60+ link building techniques checklist [2024 update]

1. Skyscraper technique

Skyscraper is almost a legendary link building technique. It’s time-consuming, but if it’s done properly, you’ll get quality backlinks, targeted traffic and possible business connections.

It’s a combination of perfect content, research, competitor backlink analysis and email outreach. The process is covered in this link building guide.

We used this email in our recent skyscraper campaign:

Just in case you are not willing to invest your time the skyscraper techniques, you can always try link building services.

2. Content-based link building

The hardest, yet the most efficient technique. Create content that will naturally attract readers, social shares, and referral traffic. Get inspired in our Learn SEO guide.

When you write, pay attention to readability. Content has to be well-structured and without grammar errors. There are many tools to help out. ShoutMeLoud made a nice list.

Watch out for flow, adverbs usage, passive voice index, unique words, or estimated reading time. Of course, this depends on your target audience.

3. Top lists

There are many, but if you have unique and relevant data it should be a success. When we published the Top keywords list, it was our most visited blog post in 2016.

When writing top lists, think about timing and prepare to dig deep into data.

4. Produce educational content

Google SERP is full of “How to” articles. Publishers think it’s easy to educate. Well, it can be, but the amount of recycled content out there won’t attract readers just like that.

On the other hand, you can always target a specific group of people with your own opinions and unique insights.

5. Case studies

Case studies can be a backlinks gold mine! That’s why I’ve dedicated a special point to them. Case studies are always unique and bring new information. Make sure to have proven data, do your research, try to experiment and test industry myths.

6. So-called “Green content”

Yes, it’s a content, but very specific and beneficial when it comes to gaining high-quality links. If it’s good enough and deals with the most up-to-date issues, not only environmentally-friendly organizations will share it.

Environmental threats such as climate change, water pollution or species extinction have been discussed widely for years. Who knows, maybe you will become an influencer who will help to save the Earth.

7. Thought-provoking, irritating, annoying content

This can be tricky. It can ruin your reputation when done wrong. Don’t try to abuse people, their struggles, and opinions. Help them to solve their issues. Be careful on what you plan to profit. I recommend reading this article by Sean Hodge.

8. White-papers

They’re widely used in the B2B world but you don’t need to be a corporation to conduct a deep research in the industry, add your thoughts, charts, and knowledge others can benefit from. White-papers are a great source of sharing opportunities and gaining valuable links.

9. Reviews and comparisons

These two rank very high when done right. Your deep analysis, pros, cons and recommendations will solve decision paralysis of many readers. What’s more, if you’re good enough, businesses will be willing to pay for reviewing their products. And suddenly, you can be a thought leader.

10. Create a dedicated blog section

There are many companies with useful content despite not having a blog. It’s time to use that potential! A dedicated blog is an engagement magnet.

Make sure to go through this very detailed guide on how to learn blogging if you aren’t sure how to start. This infographic on how to start a business blog is extremely useful as well.

11. Make an interview

Try to partner with well-known authorities in the industry. It doesn’t need to a superstar. The person will share the interview with their audience and might link to it on their website too.

12. Guest posts

Guest posts represent a good way to earn backlinks. Do website research, write outstanding content and try to publish it on an authoritative website. They usually have strict guest blogging guidelines and it sometimes takes a lot of time to accept your submission.

It’s a bit more time consuming, but it definitely works. You will find lists of websites accepting guest posts but if you plan to target relevant ones, use Google search operators. Start with the focus keyword and add “write for us”.

You can specify your query with the operators: allintitle, intitle, inurl to find even more opportunities. Make sure to do a proper guest post outreach and focus on the quality of your email – it may be your only chance to get the attention and earn a backlink.

And now from the opposite point of view: If you publish a guest content on your site and the same blogger publish another content on a different site linking to the original article on your site, you’ll have a backlink.

Feel free to find some other great guest blogging opportunities.

13. Podcast guesting

We all know that podcasts are popular. They are easy to consume so you can gain a lot knowledge and get some cool industry news while cleaning your apartment or car. Doing podcast guesting means that you target podcasts relevant to your niche and outreach their creators to be part of them.

To be honest, I don’t like listening to podcasts. On the other hand,  I think it’s an underrated marketing technique that can bring a lot of exposure to you and your business. Make sure to read this podcast guesting guide.

14. Social media outreach

Share your content on social media, promote it on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, comment relevant posts and create connections. I love these 4 powerful social media outreach tactics.

15. On-site social sharing actions

Sharing buttons and widgets. You can’t skip them on your website. Besides sharing your content via social networks, people can place your widgets on their sites and link back to you.

AddThis is a useful plugin in which you can track the results of social engagement of your website.

16. Share to download buttons

Give your users an opportunity to access exclusive materials, bonuses or discounts by asking them to share your website. Motivate them to share your stuff. We use Social Locker.

17. Specialized discussion forums

Join Quora, Reddit, StackExchange, and others to ask and answer related questions. Be careful, these forums usually have strict spam rules and are full of professionals, so you can suddenly get banned. It happened to me as well. I should have read this guide before.

36. Get interviewed

No, you don’t need to be Britney Spears. Things happen really fast in the digital world. Take the advantage of it. You can become successful in a short time so getting interviewed with a link is definitely a good idea.

However, nothing comes for free so don’t wait to be interviewed. Research publishers and get in touch with them. This is a detailed guide by Ann Smarty you should go through.

37. Gifts

How about sending gifts to your most valuable customers and partners? Use special occasions such as Christmas or birthdays and include a call-to-action to share it and link to you.

38. Exchange

Exchange your products for a review or other promo activities leading to a link. Bloggers writing a review will usually include a link so you don’t need to ask them.

When it comes to affiliate partners, they tend to provide no-follow links.

39. Build a campaign microsite

Do you have a special discount, an event or a product launch? Build a microsite! Keep in mind that content should be 100% non-duplicate and you should also build a good link profile for the microsite.

Creating microsites from the SEO point of view isn’t as profitable as it was in the past but you should consider it when you are planning to build a long term authority website.

40. Create a sitewide announcement link

Yeah, a sitewide link isn’t that good when it comes to the link strength but it’s perfect for a short term link placement to gain high traffic, i.e. you can do this with a short term special offer. Keep in mind that the linked sites should be related.

41. Comment blog posts

In general, I think that comments with links don’t positively influence your SEO because they are deleted almost immediately. But if you select blog posts with high traffic, then you write a comment which is super relevant and boosts the discussion, it may end up with providing a link that will add a value to the discussion.

In this case, the moderator shouldn’t delete the comment. No one wants to stop a productive discussion under their blog post.

42. Cooperate with courses, schools and teachers

What’s better than to be recommended to many students by well-known courses, universities or respected teachers? Not to mention that a backlink from “.edu” domain can be a great signal for Google. The quality of website users referred this way is unquestionable.

What’s more, you can prepare a special offer for the students. One last thing I would like to mention is that well-known teachers tend to speak on various events or conferences on which they can promote your website.

The amount of time you will need to invest into this depends on whether you are the outreached person or you plan to outreach them.

43. Content syndication

Content syndication is a great backlink source and you will get some additional traffic boost.

You can submit an excerpt of your original article or create a unique description, it’s up to you. In case of the duplicate content, make sure to check whether the platform has implemented a “rel=canonical tag“, which links back to your original content.

44. Beta lists and startup submissions

Links from these sites are usually no-follow but their overall influence helps a lot. There are highly focused people willing to test or support new products. Check Betalist, ProductHunt, or Erlibird.

45. Business listings and catalogues

They used to work in the past. It’s really time-consuming and benefits are usually minimal. However, it’s ok to be there, at least on the most relevant ones.

46. Submit creatives

Infographics, ebooks or leaflets can be submitted on Slideshare, Issuu, Pinterest, Scribd and other alternatives. Reserve some time as you would need various digital formats, descriptions, and links.

In fact, creative formats like infographics can be incredibly powerful for link building. As long as you’re building an infographic that includes important information about your industry, you can generate more and more links and website traffic. Learn more about how to build links with infographics.

47. Submit videos

Compared to the time neeedd for a video production, the submission is nearly nothing. And it’s not only about YouTube. There are many sites where you can attract views such as Vimeo.

48. Develop and share

Have you developed something that works and looks like a charm? Share it on highly-focused forums such as GitHub, Bitbucket, or CodePen. It doesn’t directly make a link but it can improve the overall share of search for your brand and that means audience, clicks, and links.

49. Wikipedia link building

Link building on Wikipedia isn’t complicated but you should think tactical. The biggest con is that linking from Wikipedia will automatically generate new links because your site will be used as a reference.

50. Barnacle SEO

Many of the mentioned techniques in this category and some others are part of barnacle SEO. However, the main point of barnacle SEO is that you optimize someone else’s website and leverage its authority at the same time. That means you focus not only to get a backlink. You should help the website to rank high by improving it with quality content.

51. Email outreach

Email outreach is a time-consuming task. You need to do it as a part of many link building techniques mentioned in this article. It’s all about finding the right prospects, listing the potential link placement, researching email addresses and sending personalized emails. Get ready for sending reminders and don’t forget to track the results.

You’ll find many guides on this. Last time, we reached a 16% response rate. Therefore, I’ve formulated 9 actionable email outreach tips.

52. Resource pages

There are thousands of pages listing guides or tools and linking to them. Use Google search operators such as exact match, allintitle, intitle, inurl with your keyword and you will find many pages on which you would like to have a backlink. Example: inurl:”seo resources”

Once you create a list of the pages, prepare personalized messages and outreach the authors.

53. Top lists, how-tos, guides

Creating this kind of content attracts links so why not to have a backlink there? This technique is similar to #44 and it requires using the exact match, allintitle, intitle, inurl search operators. When creating the list of prospects, think about your website’s authority too. You should provide a value for the outreached person.

Besides using the search operators, you can try tools such as BuzzSumo.

54. Email signatures

How many emails do you send per month? Imagine only a few of the recipients click on the link under your name. You get a couple of clicks and it costs you nothing. Keep in mind that email signatures don’t positively affect SEO.

55. Internal linking

It’s a must! Internal linking means you rule anchors and add links where you want to. If you do it regularly, it’s a matter of seconds. In case your website is full of content without internal links, you’ll spend a couple of days fixing it. Before doing so, I recommend reading the Essential guide to internal content link building by Julia McCoy.

My advice: Don’t add more than 2-3 links per article. Avoid using a plugin which automatically links particular words. It’s annoying and ruins UX.

One more tip: Identify your most-viewed pages so you know where to put specific links.

56. Breadcrumbs

Another internal link building tip is to use breadcrumbs. The site navigation is transparent thanks to them and you can optimize the anchor text distribution as well.

57. RSS feed

You probably have it but in case you don’t, create one. Sooner or later, somebody will scrape your content. But if you place internal links in the content, you’ll earn a link.

58. Create a sitemap

This is one of the internal linking methods and it’s extremely useful. Search engines like sitemaps. Moreover, it’s a good navigation for visitors. You can use one of the many WordPress plugins.

59. Broken link building

Identifying links leading to non-existing sites and linking them to your content can be a time-consuming but effective method. You can use search operators or various tools for this.

60. 404 errors

Check the Google Search Console if there are any. No one likes to land on 404 – Page not found.

61. Do you have robots.txt?

Review it whether there are any linked pages. Either contact webmasters of sites linking to them or consider allowing crawlers to index these pages.

robots.txt syntax:

User-agent: * (e.g. Googlebot)

Disallow: /  (e.g. /images/pizza.png)

62. PBNs (Private Blog Network)

PBNs are a way as well but you have to be very careful. These links should look as natural as possible. PBNs are websites to implement links to other websites (ones that generate money). It’s an expensive technique. You need to pay for a domain, hosting and set of blog posts.

It can be risky because Google bans PBNs from time to time. Think wisely. The costs of PBNs can be higher than the income.

63. Expired domains

Look for expired domains with working links. All you had to do in the past was to find them and redirect them via 301. Nowadays, it’s more complicated. Watch out for relevancy.

64. Create a free tool

Everyone loves free tools: free = buzz. That means it’s shared and likely to build a solid number of backlinks. So why not to create a free tool to use this potential of high website traffic and many backlinks for your own needs? You can link your other websites from it.

We did the same thing with RockingPage where we included links to our SEO tools.