There are a number of ways to effectively gather links in link building as you optimize your website for SEO. One of which is Broken Link Building. This method aims to acquire links by searching for – as its name suggests – broken links, and replace them with working ones on your site. This is a proven effective white hat tactic that is focused on content that provides real value to users.

However, undertaking a broken link building campaign can become tedious. In fact, some experts say that for every 100 emails sent to website masters and administrators, only an average of 5 to 10 links will materialize into links. Broken link building is a time-consuming task that includes:

Prospecting – The first step in link building, finding prospects that fit your criteria includes using search operators and clicking through every result to check on its relevance.

Dead link checking – Websites with dead links is a great opportunity for BLB, so link builders usually use browser plugins and other web services that check on links.

Outreach – Both the steps above will be useless unless you reach out to them. This step is vital because this is where you let webmasters know about their broken link, and present them with a solution.

While there are other link building tactics you can use to acquire links and increase your website’s ranking, broken link building is a technique that provides a great room to practice creativity and decisive thinking. It’s also one of the cheapest ways to increase your website search ranking, considering some techniques require some sort of payment or cross deals with bloggers and webmasters.

If you’re trying to check if you should give broken link building a try, look at some of its aspects first to help you find out:

Searching for target sites on a certain niche

Any digital marketer would already be familiar with Google’s Advanced Search Operators. However, if this is the first time you’re hearing about this, then you should try to at least familiarize yourself first with Advanced Search Operators first. It is basically a much more advanced way of using Google Search by putting syntax and symbol operators in your search queries to quickly filter your web search.

For example, if you’re looking for resources about parenting, you can type in parenting blogs inurl:links, which will provide a search result with websites that links to related web pages.

Otherwise, there are basically three types of broken link building strategies:Otherwise, there are basically three types of broken link building strategies:

⦁ Resource Page Targeting with Keywords

⦁ Resource Page Targeting with URLs

⦁ Direct URL Targeting

Taking advantage of broken links

In broken link building, the most difficult part of the process is probably finding relevant websites. This is why it’s important to be really knowledgeable of Google’s advanced search operators. Aside from this, it’s also important for you to identify which keywords and topics are associated with your niche.

Once you’re finished identifying these keywords, you can then match them with prospecting phrases. To illustrate what we mean by prospecting phrases, I’d like to show some of our favorite keywords when searching for broken link building prospects:

⦁ topic keyword “useful links”

⦁ topic keyword “useful links”

⦁ topic keyword “resources”

⦁ topic keyword “useful websites”

⦁ topic keyword intitle:resources

See to it that the websites you find and choose are relevant enough so that users will be encouraged to research further. You can do this by checking the keywords normally used in your niche or in your industry, and checking them further for relevance. Once you have at least 10 of these relevant websites, you can proceed to search these websites for broken links.

Expired Domains are also gems

Aside from the usual 404 error, broken links that you’ll find from the tools mentioned before usually links to a website that no longer exists. In link building, this is a solid opportunity that should not be missed.

Websites that link to expired domains is actually a solid find that will easily mean good results. Depending on your own observation together with automatic analyses of tools such as AH Refs that review websites for broken links, you should decide what to do with the broken links of old websites. If it has good links, you can consider purchasing the old domain and recreate all the pages on it. After which, you can proceed and reach out the webmasters who linked to these pages.

Personalize your outreach email

When you’re sending an email to 10-20 prospects at a time, it is quite hard to customize every single email you send out. Despite this, you should at least try to customize your emails on a campaign or industry level. Simply using templated emails across all your efforts will only waste your prospects and diminish your chances of getting links.

It will also help if these steps are seen as a collective process. During the part where you verify each website, try to look for something peculiar or descriptive about their website – is it cute? Is it very appealing to kids? Is it rustic? Why so? Keep note of this and use it to customize this specific email outreach down the line.

In composing your email outreach template, a simple and concise email should do the trick. Right off the bat, introduce yourself, tell why you sent the email, and include solid ideas that can fix what’s broken (and how to include a link to your site). Here are some tips that can help you make awesome emails for outreach:

⦁ Refrain from using full hyperlinks or website URLs in the email as it can cause your email to go straight to your recipients’ spam folder. Embed these links by hyperlinking relevant phrases.

⦁ Refrain from using full hyperlinks or website URLs in the email as it can cause your email to go straight to your recipients’ spam folder. Embed these links by hyperlinking relevant phrases.

⦁ Do everything you can to know their real name and email address. Look for clues and do some research to verify their name, as you wouldn’t want to get this wrong.

⦁ End emails with a question, or a statement that will compel them to right back.

⦁ Proofread your email to get rid of mistakes.

Broken Link Building is worth it

Even if broken link building requires a tedious process and long waiting times for links to materialize, the result it brings is unparalleled. I have acquired a great deal of very high-quality links through broken link building and didn’t even had to pay for any posting or publication fee. In fact, our team of digital marketing experts are mainly composed of professional link builders that have, over time, mastered broken link building just because it is so effective we cannot ignore its benefits.

If you are an organization looking for fresh ways to acquire links for SEO and has a limited budget, broken link building is perfect for you. With just pure wit and creativity, plus some technical knowledge of SEO, using broken link building in SEO can be a fun way to increase your website’s ranking on the internet.