Climbing Google rankings is the ultimate goal of any website owner, regardless of their industry. If you’re writing content, one of the best ways to do that is through linking. Many website owners stop at internal linking, which is a powerful strategy. However, as is it a part of the SEO basics, it won’t give you mind-blowing results on its own. If you want to expand your linking strategy, you’ll have to get some inbound links — and make them useful, too. Here’s how you can create powerful incoming links to your content and improve your SEO ranking.

Inbound Links 101

An inbound link is a link from another website that leads to your site, which should tell you enough about the importance of having them. Inbound linking strategies have a standard place among the frequently mentioned SEO tips because they’re essential for better SEO ranking. Their quality directly impacts your SEO, so you should aim for the best possible links.

There are a few ways SEO experts usually go about providing good quality inbound links. Depending on the website and industry, you might look into guest blogging, broken link building, or turning unlinked mentions to linked mentions.

Creating Inbound Links through Guest Blogging

Among these three ways, guest blogging is the most common one, although there are pitfalls to be aware of. With guest blogging, look for websites where your material would be a good fit. Come up with a guest post and pitch it to them. Ideally, that website should already be high up in the Google rankings, because their link will be almost worthless to you otherwise. Once they accept your pitch, you can insert your links through the author bio or the content, depending on the site’s guidelines.

Even though it’s a long process to find suitable websites and come up with a winning pitch, guest blogging is rewarding as it allows you to build your authority at the same time. Other ways might take a little less time and effort with the help of a few tools, but they don’t do as much to spread your online influence.

Finding Inbound Linking Opportunities

If you’re not up for guest blogging, you could try and look for other inbound linking opportunities. For example, an excellent way to use your existing content is to find broken links on big websites that were supposed to lead to similar material. To do this more quickly, you might need to use tools like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Send an email to the website to inform them that the link is broken, and provide them with your alternative link that contains content which is just as good.

Alternatively, there might be a gold mine of unlinked mentions of your brand waiting for you to discover. Sometimes blogs link to your domain but misspell it, or mention it without linking. Use Google search or other tools to find these mentions so you can reach out to the blogs and ask them to make them clickable. Whichever way you choose, it should provide at least a few good-quality inbound links to help your SEO ranking.

Now that you know why inbound linking is considered one of the essential SEO tips, you can get started on your strategy. However, it might take a few months to see the results of your SEO optimization efforts, so keep that in mind before you begin.

If you wish to start seeing results more quickly, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll be happy to discuss your marketing strategy with you and help in any way I can.

Rob Dunford is a Marketing Consultant in the Great Toronto Area with over 20 years of experience in implementing marketing plans for small businesses.