7 Safe Ways To Build Links In 2014

Anybody involved in the marketing of a website will understand how difficult it can be to obtain quality links to your website. Not so long ago you would see results from building dozens of links through directory submissions, social bookmarking sites, and other low quality sites with no editorial standards – those days are long gone, but it’s not as hard as you might think to build credible backlinks. In this post I will show you 7 safe methods you can use today to help you build backlinks for your business during 2014.

1. Relevant Directories
   Directory submissions have gained a bad name for themselves over the years; with many thanks to people abusing them for SEO benefit in the early days. But, there is still value to be had in getting your website listed on relevant link directories and on local business directories too.Obviously you don’t want to go out and start submitting your site to hundreds of irrelevant directories which all have no editorial standards (every link submitted gets published). But, if you take the smart approach you can often find a few great directories which will help your website in the SERPs. For example, if you operated a web design agency in New York, then looking for New York Business Directories would be a great place to start.


2. Guest Blogging
   This is probably the favourite method of building solid links right now; that’s probably partly due to the fact that it doesn’t only benefit your SERPs, but if done right it can provide other great benefits too, including building your brand, establishing yourself as an authority, targeting new audiences, and driving masses of direct referral traffic.If you have the budget then a guest posting service is the best way to go; they have the experience and the expertise to ensure you get the maximum value from every single guest post. But, if you don’t have a marketing budget then you can do guest blogging yourself, you just need to make sure that you’re doing it right.


3. Reverse Guest Blogging (Accepting Guest Posts)
   So, you now know that guest posting is a great way to build links, but did you know that reverse guest blogging can help you to build links and increase your reach too? ‘Reverse guest blogging’ is simply the act of accepting guest post contributions on your own blog.Now, this isn’t something you want to go into all ‘willy-nilly’, you don’t want to accept trash content. But, if you can get authors who are already respected and hold a position of authority in your industry to contribute a piece to your blog, then you’ll see some great benefits from that. Your visitors will start to consider your website as more of an authority (because you have authoritative people contributing on your blog), and you’ll get backlinks and social shares on the contributed content from people who are already following that author.


4. Link Baiting
   This basically involves producing amazing content which people will want to link to and share, without you having to lift a finger. Matt Cutts has described link baiting as anything which is “interesting enough to catch people’s attention”, and there are no shortage of different ways you can go about producing content like this!Infographics have been very popular over the past year or two (most blogs where you see an infographic posted will have a text area box containing the embed code for you to add the infographic to your own website if you wish. This embed code would include a link back to the original infographic page on your own website. There are plenty of other methods too, we’ll look at a couple more later on in the list.


5. Social Profiles
   Creating brand pages for your business or website on all of the main social sites is another great way to get some powerful links and help to establish your brand. You can create pages for your business on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIN to cover the main ones.Social profiles make a great place for you to syndicate your content toand it helps you to get more exposure for your content. As your social profiles receive more followers, your content will be exposed to more people, you then have the opportunity of those followers and friends of those followers re-sharing your content, expanding your reach even further.


6. Interview Industry Leaders on your Blog
   This is another great way of attracting new audiences and increasing your reach. By interviewing industry leaders and publishing the interview on your blog you will find that you are able to collect tons of natural links to your site, and get some great exposure for your website at the same time.This method works particularly well for new blogs who haven’t had a chance to build credibility yet. You just need to find an industry leader who is happy to be interviewed by you and then you can get started.


7. Reverse Engineering (Competitor Link Analysis)
   Probably one of the easiest way to quickly locate some of the best linking opportunities available to you is by checking your main competitors backlink profile.OpenSiteExplorer.org and MajesticSEO.com both provide tools which will allow you to compile a report of your competitors backlinks.You can then sort through the results, remove all of the rubbish links and compile a shortlist of quality link opportunities based on your competitor’s backlink profile. Assuming your competitors are ranking on page 1, you should be able to duplicate the results by following their backlink profile and adding in a few great links of your own.

Hopefully that’s given you at least a few ideas which you can take away and put to use for your business today. What do you think of these methods? What results have you had from these linking practices? Do you have any super link building methods that you would like to share?

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