The Two Core Principles to Building Quality Links

I like to keep things simple when it comes to building quality links. If you make link building too complicated, you can often over analyze and overthink things that you don’t get much done.

Most of my quality links have come from applying these two simple principles.

Connecting

I like what Aaron Wall at SEO Book said about link building. He said you should think of links in terms of social connections. The better connected you are to influential webmasters, the more quality links you’ll build.

Therefore, you should be connecting regularly with the webmasters of the quality sites in your niche.

Too many bloggers have the mindset of “build it and they will come”. In most cases though, it doesn’t matter how awesome your blog, you need to let others know about it because there are so many websites on the net. How will anyone find out about your blog unless you tell others about it? But if you get the attention of other webmasters, they will often promote your blog if you have content that adds a lot of value to the industry.

Moreover, many webmasters with quality sites are busy and don’t have time to keep up with all content in the niche.  Therefore, you’ll need to contact them directly to get their attention.

Especially in the beginning of your blog, you’ll need to make yourself known by connecting with other bloggers. Here are some ideas to consider:

• Introduce yourself to other bloggers and tell them about your blog. If you have good content, many of them will add you to their RSS reader and they may link to you in the future.
• Send them a guest post.
• Create something really good.  Content that is unique and comprehensive is the best.  Then, contact bloggers and ask them to link to it if they like it.  Don’t be shy. Most bloggers don’t mind a little bit of self promotion as long as you have quality content and don’t overdo the promotion.

Content

It’s not enough to have the right connections, you also need to provide something to attract the link. This is usually content.

There are many ways to do this – from in-depth resources on your sites to interesting guest posts on other blogs – but the main thing to keep in mind is to keep the quality very high.

Consider guest posts. Many of my guest posts used to get ignored until I started putting more into each guest post. My motto now is that every guest post should be better than the posts on my blog.  Leo Babauta of Zen Habits has excellent content on his blog of over 100,000 RSS subscribers, but I think his guest posts are actually higher quality.

Quality sites have quality content so you will need the same kind of content for them to link to you or for them to publish your guest post.

By connecting with other webmasters and producing high quality content, you should be able to build quality links.  Now while these two principles are simple to understand, they do take hard work to apply in real life.  But just stay consistent and focused with your link building efforts.  In time, you’ll enjoy top rankings and huge increases in traffic.

If you don’t have time to apply either of these principles, consider our link building service.