Creating Linkable Assets
Acquiring both social shares and web backlinks is a key part of an advanced SEO strategy. We might focus in on the great user experience to attract links, but an experience should be placed in the correct digital container (blog, video, case study pdf, etc.) for our target audience.
In this post, we discuss the best types of assets to use to attract backlinks to your website. Whether you’ll get backlinks from influential high domain authority websites depends on the quality of your content, branding, strength of promotion, and of course strategy.
Google is highly dependent on backlink signals to rank web pages. That’s why this is perhaps the most marketing activity. Getting quality backlinks is a top priority of SEO experts and we attract them by providing pleasant content experiences that makes visitors want to tell others about our client’s product/service/brand.
Choose the Right Type for Your Audience
Indeed, whether you’re doing passive or active outreach for links, you must still have a blog/image/video etc. to offer and to link to. Choosing and using the best digital vessel is a fun challenge for your content creators. It’s an esteem building bit of generosity that could benefit your company well. Make your choice and fill it with outstanding ideas and images. It might end up being the best asset your company has ever produced.
Amateurs assume that any content offered will soar on social media and search engines. In fact, the ranking and sharing power comes from the right type of content along with exceptional user experiences contained within them. Different types of content deliver different emotional impact and have unique potential (e.g., infographic vs video). Each has its place in an outreach and link building strategy. You’ll be using many different types.
People like linking to certain content and sharing content. However, they may not like certain pieces of content, and some content such as social posts may not even be linkable. You’ll want to ensure whatever you put your content in, it is something others feel comfortable about linking to.
And your content pieces will need to appease Google’s AI driven robot machine and meet all the keyword indexing and quality signal requirements. And it must also appeal to real human users. If either one should fail, your rankings will fall.
Don’t fret, the backlinks and site rankings will rise once you make sustained effort to improve your content and promote it. We all start somewhere.
Ensure Your Content Meets Standards
It’s important to realize how competitive it is now on the Internet. Posting on Twitter or Facebook, or creating blogs, infographics or videos won’t win battles. Millions of competitors, many of them well funded, are trying to put you out of business with an exceptional and strategic effort.
Having a dedicated graphic designer is wonderful. Most of the reports which Salesforce, CMI, Hubspot and other big marketing companies publish are amazing. Yet readers see this polished material a lot and aren’t as impressed as you might think. If your material is presented well, is coherent and relevant, and presents your ideas fully, without unpleasant gaps, readers will enjoy it and share it. It’s the consumption experience of ideas and images that impresses them and an ordinary piece of content can create a nice experience.
So meeting standards really means don’t make it sloppy and disjointed. Ensure there’s a nice flow which builds emotion and intent in your reader. If they share it, then you know your material resonated in their mind.
The challenge for many small business people like you is to create compelling, fresh, interesting, impactful, material that your customers will enjoy. To get reach, make impact, be relevant and achieve significance, you need to create content that will attract backlinks. Creating excellent informative content of the highest quality doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether people like you and your content.
Much of the content you see liked and shared by others is awful, and not the best. It’s shared because they are part of a community and they share it because they like the creator. The web has always been a popularity party. But there’s more of course that fits into advanced SEO.
And Too, the Advanced BackLink Building Techniques
Advanced SEO and backlink strategies also get at the quality of what’s in these pieces of content, and what makes them so attractive and special. Thinks like special insights, in-depth expertise, storytelling of someone’s experience, or a topic discussed in key webpages which now have broken links (content went missing), answers to specific questions, authoritative forecasts, specific emotional hooks readers can’t turn away from, stats not available anywhere else, and a new service or software product that is brand new.
But the advanced backlink techniques is another subject. In this post, we want to know what will be the asset you can create that will be the target of links to your site.
The point of creating content for SEO, is that it creates, shares, backlinks, rankings and pageviews. Those are the important SEO KPIs. Of course, leads generated and total revenue produced are the ultimate KPIs.
Top Sharable Content
- blog posts (ultra-rich experiences)
- research reports (deep reliable, credible data)
- latest news (current trends, updates, evidence/support)
- significant events (key activities that showcase your product/service)
- cases studies (credible proof of what actually works and what real consumers/business owners did)
- ebooks (comprehensive coverage of a particular topic of keen interest to people)
- images (pleasant visuals that make people feel good or remind them of important values)
- infographics (flowing charts/presentation of vital facts)
- interesting social posts (intriguing events and points of view that people approve of)
- videos (audivisual experience involving people, places, and value that people can relate to)
For most website owners, the fully loaded, informational, topically relevant blog post containing emotion-stimulating images, videos and comments is the tour de force of linkable assets. High quality reports, case studies and whitepapers with current, up to date data are very effective.
Blogs are great because they include everything needed to produce a nice reading experience.
There’s Nothing Like Great Images
Images are important. People are visual. If there’s one thing you must have, it’s high quality and highly relevant images. People love great photos and illustrations so consider subscribing to the best image sites such as Shutterstock, Getty, istock. One of my clients paid thousands of dollars for a beautiful photo of Vancouver from a famous photographer to help her appeal better visually to wealthy Hong Kong real estate buyers. Images do evoke fascination, awe and desire. Using great photos will produce better link building results.
If your content lacks useful information and data, nice photos, an ultra significant topic, then it would have to contain other elements to generate emotions that inspire readers to share it and link to it.
Use interesting, colorful, modern, and unique images. They evoke emotions and they’re something people feel good about sharing with their social connections.
So let’s dig into what type of content is most likely to get shared, liked and linked.
7000+ word articles we looked at got almost 3 times more pageviews and 43% more shares than shorter ones (900–1200 words). — from State of Content Marketing Report from Content Marketing Institute. State of Content Marketing Report
Let’s look closer at what CMI’s yearly report tells us:
Content with images is best: Posts with one image get twice as much traffic as posts containing text only. These also get 30% more shares and 25% more backlinks. Images and videos have the advantage of being shared on Instagram, and on Facebook/Twitter too.

Lots of images is even better: Posts with 7+ images get 4 times more traffic than articles containing just text. Just remember the images have to be relevant, because the image represents the content.
- Use lists: Blog posts containing at least one list per every 500 words of plain text get 70% more traffic than posts without lists
- videos are good too: Posts that don’t contain a video get 92% less traffic and 24% less shares than posts with at least one video
- blog posts of 900 to 1300 words attract the most backlinks
- posts between 1500 to 7000 words get the most shares
- posts above 3000 words get twice as many pageviews
- how to’s, lists and guides got the most backlinks, share and unique pageviews
- long H1 tags of more than 10 words got the most backlinks, pageviews and shares
- posts with more images received much more pageviews but not more shares and backlinks
- videos had almost no effect on pageviews, shares or backlinks
Based on CMI’s report then, we know:
- lengthy articles of between 900 to 3000 words with plenty of images and lists in it achieves more backlinks, shares and pageviews. And that means the content will pass the engagement test too giving Google and Facebook validation signals.
In another survey OkDork and BuzzSumo found:
- monday, tuesday and thursday where the best days to post to get shares
- articles that have bios are more trusted and shared
- long content above 3000 words gets shared twice as much as that less than 1000 words
- content ages fast: After three days, on all social networks, the number of shares dropped at least 96% for the next four days. After the first week, the number of shares for the next three weeks drops at least 86%.

Summary of Most Linkable Content
The psychology of making content linkable is fairly sophisticated. There are preliminaries to consider in audience research, topics, design, ad campaigns, and establishing clearly “what in it for them.” However, sometimes you need to do your best and just do it. Through experience, you’ll learn.
To get your content liked, shared and linked to, do these things:
- create an information rich and fun to read blog post of more than 3000 words
- do research and publish findings
- create a guide or ebook
- do an interview with an influencer/notable in your field
- create a news post
- make your post epic (meaning edit it and make it better)
- ensure your copy/photos elicit strong emotions (awe, surprise, comfort)
- use many attractive, unique and interesting photos
- include bulleted lists of key points
- insert a relevant video
- share it on Monday or Tuesday
- ensure you have an authors bio on it
- engage with people on social media, promote it, boost it, feature it, and link to it
- ensure it resonates to your targeted keywords
A lot of what is stated about linkable assets is based on surveys/analytics, which is fine. However it takes relevance and significance to audiences for granted. The fact is, creating content that is significant to others out there on the web isn’t easy.
Produce a variety of excellent, epic, visual, informative and exciting content, and promote it in blitz campaigns so you can get enough of a sample set to know what does work. If your content is getting less than a thousand views on Facebook, there’s no way of knowing what worked. Even Facebook analytics dashboard won’t tell you when there’s so few views. This is where advertising can come in handy and let you fast track content performance insights.
Take a closer look at Advanced SEO Services and discover a more comprehensive way to dominate Google.
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