45 Link Building Tips, Tactics, and Strategies

Loz James recently interviewed 33 SEO experts and asked them to share their most effective link building strategies.

I broke it down into a quick list of strategies for easy reference. I added some notes (in red) and also a few of my own tips at the end.

1. Write awesome content and share like crazy on Twitter (I pull 7-10+ tips from each article and schedule using HootSuite)
2. Embed offers in the content
3. Use trackable links for outreach
4. Get links from relevant resource/links pages
5. Infographics still work (if done right)
6. Do smart guest posting (high quality, relevant sites)
7. Curate resources to build great content
8. Perform outreach to the people you’ve linked to in your article
9. Get links to educational content on library or school resource pages
10. Give related sites custom coupons to give their readers
11. Thought leadership + bios & interviews, for example, speaking, podcasts, online hangouts, etc.
12. Create online tools, calculators, and interactive data
13. Participate in or run a monthly blog carnival for your niche
14. Build relationships with content curators in your niche
15. Get links from Wikipedia (check out WikiGrabber)
16. Use HARO and MuckRack to connect with journalists and reporters
17. Build your own Private Blog Network and don’t use someone else’s
18. 404 link reclamation (identify errors in Google Webmaster Tools)
19. Pay big bloggers in your industry to guest post on your blog
20. Identify and claim existing citations and develop further local citations (Brightlocal put together an awesome list of 1000+ citation sites)
21. Broken link building (check out brokenlinkbuilding.com)
22. Find other people’s successful content and offer to enhance it with your own expertise or data
23. Sponsor events, charities, and organizations
24. Create a scholarship for your industry (I’ve never tried this, but this scholarship management service looks cool)
25. Offer testimonials to any business you’ve hired or worked with
26. Monitor for brand mentions and request links where your brand is referenced (check out Moz’s Reclaim Links tool if you have an account or set up Google Alerts for free)
27. Use the Skyscraper technique (from Brian Dean)
28. Offer senior or veteran discounts and look for pages that list these discounts
29. Give influencers an early look at new features to get great reviews
30. Build backlinks to your backlinks to make them stronger
31. Participate in industry-related forums
32. Do internal linking
33. Use targeted social media buys to get content in front of influencers

It’s a great list of strategies, but here are a few more I would add.

1. Run a contest or giveaway
2. Promote your best content in amplification services like Outbrain, Zemanta and NRelate
3. Do expert interviews (just like the 33 SEO Experts article this is based on)
4. Look for podcast interview opportunities on RadioGuestLists.com
5. Get listed in local Chamber of Commerce websites
6. Start marketing on SlideShare
7. Set up a Triberr.com account
8. Get links from partner/vendor pages
9. Get links where your competitors are getting links (run your competitors through Open Site Explorer, Majestic, or ahrefs
10. Offer your products to bloggers for review (check out BzzAgent.com, BloggersRequired.com, and Tomoson
11. Look for Twitter fans who own blogs and who aren’t linking to you
12. Look for people using your images and ask them for a link. Try Berify or TinEye

Image: “It’s about rules and strategy” by pshutterbug is licensed under CC BY 2.0