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These are re-posts from the original sources. Author: ahrefs

Before Google nobody would build links solely to suit the needs of a search engine. Links were built according to the purpose of hypertext, to connect texts hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

Now that link building techniques "for SEO" expire faster than you can imagine, it's about time to return to link building the way it worked for years before Google has broken the Web.

How to build links for traffic? Does it still work?

Remember my biggest link building success of 2013 part 3? Yes, it was about the blogs I write for and how they linked to me so that I even got valuable traffic, especially from Ahrefs! Make sure to read also about the undetectable link building technique I have covered.

The point of the article was to make sure you're independent of Google with your links. Of course you can't break free from Google completely as long as you try to build links for Google SEO.

The only truly future-proof link building technique is one that doesn't aim to boost your authority on Google but has direct benefits.

What is the most obvious benefit of a link? It's the traffic that gets through of course. In other words, it's about the visitors that find your way via the hypertext wormhole a link has.

In traditional Google SEO nobody cares whether people actually see the link and really click on it. In modern SEO it's back to the roots of the Web. We attempt to get people to visit us even before Google – the gatekeeper- can prevent them from entry. My own blog at seo2 has taught me some links are better than others for traffic.

These are the kinds of links that result in people visiting your site:

Ranking articles

Third party resource articles that rank high on Google are a good way to get consistent traffic. I mean on topic posts people really read and follow the links from. You minimize the risk of getting penalized because the site is already of high authority.

Why wait and work hard for years to rank when you can piggy-back a site or page that already does?

A socialtriggers resource list on Twitter from 2009 ranks #5 for [twitter tips] on Google among other queries. I get steady traffic from it for 5 years now! Why? I'm the first link of the 7. chapter dealing with SEO:

I didn't get there on purpose. The author of course included my link organically back then. You could try to get included today though or find similar lists and try it on those. I have just recently searched for Twitter resources for my upcoming ebook I could link to and indeed most of them have been several years old. I bet there are quite a few broken link or outdated resource opportunities. Help a blogger out and offer them a more current replacement.

Community sites

A lot of my referral traffic stems from the likes of inbound or Digital Point. These are hundreds of visitors not thousands but it, of course, depends on my activity. I didn't publish much lately so that I got fewer visitors from there but sometimes there are hundreds in a day.

inbound is a community-driven site where everybody can submit and vote up articles and other resources.

I have been pretty active there from the start and still show up almost daily so it's not that easy to get that traffic. Some posts of mine have been added to Digital Point by their moderators though so I'm not sure you can even try to get a link from there. I'm not referring to the the forums. I mean the news on the front page.

Of course there are other sites like inbound while growthhackers is a good example of a relatively new site. Bizsugar is still pretty active after several years. There are mainstream sites likes Reddit or Hacker News but I had personally awful experiences with both of them. Obnoxious users raging in my comments or attacking me on the sites themselves both based on my posts someone else submitted or my activity there.

There are basically communities or forums for everything out there. Take part, contribute, and earn the attention of other users so that you get traffic from links either being shared by others or posted by yourself.

Overview sites

There are many sites that rate or rank blogs for a particular topic or a large set of topics. Alltop is one of them. I get steady traffic from alltop despite being pretty low on that list and SEO not being a very popular topic by and large.

Other sites like Blogmetrics that rank you based on some numbers have been also beneficial. These days I don't rank well there because after banning Google search on my blog traffic and other success metrics have dropped.

I have been included on Alltop without asking for it but you can try it directly

as I've been told by someone who successfully did. Blogmetrics has included me of their own accord years ago but I guess you can contact Blogmetrics people to get included there.

Social media and other profiles

Social media links on your profiles can work well when you are active on these social sites or for some reason your site does not rank well. My Twitter profile link and my Moz profile links for example have sent actual referral traffic over the years especially whenever I actively contributed there.

Profile links are mostly "nofollow" these days so they don't have an impact when it comes to Google rankings but you are welcome to use them for their original purpose: to let people know more about you.

Ideally you should create a landing page for every major profile link.

A dedicated Twitter landing page has been en vogue a few years back. Depending who the visitors are and what they know, you can write and add links specifically for them on such a page. For example you could link your Twitter resources on your Twitter landing page.

Some sites are better than others for profile link optimization for traffic. Facebook and Google+, for example, hide your homepage link pretty well, and tend to outrank your site instead so be careful and not too active there in order not to compete with yourself by promoting third party sites too much.

Creative Commons image by Ben J. Gibbs