Imagine a tourist arrives in your city, unfamiliar with its historical, cultural, and scenic attractions. However, the city is home to famous landmarks that draw attention from far and wide! Imagine a tourist arrives in your city, unfamiliar with its historical, cultural, and scenic attractions. However, the city is home to famous landmarks that draw attention from far and wide! The tourist thinks, “This place must be worth visiting.”
External link building strategy works in exactly the same way for search engines! Google “asks” other websites about your site and its content. Based on the “votes” they cast in the form of backlinks, your website’s position and ranking are determined.
If you’d like to know more, as always, stay with us.
What Is an External Link Building Strategy?
Previously, we discussed the importance of link building in boosting SEO and optimizing your website for both search engines and users in articles like How to Do Internal Link Building and Internal Linking in WordPress.
But what is an external link building strategy, and how can it help improve your site’s SEO? To better understand external links, let me explain the difference between them and internal links: An internal link connects content on your website to other content also on your site. It’s essentially value and authority you pass from one page to another within your own domain.
But an external link is a hyperlink from a piece of content on one website to content on a different website with a completely different domain name. It’s not always you linking to another site; sometimes, other websites with different domains may link to a page on your site.
But why are external links important, and why should we develop a strategy for building them? As we discussed with internal links, link building helps enhance the user experience and helps search engines better understand your content. The same applies to external links—they increase Google’s trust in your content.
The difference is, external links are created by other people and businesses across the web, so they hold even more weight in Google’s eyes. In fact, Google is a lot like us humans! Google values what others say about us more than what we say about ourselves! So when other websites link to our content, and we receive external links, it improves our search engine rankings.
Setting an External Link Building Strategy
Now that we understand the importance of having an external link building strategy, let’s explore methods for acquiring backlinks to boost website SEO. Since SEO professionals consider backlinks one of the most critical ranking factors for search engines, creating a strategy to acquire external links is essential.
But remember to follow the right path to acquire backlinks to achieve long-lasting results. Here are 4 methods to earn external links. They may require time and effort, but they are definitely effective.
1. Create Unique and Original Content
The more time you invest in producing rich, high-quality, and unique content, the higher your chances of naturally attracting links from peers in your industry. When you create content that is unique and attracts a large audience, other content creators will link to your site to establish credibility for their own articles.
So, you need to attract both audiences and other business owners organically. To do so, you can create evergreen and long-form content, such as implementing the Skyscraper Technique, to increase your chances of getting backlinks.
2. Build Relationships
Building relationships with others—whether in-person or online—is vital for all types of businesses. Whether you’re building your personal brand or working with a team or company, connecting with successful businesses in your field can be incredibly rewarding.
This way, people are more inclined to link to your content. You can even ask friends and partners to create opportunities for mutual linking and growth.
3. Write Guest Posts
One method closely tied to strategy #2 is writing guest posts on other websites. To do this, you need to have already built solid connections with reputable businesses in your niche.
This allows you to write high-quality and engaging guest posts that serve as both content for them and promotion for you. Within these guest posts, you can link back to your blog, earning a clean, natural backlink.
4. Publish Sponsored Content (Advertorials)
In this article, I’ve discussed four strategies to help you naturally gain external links. The fourth method, however, is a hybrid of organic and paid approaches. Unlike unethical methods, this one is structured and rule-based.
Publishing advertorials (sponsored content) is an effective external link building strategy. However, it does involve some cost. Still, if done correctly, it can mimic the benefits of naturally earned backlinks. Here’s how it works: You write content about your brand, and it gets published on a reputable website related to your industry—for a fee.
The important point here is that the sponsored post must read naturally and avoid a direct advertising tone. Otherwise, it may have the opposite effect.
