How to Create a Link Building Strategy for Your Website

Content and keywords alone won’t move a site to the top. Without backlinks, growth usually stalls. That’s especially true in competitive niches. To build links in a controlled way, you need a link building strategy. Otherwise, links appear randomly, rankings jump up and down, or don’t move at all. In this article, the 888STARZ Partners team explains what a backlink profile is and how to build a link strategy that works in practice, not just in theory.

What Is Link Equity

Link equity (also called a backlink profile) is the set of external links pointing to your website from other sites. Search engines use backlinks as a trust signal. When relevant websites link to your pages, it shows that your content has value. Strong links from authoritative sources usually have a direct impact on rankings. Weak or irrelevant links don’t.

There are two main types of backlinks:

1. Natural links. These appear when other websites link to your content on their own because it’s genuinely helpful or interesting for their audience. This is the most valuable and safest type of link;
2. Paid links. These are links you buy through linkbuilding platforms or directly from webmasters to grow your backlink profile faster. This approach requires caution – quality and relevance of the donor site matter far more than the total number of links.

What Is a Link Building Strategies

To grow backlinks safely and avoid penalties, link building needs structure. That’s where a link building strategy comes in. It is a step-by-step plan for acquiring backlinks from relevant and trustworthy websites in a controlled, natural way.

A proper link-building tactic helps you:

• Rank higher in search results. Backlinks remain one of Google’s strongest ranking signals. Links from reputable sites work like recommendations.
• Increase organic traffic. Better rankings mean more visibility and more clicks from search.
• Speed up indexation. Links from other websites help search engines discover and crawl new pages faster, while also bringing in referral traffic.

TF / CF Balance

Trust Flow (TF) and Citation Flow (CF) should grow together. If they don’t, the link profile degrades. CF shows how many links a site has. TF shows whether those links come from decent sources. Both metrics are easy to check in Majestic.

In practice, TF should not lag far behind CF. A difference of up to 50% is usually safe. For example, CF 60 with TF 30 is still workable. CF 80 with TF 30 is not – that’s a clear sign of cheap links and a fast track to filters.

How to maintain balance:

• Grow links gradually – no more than +15% per month. If the TF/CF gap exceeds 50%, remove links from donor sites with TF below 10 and add trust instead: 2–3 links per month from sites with TF 40+ (niche media, industry blogs, educational resources).
• Track dynamics. Check TF and CF monthly in Majestic or similar tools.

Risks of imbalance:

• TF lower than CF: traffic loss (up to −70%) and a complete reset of site trust signals.
• Sharp spikes: buying more than 50 links in a month or suddenly stopping link acquisition often leads to penalties.

Key rule: every new link should improve your TF/CF ratio. If CF grows faster than TF, you’re moving into a risk zone.

How to Create a Link Building Strategy

Solid link-building strategies are built step by step. Skipping stages usually leads to wasted budget or unstable results.

Step #1: Site Analysis

Before looking for external links, you need to understand your site’s current state. Start with a backlink audit. Check how many links you already have, where they come from, how clean the donor sites are, what anchors are used, and which pages receive links. At the same time, identify key pages that are underperforming and not getting enough traffic. Tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, Semrush, and Google Search Console are more than enough for this.

Pay attention to the metric that shows a page’s average ranking position over time. Pages with consistently low positions should be your first priority for link building. Also check CTR in search results. If a page ranks but gets few clicks, the issue is usually the title or meta description, not links.

Make sure your site actually has pages worth linking to. Content should be useful, unique, and properly optimized. Additionally, review the technical side in Google Search Console. Broken links, pages, duplicates, crawl issues, or slow loading can significantly reduce the impact of new links.

Step #2: Competitor Analysis

The next step is analyzing competitors who already rank for your target keywords. Look at who links to them. This gives you a ready-made list of relevant donors. Study the types of links they use: guest posts, crowd links, press releases, partnerships, and editorial mentions.

Pay special attention to which pages attract the most links. This usually shows which content type works best in your niche. For this analysis, Ahrefs (Site Explorer, Link Intersect), Semrush (Backlink Analytics), and SpyFu work well.

Step #3: Setting a Goal

Once technical issues are fixed and competitor data is collected, define a clear goal for link building. Without it, you won’t know whether the marketing strategies work. Typical goals of an affiliate include next:

1. Increasing organic traffic by a specific percentage within a set timeframe (for example, +20% in 6 months);
2. Pushing selected keywords into the top 10;
3. Improving visibility in a specific GEO;
4. Strengthening site authority within a niche.

Step #4: Choosing Link Donors

A link donor is a website that links to your website. Donor quality is critical. Key selection criteria:

• Relevance: the donor’s topic should match your niche.
• Authority: measured by Trust Flow, Domain Rating, or Domain Authority (Majestic, Moz, Semrush, Revalin).
• Traffic quality: real, active users (SimilarWeb, Semrush, Majestic, Rank2Traffic).
• Clean profile: no obvious spam or aggressive link selling (Majestic, RDS Bar, CheckTrust).

If you decided to buy links, do it carefully. Link exchanges can be used, but manual filtering is mandatory.

Common platforms include:

• Rotapost – over 70,000 blogs with permanent links, flexible filters, and multiple placement formats.
• Gogetlinks – stricter moderation, safer placements, supports contextual links, notes, and reviews.
• Miralinks – focuses on full articles and trusted sites, offers automation with copywriters and webmasters, and allows confidential placements.

Other options include working with proven link building agencies or contacting site owners directly. But the main rule stays the same: quality and natural placement always matter more than price or volume.

Step#5: Making Content Worth Linking To

Without strong content, any linkbuilding strategy fails. Really great high-quality content makes natural links possible and opens access to higher-quality donors. Focus on:

1. Solving real problems and answering real questions;
2. Publishing unique data, research, visuals, or expert opinions;
3. Producing in-depth content: guides, reviews, step-by-step instructions;
4. Mixing formats (text, video, interactive elements) and keeping content easy to read;
5. Actively promoting new content in niche communities, social platforms, and email lists.

To understand what to improve, look at the competitors above you in the ranking. What do their pages offer that yours don’t? Is it depth, structure, data, or usability? Whatever search engines consider more useful is exactly what your content is missing.

How to Buy Links the Right Way

Now, finally, here are a few more advice for affiliate marketers and webmasters:

• For safe and effective link building, start small. A reasonable entry budget is $50–$100 per month, around 5–10 links, and only from trusted donors (Trust Flow above 20, XT above 1.0, spam score below 25%).
• Increase spending gradually (15–20% per month). Over 6–12 months, this should bring you to 15–30 links per month. Split the budget roughly 70% on vetted link platforms and 30% on manual placements in media outlets or niche blogs.
• Cheap links (under $5) should be avoided completely. The risk of ending up in Google’s sandbox or under manual review is too high to justify the cost.
• Sharp spikes are just as dangerous. Increasing the budget by more than 20% in a single month or buying over 50 links at once often triggers search engine filters.
• Stopping link acquisition abruptly after a long campaign (six months or more) is also risky. In most cases, rankings start to drop 2–4 months later due to loss of link equity.

If you need to scale down, do it gradually. It’s not more than 15% per month, and then redirect a portion of the budget to content and usability. Without strong pages and a decent user experience, even expensive links won’t produce stable results.

Conclusion

Without a structured link strategy, SEO doesn’t work. In highly competitive niches like iGaming, a combined approach is critical if you want to stay visible long term. If you’re looking for an affiliate program with strong conditions for monetizing SEO traffic, start working with 888STARZ Partners. 

Our platform offers competitive terms for promoting unique iGaming offers across 100+ GEOs, with new markets added regularly. Partners also get access to ready-to-use promo materials, including localized creatives and high-quality PWA apps.