If you’re serious about your search engine ranking, it’s extremely important that you’re paying close attention to your backlink profile. Sure, while you can’t control every link that points to your website, you can control those that you build manually.
Since automation doesn’t work anymore, you may be thinking about building links the right way – by hand.
Manual link building, if done right, is a sure way to keep your website ranking high and keeping you sleeping at night since you won’t have to worry about that dreaded search engine penalty message showing up in your inbox.
To get you on the right path, here are some manual link building services you may want to try.
1. Guest posting
Lately, you may have heard that guest posting doesn’t work anymore. While this is true, you have to understand that guest posting is a lot more than trying to obtain a link. A good guest post will not only help your ranking, but will help develop relationships with other website owners and draw in outside search engine traffic.
If you’re going to hire a guest posting service, there are a few things that you’re going to want to pay close attention to.
For starters, always make sure that these posts show up on unique websites that post more than just guest posts. If the website posts nothing but guest posts, search engines are going to see these websites as a glorified article directory. The next thing that is important is the content quality. Since this content is going to reflect your brand, it’s important that the company delivers strong content that’s error-free and informative. Some guest posting service companies outsource their guest post content to third-parties. This is okay, as long as the quality doesn’t suffer.
2. Citations
Citations are a gold mine if you’re in the local SEO space. Known as business listings, these citations will show up on well-known websites, such as Yelp and YellowPages.com. These listings, in turn, will help drive in click-through traffic and help boost your rankings.
With hundreds of websites out there that will accept your listing, it could take hours, if not days, to create a listing on each website. If you’re doing local SEO, highly consider building at least 30 to 40 citations a month using reputable manual citation services.
By the way, even informal mentions of your company on blogs, press releases, and others, can be considered citations too. If they sound too complicated, consider getting the proper services for them.
3. Broken link building
This time-intensive method can land some powerful links if you build the right links. Basically, the goal of broken link building is to find links on relevant websites that don’t work anymore. If that broken link relates to your website, you can simply email the website owner and let them know about the link that doesn’t work. The kicker here is to let them know that you know of a resource that they can replace that broken link with, and of course, the link would be yours. As long as your website is credible, most website owners will be more than happy to do this.
Now, if you’re thinking about how you can find expired domains, there are a few ways you can do so.
One popular method is by searching for domains that have recently expired. Using tools, such as ExpiredDomains.net, can lead to millions of domains that have expired in the past 30 days.
The key here is to search for domains that are relevant to your industry, and usually, no matter what industry you’re in, you should be able to find hundreds of expired domains. With these results, you will sort it by the number of backlinks pointing toward the domain and do a simple backlink check to see where the backlinks are coming from. If you spot any websites that are authoritative, you can use the email trick mentioned above.
Again, keep in mind that this strategy can take hours upon hours to land one solid link. When you are reaching out to the webmasters of the websites, make sure to write effective email subject lines to increase your chances of getting read and replied to.
4. Social networks
Like the hundreds of citation-based websites out there, there are also hundreds of social media websites that let you post your URL on your profile page. Now, while you don’t want to just create a profile, post your URL, and never touch it again, the key here is to become active. As social media evolves, this is a great way to diversify your website traffic. To get started with a service that knows of hundreds of reputable social media websites, you may want to try Marketer’s Center Social Foundations.
