Link building is almost as old as SEO itself. However, many SEOs and webmasters that are just dipping their toes into link building, are struggling to come up with ideas for where to get backlinks from.
There are many ways to build links online, but these seven link building campaign ideas are among the most practical ways to find real link opportunities.
In this article, we will be discussing what is link building and why backlinks are important, and what’s the difference between a good backlink and a bad backlink.
Key Takeaways:
- Strong link building campaigns usually start with one of seven proven approaches: anchor text link insertion, competitor backlinks, guest posting, listicle outreach, unlinked mentions, reverse image search, or broken link building.
- A good backlink is relevant to the page, uses sensible anchor text, comes from an authoritative domain, and is not buried on a page overloaded with outgoing links.
- The core workflow is simple: find link prospects, build your email sequence, find the right contact information, and personalize your outreach.
Link building cheat sheet
What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks to your website, from other websites.
In practice, link building usually means earning an inbound link from another website through outreach, content marketing, digital PR, or guest posting.
There are white-hat and black-hat techniques for building links.
White hat link building focuses on earning editorial links through valuable content and outreach, while black hat tactics try to manipulate rankings with shortcuts.
Black-hat techniques include PBNs (Private Blog Networks), paid links, and link schemes.
Note: Paying a link building agency on a link-by-link basis is not considered a black-hat technique. “Paid links” is referring to situations where you reach out to a website for a backlink, pay them for it, and they put it up on their site without a “sponsored” tag.
Previously, if Google caught on to you using black-hat link building techniques, your website could be penalized, preventing it from showing up in search results.
A telltale sign of a penalty would be a sudden drop in traffic in your Google Analytics.
Recovering from a Google penalty is possible, but far from easy.
This has led certain marketers to perform “link attacks” on their competitors, spamming them with thousands of spammy links within a very short time period, causing them to receive a Google penalty.
Because of that, Google has stopped issuing penalties for shady link building practices since they have no way of knowing whether it was done as an effort to increase your own rankings, or as an attempt to get you penalized.
And while you can no longer get a penalty, it doesn’t mean that black-hat links can help you either.
Over the years, Google’s algorithm has become exceptionally intelligent, so it’s really good at spotting shady or spammy links.
These get completely de-valued by the algorithm and so do not actually contribute to your website’s rankings in any way.
So, you should always strive for acquiring white-hat backlinks.
Link building can be an extremely time-consuming process, but taking shortcuts is not recommended.
Running a link building campaign typically includes 4 steps:
- Prospecting (finding websites that make for good link building opportunities)
- Preparing your email sequence (both the initial email and the follow-ups)
- Finding contact information
- Personalizing your link building pitches for each prospect in the campaign
Doing all of this at scale is just not feasible manually.
Why Are Links Important?
You can send hundreds of link building emails before you start to see any results from your outreach.
And to start seeing any SEO results from your link building, you need to consistently secure a number of high-quality backlinks every single week, sometimes for months at a time.
A quality backlink can improve visibility in search engine results and also send referral traffic from relevant sites.
If you run your website on your own, this can take up a huge chunk of your time. And most companies that can afford to hire a link builder, hire a person to manage it full-time.
If people are willing to spend so much money and resources just on link building alone, there must be a really good reason for it.
And there is.
Backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking factors to this day. But if you read any other content about SEO, you have probably heard this one a thousand times before.
To really understand the power that backlinks hold, let’s dive deep into what is known as “PageRank”, also commonly referred to as “link juice”.
What is PageRank?
PageRank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996 as part of their research.
Sergey’s idea was that the content on the Internet can be organized by “link popularity”.
The more backlinks a website would have, the higher would it show up in search results pages.
Two years later, in 1998, Google first officially launched. The first iteration fo the search engine utilized a very basic version of the PageRank algorithm.
The formula for PageRank of any page can be displayed as follows:
PR (A) = (1 – d) / N + d * (PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + …)
PR, of course, stands for PageRank.
N is the total number of pages on the web in that moment.
d is the damping factor, usually set to 0.85.
L is the number of outgoing links from that page.
PageRank is passed on from one page to another.
A link from a page with a higher PageRank passes on more value than a link from a page with a lower score.
In its earliest versions, PageRank was easy to abuse, and marketers caught on to that, building as many links from as many pages as humanly possible.
This has resulted in pages that don’t necessarily deserve the top spots in search results ranking much higher than they should be.
PageRank also used to be publicly visible through Google’s PageRank toolbar, making it even easier to manipulate.
Because of that, Google have taken down their PageRank toolbar and heavily modified the PageRank algorithm over the years.
It no longer exists in its original form, however, it is still being used all these years after its invention, as confirmed by Google’s Gary Illyes:
The exact formula is not publicly known, but what is known is that links from relevant, highly authoritative websites have a profound effect on a website’s rankings.
Google has also released numerous algorithm updates (we’re looking at you, Penguin) that were aimed at further reducing the impact of spammy and low quality backlinks on websites’ rankings.
However, these updates have only served to reinforce the importance of relevant backlinks from highly-authoritative resources.
There exist other, third-party metrics that function similarly (but not exactly) to PageRank.
Namely, Moz’s Domain Authority (and Page Authority), and Ahrefs’ Domain Rating.
The main factor that affects both of these is the number of high-quality backlinks from other authoritative resources.
So, to get more out of your link building campaigns, you should aim for websites with a higher Domain Authority/Domain Rating.
This leads us to the next section.
What Makes A Good Backlink?
To get the most out of your link building campaigns, you need to first understand what makes a backlink “good”.
There are several factors, namely:
- Relevance
- Anchor text
- Linking domain’s authority
- The number of other backlinks leading from that page
- “rel=” attributes
Let’s break them all down, one by one.
Relevance
First things first, the link needs to make sense.
For example, it would make sense for us to link from this article to another article that covers a single link building strategy in more depth, for example, guest posting.
It would not make sense for us to link from the same piece of content, for example, to a blog post on how to balance your tires.
A person that came to the page with the intention to learn more about link building is likely not interested in changing tires.
Google works in a similar way: the algorithm knows which topics are related to each other, making links in between them relevant, and which ones are not.
If it indexes a backlink and deems it irrelevant or spammy, there is a good chance that it will not actually pass on any ranking signals, therefore not contributing to your SEO in the slightest.
When preparing your link building campaigns, you should always aim for backlinks within your niche – or, at the very least, from content that is on a relevant topic, even if the website as a whole operates within another niche.
The context in which a link is used is also extremely important. In addition to coming from a relevant website, the placement also needs to make sense in the individual paragraph/sentence and not look obviously crammed in for the sake of building a backlink.
Anchor Text
Your links’ anchor texts can be a ranking factor in and of themselves.
Search engines treat your links anchor texts as an indication of how other websites are referring to yours.
So, if you have a lot of links that contain a certain keyword in their anchor texts (even if that keyword isn’t mentioned on your page), you might actually start ranking for that keyword.
There are many different types of anchor texts:
- Exact match – has your focus keywords in the anchor
- Partial match – has a variation of your focus keyword in the anchor
- Related keywords – includes a keyword that is related to your focus keyword but doesn’t match it
- Branded anchor text – includes your brand name
- Page title anchor text – includes the whole page title as the anchor text
- Site name – includes your website name
- Generic link – terms like “click here”, or “learn more”
A healthy anchor text profile includes a mix of all types of anchor texts.
However, when it comes to link building campaigns, you should strive for exact and partial match anchor texts, as these are the ones that help you rank for your focus keywords.
You should avoid generic anchor texts like “click here” since they do not provide any context for either the reader or the search engine as to the type of page they can expect after following that link.
So, they do not contribute to your rankings for any keyword.
It goes without saying that an anchor text should be relevant to the content it’s in, and make sense for the reader.
Linking Domain’s Authority
We have already mentioned that links from websites with a higher authority are more valuable than lower-quality ones.
For example, a link from Search Engine Journal to this very guide would be tremendously helpful to us in comparison to a link from a smaller blog that has only recently started out online.
Total Number of Links from the Page
The more outgoing links a page has, the less PageRank each individual link is able to pass on.
As you can see just from the sheer amount of blue on the screenshot, the depicted page is way too saturated with links.
To get more “link juice” from your link building campaigns, you should skip pages like this and aim for ones that only have a couple of outgoing links instead.
Link Attributes
A “rel=” attribute is a tiny snippet of HTML code that gives a link a certain attribute.
There are dozens of different link attributes, but for link building purposes, you only need to know about four:
- rel=dofollow (or rel=follow)
- rel=nofollow
- rel=ugc
- rel=sponsored
You can check the attributes a link has by clicking the right mouse button > Inspect, and then typing the URL of the link or its anchor text in the search bar.
The difference between these link attributes is very simple.
Dofollow links are followed by search engines, and so pass on ranking signals. Nofollow links are not followed by search engines, and do not pass on ranking signals.
According to Google’s guidelines, any user-generated links (such as links in your comment section), and paid links need to be marked with the UGC and sponsored link tags accordingly.
UGC and sponsored links typically do not pass on ranking signals, however this may vary on a link-by-link basis.
If a link does not have either the dofollow or nofollow attribute, it is set to dofollow by default.
Since dofollow links are the ones that pass on ranking signals, they should be your priority when running link building campaigns.
However, a healthy backlink profile consists of a mix of all different types of links.
So, to sum it up, a good link is relevant to your (and the linking page’s content), has a descriptive and keyword anchor text, comes from an authoritative website that doesn’t have a dozen of other links on the page, and has the dofollow attribute.
ts stack up if you have hundreds of prospects to reach out to.
Want Link Building Campaigns Without Running Them Yourself?
All of these campaign ideas work.
The hard part is not understanding them. The hard part is executing them consistently enough to turn them into actual backlinks.
That means doing the same things over and over:
- finding relevant sites
- checking whether they’re worth targeting
- identifying the right person
- writing a pitch that doesn’t sound templated
- following up until something happens
That is where most teams slow down.
They know which link building campaigns they want to run, but they do not have the time or internal bandwidth to run them well across dozens or hundreds of prospects.
That is exactly where our done-for-you link building fits.
We handle the full workflow for you, from prospecting and qualification to outreach and relationship building. Instead of just helping you send more emails, we focus on securing placements on pages that already have authority, traffic, and actual ranking potential.
All you have to do is place an order along with your requirements/guidelines, and we’ll handle the rest.
That can mean:
- guest post placements on relevant industry sites
- listicle mentions on pages that rank for high-intent keywords
- editorial links from niche publications
- placements on pages already linking to your competitors
In other words, the goal is not just to build more backlinks. It is to build the kinds of links that improve rankings over time.
There is also a second benefit now.
Many AI tools pull from the same kinds of pages you are trying to get featured on. If your brand consistently appears across trusted listicles, guides, and editorial articles, your visibility improves not just in search results, but in AI-generated answers too.
Our Campaigns feature helps track exactly that.
It shows where your brand appears across major AI platforms, which sources are being cited, and where you are missing coverage compared to competitors.
From there, we can turn those gaps into a link building plan built around the pages that are already influencing visibility in your niche.
So instead of running one-off campaigns and hoping for the best, you build a repeatable engine for both backlinks and discoverability.
Link building cheat sheet
Now over to you
The best link building campaigns usually come from repeatable strategies, not random one-off tactics. Whether you focus on guest posting, competitor backlinks, broken link building, or unlinked mentions, the real challenge is doing the work consistently enough to turn outreach into results.
That means finding the right link prospects, sending thoughtful pitches, and building relationships over time.
If you’d rather have a team handle that process for you, check out our done-for-you link building.
We handle prospecting, outreach, and relationship building to earn high-quality backlinks that strengthen your backlink profile and help you grow organic traffic.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is a link building campaign?
A link building campaign is a structured outreach process used to earn backlinks from other websites. That usually involves finding relevant sites, identifying the right contact person, sending a pitch, and following up.
What makes a good backlink?
A good backlink is relevant to your content, comes from a trustworthy and authoritative website, uses natural anchor text, and appears in a context that makes sense to readers. Dofollow links usually carry the most SEO value, but a healthy backlink profile includes a mix of link types.
What is the best link building strategy?
There is no single best link building strategy for every site. Guest posting, broken link building, unlinked mentions, and competitor backlink outreach can all work well depending on your niche, the content you already have, and the type of sites you are targeting.
Is broken link building still worth doing?
Yes, broken link building can still work well because it gives the website owner a clear reason to update their page. It tends to work best when you already have a strong replacement resource or can create one that closely matches the dead page.
Are paid links against Google’s guidelines?
Yes, buying links that pass ranking value is against Google’s guidelines unless they are properly marked with a sponsored attribute. Paying for a sponsored placement may still be useful for visibility or referral traffic, but it should not be treated the same as an earned editorial backlink.
How many follow-ups should you send in a link building campaign?
Usually one to three follow-ups is enough. More than that tends to feel pushy, especially if the original outreach did not get a response.
What tools help with link building outreach?
Most teams use a mix of tools for prospecting, backlink analysis, and outreach. Respona is built to combine prospecting, contact discovery, and email personalization in one workflow, while tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are useful for backlink research.
