Top 14 Link Building Strategies to Conquer Rankings in 2026

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At the same time, getting relevant backlinks is undoubtedly one of the most challenging parts of any SEO strategy. It requires a thorough analysis, content improvements, and significant outreach efforts to ensure measurable, long-term results. Luckily, in our guide, you’ll discover the best tactics and practical tips to boost your backlink profile without resorting to black-hat methods that could lead to Google penalties.

What is Link Building Strategy?

A link building strategy is a plan to improve your backlink profile by acquiring one-way hyperlinks from reputable, relevant sites. This off-page SEO technique can improve your online visibility, eventually increasing your website’s popularity and revenue.

The development of an efficient strategy requires not only relevant experience but also powerful tools and thorough analysis. You need to review your competitor’s methods and identify new opportunities to strengthen your backlink profile.

Of course, it may be difficult to complete all the mentioned tasks on your own! Fortunately, you can rely on SeoProfy link building services and let our expert manage your backlink profile so you can focus on more important business tasks.

The Role of Links for a Website

Google clearly states that its algorithms consider backlinks as an indicator of unique, reliable, and expert content. Thus, the more links from other sites your pages have, the higher their search engine rankings are.

According to our SEO stats, only 9% of users scroll to the bottom of the first page of Google and other major search engines. It means that if you want your website to attract more organic traffic that converts into clients, you need your pages to conquer the top of search results. Link building can be a valuable strategy in this regard.

Although backlink profile isn’t the only factor that determines whether your site will be on the top, it’s still very important when it comes to rankings. For example, 96% of websites in Google’s top 10 have more than 1,000 links from unique domains. Even if you run a new brand and it’s difficult for you to compete against the key market players, earning valuable links from other sites can help you start growing your online authority.

Thus, while developing SEO strategy for your website, it’s essential to focus on your backlink profile if you want to boost your website’s authority. Moreover, off-page optimization is necessary for a successful recovery of your site after Google updates. We have numerous SEO case studies proving that effective link building combined with other methods for search engine optimization can help a website thrive again.

Nonetheless, everything is not as easy as it looks because Google constantly improves its algorithms. After the release of Google Penguin, it’s not enough just to collect the links from any website. Now, it’s more important to focus on quality than quantity. Also, there are other link building strategies to stick to if you want to ensure stable growth of your site, making it reliable in the “eyes” of search engines and prospective clients.

14 Proven Link Building Strategies

Regardless of your industry and business goals, you should always try to use only white-hat SEO techniques. Implementing effective link building strategies from our list is a great way to ensure that Google won’t lower your rankings or even remove your pages from the search results.

1. Make Link Bait Content

If you wonder how to build backlinks that will take your website to the top rankings, you should undoubtedly start generating content that will make others refer to your pages. In SEO, such articles are called “linkable assets” or simply “link baits.” They’re crafted specifically to attract backlinks from other websites. There are many types of content you can use to catch the attention of other webmasters and inspire them to link to your pages, including:

• Niche-related surveys and studies;
• Useful tutorials and how-to guides;
• Listicles with tips;
• Infographics.

The more unique and valuable content your website offers, the stronger its chance of getting backlinks. For example, look at Aria’s annual “The State of Link Building Report.” This content provided the digital marketing agency with over 1,500 backlinks from over 600 sites.

However, what can you do if your business operates in a relatively boring niche? It may be a good idea to opt for tangential content. As a rule, it’s not directly related to the products or services your business offers. The fascinating fact is that, according to Fractl, 6 out of 10 brands that have blogs feature tangential content. It’s even more exciting that you can use this technique for literally any niche:

So, whether you want to start link building for ecommerce or a law firm, tangential content will surely stand you in good stead if you skillfully implement it in your blog. Also, you can focus on the creation of interactive elements, such as calculators, minigames, online generators, and quizzes.

Top-Quality Links for Your Success

Boost your backlink profile to reach your business goals:

• Increase traffic, eventually leading to higher revenue
• Enhance your online presence and rankings
• Cooperate only with reputable and relevant websites

Start Your Link Building Journey

2. Use the Skyscraper Technique

First of all, this link building technique doesn’t involve the building of a real skyscraper, so you can exhale with relief. Nonetheless, this is still one of the most challenging yet rewarding link building techniques in SEO.

To implement this strategy, you have to find an outdated page with a significant number of backlinks. Once you do it, use it as a basis to craft more interesting and valuable content on your website. Then, reach out to the websites linking to the original content and present your updated version. As you can see, this strategy truly resembles the Great Skyscraper Race of 1931, but now it takes place in the digital world:

Considering that over a decade has passed since the introduction of the Skyscraper technique in 2015, many experts believe that it can no longer help you reach your SEO goals. Nonetheless, this technique keeps evolving and is still efficient even in 2026. For example, Skyscraper Technique 2.0, which also focuses more on satisfying user intent, can still reach impressive results, such as a 652.1% increase in organic traffic.

Although the implementation of this technique looks pretty simple, there are several mistakes to avoid if you truly want to get the desired outcomes. Here, we’ve prepared a list of the most common pitfalls:

• The use of templated emails: Although the creator of the Skyscraper technique also introduced a template to reach other webmasters, it doesn’t mean you should use it word-for-word. Personalize your emails to increase your chances of getting answers and valuable backlinks.
• The absence of value: Some people believe that if there is an article containing the list of 10 useful tools, upping it to 20 in your content is enough to skyscraper your page. However, instead of simply adding tools, it may be better to focus on improving the existing list and visuals to make them more attractive to visitors.
• Lower reputation: Finally, if you’ve just launched your brand, it may be difficult to compete immediately against titans like Forbes or Investopedia, as many people link to these websites because of their time-tested reputations. In this case, there is no reason to skyscraper their pages. It’ll be better to focus on improving your online authority by crafting unique, valuable content.

3. Follow Competitors’ Best Link Building Practices

One of the best practices for discovering authoritative websites to generate links is analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles. If a webmaster refers to the sites from your niche, there is a strong chance that they may also provide you with some valuable backlinks. Such an approach is called “resource page link building.”

The good news is that the analysis won’t take long if you follow our instructions and use the best SEO tools, such as Ahrefs. To implement this strategy, you need to make a list of your biggest competitors’ homepage links. The best way to do this in seconds is to opt for the Batch Analysis tool, which allows you to analyze up to 200 links. Once you copy-paste the URLs you’re interested in, the platform will generate a report highlighting the most important metrics, including backlinks.

Also, Ahrefs can provide you with a competitive map of the organic competitors. This visual report shows how your opponent’s websites stack up against your site in terms of organic traffic (including its value) and the number of organic pages. The bigger the competitor’s circle, the more pages they have.

Select the competitors with the largest number of obtained backlinks. Your next task is to discover the pages on their websites that attract the most references using the “Best by links” tool, which you can discover in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

This useful report allows you to identify what types of content helped your competitors attract other webmasters’ attention. Use this information to create something similar or even better.

You can also use this link building tool to set up a backlink alert. As a result, the platform will notify you whenever your competitor gets a new link. Thus, you’ll be able to analyze your opponents’ new tactics and implement them on your pages ASAP.

4. Determine Your Selection Criteria for Link Building

Even the most efficient techniques won’t help you reach the desired results if you can’t distinguish high-quality backlinks from the ones that can affect your search rankings. The table below includes the most important criteria to consider while estimating the authority and relevance of the online resource that provides you with a link.

It doesn’t matter whether you need link building for law firms or dental clinics. You need to consider these criteria every time you obtain a link from a new website. Moreover, it’s also important to analyze your competitor’s backlinks to find out the average value of these parameters in your specific niche.

5. Write Quality Guest Posts/Outreach

Guest posting is one of the most efficient link building practices often used during the SEO campaign setup, as it allows you to obtain backlinks by posting content on other websites. Nonetheless, this process is way more difficult than it might seem at first glance.

First of all, you need to discover the top websites in your industry that are eager to accept your contribution and allow you to add the link to your site in the provided blog post. That’s where SEO outreach comes into play! By analyzing your competitors and niche, you may define the best websites and bloggers for your guest posting campaign. After this, you need to come up with an attractive email and a compelling blog post idea.

It may be a good idea to find the main competitors of the blog you want to write for. Analyze their content to identify which topics drive traffic to these sites. Using Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool, find the articles that haven’t been covered on the targeted blog yet and include them in your guest posting plan.

Consider that it’s essential to write top-quality articles for guest blogging. By doing so, you’ll not only ensure your potential partner accepts your content but also that its page is indexed and receives organic traffic. Thus, you can earn a high-quality backlink and inspire people to visit your site through the links skillfully woven links in the guest posting content.

6. Build Tier-2 Links

Here, we come to one of the link building tactics that doesn’t require a lot of effort and time. Nevertheless, the benefits you’ll get can surely overcome your expectations. Tier 2 link building involves providing references to other websites that contain the links to your pages. SEO experts do it to improve the authority of these online resources, making their backlinks more valuable for your site. Eventually, it strengthens your backlink profile.

Unlike Tier-1 backlinks, Tier-2 links don’t need to be placed on high-authority websites or popular blogs. You can build them from social media platforms, directories, and forums related to your niche.

For example, if you want to implement an efficient ecommerce link building strategy, it’s surely a good idea to opt for this cost-effective tactic. Create a list of pages linking to your website, and select a couple to improve. Then, you’ll need to provide the backlinks to them from third-party platforms, following several simple rules:

• Avoid generating many Tier-2 links in a short period: It’s essential to maintain a steady, slow pace to avoid search engine penalties.
• Build relevant Tier-2 backlinks: Since these links still have to drive relevant traffic to boost your Tier-1 backlinks, it’s important to make them fit the content on the promoted page.
• Never overuse exact-match keywords in anchors: Google may consider this activity an attempt to manipulate its algorithms. It’ll negatively impact the SEO performance of the page that links to your site.

7. Find Unlinked Mentions

A popular website may mention your brand or product without linking to your website. Luckily, there is a strong chance they’ll add a backlink to this content if asked. However, how can you discover these unlinked brand mentions?

You may opt for the Brand Monitoring app developed by Semrush. This amazing tool for the implementation of efficient link building tactics allows you to search for all your brand’s mentions, including possible misspellings.

Enter the “Mention Details” tab to see the mentions of “Without Backlinks” in the “Backlink” section. Furthermore, you may opt for a Positive Sentiment filter. Thus, you’ll see the websites that are more likely to fulfill your request for a backlink.

When you prepare a list of online resources mentioning your brand without references, it’s time to write emails asking their owners to add the links to your pages. Here are some tips that will help you persuade them:

• Stay respectful: Always thank the publisher for the positive mention of your brand.
• Don’t hesitate to ask for links: Politely clarify whether they can include a link to your website as attribution.
• Offer your ideas: If a publisher is willing, you can suggest where to link and which pages to refer to.

8. Check for Broken Links

There is no reason to immediately opt for quality link building techniques if you haven’t analyzed your backlink profile first. The interesting fact is that 66.5% of the links to sites in the last 9 years are “dead.” So, when you take a closer look, you will probably discover a couple of broken links that slow down your website’s progress.

Different reasons may lead to such a situation. For example, you might remove the page with content that other sites were referring to. Also, the owner of another website might just misspell the URL while adding a backlink to your page.

Anyway, these broken links don’t provide you with any value, and sometimes, they may even harm your site’s performance. That’s why fixing them is often a part of our Google penalty recovery services.

First, it’s necessary to find the broken link building issues. The positive news is you can do it in minutes using Ahrefs’ “Broken backlinks”:

Once you find that any website refers to a page that doesn’t exist, get in touch with its owner and offer them a link to the new content that includes relevant information. This is one of the fastest and most budget-friendly ways to solve most of the broken link building issues.

Finally, we have a useful pro tip that will help you build links more efficiently. Consider that just like you, your competitors also face broken link building problems. Using Semrush’s Backlink Analytics, you can check their broken links. After that, you can reach out to the sites that contain them and suggest your content as a replacement.

9. Reclaim Lost Links

Looking for smart link building tactics, you definitely shouldn’t ignore link reclamation. It involves returning backlinks removed from third-party websites. First of all, this is an excellent strategy because you don’t need to spend a lot of time looking for new link building opportunities. Further, if a site has linked to your pages once, there is a strong chance it’ll do it again.

A publisher might have accidentally removed a link. Furthermore, they might have slightly adjusted their content, so now they’d like to refer to another page on your website. You can discover lost links using powerful platforms like Ahrefs. Simply opt for its Calendar tool and open the “Lost” tab:

10. Never Ignore Internal Linking

As a rule, your website includes three major types of pages:

• Homepage: This is the heart of your site, where visitors can discover your products and services.
• Linkable assets: These are the pages with content that easily build links. For example, it may be a blog post, an online tool, or a case study.
• “Money” pages: These pages generate your income as they sell your products or services.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to inspire other website owners to refer to the commercial pages. As a rule, webmasters opt for content that provides their audience with useful information for free.

Luckily, you can still boost your “money” pages with the help of internal links. Analyze your website to discover the content that gets the most backlinks. Thereafter, skillfully weave the links to your products or services into your linkable asset. Thus, even the most boring pages on your site will get more traffic and significantly increase your revenue.

11. Use Digital PR Platforms

Although digital PR is not among the latest link building techniques, it still works perfectly for all types of websites. The technique is a great way to promote your online business by getting references from popular external sites in your niche. Its implementation requires taking the following steps:

• Step 1. You research your industry’s trending topics and create a story related to one of them.
• Step 2. You share your content with relevant journalists via a press release.
• Step 3. Once an online magazine decides to cover your story, it credits your site with a link.

The chance of getting high volumes of backlinks and mentions makes digital PR one of the best practices for link building. Nonetheless, you probably wonder which platform to use to build your prospect list. Here are several options that you can start with:

• Featured: Founded in 2022, this visibility platform brings together experts and over 1,000 publishers, including popular brands such as Forbes and Fortune.
• Connectively: Formerly known as HARO, this site offers high-quality backlinks from online sources related to technologies, SaaS, finance, business, and wellness.
• SourceBottle: Although this is a global, free-to-use platform, it’s best suited for businesses seeking publicity in the UK, NZ, Australia, and North America.

Choose the platform that best aligns with your industry, target publications, and the geographic markets you want to reach.

12. Use Roundup Posts and Resource Pages

Roundup posts, also known as “expert posts,” provide readers with useful tips and a great flash of inspiration. Moreover, they are also shareable, which means adding this type of content to your blog may provide you with a significant number of external links.

When you create a roundup post, you provide the backlinks not only to your own articles but also to the experts from other trustworthy and relevant websites. Thus, if you manage to create truly brilliant content, there is a chance that the sites you linked to will share your roundup post with their audience.

If you don’t know which topic to choose, you can simply use Google Search to get a flash of inspiration. Simply enter the following search modifiers to find out the trends in your industry:

• “Your keyword”:roundup
• “Your keyword”:best
• “Your keyword”:top

It’ll also be a good idea to opt for relevant resource pages. These curated blogs serve as centralized hubs offering users links to useful interactive tools and materials related to specific industries or topics. For example, if you have a SaaS project and want to build links, it may be a good idea to pay attention to the resource pages run by the well-known companies like Figma, Canva, or PandaDoc:

As a rule, getting mentions from reputable resource pages is a challenging task, but these backlinks will significantly boost your brand’s credibility. The best ways to gain references from these online sources include creating link-bait content and staying active on social platforms popular with your target audience. And if you want to find relevant resource pages, it’s a wise decision to opt for Google search operators, including:

• coffee intitle:resources inurl:links.html
• coffee intitle:links inurl: resources.html
• coffee inurl:.com/resources
• coffee inurl:resources intitle:resources

These search queries help you quickly identify curated resource pages related to your niche.

13. Avoid Black-Hat Link Building

No doubt, the implementation of all the mentioned link building tips requires time and effort, so it may be tempting to opt for slightly easier ways of boosting your website. That’s the main reason why many people decide to pay for performance SEO, which guarantees jaw-dropping results in a short time.

The truth is that these experts often focus on low-value keywords. Their implementation may indeed increase your rankings, but they actually won’t provide you with real business value. Furthermore, when they guarantee you many quality backlinks and a significant increase in natural traffic within a couple of weeks, they’ll likely use black-hat tactics. In this case, you may indeed notice improvements at the beginning of the SEO campaign.

Nonetheless, spammy backlinks will only ruin all your previous SEO and link building efforts. Moreover, you may incur Google penalties, resulting in the removal of your pages from search results. Of course, it’s possible to recover from this damage by disavowing toxic backlinks. However, it may be much more expensive and time-consuming than investing in professional link building services from the beginning. Thus, we strongly recommend partnering with agencies that use only transparent and time-tested SEO strategies.

14. Gain Backlinks from AI-Powered Platforms

The interesting fact is that 49% of marketers claim that web traffic from online search has decreased due to the introduction of AI answers. Platforms and tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Grok provide their users with summaries on different topics, allowing them to get straight to the point. At the same time, they still offer users the opportunity to follow the links to the sources from which their algorithms have taken the information:

If you want your content to get into AI-generated answers, you must position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Furthermore, it’s not enough just to publish great content and case studies that prove your professionalism or the high quality of your products. You should also focus on:

• Entity authority
• Content Structure
• Third-party validation

As a rule, AI-powered algorithms prioritize clear, concise, and trustworthy answers. Thus, if you want to get a link from the theme, it’s a good idea to include the FAQ sections in your content, where you can directly address your clients’ key questions.

References from AI platforms will provide you with high-quality traffic, since once a user clicks the link, they’re already interested in the content you publish. It means they are likely to get acquainted with your products or services, so you won’t just get links but also reach the right people, who may potentially become your clients.

Reach the Top of Search Rankings with Time-Tested Link Building Methods

If you want your SEO campaign to succeed, you definitely need to create a strong backlink profile. Furthermore, it’s crucial to monitor it closely to ensure steady growth and to promptly eliminate harmful backlinks.

Also, from time to time, new link building techniques appear, and if you want to stay on top, you should be the first to implement them. Of course, it may be challenging even if you run a website together with an entire team. In this case, you can opt for SeoProfy and hand over all your link building tasks to us so you can focus on more critical business tasks.

Author

Andrew Shum

Andrew Shum is the Head of SEO at SeoProfy with 10+ years of experience in SEO and digital marketing. He has been part of the company for over 6 years and has led the SEO department for the past 3.5 years, managing a team of 15+ specialists. He works with competitive and international multi-language projects across eCommerce, SaaS, and enterprise niches, focusing on practical SEO strategies that deliver measurable results.