How to Combine Link Building with a Content Marketing Strategy

Getting higher rankings in online organic search results has always been associated with getting links from other websites. Before 2008, this was relatively simple, as what counted was the quantity and not the quality of backlinks.

The more links existed to the given website, the higher was the rank of the websites in search engines. However, over the last few years, Google engineers have implemented a number of changes to the algorithms of their search engine that resulted in this strategy no longer being effective.

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What counts now are natural links of good quality (i.e. links that have not been paid for) from reliable and trustworthy websites. More attention is also being paid to the type of anchors (the text of the link).

There is a list of the most common groups of links:

• Exact Match: a phrase in the link is the keyword you want to rank for
• Partial Match: a phrase in the link contains a partial or modified version of the phrase you want to get higher positions
• Brand: the link contains the name of your company’s brand
• URL: the link is in the form of URL address
• Zero Match: the text of the link is not associated with your offer or brand (e.g. ‘read more’,  ‘click here for more’ etc.)

Keeping an anchor text cloud natural and versatile became a very important task for SEO specialist because unnatural link profiles have been penalized under the new algorithms. Some websites have been punished and lost most of their organic traffic (the Penguin algorithm).

Google algorithms have also started to pay attention to the quality of content. Illogical texts with no added value (thin content) have had their rank lowered (the Panda algorithm). However, in this article, we will focus on link building.

How to get natural links?

One of the most popular strategies in this respect is “link baiting”. The idea is to create content on your website other publishers will link to not because you asked them to or paid them for it, but because they decided to do so themselves.

It can be a post answering a question commonly asked online (evergreen content), a helpful e-book, an interesting economical comment, viral video, etc. There is a number type of content you can post a link. Let’s have a look at a few examples and see how active content marketing can help your website get more valuable links.

Boosting link building with social media 

Great materials will always be a good bait for linking to your website. When creating a new blog post or revising the existing posts, think if your articles are worth mentioning by others.

See if the content you create is attractive enough for people to wish to share it with their friends, e.g. via social media. Before publishing, it’s a good practice to ask your co-workers for an advice. While creating the content we are usually too subjective and lack distance to what we create.