Small and midsize online businesses recognize the importance of link building. Simply put, link building is the SEO strategy making other websites link to your own website in order to move higher on the SERPs.

There is a caveat, however. You need to differentiate between links, since not all of them are viewed as equal by Google. The search engine distinguishes between trustworthy and untrustworthy links. Your efforts, therefore, should be directed at finding reliable links: fewer trustworthy links are more preferable than a larger quantity of suspicious ones. If Google detects unreliable links on your website or if you simply buy trustworthy ones, it will punish you. When companies violate Google’s guidelines, their ranking drops, their website becomes blocked, and their content gets removed. In contrast, when your link building is done right, your authority in your field strengthens and your Google ranking climbs.

Indeed, you should strive to build trustworthy links to improve your reputation on Google. Several strategies described below will help you get in Google’s good books. But remember: authoritative websites will link to yours only if you produce well-written, smart content that readers want to share, comment on, or link to. Composing high-quality content is, therefore, the key to capturing the attention of authoritative, trendy websites.

Broken Links Building

If you are a newcomer in the industry, start your link building by replacing broken links with yours. Look for blog posts with broken links and put your links instead of them. To identify broken links is easy: when you click a link and receive the message “the error 404,” know that it is broken. There are several reasons for the disappearance of a link. It either has been deleted or updated. Or the product is no longer available from the source website. Once you find a broken link, connect with the website’s author to update his or her link and direct it to you. Most probably, the website’s author will agree to the replacement, because broken links negatively affect any website’s SEO. The replacement will help the owner’s SEO strategy.

Guest Posting

In addition to replacing broken links, consider guest posting. This strategy is easy. What you need to do first is to reach out to websites in your industry to whom you can make a valuable contribution. Some websites officially accept posts from guest contributors. They have their guidelines, which greatly facilitates your work. You make a proposal to such websites, study their guidelines, and then write an article or post as instructed.

Although other websites do not have formulated guidelines, they might be open to guest posting. Reach out to them, too. Websites’ owners are usually glad to receive written content from outside contributors, because they spend neither time nor money on writing guest posts, but their website still gets developed. In return, you get backlinks from guest posting. You also promote your website: readers browsing your post click on your website to learn more about your product and services. Therefore, if you want to attract more people to yourself, write high-quality guest posts for authoritative, well-known websites.  

Link Building on Community Websites

Another strategy is to build links on online community websites. Online communities and forums are indeed a valuable source for backlinks. Consider contributing to such communities as Quora and Reddit. They have a variety of subgroups, each of which is dedicated to a specific topic or industry. It would be wise to join these communities and participate in a relevant discussion.

Check out questions connected to your specialization or industry that have been posted on Quora. Then, write an informative, engaging answer to the most pertinent ones. In your text, you may insert a link bringing people to your website. You may also openly encourage readers to search on your website for more information and explanations. Readers rank answers on Quora and Reddit. If you post an enlightening answer, you receive more votes and become more visible to the members of the community or forum. Your promotion guarantees that more people will visit your website.

There are other link building strategies. Some are more complex than others. Yet all of them are worth trying. The more experience you get in building links, the more traffic your strategy will bring to your online business.