Driving website traffic can be a challenging ordeal for beginners and less experienced people. Without traffic, a website will struggle to produce the desired results. If you have a business website or looking to make money from blogging, you have to find ways to drive traffic to your site. It is this traffic that can be converted to clicks, sales, draw adverts and more. Some web owners use paid traffic to boost their website activity but it is not everyone who wants to spend to get traffic. If you are one of those people looking for ways to boost organic traffic to your website, then you have come to the right place. We will look at different link building strategies that can increase the amount of traffic heading to your website.
What is link building ?
Of course, before we dive into link building strategies and discuss how to get backlinks you need to understand link building and its role boosting website traffic.
Link building is the process of getting other websites to place hyperlinks to your websites on their own website thereby providing a backlink to your site. A hyperlink is a clickable link within content, it makes it easy for users to navigate from one page to another including moving from one website to another.
Search engines use robots that crawl through a website mapping and collecting data that is used to rank that particular website. The ranking algorithm rates links found on a website to determine its value and use to the visitors. The more value a link adds to a particular website, the better the ranking will be once all other ranking factors have been taken into consideration. Link building is another Search Engine Optimization factor that helps a website rank high on search engine results pages.
Ranking high on Search engine results page is the best way of increasing site visibility and getting a boost in organic traffic. Since link building plays a role in website ranking, it automatically becomes a very important factor in as far as increasing traffic is concerned.
Types of links
There are different types of links that can be used to optimize a website for better rankings. There are outbound links that link from your site to another site, there are also backlinks that link from other sites back to your own site. It is the backlinks that matter the most when it comes to search engine ranking.
How to get backlinks
Acquiring backlinks varies in difficulty, depending on the techniques that you use you may find it easy to get backlinks or extremely difficult. The catch is that every backlink you get has to:
- Be relevant to your website theme and topics
- Be active
- Come from an authority website within your niche
- Add value and improve browsing experience to your visitors
As you may already have guessed, it is difficult to get authority websites to link back to your website, especially if your site is new. That is why quality backlinks are often the separator between competing websites. If you are able to get better quality backlinks as compared to your competitors, you will stand better chances of ranking above them and essentially gain more visibility which leads to more traffic to your website.
SO here are some ways that you can use to get backlinks:
White hat link building
- Seeking out backlinks from others
The easiest way to begin your backlink campaign is to simply seek out backlinks from other people with an online presence. It is easier to start with people that you already know these could be family members or friend that own websites and blogs. Only seek backlinks from ones that have sites that are more reputable than yours and are related to your niche. You can then move on to colleagues, work mates and other contacts that 
you may have.
Do not be shy to ask for backlinks from authority bloggers within your niche. Getting backlinks from well established and reputable blogs can have a huge impact on your rankings and essentially your traffic. Admittedly, it is extremely difficult to get this kind of backlinks but it is not difficult, you just have to continue asking and approaching authority sites until you get positive responses.
- Get backlinks from social pages
Another excellent strategy of how to get backlinks is taking advantage of social pages. You can start out by simply activating social sharing buttons on your site so visitors are able to share your posts and content to their social media platforms. By sharing your posts to their site a backlink is automatically generated, now imagine how powerful it will be when a visitor shares your post on their social sites and it gets reposted by their followers!
Google, the leading search engine values social presence as it directly attributes this to the public. As such, social backlinks that come from Facebook pages, twitter, pin interest and other social pages tend to score really well with Google’s ranking algorithm.
To gain high-quality social backlinks to boost your search engine ranking, you need to first develop great and engaging content that is worth sharing. Engaging content will score you organic backlinks from genuine readers who link back to your site from their social pages. This leads us to the most import method of the how to get backlinks series
- Develop Quality content
No one wants to share or link to poor content that does not provide any value to their readers. Your link building strategy should be based on developing and posting content that is worthy of linking back to. If you develop excellent content that is informative, entertaining and engages the public, you will naturally gain backlinks from other bloggers or websites within your niche. This makes it even easier to get positive responses when you seek out backlinks from authority and reputable sites.
Also, high-quality content naturally gets shared on social media pages by visitors. So in your quest to get backlinks, make sure that you have good posts and content to back your campaign.
- Developing online relationships
Another great way to get backlinks to your website is to develop good relationships and partnerships with fellow bloggers and other people that you meet online. This can be achieved by participating in relevant forums, discussions, and making useful contributions in conversations. Once you have established solid relationships you can then get these people to provide backlinks to your site or blog.
- Guest posts and submissions
Writing guest posts for other leading and well-known sites is a great way to get backlinks. For every post that you provide, the website will link back to your website thereby providing high-quality back links. You can also write and submit some product reviews, press releases, news articles and more to other platforms that have authority on your niche of choice.
Black hat link building
- Reciprocal backlinking
Reciprocal backlinking is regarded as a form of black hat SEO that is shunned upon by leading search engines like Google. However, when used correctly it can provide excellent backlinks that improve your rankings. Reciprocal backlinking is exchanging backlinks with another site, it is a tit for tat kind of setup. This method of getting backlinks should be used sparingly, do not abuse it by exchanging many backlinks with one site. Limit the number of reciprocal backlinks that you associate with your site. Focus on trading backlinks with bloggers that share the same niche as you.
- Broken link building
Broken link building is a black hat SEO tactic that involves searching for content and pages related to your niche that are no longer live and recreate the content before reaching out to webmasters who linked to that particular content asking them to replace the link that is no longer live (broken link) with the new link to your recreated content. There are two downsides to this tactic, one it is tiresome to search the internet for broken links and it difficult to get positive responses for webmasters. However, finding broken links has now been made easier by the availability of many automated tools that scan the web for broken links.
So therefore, what is link building?
Link building strategies can be really difficult, there is a lot of work involved especially with the white hat link building methods. But once you learn how to get backlinks everything else becomes easy and you will see your traffic begin to soar.
