Advanced SEO Tactics Ways to Turbo Charge Your Link Building

Advanced SEO Tactics: 5 Ways to Turbo-Charge Your Link Building

When it comes to SEO, links matter. Link building is among any SEO campaign’s least popular yet most essential parts. Any webmaster who has tried to build a website understands the struggles and frustrations that come from pitching, e-mailing, searching, scouring, guest posting, and even begging for links—usually with very few results.

Links from other sites (aka backlinks) have long been one of Google’s most important ranking factors. SEO specialists have also noticed that links are a contributing factor in “Authority” and “Trustworthiness,” two factors Google has stated play a major part in ranking websites. Other factors contributing to those nebulous terms are unknown outside of the search engine’s engineers.

Like it or not, gathering website backlinks is crucial. This can be a challenge. Years of websites’ mass e-mailing (spamming) make most website owners immune to requests. If not outright hostile towards them.

If backlinks are so important but hard to get, how is a webmaster supposed to build a website that gets results?

This is a legitimate question. The following five advanced techniques can help you take your link-building efforts to the next level.

#1: Talk Directly to Brands

Especially when dealing with niche websites or affiliate websites, generally website owners often only reach out to other small websites trying to do the same thing. This is a big mistake. One of the best ways to get good backlinks to a website is to reach out to the companies or brands whose products the website is promoting.

An outdoor blog selling ALPS tents should contact ALPS to tell them about the product review. Someone reviewing backpacking food should reach out to each of those companies. The response rate is much higher because this is more of a partnership. Brands love positive reviews of their products. Many will have media pages with links to all positive reviews or mentions. Sometimes they will ask you to write an original write-up of your experience or review for them to publish, or even include a testimonial that includes a link to your site.

Brands are always looking for positive PR, which makes them much more likely to link to your reviews. While these are rarely “high authority” websites in Google’s eyes, and many companies aren’t that great at web design, they are still sites in your niche from actually recognized brands, which makes them very relevant and very important to the Trustworthiness and Expertise in Google’s E-A-T score.

Reach out to brands, especially if they have a marketing department. You might be surprised at what type of profitable relationship you can build well beyond getting a couple of links.

#2: Statistics & Original Infographics

Certain types of posts are going to get more natural links than others. Understanding this is critical to get the most out of your efforts. When writing informational posts, look for keywords that can call for statistics or which you can create infographics for.

Statistics get links. If you do the legwork to find some good statistics that you publish, many websites that share that information will cite your website as a source. As your information spreads, you can Google search the stat, find websites that use that information without citing your website, and then send them a polite e-mail letting them know that you did the original work for it, you’re happy their readers found it helpful, and politely request them to cite your original post as the source with a link.

Infographics are a strategy that can still be very effective, but many people are doing them wrong. Don’t pay a cheap outsourcer on Fiver for a quickly thrown-together infographic. These are a dime a dozen and don’t add much value. You want one that has top-notch writing, excellent eye-catching headlines, and outstanding graphics too.

It is a genuinely fantastic infographic that is put together well and ideally has exciting facts, and many statistics can still be shared. Don’t forget to promote it on Pinterest for even more opportunities for links and shares.

After some time, you can even use Google image search to search for your graphic. Any way that it pops up online where they don’t link back to you, send an e-mail asking for the link. The key here is to be nice. Thank them for sharing your graphic, mention the hard work you put in, tell them you’re 100% okay with them using it, but please link back to the original website to credit your hard work.

The overwhelming majority of webmasters will be happy to do that, giving you even more links to your website.

#3: International Link Building

I’ve been absolutely floored by how well these strategies work, to the point where, to be honest, I’m kind of hesitant to share them. What really surprises me is how few studies have been done on how international links can help your website, but I think I know why.

There are tons of spam links out there. If you build a website for any time, you’ll eventually see a bunch appear in your profile. It’s just the way it is. Many of these come from different countries or at least IPs in different countries. So it’s easy to assume all international links are low quality, right?

Well, no. Spammy international links are bad just like spammy links from websites based out of the United States will be bad. Good international sites in other countries that have great content, good EAT, and are related to your niche, are going to have a positive effect.

The positive effect can be twofold. Not only do these links count as solid links that up to your profile in your home country (assumed the U.S. but could be Great Britain, Canada, or wherever), but they also are a huge boost to your site’s ability to rank in the search results of the home country where that international link came from.

If you monetize with Amazon’s OneLink program, you get international sales. So links that boost your rankings at home and abroad mean you monetize all your traffic, not just domestic.

Why does this work so well?

While there haven’t been many deep-dive studies on this technique, there are a few reasons this strategy tends to work well. Right off the bat, in many countries, website owners have not been flooded with the linking requests that most of us are familiar with. So they’re more open to listening, guest posting, and adding a link.

Since not many people shoot for international links, the market isn’t flooded with spam and requests. This keeps webmasters more open to techniques that have continued to become harder and harder in larger markets. When you’re one of the only ones doing it, you’re much more likely to get a good response.

Another reason this tends to work is that many businesses want international business. Building a relationship with you can be valuable for them, and so they’re more open to giving a link. When you guest post and open up that relationship (especially if you promise to promote the guest post), you’re adding a lot of value. A guest post isn’t that valuable for many decent-sized, well-established blogs domestically.

Those are the reasons for getting these links. Why do international links help boost you in domestic rankings? There’s been less study on this, but a few things stick out. While a single international link doesn’t seem to move the needle much, a small group does. A lot of them can do wonders.

These links are almost always unique compared to your competition. In other words, when Google compares your site to others in the niche, you have a wide array of legitimate backlinks that none of your competition has. That is a significant plus as you get boosts to your profile that they are not.

Finally, having several links from international locations might be a major EAT boost. Google has talked about Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness as the biggest factors for ranking alongside relevance. If your site has a solid backlink profile from the country you’re out of and dozens of links from non-spammy, legitimate websites in your niche from 10 or 15 different countries…that sounds like an expert with authority.

In other words, that formula might just give you an extra little EAT boost on top of the direct SEO benefits from the links themselves. This makes a lot of sense and further promotes this as a great strategy for outreach and boosting your site’s rankings.

Give it a shot. You might be surprised just how effective it turns out to be.

#4: Social Link Builders

There’s a lot said about social media, and many arguments end up losing the forest for the trees. Certain social media sites are very well regarded, can push massive traffic on their own, and Google recognizes links. There’s an argument about whether or not these links help and follow vs. no-follow, but Google rewards time-on-page a low bounce rate and likes seeing multiple sources of traffic.

So even if the SEO help from websites like Facebook, Pinterest, Quora, or YouTube are indirect – that doesn’t make them any less effective. This is one where people think “no-follow” and instantly lose interest. But you shouldn’t. Google expects to see a mixture of no-follow links; otherwise, they get suspicious.

The search engines also care about social media footprint. In other words, even if you can’t hammer down just how important it is, you know this is a factor in what sites rank and which don’t!

You want traffic. Doing well on certain platforms means getting a lot of direct traffic. That is good in and of itself, but it also checks the SEO box for getting traffic from multiple legitimate sources.

This means you aren’t 100% reliant on search engines that can change your rank anytime for any reason, but you have other traffic sources like syndicating your content. You get social evidence, you get no-follow links so you don’t have to waste time finding any, and you almost certainly get some boost to trustworthiness with all that social evidence.

#5: Apply Good Marketing to Guest Post Outreach

If you have had a niche website with any amount of success at all then you have probably received dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails requesting a chance to offer a guest post. See if any of these lines sound familiar:

• I stumbled upon your blog and liked your content…
• I recently published a blog post that I think your readers would love…
• I’ve been following your blog and love it.
• I recently visited your blog and was intrigued by…
• More quality content for your blog!

These are very common lines used on various big-name blogs to give a basic template for reaching out. There is nothing wrong with that. A really good guest post can be valuable, but the majority of people pitching you are planning on sending a minimum-effort, minimum-quality article to get themselves a link.

In other words, they want all the value you can give them for minimal effort. That’s not the attitude you want when looking for really good content. You can see (or you’ve experienced) why this makes the guest pitch posts so tedious. There’s a reason that in the world of “content is king” most people get a response rate of only 1-2%.

The funny thing is, there are plenty of website owners willing to respond to the right email. I’m stunned at how many accept this low conversion rate and begin shot-gunning requests. While this can work for pure numbers, you’ll only get the links from sites willing to give out links to pretty much anyone in the niche.

Why not apply good marketing? Stop using templates that have been overused to death! Barely change templates; put more effort into redesigning them. A person can still tell it’s based on a copy-and-paste template. Use good marketing practices: a catchy, snappy headline aimed at the reader. Give an offer nobody else is matching. Take the opposite track of everyone else in your niche.

If everyone else pitches in extremely formal language, use casual (but respectful) informal language that’s more friendly and open. Are people offering 1,000 words? Offer 2,000 to 3,000. Don’t call it a “blog post.” Call it an “authority post.”

When people give those canned lines, be direct. Saying things like, “We both know the SEO benefit, so I’m not going to b.s. you” has done wonders for me in outreach. Of course, you must offer more value, prove you can do it, and follow through.

You wouldn’t try to sell something off a boring template. Use normal marketing techniques for reaching out instead of templates, and your number of responses will boom. Do more guest posting, and sometimes on websites that don’t accept guest posts. Those are going to be powerful links no matter what the niche!

Watch Your Traffic Numbers Boom!

These are five advanced SEO techniques. They are how you open up the gates once you have your foundation in place and ensure all the basics are fully taken care of. If you follow this advice for gathering links, unique outreach, brand partnerships, and writing content that attracts links, you will see a major difference over time as your traffic numbers boom!