Top 10 Link Building Strategies for 2024 That Work

Link Building Strategies: Do you know – Links are like ‘Confidence Vote’ and should flow naturally and freely (Unpaid in nature) between websites.

Link building is not a one-time job. It's a culture that should be a part of your blog marketing strategy and continue throughout the lifetime of your blog and blogging career.

The year 2016 is a landmark for SEO practitioners and webmasters from a link building point of view. With the introduction of the Google Penguin 4.0 Algorithm, lots of websites and blogs are being penalized for following wrong link building strategies. This algorithm update has changed the whole grammar of link building techniques for sure.

The problem with so many webmasters and SEOs while link building for websites is – They try to over-smart Google.

Many times they rely on link building strategies that are quick, unreliable, not from long-term perspective and associated with a lingering danger of penalty from Google.

With a “Sophisticated Link Analysis System,” Google is getting more smarter to catch link spammers in 2019. Apart from that Google is getting more intelligent to evaluate the value of a link. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web-spam team, publicly declared that – How Google will improve its link analysis system, and how it will take strong action against link-networks in 2013 and beyond.

Basic Fundamentals of Link Building

Link (Definition): A piece of hypertext link which when clicked redirects the users to another web-page or website.

Search engines discover web pages or web content across the world wide web via links. According to the original “Page Rank Theory” which Larry Page and Sergey Brin postulated while they were undergraduates at Stanford University –

A link to a web-page is like a Vote Of Confidence. But, not all votes carry the equal weights.

That means a link coming from the article body of a PR-7 web page is not equal to a link from the author-box on the same web-page via guest blogging, or a link on the comment section. Even though all three are dofollow links.

The value of a link depends upon the – Page Rank of the home page, Page Rank of the originating web-page, location of the link on the page, number of out-going links, anchor texts, subject relevance, niche relevance, authority of the site, trust factor of the site, and even the adjacent texts and links. Google calculates all these things in a millisecond while returning search results.

Again, Nofollow links are not considered a vote of confidence. They are just “mentions.”  Here the webmaster is giving a link to another web-page or site to say something about it (positive or negative), without having full confidence. They don’t carry any value in terms of link-juice or Page Rank.

Google: Its entire content ranking system relies heavily on links and things associated with it. That’s the reason Google is investing so aggressively on links or link analysis system. And deploying its resources to catch link spammers or link networks and making the web spam-free.

Google is quite smart at evaluating a link’s actual value. It gives different weights to different kinds of links, like – Advertorial links, Footer links, Blog Roll links, Guest Blogging links, Infographic links, Links from social media profiles and directory links, etc.

Time and again Google has told – Either earn links naturally or build links legitimately obeying Quality Webmaster Guidelines.

I am going to tell you 10 link building strategies for 2024 which will not only steer you from the deadly Penguin era, but also help you to gain a ‘Vote of Confidence’ by building legitimate links from authoritative sites.

Top 10 Link Building Strategies for 2024

Let’s forget everything for a moment and tell me – What is the main goal of a website or an online business?

It’s not link building or increasing the Page Rank of the website.

The main aim of an online business is to receive targeted traffic, capture prospects and convert them into customers. Or simply – More traffic and more sales. That’s all.

So why are you confusing yourself with dofollow, nofollow, Page Rank and all the BS? If you really want to achieve your online goal, that is traffic and sales, then follow the Link Building Strategies Which Google Likes.

1. Linkbait

One of the best yet easy link acquisition strategies is link baiting. It means creating content for the specific purpose of acquiring links.

The content should provide so much value that people will want to reference it or link it. There are lots of high quality articles in every niche on the worldwide web. And, these articles get links from webmasters or bloggers regularly.

You will be surprised to know, people have got thousands of links from other sites by simply writing a high quality article that offers tremendous value to the readers.

A different approach of linkbait while content creation is – Writing a controversial post which can provoke a strong emotional reaction in readers’ minds leading to plenty of opinions (comments) and backlinks.

Point to be noted, even though these posts are controversial in nature, the final aim is to provide something positive and valuable content to web readers with lingering negativity.

Writing controversial posts for link building requires courage. Not every blogger is comfortable writing this type of post.

Even Matt Cutts, the head of Google Web Spam Team suggests link acquisition via writing a controversial post is always legitimate and carry high value. You should explore this link building strategy in 2024 for better results.

2. Directories Submission

Directory submission is an easy and great way of acquiring links.

Not very long ago, webmasters were submitting their websites to the infinite number of directories, any x,y, or z directory.com. But recently Google put a full-stop on this practice by introducing Google Penguin Algorithm. Lots of websites penalized by Google for receiving backlinks from low-quality directories like Global-web-directory.org, EZineArticles.com, etc.

You should always list your site or blog on reputed and high traffic blog directories with an intention of traffic, not for any SEO benefits Boing Boing, Alltop, and Entire Web are always good. This should be definitely one of your link building strategies in 2024, for sure.

3. Social media 

It’s difficult to believe, there are sites who drive hundreds of thousands of visitors daily from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

Social media link is considered one of the safest which increases SEO value, and at the same time send tons of traffic. To achieve this your links, whether they are for content or image, or video; shouldn’t look like junk. Participate and add some value to your online social community.

Social networking sites are the most visited websites on the internet nowadays. By leveraging social media sites like Facebook, Mix, Medium, Pocket or Digg for link building is a wise decision in 2024.

Produce a quality article or something controversial post and share it on all the leading social media sites. You will receive tons of traffic and plenty of links, if you are lucky enough to feature on the Home Page of StumbleUpon or Digg. Sometimes your post goes viral on Facebook with 100s of likes ending with plenty of references and links from bloggers and webmasters. Try this link building technique in 2024.

4. Infographic 

Google is quite smart at ignoring infographic links. But our main aim is – not to collect link-juice, but to receive tons of targeted traffic, right?

Another great way of getting plenty of links in 2024. Now infographics is a very popular method for conveying information in a graphical way.

A well-targeted and well-marketed infographic are capable to send you a great amount of targeted traffic from a number of authority sites. Considering the risk-reward ratio, I mean the expenditure and profit ratio, infographics and infovideos are IN.

When you produce and publish an infographic, always provide an HTML code for other bloggers for republication and backlink. You should also add a logo of your blog in a natural manner on the infographic to give a clue to its origin. B’cos sometimes people don’t link back to the original site while publishing infographics. Try out this link building method for 2024.

5. Infomovie

Just like the infographic, infomovie is also gaining popularity nowadays. You have to produce a high quality video or something interesting or controversial video to publish on YouTube.

Never forget to SEO optimize your YouTube video with a backlink to the original content on your blog to channelize the traffic. No doubt lots of people will link-back the video on YouTube, but your original site and content will definitely get few links. Explore this link building option in 2024.

6. Guest blogging

Forget all the old wisdom about guest blogging. Guest post writing has been a hot trend since the last 5 to 10 yrs. Guest blogging is an easy and popular method for link building.

While guest blogging you should choose authoritative and high traffic blogs. Google recently penalized a few websites for guest posting and backlinks from spammy blogs.

Choose a blog that is popular and so busy to meet your traffic requirements. Use your best creation. Publish something which the author (founder) himself has not published on his blog. If you offer value to the publishing blog’s visitors along with authority, you will be successful in getting quality traffic.

You should not choose exact anchor texts for backlinks, while guest blogging every time. Google Penguin penalizes for multiple exact anchor texts.

Important: You should always request the publishing blog owner to put the (your) author info and backlinks inside the author-box. Google devalues the backlinks put outside the author box while guest blogging. B’cos Google always gives differently weighted to on-page links and backlinks from guest blogging.

7. Link-back

If you want links from other blogs, you should give links to other blogs too. Whenever you get an opportunity to link a blog post while writing an article, link it. Every webmaster regularly checks where they are getting backlinks from. As a goodwill gesture, they will never hesitate to link you when the opportunity arises.

Never do the mistake of asking for a link if you are linking a blog. In this way, you will never get the link and running a risk of spoiling your image and reputation.

8. Run a contest

Run a contest like “Best Blogger of 2020” or like that. Then reward the winners by providing a ranking widget, which they should show on their blogs with a backlink.

In this way, you will get a number of high quality backlinks. Of course, designing a widget is a bit costly, but finally, it’s money well spent!

9. Buy Advertorials

Putting advertorials on busy websites or blogs is really rewarding. It’s up to you, whether you want to buy an advertorial on a site with 50,000 visitors per day, or 500,000 visitors per day.

The only thing you should remember to please Google is – make the advertorial link nofollow along with a clear disclosure. To get a good amount of targeted traffic and prospects select niche and authoritative sites.

10. Increase PR

Read Public Relations, not Page Rank. Building PR means building offline-links.

Organize or attend workshops and seminars, and even think of a cycle rally. Interact with real people and spread the words. Always remember, word of mouth spreads like wildfire. And the real offline people are the ones who will give you online-links and buy your products.

Others — 

You should also try for a direct link request. Write an editorial about a blog or a product and send an Email to the blog owner requesting – if possible please mention this article on your blog/blog post.

When publishing a high quality article, send an Email to few blog owners requesting – if you consider this valuable, please mention this on your blog post.

If you have blogger friends, request them directly for links either online or when you meet them offline.

As a serious blogger, I recommend the above 10 link building strategies for 2024. If you have link building tips, please add this in the comment section below.