32 Link Building Tips You Should Know To Be More Effective

Here's a collection of small link building tips that I've found useful over the years of building hundreds of backlinks and creating a company for link building.

Most of these are not hard rules but more like rules-of-thumb that help with link building.

Link building and ranking

• Link building is not the only thing that matters for ranking. For a new site, you'll also need social signals, brand mentions, content and topical authority, and good technical SEO foundation.
• Keep yourself updated regularly with latest research and statistics on link building to know about the most effective strategies.

Link exchanges

• Domain Rating from Ahrefs is one of the main metrics other link builders use for exchanges. 
• Getting started with link building is the hardest because your domain rating is low so you won't be able to exchange with high-authority sites.
• Each Domain Rating tier (30, 40, 50...) unlocks a new level to exchange links with that tier. Sometimes you're able to go a little bit higher than what your domain rating is but generally the difference is not going to more than 10 points. DR50 is where the fun begins. 
• Traffic (in Ahrefs) is also important for link exchanges. Let's say, a minimum of 1k in my experience.
• One week is a reasonable expectation for the link to go live in an exchange.

Link quality checking

• To check for highest quality, check on a page, domain, and link network level.
• Check IP ranges to see if a domain is part of a PBN.
• Make sure there is no similar link in the blog post already because it adds no value to the user.
• The higher the Domain Rating, the better the impact usually. However, DR can be gamified.

Guest blogging

Outreach

• Many marketers and webmasters receive about 2-5 guest blog outreach emails every day if they have a valuable website. Make yours stand out.
• Best outreach I've heard of was when a writer had analyzed and pointed out a content gap in the company blog.
• The success rate of outreach is about 2-4% depending on your industry and personalization. So don't feel down after a few rejections.
• Build out your social profile to show you're an authority in the niche to make your outreach more convincing.
• Use tools to automate outreach. Tools like Instantly work great.
• Verify all the email addresses you send outreach to. Use Zerobounce.
• Reach out to your best competitors, but don't try to get a direct link from them because you're not going to. Get a link to another page that you then link to your page. This is called tier 2 link.
• You can google "site:example.com write for us" to check a site accepts guest posting publicly - no need for outreach. 

Guest blog writing

• The industry standard is to get 3 links from a guest post unless stated otherwise.
• If everyone can guest blog on the site without editorial oversight, the link is probably not very valuable.
• If it's a well-known platform like Medium or Linkedin Pulse article, you'll probably get a nofollow link.

Link insertions

• Try to place your link as high as possible. This is because the Reasonable Surfer model values links more if a user is more likely to click on them.
• Most editors don't allow links in the first paragraph. This is to boost ranking signals due to higher dwell time and deeper scroll depth (NavBoost algorithm).
• Only insert links to pages that are indexed. Check for indexing by googling site:example.com/page-path. If the page you want to insert a link into appears in the search, it should be indexed.
• Don't add a link to a paragraph where there already is a link. This comes from the Reasonable Surfer model where a user is unlikely to click on another link in the same paragraph because it offers no/less value.
• A link from a blog post by a known authority in the industry is more valuable. You can check if that person is an entity in the Google Knowledge Base.
• Prioritize link insertions in blog posts with historical traffic for maximum impact.
• Diversify your anchor texts because Google will detect over-optimization.
• When you work on a new business, try get link insertions into listicles first to get potential paying customers at the same time.
• When inserting a link, make your anchor text mention your brand name unless you already have a known brand (a Google entity). Don't use the brand name as the anchor but do something like "link insertions(link anchor) are a key part of link building, according to The Backlink Company(brand mention)".

Link monitoring

• Always make sure your link is a dofollow after it's made live in guest post or link insertion. Check for them manually or with a tool.
• Check your links are live regularly as there's a decay rate for how many links you lose each year.
• The sooner your request a link to be added back after it's lost, the likelier you're going to get it back.