Good SEO is always working to get your website the good rank and reputation it deserves. One of the major ways to do that is through link-building efforts. Link building is a sure way that SEO can generate links and organic traffic to your website. To that end professionals like the Link Department utilize a multitude do strategies. One of the common one today is broken link building. Knowing how to do it and leverage broken link building for improved SEO is important today. So, although you can easily get professionals to help you out you should know more about broken link building.
Broken link building its value
In today’s era when everything is aimed at providing a great user experience broken link building is a complementary strategy. First and foremost, Google is interested in UX and all of its updates are aimed at providing the highest possible user experience. Loading times and mobile-friendly versions are all just a continuation of the practice of eliminating broken and missing pages. Here is where broken link building comes into play. It is both ethical and sustainable practice that also provides value to the one performing it.
What is it really?
Broken link building is a strategy of acquiring links from ideally high-ranking websites and building your own backlink portfolio and rank. In practice, it is a process of finding all of the links that lead to non-existing pages and websites, reaching out to webmasters, and providing them with another relevant alternative. This situation allows those utilizing broken link building to pitch their own content and website to webmasters. In return, they have the opportunity to gain valuable backlinks to their own content. It is a win-win situation. Webmasters get rid of broken links that can burden their link profile. The company doing this can get valuable links from these webmasters. Google gets what it wants from eliminating dead links and providing a much better experience to the end user.
To be clear, this is not the only strategy that SEO utilizes. Good companies use a multitude of strategies that are interlaced and provide joint results. When it comes to broken link building other than gaining backlinks there are other advantages. So, here is what the term to leverage broken link building for improved SEO provides:
- You can get links from authoritative sites that have good standings
- Relevant content is further developed and built
- Some links that were aimed at your competitors can now be aimed at your content to further your SEO results
- This strategy can also supplement other strategies when needed.
How to do it?
Leveraging broken link building is a simple process. However, there are multiple ways to do it. Basically, all of these tactics stem from three steps. Here is how utilizing broken link building works.
Crawl the websites
The first step is always identifying broken links to missing pages and websites. This is the most tedious and difficult activity in this whole process. The trick is to start this search with the most authoritative websites in your niche. You are supposed to crawl these websites in search of missing pages and broken links. It is good to get a list of these links that you can utilize. This is time-consuming but also a task that is most important.
To help you out today there are plenty of different tools that automate the process. So, you can easily utilize some of the tools like Ahref Site explorer or LinkChecker. In this way, you can save a lot of time lost when manually checking those links. The next step involves the use of the Waybackmachime to determine the content that was used and linked to that no longer exists. The broken links may appear either due to the fact that the target pages were moved or sites lost or shut down together.
Recreate the content
The second step is to recreate the content in question. The previous step should provide you with quality insight into what the pages you crawled were about and what content and data missing pages used to provide. this will be the bases for you to recreate the content that you can use as an alternative. In short, you must understand what someone liked and found valuable about the content they linked to. This will help you either find the right content that will serve the same purpose on your website. Or create content that will be a suitable replacement. Either way, you go about it, this new content should be fresh, relevant, and provide additional value. Only content like this has a chance to be accepted as a replacement by any webmaster. Finally, this is the bases for the creation of a good outreach campaign.
Outreach email for broken link-building campaign
Once you have a list of links you can replace with your own content you should start your campaign. The first step here is to get the right contacts of authors, webmasters, or companies that maintain the sites in question. There are many tools to use here as well as s lot of manual action to get the right mailing list. After that, you should prepare an outreach mail.
These emails should be simple but effective. Do not use templates and customize the email for every prospect individually. Use a complete subject line, and be courteous, and respectful. Make sure to point out just how you got to find these broken backlinks and what the problem with their broken links is. Do not be too obvious in your desire to score backlinks and do not directly affiliate yourself with the content you are offering. It is always good to provide several alternatives besides your own content to webmasters. Don’t be pushy and be sure that gaining backlinks will be simpler if you are less aimed at link building. If you do this outreach campaign preparation well you will profit a lot from the broken link-building effort and strengthen your backlink profile.
Improve your ranking
To leverage broken link building for improved SEO is a time-consuming and very extensive process. However, it can get you a lot of great results. This is not a strategy for lazy website owners. However, any effort you put into it can provide you with lots of backlinks pushing you up the rankings with Google.