This guest post link building tactics is by ZenChange CTO Michael Richmond. You can read about his experience with SEO here.
Link building is a full-time job, and it’s not easy. If you’re doing link building for your boss or a client, they might become frustrated when it takes longer than expected—thanks to the amount of outreach you have to do and the low response rate from potential collaborators—because they don’t know how complicated the link building tactics you have to use actually are. But it’s not an impossible task. If you want to do link building yourself, one of the best ways is the Skyscraper Method. It is relatively easy and fun if you like doing link building.
What Is the Skyscraper Method for Link Building?
The first step is to make a killer article that talks about the topic or industry you are trying to target. For instance, if I am the owner of a Ford car dealership, and I want to build links on other websites, I could write about the features that the new Ford cars have. This article has to be well-written because the whole idea behind the link building tactics of the Skyscraper Method is to reach out to other website operators with a better article than they are linked to currently.
Next, you’ll want to use a tool that can help you find websites that talk about the topic or industry you are trying to go after. I like to use Ahrefs because they let you see the domain authorities of potential websites. Knowing the DAs of the websites you want to target is critical if you want to avoid reaching out to spammy sites. Once you get a list that you are satisfied with, check their website average traffic and whether they have active social media accounts.
If all those things check out, then go on each website that you have on your list and look for an email address. This can be difficult because a lot of people don’t want to be contacted. The best way to look for emails quickly is by adding a website extension. The extension I use is Email Hunter. Once installed, it looks for emails on any website automatically by scraping the entire site. Be careful because the free version only gives you 100 scrapes.
After You Get the Emails You Need, Then What?
Once you have all the emails you need, draft a short-and-to-the-point email template that you can easily use for outreach. I suggest something that is only one or two paragraphs long that includes the website or article you are targeting. You can make your offer more attractive by adding an incentive like “if you add my link I will share your article on our social media.” You’ve got to give something to get something in return, and such an incentive might help to get them more interested in responding to your email. More than likely, they will respond to your email with a fee they charge for adding a link. Nine times out of 10 they will charge you for doing this.
Lastly, when you get the payment or arrangement figured out with the webmaster, you can tell them the exact anchor text you want the hyperlink to be attached to. You want to make it a keyword that is related to your topic.
Need Help with Your Link Building Tactics?
I’ll admit it—I made this sound easy. But honestly, link building is really hard to do, especially if you’re not familiar with SEO. I only like doing it because SEO is my passion! There are countless hours and rejections you will experience that I didn’t even mention in this blog post. The good news is, when these link building tactics do get a response, it will definitely help your website ranking for that keyword or topic. I have seen a two to three percent jump in organic traffic every time I succeed in getting a link added to a website. But again these are highly rated domain authorities, so always keep that in mind when you do any link building.
Want a more in-depth discussion of SEO? Check out the interview I did with Zenchange Marketing Analyst Nick Branda below.