Link building is far from being dead and if you implement proper white-hat, ethical strategies, you’ll see a positive boost in your rankings. Let’s talk links for just a minute, before we dive into the 3 key ways to improve your rankings.

It’s important to keep in mind that links will continue to remain a strong ranking factor to how Google views the quality of your site, and it’s been stated by Matt Cutts several times throughout 2014. Recently in a You&A at SMX Advanced, Danny Sullivan asked the following:

Danny: Is link building just dead? You keep saying a new tactic is dead, or must be nofollowed, is it really you just don’t want people to try to build links at all?

Matt Cutts replied back with the following….

Matt: No, link building is not dead. And a very small percentage of links on the web are nofollowed. There’s a lot of mileage left in links.

Yes backlink are still important, and link building should never stop! Now as promised, here are the top 3 strategies that will ensure higher rankings in the SERPs.

1. Create AWESOME Link Worthy Content

The main focus of content creation is to provide valuable information to your target persona.  If you want to create better content, start by mapping out the demographics, psychographics, key questions and characteristics about your different persona types.

Once you have this mapped out and defined, it will help build loyalty to your brand so when prospects and customers need your products and services, they will come to you and share the quality information you offer.

Content marketing is hard but not impossible. It’s incredibly important to make sure the content you’re producing is creative and relevant. Go beyond the traditional blog posts, think outside the box. What will engage your target audience?

Content creation ideas:

• Infographics
• Quizzes, polls
• Case studies
• eBooks
• White papers
• Helpful tools/widgets
• How-to guides
• Videos
• Press releases

Remember, you can’t just set it and forget it. You need to market it. Be sure to promote content through social efforts and outreach to key influencers. This is a sure fire way to obtain quality backlinks month over month and it’s incredibly natural!

2. Relationship Building

There are several ways to engage with your customers and target audience. One strategy that has been increasingly successful for us has been using, Twitter followers. In a recent post “The One Crucial Link Building Strategy That You’re Missing Out On”, we shared step-by-step instructions for conducting research and outreach. By implementing this strategy, we saw an 18% increase in response rate and 3% increase in conversions. One strategy we definitely recommend testing out!

3. Link Reclamation

Link reclamation can be executed several different ways:

• Turn brand mentions into quality links
• Find and fix broken links from external sites
• Find and fix broken internal links

The one we’ve found to be most successful is turning brand mentions on the web into quality links. To clarify, these are webpages where your brand name has been mentioned, but not linked. Perhaps the webmaster couldn’t find the right URL, forgot to add the link in, or maybe misspelled your domain name…etc. Doesn’t mean they don’t want to link to you, so why not reach out, right?

You can identify these webpages a couple different ways:

• Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer
  • This allows you to add advanced operators to see where your brand has been mentioned but you haven’t been linked to
• Use advanced search parameters in Google
  • One example, “Brand Name” -site:brandwebsite.com -press –release. This will return thousands of results, but keep in mind, you can easily filter out pages you’re already aware of and just keep digging for the gems.
  • Set the searches by date in Google – you can search by 24 hours, a week, a month, custom dates, and it will give you the opportunity to see recent mentions that sometimes offer a nice supplement to the fresh web index

Since these webpages have already mentioned your brand, you can expect a really high conversion rate on your request. As an extra bonus, most of these links will carry great authority and will help boost your site’s rankings.

It’s a really powerful strategy and we hope you can capitalize on missed opportunities where people don’t link to you.