Link building is a complex process of getting links to your travel site, and a really important one. Links determine how credible your site looks in the eyes of Google. Even if you have excellent educating content that users will love, your site has almost no chances to get ranked if it has no links pointing to it. Apart from serving SEO purposes, good links can also be a source of traffic and establish connections with other authoritative sources in your niche.
Link building can be paid and free. When working on a long-term project, it’s strongly advised to stay away from buying links. First of all, you don’t even know if those links will work, and this money can rather be invested into the quality content and site improvements. Or even worse, a paid link can get you penalized. Free link building has a lot of options that look more natural in the eyes of Google, and in this post, I’ll share a few of them that are most popular among travel bloggers.
Guest Posts
Guest posts are a great way to build links, as long as they are from non-spammy websites, and from the related niches. They usually allow you to place 2 links in the post, an anchor link from the post to one of your articles, and a homepage link from the author bio. It all depends on what SEO strategy you have, some bloggers prefer linking only to posts, while others grow their homepage links number.
Guest posts are time-consuming, you have to write an article from scratch, and include the photos. It’s also recommended to choose a topic that won’t compete with your own blog posts. From terms of SEO, guest posts are the best way to get link juice, because the total outbound links from the page are minimal.
How to find guest post opportunities?
- Search for related blogs using keywords like “write for us” + the topic of your choice.
- Join online blogging communities and check for the bloggers who accept guest posts on their websites.
- Research your competitor’s backlinks, and contact those blogs for cooperation.
Collabs
Collabs are posts that feature stories of 15-25 bloggers on the same topic. Collab posts usually feature 200-300 words per blogger plus photo, and each of them gets a link to the homepage or a non-competing blog post. It’s the fastest way to build links in the travel niche, however, the quality of such links is lower compared to guest posts (more outbound links from the page, less link juice for you).
Collab posts are also a great way to grow content on your own website. When you feature a collab post and invite bloggers to contribute, it will help to build relations within the industry. Plus, it will get you many social shares by the contributors and their followers.
Link Swaps
Exchanging links with other websites is a fast way to build your DA, and there are a few approaches to do it.
Link swap between 2 sites – when you exchange with another website, you link to them, they link to you. That’s the simplest method but does not appear natural for Google. This way your link-building efforts get canceled out. There are also rumors that such activity may get you penalized.
3-way link swap – recommended. Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, and website C links to website A. Everyone gets a link, and a reciprocal connection won’t be so visible.
If your website is new and the DA is low, you may find it hard to find the logs willing to swap with you. Don’t be discouraged, look for the new bloggers, and ask to swap with them.
To reach out to the network of bloggers for link swaps and collabs, check out communities in social media, like this Group on Facebook.
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) and similar services
This is one of the best ways to build links from authoritative resources with the highest DA. You can register as a source. After that, HARO will send you daily emails from journalists who look for quotes on the subject they are researching. You can reply with your authoritative option, and in return, you have a chance to get a link to your own website. The practice shows that the reply rate is quite low, so it’s a game of numbers – the more pitches you send, the more chances you have to get a link. Many bloggers have mentioned that it’s their one and only way to build links, and since these resources usually have a high DA, they are great for building blog trust and establishing yourself as an industry expert.
What Else?
Apart from the methods mentioned above, there are many ways for passive link building, like concentrating on developing high-quality content that will attract links and shares. These can be stats posts that feature a lot of data and research on the topic. For example, “55 Surprising Travel Statistics in 2021” – for each post you have to analyze a lot of poll and survey responses and wrap them into a long read post. The main purpose of such posts is to attract readers and deliver good content, backlinks come as a bonus.
Backlinks are a great way to build authority, and may also become a continuous source of highly related referral traffic.
I hope this post has given you some inspiration to develop your link-building strategy. Do you know any proven link-building methods that you’d love to share with the community? Let us know in the comments below!
