Link building is an essential component of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you take a look at the periodic table of SEO Success Factor created by searchengineland, you will notice that under off-the-page SEO Section, Links and Trust(Authority) takes up more than 35% of Off-Page SEO Success!

It is a crucial process that all SEO Specialists have to go through in order to increase their page rank in organic search results. Link Building component cannot be ignored especially when you are competing in ranking for hot keywords.

But the process of acquiring quality backlinks to your sites can be onerous. Here are some useful links that will help to improve your Search Engine Rankings. After reading all of them, I am pretty sure you’ll never look at link building in the same way again.

By Jon Cooper

Before embarking on any link building effort, the first thing I’ll revisit is Jon Copper’s Complete List of Linking Building article. His article is well-structured and it comes with the flexibility to search the best link building tactic you need.

You can search by time, link value and dependency on other sources. You can even categorise them by different selection such as content-based, link attraction and many more.

This article has been shared by more than 2400 twitter followers, so it can’t be wrong! Check it out!

by Justin Briggs

Competitor backlink analysis is great – you get the initial research and link building strategies. I usually use opensiteexplorer.org or ahrefs.com to collect and analyse inbound links.

Export all data to Excel and Page Authority, External Link and etc. It gives you an overview of how your competitor is performing and how much effort do you need to compete.

Follow Justin’s guide and I am sure you will be able to outbeat your competitors in no time! 🙂

by Chuck Price

Some link building rules and direction you can’t ignore in the year of 2014. Link Building is still about relevancy, it is not based on the quantity of the external backlinks your have but the quality of external backlinks pointing to your website. Algorithm changes do not affect site which builds quality backlink the right way. So make sure you do it right too!

by Neil Patel & Brian Dean

There are lots of free link building guides available (HubSpot, SEOMoz, Backlinko) and one of my favourites is a quicksprout advance guide to link building.

Neil and Brian provide you with all the micro details of link building, from words to pictures and screenshots that explain every single step.

Whichever link building ideas you would like to execute, the quicksprout provides you with the all the execution steps in details. From web directories submission to business listing to content writing for backlink baits, all the workflow are defined nicely just for you!

by Christian Arno

This article emphasises on leveraging social media as a link building tactic for your site. Create value content (blog post, infographics or videos) and share with your community. There are also tools and techniques provided to help you identify the key influencer in the social media space.

by Matt Cutt

If you are building backlinks using guest blogging technique, perhaps you should do it less often. Earlier this year, Matt Cutt, head of Google webspam team, mentioned about the increasing activity of guest blogging spam in the web space and Google might create the policy against such actions, if so, it might change its algorithm to weight less of guest blogging.

Nevertheless, guest blogging still has its benefits in gaining exposure, improving branding and reaching a larger community. As long as you create a high-quality guest post, there should not be any violation of spam.

Do check out Matt Cutt’s blog post before you try to implement guest blogging strategies.

by Jeniffer Slegg

Not to worry! Link building still has its value! This article serves as good key points for SEO Specialist to take note on. In a few years to come, Google is heading towards a direction that is less reliance on backlinks itself but more of a value of authorship and understanding of natural language.

Conclusion

Although this is not an exhaustive look at link building techniques, I hope it helps give insights into how link building can be used to create an impactful website. Feel free to find me on Twitter if you ever want to chat more about link building.