You have an outstanding piece of content on your blog or site, but it is just sitting there. It is gathering dust when it was supposed to gather links. How did that happen? Why did it all go wrong? Did you waste all those resources for nothing? Was it the timing, the alignment of the stars or was it just not as good as you thought it to be? Well, you can stop beating yourself up and relax right about now. Linking was easy and quick once upon a time, but now it is one of the toughest parts of SEO.

Without links, there is no traffic, and without traffic, there is no revenue. Just because value-adding links have become rare, does not mean they have become any less important. You need to stop freaking out and break down the smaller aspects of link building. New SEO experts feel lost when someone says this to them, but we are here to help you explore the different nuances of great link building strategies to boost your search engine optimization.

Revisit your content

Contents do not find good links because they do not have enough information and value-adding qualities. Since you are confident about your content quality, this step should be straightforward for you. Run your article through a grammar checker or content audit tool. Correct any mistakes that show up, remove the repetitions and use keyword synonyms whenever possible. Great content pleases the readers, the webmasters, and Google at one go.

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No webmaster wants to link to content that does not guarantee a great reading experience to their visitors. Harboring an external link is like opening a passage to related content on another website. Unless that destination is secure and high-quality, no website owner wants to risk it. Building links with subpar content are at least ten times more difficult than doing so with good quality content.

Finding the right site

What is the correct type of website that will potentially link to your content? Start by looking for a website that hosts similar content. There is no way you can benefit from linking to a platform just because you like their layout or their articles interest you. They have to be relevant in more ways than one to your online presence. Check if the target site has similar topics in their blog and library. If you don’t see similar themes, you might be wasting your time there. Going through thousands of websites and millions of articles is impossible unless you have some powerful tools to help you out. You can also run a site-wide search using some major keywords to see if they have something along the lines of your work.

Finding the right fit for the visitors

Would you want to shop a piece on sportswear and energy drinks on a senior healthcare website? Well, definitely not, unless you have something specific, that would help the seniors in mobility or healthcare. Just like you don’t set up an ice cream shop in front of a diabetes wellness camp, you need to find your audience while shopping for links.

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You might have mentioned how sugar-free ice cream can replace high-carb and high-calorie ones in regular diet once, but that does not make it alright for your site to host articles on insulin pumps. As ridiculous as it might sound, these things happen in the world of SEO and link building. Sometimes, all people need is one mention of their keyword of interest to jump at the opportunity. All we ask of you is – don’t be that guy. Find out who is interested in your product and which site has a significant crossover with your target audience. Pay attention to the impression of the site, its tone, and the immediate audience. Find a website that matches your standards, values and overall brand outlook.

You are not looking at the right places

There are two possibilities to this – either you are approaching too many random websites and diluting the impact, or you have no idea which sites turn to great link buddies. Casting a wider net may sound foolproof. Theirs is always security in numbers, right? Well, no! You will end up spending too much time and resources on websites that were never a part of your journey. You need to begin with specific searches. Use more than one tool to find the rewarding prospects. Relying on one tool can usher the doom of your link building adventure.

Always remember to make your own judgments. Do not go by the strict criteria and metrics that other people set for building links to the sites. While metrics can help weed out sites that lack domain authority and page authority, they cannot replace manual evaluation. Throughout the evaluation process, you need to check the quality of the site’s content, the publishing frequency, linking frequency, other linked sites, and comment density.

You can always try cold-calling

To make it sound optimistic, we will replace the term “cold calling” with outreach. It is tough, and there is a high probability that your efforts at link building will fail rapidly. However, it is always worth a try due to the significantly lower stakes involved. Link building outreach is challenging, and there is no guarantee that the recipient will open your email. You can always try using email trackers to see who has opened the email and who hasn’t. It might not help you trigger a response, but it will always help sort the priority recipients, who open and respond to your emails. Even the negative reactions should count since they might agree to link to an article in the future.

Link building is an inescapable part of SEO. Search engines can evaluate the nature of each link. Duping Google with private blog networks, link farming, and link shopping does not work anymore. In fact, these are now black hat techniques that attract hefty penalties from the search engine giant. So, stick to great content and audit the other factors to find out why your piece is still inert.