Link building in 2020 greatly differs from what it used to be back in the days, because now SEO specialists need to focus on quality over quantity and diversify the backlink profile. We did research to find which link building strategies would bring the highest rankings to your website in 2020 and here’s what we’ve discovered.
#1 Reverse Guest Posting
Reverse guest posting refers to other writers that are not affiliated with your website writing guest entries for you. At the moment, reverse guest posting is one of the most popular and widely used link building strategies due to its effectiveness.
Advantages of Using the Reverse Guest Posting Link Building Strategy
- Reverse guest posting does not require any outreach, which means it is a rather passive yet effective link building strategy.
- It is a versatile technique that is not limited to selected niches and works well with websites operating in essentially all industries. Unlike a number of other strategies that are only applicable to certain niches, this link building strategy can be used regardless of the main focus of your website.
- Reverse guest posting cuts down the amount of work put into the filling of the website by the website owner. In fact, it saves you the effort of having to write ‘pillar articles’. Often, it is said that in order to attract more traffic to your website, it is essential for you to make the content you have on your platform relevant. This implies that you need to fill your website with an array of articles that would be interesting for a wide scope of internet users, or at least those who constitute your target audience. With the number of websites being virtually unlimited, it is rather difficult to produce content that would immediately grasp the audience’s attention. Moreover, it is often rather difficult to keep the flow of articles steady and consistent. By getting other people to write those posts for you, you can focus on other parts of your business strategy with your blog still being updated regularly.
- It increases the value of your website in the eyes of both your target audience and other authors in the niche. First of all, if you get top authors to make a blog post contribution to your website, you are likely to come across as a more trustworthy resource in the eyes of your readers. If they see a post written by a person who has some sort of authority in the niche, they are likely to not only read it but also share it on their social media. This, subsequently, creates increased media interaction and improves traffic.
- Networking link building reflected in improved relationships with niche writers and top-influencers. This one is purely based on the psychological aspects of human nature yet is still an important factor for successful link building. If you establish a connection with authors and publish their entries on your website, they are likely to like you and be up for working with you in the future. Besides, since you essentially ‘do them a favor’, they will be more inclined to link to your blog in their future posts even, granted that your content is relevant, useful and engaging.
- High prospects of backlink creation. At last but definitely not at least, the reverse guest posting link building strategy is extremely effective and serves the purpose well! If you publish an article from a guest author on your website, it is likely that they will share a link to it on their platforms that would attract a lot of readers, especially if your guest poster is a top-rated figure in the niche and has a considerable follower base.
How to Actively Look for Great Guest Posters?
At the very beginning of this article, it was stated that reverse guest posting is great because it does not require any outreach. However, if you are just starting your link building process and do not yet have a base of authors willing to make a contribution to your website, you might want to turn to active guest posters searching instead of simply waiting for them to find you first.
Of course, the more you cooperate with top guest posters and the more popular your website becomes, the less work you will have to do in regards to looking for people to write for you, but at the beginning stages of implementing your reverse guest posting link building strategy, it is essential for you to be proactive and put sufficient effort into the process.
Some of the best ways to search for professional guest posters manually include the following:
- Search for [your topic] + ‘guest post’ on social media. It will help you find authors that are creating posts in your niche. The best platform for this type of search is Twitter since it is more professionally oriented with people most often sharing links to blog posts there.
- Google search ‘guest posts’ for your topic. Followerwonk is a great tool for filtering results by topic and experts.
How to Make Reverse Guest Posting as Effective as Possible?
- It is best if you have at least several websites in order to create seamless and natural backlinking. The reason for this is that a combination where one of your sites receives quality content and the other one increases its backlink profile is much more natural than when you are simply exchanging links.
- Set up an SEO-optimized page for contributors on your website.
- Clearly outline your requirements to ensure the quality of the pitches you receive.
- Make sure your website looks trustworthy
#2 Replicating Competitor’s Backlinks
You can also identify your competitors and try to outrank them when it comes to link building. All you need to do is to find out who their top fans are and which sites they guest post for. Once you have done that, you may start replacing them by building a relationship with their readers and writing for the same websites.
Your key objective is to use the same keywords so that search engines would show your website among the top search results and not that of your competitors.
#3 Hunting for Broken Links
The broken link (also known as a dead link) link building strategy is, perhaps, not the most ethical strategy out there, but surely an effective one. In fact, it is among the most used strategies in 2020 as it is likely to bring immediate results. On top of that, it is quite easy to employ, which means it saves your time and does not require as much effort as other strategies on this list.
All you need to do is find trustworthy websites in your niche that have broken links and offer to replace it with a link to your article.
In order to find broken links, you may use one of the numerous tools that help to analyze websites and identify dead links.
The only catch with it is that you need to have a suitable article ready. Other than that, it is a foolproof strategy as you are ‘making a favor’ to the website with a broken link by pointing it out and helping them to make their platform better. So, naturally, they will be more inclined to return the favor.
#4 Guest Blogging
The concept of guest blogging is somewhat controversial in the modern marketing world. Some people claim that it is dead and ineffective, but research and statistics state the opposite. When done correctly, guest posting remains the most effective strategy for link building.
The Guest Posting Process for Maximum Link Building
Find a platform to get published on
There are several ways in which you can tackle the platform search. Depending on your niche, you may benefit more from one that you would from another.
The first method of finding websites to guest blog for is the good old Google Search method. You basically search for the keywords that are relevant for the niche of your website that you are trying to get backlinks to and look up websites that are interested in guest authors.
- “[a relevant keyword]” + “write for us”
- “[a relevant keyword]” + “contribute”
- “[a relevant keyword]” + “guest post/blogging guidelines”
Another method is known as the influencer method. This is a much easier method in terms of ensuring the blogs you choose for submitting your posts are high-quality and will bring the desired results. After all, top influencers mostly publish on authority blogs.
This method comprises essentially finding a top influencer in your niche that guest posts and identifying the platforms that they guest post for. In order to do this, you can just google search ‘Guest post’ + ‘[influencer name]’.
Make sure that you establish a solid relationship first. In regular life creating a strong bond with someone takes a lot of time, you cannot exactly call someone you have known for a couple of days your best friend. In the world of online marketing, however, this period is much shorter. All you need to do is market yourself by leaving a couple of comments on different posts published on the website you are interested in guest blogging for, and write an email with longer feedback. That way, when it comes to submitting articles, you will not be just a random person but rather someone who is active on the website and provides great feedback. This is likely to increase the chances of your pitch being approved.
Short-list the websites you have initially selected
Once you have identified all the sites that operate in your niche and will find your content (and subsequently your website) relevant, you want to filter them. There are several reasons for you to have a closer look at the websites that you have found starting from it being psychically impossible to write that many guest posts of high quality, and ending with some of the websites being not suitable for link building.
You need to sort all the potential sites into different categories by ranking them from the most to least desirable to be published in. When doing that:
- Make sure you review the website’s performance
- Check whether the site is appropriate for link building
Brainstorm the ideas and write a post that would fit into your link building strategy
When writing a post, you need to be particularly strategic as you are doing it to garner traffic to your site. First of all, make sure that your writing is of the highest quality so that people would be interested in reading more of your posts and therefore would check your website out.
Moreover, keep SEO in mind. You should opt for those topics that align with your website and include the same keywords as the content published on your platform.
#5 Focus on the Quality of Your Content (Increased Publicity)
When attempting a successful link building, you need to remember that links are, in fact, not the most important thing.
Google as well as a number of other search engines hate link building and are trying to fight against it. Therefore, you as a marketer and an SEO specialist need to be more inventive and creative when it comes to expanding your backlinks profile. You need to ensure that your link building strategy is organic and does not come off as superficial. Otherwise, chances are, you will be blacklisted or thrown into the shadowban by the search engines, which will adversely affect your traffic.
Thus, one of the best link building strategies in 2020, when search engines are becoming more and more strict with the rules of backlinking, is focusing on the content you post and encouraging your readers to share your content by linking it on their social media pages for their followers to get familiar with it.
One of the easiest ways of making that happen is publishing posts that would get a lot of publicity. In fact, it does not even have to be positive publicity as black PR is rather effective in this case, too!
An example to illustrate this point would be Ivar’s undersea billboards hoax that turned out to be a marketing success in terms of effective link building. While it did receive a lot of backlashes once it was discovered that the documents were fake, their sales increased by 400%. Moreover, their website received a lot of backlinks, which increased its rating.
However, you can employ the aforementioned link building strategy and expect it to bring results in 2020 even without having to pull the prankster card. What you need to take into consideration is human psychology. If you want to receive recognition from your target audience, you need to fill your website with the content that they will find interesting and useful. People are likely to share stuff that makes them look funny and interesting, so if you include some little known facts or figures into your posts, you will receive more shares.
More social interaction means more traffic to your website, which is exactly the initial purpose of all effective link building strategies. On top of that, it also creates a positive feedback loop as more traffic equals increased social interaction, which subsequently leads to even more traffic. All of that results in a favorable outcome all search engine optimizers are looking for as it positively affects your website’s search engine ranking, so the process of backlinking continues until you become the top-rated website in your niche.
Conclusion
In 2020, you need to be more creative with your link building strategies, but when approached correctly, there are still plenty of different ways of building your backlinks portfolio and promoting your website in the search engine ranking.
About the Author
Louis Robidoux is a blogger who enjoys writing articles that are of great interest to society. After having lots of posts published on different platforms, Louis decided to create his own site deeptop10.com where he’s covering topics about food, interesting hacks and lifestyle.
