Advanced Link Building Tips and Tricks

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This section will give you a few link building tips and tricks that we've picked up over the years. Some have been mentioned briefly elsewhere in this guide, but all are quite specific and should be quite useful for you, no matter what industry you work in.

Speed up link prospecting with lists

Say we worked in the gardening industry and wanted to find garden blogs to do some outreach. Our first instinct may be to search for "garden blogs" or something similar to that. This will certainly give you good results, but you'll need to search through lots and lots of search results to get a decent amount of blogs.

To help speed things up a bit, try searching for "list of garden blogs" instead which will give you results like this:

As you can see, within the first few results are lots of lists of garden blogs that have already been curated by other people. This not only helps you find blogs quicker, but it helps you find better-quality blogs because the list has been curated. I wrote a blog post on link building using lists on the Moz blog which you should also take a look at.

Find bloggers using Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a great little tool that lets you run lots of analysis on Twitter accounts. It's a Moz tool that's available as a separate, lower-cost subscription from Moz Pro.

One of the features of Followerwonk allows you to find influential bloggers very quickly and easily. It is the Search bios option, and you can search for keywords such as this:

This will show me people on Twitter who have "fashion blogger" in their bio:

You can then export these results into a CSV which will tell you which of these people have websites listed next to their bio. If they do, then you can go take a look and see if they'd be a good person to start engaging with and eventually, promote your content to.

Get more links from your infographics

Like guest blogging, building links using infographics has become very popular over recent years. In general, the process for getting links here is the same as the content-based link building process outlined previously, but there is an extra step here that you can take which could get you a few more links.

The technique is based on the fact that some people will embed your infographics, but will not give you a link. This is actually quite common, so there is often opportunity for you to contact these websites and ask them for the link.

To do this, we need to start by getting a copy of the filename where your infographic is hosted. Note that we want the actual jpg, png filename rather than the URL itself. We can get this by going to the infographic, right clicking on it and selecting "Copy Image URL:"

Then we need to head over to Google Images and look for this symbol:

Click on this and paste in the URL we just copied:

Click search by image and you'll get results like this:

Now you simply need to go to these URLs and make sure that there is a link pointing back to your website. If there is not, then you can drop a quick email to the website owner and ask them to add a link to the original source.

Learning more

This beginner’s guide should give you the fundamentals you need to begin a link building campaign, but link building is a large and diverse field with many schools of thought and practice. To further your education and development, we recommend the following resources:

• Buzzstream Blog
• Growing Popularity and Links
• Ultimate Guide to Link Building by Eric Ward and Garret French
• The Link Building Book by Paddy Moogan
• Link Building Strategies by Jon Cooper
• Link Building on the Moz Blog

To wrap up…

That's about it for now! We hope that you enjoyed The Beginner's Guide to Link Building! As mentioned right at the start of this guide, the landscape is changing regularly and we'll do our best to keep this guide up to date. Remember though at one thing is unlikely to change - the focus on quality should always be front of your mind if you're trying to succeed in the long term online. Best of luck!

One more note: We simply can't thank Paddy Moogan enough for writing this guide. His expertise and wisdom made the project possible. We'd also like to thank Ashley Tate for wrangling the early stages of the project, Trevor Klein for taking it to the finish line, Cyrus Shepard for his expert review and a few key additions, Derric Wise and David O'Hara for bringing it to life with their art, and Andrew Palmer for seamlessly translating everything onto the web.