Thread by @patientpublish

I’ve built my current site traffic in 7 months without ever going out of my way to build backlinks. 🔗

BUT, in response to the May core update and as part of my ‘kitchen sink’ strategy, I’m having a go. 🫡

These are the EXACT link building strategies I’m using.

🧵👇 #SEO #blog

First, it’s worth noting that my site has picked up over 400 backlinks organically to date.

The problem is, none of these links are coming from high authority sites in highly relevant niches. 👊🏼

As a result these links pass hardly any juice and my DA is a 0.4!

To change this I’m deploying the following 3 link building tactics:

🟢 Reclaiming image attribution
🟢 Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
🟢 Original research link-bait

Let’s dive into each of these strategies in more detail…

1️⃣ Reclaiming image attribution 📸

This one may be my favorite of the three. 😏

You spend a fair amount of time making HIGH QUALITY infographics…

…such high quality that your competitors and other sites are stealing them. 🥷

So, what can you do? 🤷‍♂️

By using the ‘reclaiming image attribution’ strategy, you can:

🟢 Discover sites who have used your images
🟢 Determine whether they have provided proper attribution
🟢 Request attribution via a backlink to your site

This overall process is fairly simple.

First, I make a note of each post that has high quality, original images/infographics. 📝

I then prioritize these by highest traffic volume over the past 3 months (a great image on a post with no traffic is less likely to be stolen). 📈

Next, I copy the image address in question and search Google with an image instead of text.

You can do this by first going to Google images tab and clicking the little camera icon that is just to the right of the search field…

From here Google will populate two key results:

🟢 Pages that include matching images
🟢 Visually similar images

For the direct pages that include your image, click through each them and determine if they have provided attribution within the post.

The visually similar images is where things get interesting…

Google uses its mega brain to surface optically analogous images.

Here you will find the folks who took your image and slapped their watermark on it (like my recent run-in 🤣) or edited the image in small ways.

The final step is to contact each of the site owners and ask for an attribution backlink.

If you want results, I would strongly recommend you take a friendly approach. ☀️

YES they took your image, BUT no one wants to collaborate with a jerk so I kill them with kindness.

2️⃣ Help a Reporter Out (HARO) 📑

HARO has been mentioned by everyone in the SEO world forever it seems.

I won’t go into great detail here other than to say that my approach is to narrow the HARO daily updates down to just my EXACT niche.

I also don’t take a spray and pray approach.

Meaning if a reporter states they are looking for an expert in “X” but I’m an expert in “Y” which is kinda sorta related to X…

I just don’t reply. It’s a waste of my time and the reporters.

Target topics you can easily win. 🏆

3️⃣ Original research link-bait 👨‍🔬

So much of niche content creation is aggregating fragmented information that already exists on the internet.

It is rare for site owners to produce unique, one-of-a-kind data.

Be rare.

My goal here is to create at least two new posts with original research and data that will serve as link-bait.

The reality is we are all inherently lazy and it’s a heck of a lot easier to pull data that took someone else days to generate than to reproduce that data on our own.

Identifying the topics for these types of posts can be difficult.

BUT even if the search volume is extremely low, these types of posts are worth their weight in gold. 👑

That’s it! 🤝

I’ll plan to report back in a few months time to let you know what’s working and what isn’t.

What link building strategies do you use?

Which ones are the most successful?