Link building is a very important part of SEO that not all small business owners know about. In fact, this can take you a notch higher when it comes to improving your ranking on Google. However, building quality links is quite a struggle for most small businesses. The main reason for this is lack of familiarity when it comes to best practices of Search Engine Optimization. If you feel this way you can always take the help of a professional SEO firm that offers affordable SEO packages.

There are many start-ups that find it difficult to afford professional help. However, in their efforts to build links, they resort to a few infamous black hat strategies, which is why they tend to fail and even become blacklisted by Google. You need to understand that most search engines have the best of the tools to crack down black hat tactics like link exchanges and paid anchor placements. This is why there is a need to focus on authoritative and relevant links that help you in driving real traffic.

Given below are 6 best strategies that you can use to build links for your small business website that will work absolutely great for the year 2016:

Partnering with niche-specific influencers: These are the people who share niche-specific content with your target audience. It is good to connect with them so as to establish meaningful relationships with your readers, while bypassing the “industry atmosphere.” In order to connect with these niche-specific influencers, you may contribute on a regular basis to their blogs, adding a link to your landing page. The trust the consumers have on these influencers will help you in gaining visitors, who will consider your post as an honest contribution.
Leveraging local partnerships: If you want to reach out to the target audience of a specific geographical area, it pays to form partnerships with some of the local organizations so as to build links from their websites. Try getting in touch with locally owned businesses and franchises and establishing relationships with them. Don’t go for the big corporations right away. You may also think of contributing to some of the local blogs to build links. Then, there are also the local news blogs and official community blogs where guests can contribute. You may even sponsor a few local events that involve small businesses. This way you can gain links from the sponsorship page of the event. You can also look at sponsoring a few local charity shows, conferences and award ceremonies.
Using the Skyscraper tactic: This is one technique you can use if you want faster results. All you need to do here is come up with brand new and innovative content ideas every week. Be on the lookout for the strategies that seem to work for others, customize them and improve upon them. This is a good way to build organic links and drive traffic to your website in a natural way.

Here are a couple of things you need to do in order to use this tactic successfully:

Do some research on the top-performing content in your niche? You need to check out the quality of the links that point to such content and find out how many times such content has been shared on social media. You can use tools such as Open Site Explorer and BuzzSumo for the purpose.
Try to work on it and come up with something that is better. Top-performing content that might work for one case may or may not work exactly in the same way for you. You need to create a more comprehensive piece on that topic so as to add in more value.
Use outreach tactics to promote your content. This means reaching out to relevant influencers and websites through social media and emails, commenting on their posts and going ahead from there.

Searching for business mentions: Look out for places on the net where there are mentions about the business you are into. If you can find some that do not include any links to forums or community resource pages, you can use them to build your links in a cost-effective way. You can also use a few relevant keywords along with your brand name to improve your visibility. You can use Brand Mentions along with Google Alerts to make your life easier. This will help in finding articles that mention your brand without links to your website. You can connect with these authors and ask them to insert your links.
Creating a resource page: Creating a local resource page that gives important information about the various small businesses in your area could be a great way to build links. Once you do this, all the businesses that you mention on your resource page will start linking up to you. You can use the help of local subject matter experts to come up with more information-rich pages. Once your page starts capturing the attention of the various businesses in the industry your efforts will start paying you. Taking part in Q&A websites as well as local business forums will help you cite your resource page wherever possible.
Creating premium content: Creating premium content is very important to gain back links from leading industry blogs and major publications. Such content should demonstrate thought leadership, apart from mentioning important tips and lists. You need to create:
- Ebooks
- White papers
- Resource pages
- Podcasts
- In-depth blog posts
- Case studies
- Co-created guest posts as well as
- infographics

Although creating these might take some time, they will provide you with better chances to be linked.

Start making use of these strategies not only to improve your ranking by gaining links but also to gain and enjoy that competitive edge in the market. If you find it difficult there are always the affordable SEO packages that you can go for.