Affiliate Tips: How to Build Links the Right Way

Believe it or not, playing by the rules will get you far in the lead generation industry. Those who practice prohibited strategies, oftentimes called black hat SEO, run the risk of getting their website(s) penalized. Simply put, it’s just not worth it. If you’re trying to rank highly for Google, you’ll experience the most progress if you know how to play the game. Google’s algorithm changes hundreds of times per year, albeit subtly, but they have a few set standards for their best ranking websites. One of those standards is having a substantial collection of high-quality backlinks. But make no mistake – not all backlinks are equal in weight and value. Some can actually harm your credibility and overall rankings. In this article, we’ll show you how to build links the right way.

First off, if you don’t know what backlinks are just yet and why they are critical to your SEO rankings, read up on our comprehensive beginner’s guide on how to build backlinks and boost your search rankings. In essence, quality backlinks give your website more credibility in Google’s eyes. If people are genuinely interested in your website and linking to it on their own platforms, it must mean that your website contains valuable and relevant information. As a top search engine, Google wants to provide its search users with the most relevant, high-quality websites as possible. If yours has a great amount of natural backlinks, you will slowly climb the ladder to the first page of SERPs! Here’s how:

How to Build Links Step 1: Optimize Your Website

Your website aesthetics and user-friendliness directly affect how visitors portray your brand and interact with your design. The user-friendliest websites uphold the following standards:

• Clean and professional design: This goes without saying, but if you want to impress your visitors, make sure your design reflects a sense of professionalism and trustworthiness.
• Grammatically Correct Content: It’s worth triple-checking your work or running it through a few people before allowing your content to go live. One of the biggest factors that contribute to a professional website is error-free writing. This will help your visitors to trust your website a lot more as well.
• Fast Loading Speed: Your page loading speed doesn’t just contribute to user-friendliness; it also impacts your SEO rankings as well. Google prioritizes websites that load fast because it provides their users with a better search experience.
• Mobile-Friendly Design: Did you know that there are now more people searching the web on their mobile phones than there are people searching on desktops or laptops? With that in mind, create or use a template that caters to your many mobile visitors! (Source: SeachEngineLand)
• Visible Contact and FAQs pages: These navigation pages shouldn’t be hidden or ignored because they provide the visitor with peace of mind and guidance.
• Visible Call-to-Action: Your call-to-action should be the most eye-catching portion on your website. If it isn’t, make sure that you apply the correct changes to your call-to-action to enhance its persuasive power.

How to Build Links Step 2: Create Cornerstone Posts

Cornerstone posts are similar to evergreen content, where it continues to draw in more traffic over time. Your cornerstone posts should be extremely thorough and detailed. The nature of the cornerstone post is such that it gives immense support to your page, so the content must be optimized accordingly. An example of a cornerstone post for the financial niche would be a blog article talking about how to sign up for a personal loan. The article would ideally answer what a personal loan is, how much it usually entails, who borrows it and for what purpose, and finally, the different ways in which people can go about borrowing the loan. Do you see how it doesn’t answer the question right away, but rather goes above and beyond to explain every single detail about personal loans? This extra effort will pay off once people realize how valuable your content really is. That’s when you’ll earn natural backlinks!

How to Build Links Step 3: Make Your Content Shareable

Your content should be shareable, which means exactly what it states: you should have share buttons available to encourage content sharing. If you have trouble incorporating social share buttons to your website, feel free to consult one of our industry experts on how to get that done. If you don’t want to incorporate social sharing buttons, then you can encourage content sharing by simply creating call-to-actions at the beginning and end of the post making it clear that you will appreciate your post getting shared if it’s helpful to anyone. People don’t get shares most of the time because they simply don’t ask or push for it. Assuming that you will retain a professional voice and not go overboard, we encourage Affiliates to encourage visitors to share their page and content to whomever the visitors think the service might help.

How to Build Links Step 4: Pitch Your Content to Authority Domains

Finally, once you’ve done all that you can to ensure that your on-page optimizations are good to go, it’s time to put them to the test by pitching your content to authority domains. This is the most thrilling part of the backlink building journey, but it can also be the most uncomfortable part if you’re not used to pitching yourself to others. The key is to let them know how your content will benefit their audience. Once you figure out your selling point, don’t hold back from proudly pitching your content!

Once you’ve completed all of these steps, your chances of gaining backlinks should noticeably increase! We have no doubt that your SERP rankings will also improve because of these best practices.

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