The Best Strategies Behind Link Building Success in 2021

Link-building has been an integral part of search engine optimization since Google revolutionized the search industry. In 2021, using links to drive traffic to your website is one of the clearest indicators of relevance and trustworthiness to search engines, in addition to bringing traffic on its own. Focusing on certain aspects of link building can improve your overall strategy. Here are the best approaches to link building in 2021.

Find and Target Quality Domains

Search engines see external links leading to your website as signs of trust and quality. The quality of those links is as important as the quantity. Link building is the practice of getting more and higher quality external links, or backlinks. One of the keys to link building is finding which domains are the highest quality and finding ways to get linked by them. Domains that are frequently visited like Google and Wikipedia are high quality, but so are stable, authoritative domains like government websites, respected news sites, and industry leaders. While social media sites are often on the top-ranking domains by pageviews, their reliance on user-generated content and lack of permanence make their value lower.

Reach Out to Encourage Backlinks

The central challenge of link building is that you have no direct control over what links are used on external sites. Trying to place links unnaturally doesn’t work and can lead to SEO penalties. Google uses backlinks today, but they have a sophisticated machine learning algorithm that learns from search behavior. However, there are several ways to promote backlinks that are especially important in 2021.

Reaching out to other sites is a reliable way to get linked from them. If you have a link that’s relevant to their page, email them and suggest they include it. If they already link to your pages, suggest that they use the most relevant page and let them know when it’s updated to the latest version of the page. There are other ways to place links directly. Social media allows you to post links on widely-trafficked websites, though it’s challenging to make social media posts trend. Guest blogging and giving interviews on other sites will also allow you to leave a link back to the page of your choice.

Promote Existing Backlinks

Getting new backlinks is an important part of expanding your website’s exposure, but the backlinks you already have can’t be ignored. You may lose backlinks on other sites for reasons that are entirely within your control. For instance, the URL of a page may change, breaking the link. The page may become out of date, causing external sites to remove the link. It can also become insecure due to an expired SSL certificate or malware warnings. For these reasons, watch any pages that are a source of backlinks and ensure that they stay accessible. Additionally, consider why these pages are successful and promote them to other sites so they are linked even more.

Create Targetable Content by Being Comprehensive

The pages that get backlinks are often ones that address a specific subject that people want to know about. To that end, the content on the page should be attractive to the audience as well as comprehensive. If it fails to cover all aspects of the topic, then other websites may choose to link an alternative that is more comprehensive. However, making it too detailed can make it hard to understand and appreciate. Only by crafting pages that are the right level of detail for the target audience can websites guarantee that their page is linked on external pages as the authoritative source on the subject.

Optimize Anchor Text

The anchor text where your link appears is an important consideration in link building. Good anchor text needs to be natural and grammatically correct to flow into the link organically. It also needs to be relevant to the page being linked. For instance, you can place a link when referring to a topic that is explained in-depth on the linked page.

According to Google, anchor text should be a descriptive phrase that provides context to the material that is being linked. It doesn’t need to be the exact name of the page and shouldn’t be filled with keywords to exploit search engines. Anchor text can’t be controlled for some backlinks on other sites, but in many cases, it can, such as guest blogs, social media, and other placed links leading to your pages, so it should be considered.

Link building is key to any site that needs a way to generate stable search engine traffic. External links last a long time and demonstrate reliability to search engines.