A good way of cooperation is ‘cross promotion’. This is a promotional method whereby related products or services are jointly promoted. For example, the joint promotion of a website builder and an online marketing agency. These are services that complement each other. There is a perfect opportunity for a collaboration to get relevant links to your website.

Good content

Buying links may have worked once, but that is a long time ago. Google’s Webspam team has become very good at recognizing links that have been bought. When you buy links, you take a significant risk. It may even be the case that Google will completely ban you from the search results. Don’t let this happen.

An alternative to buying links is to provide quality content that people want to link to. Good content, which has been properly promoted, will be linked. You can buy backlinks and the best deal.

The right directories

In the past, submitting links to web directories was an important way of link building. Still, you have to be careful when using this strategy. Google will judge your website negatively if you have too many backlinks from bad directories.

That is why it is important to choose the right directories. So not directories that post your link without checking. Directories that are choosy about posting links are still rated by Google.

Participate actively

Commenting on blogs was a method many link builders used in the past to generate more backlinks. However, most webmasters have set these types of response options to ‘nofollow’. Links in comments are of no value to Google in this way.

What does make sense is to seriously participate in forums and communities. There you can post links in online discussions related to the theme of your site. In addition, the side effect is that if you help people on these types of communities, others will be more likely to give you a backlink to your site. So the knife cuts both ways.

Content mining

Previously, it was wise to look at all the backlinks that competitors had, also called ‘backlink mining’. In order to beat your competitor, it was best to get backlinks from the same sites. Backlinks are now less relevant. So it’s about content.

Content mining is a new way to outperform your competitors. You look at the content of the competition and make sure you do better! While this isn’t easy, the rewards can be great.

SEO building

Social networks

A web ring or link network was a way of connecting various relevant sites. However, this has less and less value for Google.

An alternative to link networks is to build social networks of people who have an ‘sphere of influence’ on the web. These are people with websites, blogs and social media accounts with enough followers and visitors. These in turn can link to your site and share it within their (social) network.

A new strategy

Now that you know how new style link building works, you can get started. It is important to really earn instead of obtaining links. Old style link building can cause your website to drop in the search results. That is the opposite of what you are trying to achieve with link building.