Irrespective of whether you are new to link building or have been practicing it for years, you can always get additional help from link building resources and tools that introduce newer and more efficient forms of link building. This article briefly covers important resources for link building, in addition to discovering some of the tools that one may use for link building practices.

What is link building?

Link building essentially refers to all actions that are fulfilled to increase the quality and number of inbound links to a website. The ultimate goal here is to increase the SERP ranking of a particular webpage, and link building is an essential part of search engine optimization efforts.

In simpler words, link-building efforts line towards increasing the number of links leading to a particular website or webpage from external and reputed websites. 

How can companies acquire links?

Companies often outsource their link-building efforts as projects to reputed and experienced companies, and if you are just starting it is recommended that you look for cheap link building (not cheap in quality) companies that guarantee quality services. How companies and websites can acquire links depend on the different types of links in question, and given below are some of the categories of links used in link building:

Editorial links

Editorial links refer to those links that a website may naturally acquire simply due to its high-quality content or its reputation in the industry. These are the most ideal and the most difficult types of links to acquire and do not require the website owner to request or pay anyone for a link

Organically obtained links

These are also known as acquired links, and essentially involve the website owner acquiring them either through payment or distribution. Some of the ways how websites can increase organically obtained links includes link advertisements, reciprocal linking, directory links, answering queries on forums, and commenting on relevant blogs.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging or guest posting refers to the measure of writing articles for other websites and blogs to gain more visibility on your website while also being able to link back to your web pages. This is yet another integral component of search engine optimization. 

Image linking

Image linking refers to submitting images to online image repositories and linking them back to your website. These submitted images may be infographics, photographs, illustrations, depictions, GIFs, or simple typography.

What are some of the resources for link building?

While link building may be difficult waters to navigate, thankfully there exist multiple online resources that can help ease your way into the realm of link building. These include multiple link-building industry blogs, experts, and self-help guides that one can refer to.

Industry Blogs

To get regular updates about the best link building practices, updates in Google’s Algorithm, and the newest tools, companies should keep an eye out for relevant industry blogs such as the link building blogs on Moz.com, Ahrefs.com, and the Google Webmaster Blog.

While Moz.com specifically focuses on the current trends in link building and SEO, Ahrefs.com emphasizes tutorials and case studies. The Google Webmaster Blog, on the other hand, is dedicated to the newest updates on Google’s indexing and crawling efforts.

Industry Guides

For marketers looking for immersive readings and in-depth guides into the realm of link building, there exist several link building blogs such as a twelve chapter long guide from QuickSprout.com, a definitive guide from Backlinko.com, and a forty-minute long read at SEMrush.com

What are some of the tools for link building?

When you use the right tool for your link-building efforts, your work is essentially halved as the right tool to optimize and automate any work that you previously did manually, while also suggesting the best practices. Given below are some of the tools that can help your link building efforts:

HARO

HARO, abbreviated for Help A Reporter Out, is essentially a source of ideas and information that journalists from all over the world use daily. Using HARO, journalists are always on the lookout for new things to write about in their articles, unique products or services a company may be offering, or simply search for credible comments and opinions that they can place in their articles in the discussion of what their article may be about. 

As a company, when you sign up to HARO, you can receive requests from journalists in your inbox, and when you collaborate with them you will be able to sneak in a mention of your company in a relevant and credible manner.

SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool

A backlink gap analysis is crucial to all link-building campaigns alike and allows you to analyze competitors’ insights to find opportunities and websites that are linking to other companies in your domain. Hence, your search process to find relevant websites that will agree to link back to you gets substantially easier. This tool works by entering your domain and the domains of up to four of your competitors in the “find prospects” section of the tool. 

The tool then generates a list of opportunities or websites that send inbound links towards the four of your competitors, but not towards you. Once you have identified this “gap” you can alter your marketing and SEO strategies to close in on the presented opportunities to stand at a higher footing in SERP results as compared to your competitors.

GroupHigh

GroupHigh is essentially a website that has created the biggest and the richest database containing a list of all possible blogs that you can find online. Companies can use GroupHigh to find new prospects, discover relevant industry blogs and point toward relevant influencers who would be willing to work with them. Similar to the other tools mentioned in this section, GroupHigh substantially reduces the time companies spend looking for relevant blogs that would agree to collaborate with them.

Good content needs to be spoken about, celebrated, and made available to the masses, and this is exactly what GroupHigh does. It maintains a database of a whopping 15 million bloggers as of now, and the number keeps growing every day.

Conclusion

Link building is a crucial part of search engine optimization and one that requires marketers to conduct extensive research and gain an in-depth understanding of how backlinks work. The above-mentioned resources and tools are likely to help all marketers in their link-