Leadgenerering
20. november 2023
How do you do link building?
Basically, you do “link building” by acquiring inbound links from external websites to your own website.These links can be acquired organically as well as by purchasing them.
You can build links by doing the following activities:
- Buy sponsored articles in various media outlets
- Reach out to websites that already mention you but do not link to you
- Fix broken links by redirecting them to live pages
- Update outdated content on external websites and get a link back to you
- Create listings in various business directories
Basically, you do “link building” by acquiring inbound links from external websites to your own website.
These links can be acquired organically as well as by purchasing them.
One method you can use to acquire links is to buy sponsored links from external websites.
The other method involves acquiring organic links, which are earned based on the relevance of both your website and the external website. There are pros and cons to both methods, which I will explain to you here!
We buy links to ensure we get strong links!
There are many different ways to acquire links, but if you work professionally with link building, you cannot avoid having to buy some links, as organic links are by far the hardest to obtain.
By organic links, I mean links that arise naturally when another website links to your content because it is high quality and relevant.
The harsh truth, however, is that there is so much different content online about the exact same topics—so why on earth would a specific page choose to link to your content in particular?
It is a paradox that everyone who works with link building is familiar with.
This paradox is why you cannot avoid having to buy links! Strong links from trustworthy and relevant sites are something Google places great importance on when it comes to search rankings, and we can obtain them by paying for them.
In practice, this is done by paying a site to publish a sponsored post in the form of an article on their site, which includes a link to your own website.
Which factors matter when assessing which links you should buy?
As I have also mentioned in my other blog post, there are 3 factors that come into play when defining what makes a good link – relevance, trustworthiness, and popularity.
Ultimately, these are the 3 factors you should use to assess which links you should buy. All websites are unique and relevant in their own way, so it will always vary which links are most relevant for your specific website.
For a website that sells furniture online, for example, it would be very valuable to get links from sites about interior design, as their content is highly relevant to that website.
On the other hand, it would not be particularly relevant to get a link from a site that, for example, is about animal welfare… With the one exception if the site is very popular and trustworthy.
It can still be a very valuable link if it comes from a website with many visitors and that is considered trustworthy in the eyes of search engines. The major news sites in Denmark are good examples of such sites.
Organic links are still worth the effort – here is how to get them!
It can quickly sound as if it is not worth spending time acquiring organic links, since you can pay to be sure of getting a link from another website of your own choosing. However, that is not the truth.
In fact, it can very much pay off to work on acquiring organic links—there is just always a risk that your efforts will not bear fruit, as it ultimately depends on whether you can get the site to link to your website.
If you succeed, there is a very high likelihood that you have gained a very valuable link—and as I mentioned in my previous blog post, 1 good link is worth far more than 100 bad ones!
When acquiring organic links, there are many different methods you can use, but here I will give you 3 methods that provide the best conditions for succeeding with your organic link building.
Mentions
Mentions is a method where you search the web for pages that mention your website, in order to actively try to get that page to link to your website.
This is one of the most effective methods for acquiring organic links, but it is also very time-consuming, as it requires contacting the person behind the page and making a sales pitch about why it would benefit their website and its visitors to link to the content on your website.
To find out where your website is mentioned online, you can either try searching for the name on Google or use an SEO tool. Personally, I use Ahrefs, which has a feature called Content Explorer that can find websites where you are mentioned without linking to your website.
Brug vores søgekonfigurator til at finde dine unlinked mentions
Updating dead links
You can also work on updating dead links, and I should note here that this will require an SEO tool like Ahrefs that can actually identify the dead links.
The method involves identifying pages that link to other pages that can no longer be found—what we call 404 pages.
In practice, you find pages that are relevant to your website’s content and check whether they link out to other pages that are 404 pages.
If your website’s content is relevant—then why would they not choose to link to your content instead? The method is therefore about filling a gap that is already there—you just need to have your arguments ready as to why they should link to you specifically.
Updating outdated content
The last method I will present to you is by far the most time-consuming. But the potential link you can gain will be incredibly valuable! The method involves identifying pages that have content that is outdated.
If you can find a page with a post on a topic that could be relevant to your website, you contact the website owner and offer to update their content so it aligns with today’s trends.
All websites want the content on their site to be relevant to their visitors, so if you try this method, you can really acquire some valuable links!
If this post caught your interest and you are thinking about getting started with link building, here is our complete list of links. Or if it seems too much hassle, you can click here to find out how we can help you.
