Linkbuilding remains an essential component of a successful SEO campaign. According to Moz, links remain the single most important factor in building authority and ranking well with search engines todays. Yet no area of search engine optimization is more contentious. Unethical approaches to linkbuilding are watched closely by Google, and the 
search engine cracks down hard on questionable tactics. From paid links to running a private blog network, there are a number of linkbuilding approaches that will get your site penalized or even delisted from Google. Yet building links is essential. Here’s a closer look at some linkbuilding tactics that will remain effective and help you position your site strategically in the year ahead.
Reframe Your Mindset from Numbers to Relationships
Building links remains essential in today’s SEO landscape. But building links isn’t a numbers game. It’s more about establishing meaningful relationships that result in organic links. This could happen through the placement of high quality content on branded sites or by creating excellent content that gets linked to and shared by your audience. Whatever your approach, it’s essential that you focus on creating the context for natural backlinks to occur. Think about sites and professionals that you’d like to build relationships with and find ways to provide strategic content for them over time that creates a lot of value for their audiences. By taking this approach, you’ll yield the best results without running afoul of the increasingly stringent search engine guidelines about manipulating your company’s link profile.
Redefine Value: Take an Experimental Approach
One highly discussed takeaway from the recent Las Vegas PubCon convention came from a session on creative linkbuilding. Expert Joe Youngblood recommended establishing a scholarship fund on your company’s website. Strategically, it would make sense to focus on something in your industry. For example, a commercial steel detailer might consider a scholarship for students in a draftsman program. Once the scholarship is in place, you’ll want to create a package about the scholarship and publicize it to the relevant schools. In many cases, the universities will post information about your scholarship on their program website and link back to your company’s scholarship landing page, which earns you very natural and highly valuable .edu links. While you don’t need to take the scholarship approach, the bigger lesson here is that it’s easy to develop strategies that help you break out from the crowd and position you to naturally attract links.
Creative Content Formats Attract Links
Another important approach is to think about your content strategy, and how that can be tweaked to be highly readable and shareable. Ideally, this should be part of your efforts to create quality content overall. But with small changes to how you approach your content creation, you could increase the mileage from your content. For example, readers tend to be very interested in interviews. Exclusive access or insightful questions that relate to your audience’s most burning concerns garner a lot of interest. People interviewed tend to share and promote the pieces that feature them, which in turn is a natural way to increase both links and social shares. Podcasts are another way to interest guests in your website without requiring you to create fresh written content.
As you begin to plan your company’s content strategy for 2015, it’s important to realize that while links remain as important as ever that out of date tactics can cost you dearly. Focus on regularly publishing high quality blogs or articles on your site and finding creative ways to create valuable content that encourages people to link back to your site.
Are you a business owner that needs experienced SEO help to position your website and company for success in the year ahead? Contact us today to learn more about how Be Locally SEO can help you achieve your 2015 business goals.