5 Link Building Strategies to Focus on in 2018

Link building is very critical and important if we want to improve a website’s rankings organically. Instead of guessing “the next big thing,” I am going to show you the top five link building strategies that are effective currently and should work even better in 2018.

Check out the top five strategies below:

• Internal Links.
• Citations and Mentions.
• 2018 JACKING.
• Blog Commenting.
• Guest blogging.

So let’s get started.

Internal Links

Internal links are the most powerful link-building tactics you can use. This tactic is already being used by well-known websites (e.g. Wikipedia has strong internal links and Wikipedia pages are in top positions for most of the generic terms).

What are Internal Links and Why are They Important?

Internal links take you from one page to another page within the website.

In the above image, the first link is an internal link (i.e. link from one page to another page within the website) and the second is an external link (i.e. a link to a page on different domain). It takes you to the Unsplash site for the image credit. There are four important reasons why internal links are important for your website:

1. Internal links help users to navigate a website.
2. Internal links spread link juice and help search engines to rank better.
3. Internal linking boosts page views and improves usability through call-to-action anchor texts.
4. Smart Internal linking helps search engine bots to easily crawl and index the deeper pages of the website.

Citations and Brand Mentions

We all know that building local citations is an essential building block to rank higher in the search results. Moreover, we all know how time-consuming it can be to create them manually.

Local citations is the combination of the three terms named “NAP”: Name, address and phone number.

Benefits of Local Citations

There are a number of benefits of local business citations when it comes to local SEO rankings:

1. Local listing can appear on the first page of local search results.
2. Local listings give you qualified leads and helps to improve your rankings.
3. Local listing helps you in beating your local competition.
4. Local listing help you to improve your visibility on major local search results.
5. Local listing increases traffic to your business
6. With local citation, you can attract new customers easily.

To find local citations sources, you can head over to this comprehensive list of 160-plus business listing sites with high domain authority (DA). 

You can also find city-specific and keyword-specific citation sources by using the following commands

For City specific citations:

• (city) business listings

• (city) business directory

• (city) directory

For keyword-specific citations:

• (keyword) business listings

• (keyword) business directory

• (keyword) directory

Brand Mentions

Brand mentions are the future of link building and it happens when someone refers to your product or services to others via his/her blog or website.

“Google has made it clear, being mentioned by others is the only way to do SEO properly.”

Head over to the nicely written post: How to Increase Your Rankings by Building Brand Mentions by Neil Patel.

2018 JACKING

Users always prefer to check the latest, updated post, so by adding the current year or adding some call to actions terms to your title can maximize your chances of hitting the first page results on search engine.

Suppose we have 2 posts titled:
“4 Link Building Strategies to focus on in 2017”
and
“4 Link Building Strategies to focus on in 2018”

It is obvious that the user will give preference to the 4 Link Building Strategies to focus on in 2018.
Add the following phrases (call to action terms) to your post title, and do not forget to add “2018” as well to discover timely: Top | Discover | Free | Get | Try | Greatest | Fastest | Newest |Oldest | Most Expensive |Easiest |Unbelievable |Best

Blog Commenting

There are many ways to build links. In fact, building links from blog comments is one of the easiest ways, although it can be very time consuming.

To find quality blogs, you can use the following advanced Google operators:

• “Add new comment” + “your keyword here”
• “Leave a comment” + “your keyword here”
• “Leave a reply” + “your keyword here”
• “Post a comment” + “your keyword here”
• “your keyword here” “Leave a comment”
• “your keyword here” “Comment here”
• “your keyword here” “Add comment”
• “Powered by WordPress” + “your keyword here”
• “your keyword here” “You may use these HTML tags and attributes”
• “your keyword here” “Post a comment”
• “Notify me of follow-up comments ”
• “your keyword here” “Notify me of new posts”
• “Comments on this entry:”
• “Sign in to comment on this entry.”
• “Login or register to post comments”
• “You must be registered and logged in to leave comments”
• “This blog uses premium CommentLuv”

Head over to this post if you want to know more about how to do the blog comments in the right way: 11 Powerful Link Building Techniques to Gain the Most Engagement

Blog comment links are very effective. Some of the blog commenting benefits are listed below: 

• Some blogs have a high domain authority (DA) score and this counts as a positive factors toward your search engine ranking.
• Even if a blog backlink is no-follow, your website will still be found and indexed by the search engines and more importantly, it will improve visibility, establish credibility and  build relationships with bloggers when you consistently do blog comments.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is one of the most powerful ways for driving quality traffic, building brand recognition and getting exposure to your site.

I do guest blog pitch frequently on top sites like SEMrush, Advancedwebranking, Dzone, Templatemonster, Upwork, SiteProNews and Yourstory etc.

In fact, from all these sites, I get a custom author profile and backlinks to my site.

The five real benefits of guest blogging are:
1. By doing guest blogs on high authority sites, you will get the natural backlinks that will not hurt your website or blog.

2. Guest blogging is one of the major and important sources of quality traffic and gaining exposure.

3. Building relations is very important in digital marketing and guest blogging helps you build strong relationships with the audience.

4. Guest blogs on top sites like SEMrush and Templatemonster helps you in capturing a broader audience.

5. It helps you to discover better business opportunities.

The key points to consider when guest blogging

1. Do not waste your time on websites with a low domain authority (DA).
2. Always consider the website, which has a high social follower/following ratio.

Here is a list of 180 websites that accept guest posts.

Conclusion

Link building is crucial for any SEO campaign and, thankfully, we can still rely on a few link-building techniques that work in 2018 as well.

I know these strategies will put you ahead of your competitors if used in the proper manner.

What’s your experience with these strategies? How has it helped your SEO? Do share your views in the comments section.

Ashok Sharma is a writer, blogger, digital marketer and social media enthusiast. Ashok currently hold the position of digital marketing manager at GrayCell Technologies. Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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