.

The top 2 tools for link building are Semrush and Ahrefs.

Semrush
Semrush is a powerful piece of software for SEO and competitor analysis. It also includes a suite of tools dedicated to link building.

Here are Semrush’s link building features:

• Backlink Analytics: Analyze the backlinks for any domain, including your competitors. This feature can help you discover websites to contact about linking opportunities.
• Backlink Audit: Check the quality of your backlinks, so you can discover any potentially harmful ones and make a plan to improve your link quality.
• Link Building Tool: Semrush suggests new link-building opportunities by analyzing domains based on their niche and backlink profiles.
• Backlink Analysis: Quickly evaluate multiple domains’ backlink profiles at once. This tool lets you quickly compile a comprehensive overview of your competitors’ link-building strategies.

Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another excellent SEO software choice, and it strongly emphasizes link building. In fact, Ahrefs originally launched as a dedicated backlink analysis tool and has since expanded into a full SEO suite.

Here are a few of Ahrefs’ link building features:

• Site Explorer: Get in-depth analysis of any website’s backlink profile.
• Backlink Checker: Quickly check the backlinks leading to your site or a competitor’s site. You can try the free version of Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker here.
• Link Intersect: Discover which sites are linking to your competitors but not to your site. This tool can help you find promising backlinking opportunities.
• Content Explorer: Find the most popular content in your niche and analyze that content’s backlink profile.
• Batch Analysis: Evaluate the backlinks of multiple URLs at once.

Semrush and Ahrefs are both excellent link building tools. If you’re not ready to invest just yet, Semrush offers a limited free account and a 7-day free trial of its full version. Ahrefs has no free trial but does offer a small suite of free SEO tools.

4. Nurture Existing Relationships (& Build New Ones)

As you start your link building efforts, make a list of all your existing business relationships. These could include:

• Influencers and affiliate marketers
• Industry bloggers
• Customers who have their own relevant websites
• Industry associations
• Businesses you’ve collaborated with in the past

Nurture these relationships by providing special deals or offering to create dofollow links to their sites. Then, when you ask for a backlink to your site, you’ll have already built goodwill.

After leveraging your existing relationships, you’ll want to expand your network. Frank and Cole emphasized the importance of finding the right contact at each company. You should always find a specific person to send your link requests to, rather than simply using a general email address for the company.

Here are some titles to look for:

• Content Manager
• Director of Marketing
• Growth Manager
• Content Specialist
• PR Specialist

If you can’t find titles and contact information on the company’s site, LinkedIn can often help you find the right contact for your link building outreach.

5. Get Backlinks Through Reviews

Reviews are a great way to build links from authoritative sources because reviews generally include prominent links to the product. Reach out to content creators in your niche and invite them to try and review your product or service.

Here are some tips to get more backlinks through reviews:

• Offer free products or trials in exchange for a review.
• Create an affiliate program that allows content creators to earn commission on the sales they generate.
• Add your product or company to 3rd party review sites like G2 and Trustpilot. These review sites will link to your website and drive more traffic as you get more reviews.

Here at OptinMonster, we place a high priority on getting reviews for our lead generation software. If you Google “OptinMonster reviews,” you’ll see a list of reviews that recommend our product:

All of these search results represent valuable backlinks that drive traffic and build authority for our site.

6. Use Guest Posts for Link Building

Another great way to get high-quality backlinks is to write guest posts for other sites. In fact, guest blogging can be a powerful element of your digital marketing plan. If you’re new to guest posting or want to improve your strategy, we have an article to help:

When it comes to using guest blogs for link building, Frank says it’s important to pay attention to the target audience:

“If you’re writing a guest post for another site for the purpose of backlink building, make sure you’re writing with a purpose. I suggest taking some time to understand the brand’s target audience. Then, write content that matches their goals and pain points and share backlinks that align with these needs.”

– Frank Spear, Link Acquisition Team Lead at Awesome Motive

When you write a guest post for another site, you essentially get to create your own backlinks. That allows you to optimize your links for engagement.

Frank suggests paying particular attention to the anchor text, which is the text that you use as your link. When building backlinks on other sites, Frank says you should use “natural, relevant, and unique anchor text.” Smart anchor text helps with SEO, and it “encourages readers to click through to your website because it adds more context and value to what they are reading.”

7. Try Broken Link Building

For this tip, you search out broken links on other sites and then offer your site’s content as an alternative. Here’s how it works:

1. Choose a website in your industry that you’d like to get backlinks from.
2. Enter the domain into Semrush or Ahrefs and run a report of broken links on that site.
3. Search through those broken links. Look for anchor text that matches content you already have on your site.
4. Reach out to the business and suggest your content as a helpful alternative to correct the broken link.

This process creates a win-win situation:

You get a valuable backlink, and the website replaces a broken link that could be hurting their SEO.

If you don’t have a paid Semrush or Ahrefs account, Ahrefs offers a free broken link checker.

Here, you can see I ran a free broken link report for semrush.com. The Ahrefs tool showed me the pages that have broken links, the URL of the broken link, and the anchor text:

The free tool only shows you 10 broken outbound links, but it’s a good place to start if you’re not ready for an expensive SEO tool.

8. Always Follow Up With Link Partners

Here’s a tip that Cole Phan specifically asked me to include: always follow up with any link partners you’ve contacted. These could be sites you’ve contacted about reviews, guest posts, broken link replacement, or any other link opportunity.

This suggestion applies to any of the following scenarios:

1. You’ve contacted a company about a link opportunity and have gotten no response. Send a follow-up email to remind them of your offer. Also, ask if they’re the right person to contact.
2. You’ve emailed back and forth with a company, but they haven’t come through with a backlink. Send them a nudge to ask if there’s anything you can do to make it easier.
3. A company you contacted has created a great backlink to your site. Follow up with a thank you message and ideas for more collaborations.

Cole had this to say about the importance of following up:

“One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is the importance of consistent follow-up and finding the right person to touch base. Trust me, you’re missing out on so many potential opportunities if you’ve never followed up. Craft an intriguing pitch that captures attention, and by nurturing those relationships to build trust, you can grow your network effortlessly and earn referrals. This not only enhances your link-building efforts but also fosters collective growth with your partners.”

– Cole Phan, PR Specialist at Awesome Motive

Remember, the people you’ve contacted are just as busy as you are. Don’t give up if you don’t hear back right away. Instead, contact them again to try to get a conversation going.

9. Check the Value of Existing and Potential Backlinks

As you monitor your backlinks and look for more opportunities, pay attention to link quality. You want your backlinks to come from trusted websites with a good reputation. Links from these sites will improve how search engines rank your pages.

Most SEO tools have a rating system for a website’s authority or reputation:

• Semrush has an Authority Score
• Ahref has a Domain Rating (DR)
• Moz has Domain Authority® (DA)

These scores can help you prioritize which sites to pursue backlinks from. They also help you understand which existing links are helping or hurting your site.

However, Frank cautions marketers to not rely solely on authority ratings. Here are a few other considerations he suggests when determining the value of a backlink:

• Keyword relevancy: Does the anchor text accurately reflect the content of your linked page?
• Topic relevancy: Does your content provide additional value to readers of the site that is linking to you?
• Site relevancy: Is the website linking to you in the same or similar industry?
• Link placement: Is the link near the top of the page or buried in FAQs? Is your link one of the only external links on the page, or is the post crowded with 20-30 backlinks?

In short, backlink value is more complex than simply checking a site’s domain rating. Relevant links help you build authority on the specific topics you want to rank for.

10. Pay Attention to Link Diversity

If you work in content marketing, then you know how challenging it’s been to keep up with Google’s frequent algorithm updates. I asked Frank how sites can use link building to keep up with these changes. His top suggestion was to improve backlink diversity:

“When building backlinks, keep link diversity at the top of your mind. You want to try and build links on many different relevant sites, not just the same 4-5 places month-after-month.

“This strategy will help Google see that your site is mentioned because it’s valuable and relevant, which improves your odds of rising through the SERPs. The last few updates have shown us that link quality matters much more than quantity.”

– Frank Spear, Link Acquisition Team Lead at Awesome Motive

As you go through all of the tips in this post, always look for new sites you can get links from. When your backlinks come from a lot of different high-quality sites, you’ll likely see more stability in your search rankings.

11. Conduct Regular Link Audits

My final tip for link building comes from Cole Phan:

“Don’t forget to schedule regular backlink audits. This helps maintain a healthy backlink profile and provides an opportunity to refine as well as improve your current strategy if needed.”

– Cole Phan, PR Specialist at Awesome Motive

A backlink audit is a full analysis of your site’s inbound links. Here is some of the information you should explore in an audit:

• Number of dofollow vs. nofollow links: Assess the ratio of dofollow links to nofollow links to ensure a healthy balance. Google may penalize you for having too many dofollow links, as that can be a sign of unethical link building. A ratio of about 60% dofollow to 40% nofollow is ideal.
• Diversity of your linking domains: Check the number of unique domains linking to your site. Set goals to increase the number of domains, not just the total number of links.
• Toxic links: Identify any low-quality or spammy backlinks that could harm your site’s reputation and rankings. You can ask the site to remove the link or consider using Google’s process for disavowing toxic links. Note that disavowal should be used with extreme caution.
• Anchor text distribution: Analyze the anchor text used in backlinks to ensure it’s relevant and varied, avoiding over-optimization.
• Link placement: Review the context in which your links appear. Links placed in relevant content carry more weight.
• Domain authority of linking sites: Evaluate the authority of the websites linking to you. Identify more high-authority sites for link outreach.
• Historical link growth: Look at how your backlink profile has changed over time to spot any sudden drops or spikes that could indicate issues.
• Competitor backlink comparison: Compare your backlink profile with competitors to identify opportunities and gaps in your link-building strategy.

You can find this data and more in either Semrush or Ahrefs. When you audit your backlinks regularly, you can continuously improve your link strategy. You can also catch potential problems before they tank your search rankings.

Black Hat Link Building: Tactics to Avoid

While links are essential to your site’s search rankings, you also must approach link building ethically. Black hat links attempt to manipulate search rankings, and they can lead to severe penalties from Google. Here are a few tactics to avoid:

• Buying links: Purchasing backlinks from low-quality sites may seem like a quick fix, but search engines like Google are vigilant against this practice. These links are often deemed spammy and can lead to penalties that hurt your rankings.
• Link farms: These are networks of websites created solely to increase link counts. They provide little to no value and can harm your site’s authority. Engaging with link farms can raise red flags with search engines.
• Excessive link exchanges: While some link exchanging is acceptable, avoid schemes where you excessively swap links with other sites. This practice can come across as manipulative, and it can dilute the quality of your backlink profile. Your link partnerships should always be relevant and helpful to the readers of both sites.
• Spammy comments and forum posts: Don’t add links in irrelevant comments or forum posts solely to gain backlinks. Search engines view these links as spammy. Instead, focus on meaningful engagement in relevant discussions.

Of course, link building is just one part of SEO, and you should avoid all black hat strategies. Learn more in our full guide to white hat vs. black hat SEO.

Build Links that Attract & Convert More Visitors

When you apply these link building methods, you’ll get more referral traffic from other websites, and your site will start ranking higher in search.

How can you make the most of this increase in traffic?

OptinMonster offers powerful tools to turn your website visitors into subscribers and customers. You can use our popups, floating bars, and other onsite campaigns to show your best offers to the right people at the right time.

You can even target campaigns specifically to people coming from your top backlinks. Just use our Referrer Detection targeting rule. Here’s how it works:

OptinMonster is proven to help businesses grow their email lists and win more sales. Here are a few examples:

• Storyly grew their email list by 45%
• Shockbyte attributes 52% of their sales to OptinMonster
• Cosmetic Capital captured 18,000 new leads with a floating bar

If you want to see results like these, it’s time to sign up for OptinMonster! With our robust features and top-rated customer support team, you’ll start seeing big results fast.

Related Resources:

• 10 SEO Ranking Factors to Help You Rank in Search
• How to Use Keywords for SEO Effectively
• On-Page SEO Checklist: 10 Steps to Better Search Rankings
• What Is Off-Page SEO? 15 Proven Tips to Boost Rankings