Let’s say you are creating amazing helpful content. Is it enough to rank and drive organic traffic?
The answer is a big “NO”. Google has a myriad of factors on which they decide which website to rank and why. One of those is “site authority” which is also considered a critical aspect of SEO strategy.
Google measures “authority” based on the quality and quantity of backlinks. Acquiring high-quality backlinks is the most critical as well as daunting task for beginners.
But if you know the tactics and follow the right formula you can get top-notch links from quality websites.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to build backlink strategies and an additional 15 ways to get quality backlinks.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are also referred to as “inbound links” or “incoming links”. These are links created when one site links to another website.
They play a significant role in off-page search engine optimization (SEO). These links are clickable and allow you to hop on another website.
For example, if you have a blog post about good quality leather jackets and you actually link that content to a website selling quality jackets. People can easily jump onto this site with just one click.
Why Backlinks Are Important?
If you want to grow your business and drive organic traffic you have to understand the importance of backlinks.
Google has more than 200 factors to determine page ranking and the number one factor that affects ranking is “Backlinks”.
For sure backlinking is not an easy step as about 41 percent of companies believe that backlinking is the biggest challenge. But it is worth it.
Here are the benefits of getting endorsements from potential websites.
- Build Authority: Backlinks signal search engines like Google about trustworthiness and authority. Generally speaking higher the number of high-quality backlinks you have, the higher the chances your site ranks for relevant search terms. This translates to increased organic traffic without paying for ads
- Improves website visibility: Backlinks are the endorsement you get from other websites. When the potentially relevant site gets links to you, it improves your prominence in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Credibility and Trust: When a relevant and quality website links you it builds credibility and makes you appear more trustworthy to visitors. In this way, people will be more likely to trust and collaborate with you.
- Faster Indexing: Search bots discover updated and new web pages by following backlinks from existing ones. Backlinks can help search engines find and index your website more quickly.
Note that Google guidelines say that good quality content needs to naturally earn backlinks.
15 Ways To Get Top-Quality Backlinks:
Let’s talk about the new startups. Nobody wants to endorse your website. Also due to low ranking, you can’t earn them organically.
Then how can you build a quality backlinks profile that screams “authority”?
Believe it is the most comprehensive yet effective guide you gonna read. Let’s get straight to the potential ways to get website links and improve ranking.
1. Guest Blogging:
Guest Blogging is a strategy where you create valuable content and publish it on another website. After that, you link the original content on your website so that when the readers click on that post, they can jump on your website if they find the content interesting.
It is the simplest way to get traffic back to your site and boost your brand awareness.
Guest posting is considered one of the most effective ways to build backlinks. To start guest posting you need to have a list of authority websites.
There are three ways that I used and find them highly effective.
1. Google Search Method:
It is the easiest way to find opportunities for guest blogging. Many websites in almost every niche on Google have blogs that welcome guest bloggers to contribute content. This can be a great way to earn backlinks.
Here is the list of Google search operators put together by Brian Dean, who can help you find websites that let you write guest posts.
- Your Keyword “guest post”
- Your Keyword “write for us”
- Your Keyword “guest article”
- Your Keyword “guest post opportunities”
- Your Keyword “This is a guest post by”
- Your Keyword “contributing writer”
- Your Keyword “want to write for”
- Your Keyword “submit blog post”
- Your Keyword “contribute to our site”
- Your Keyword “guest column”
- Your Keyword “submit content”
- Your Keyword “submit your content”
- Your Keyword “submit post”
- Your Keyword “This post was written by”
- Your Keyword “guest post courtesy of ”
- Your Keyword “guest posting guidelines”
- Your Keyword “suggest a post”
- Your Keyword “submit an article”
- Your Keyword “contributor guidelines”
- Your Keyword “contributing writer”
- Your Keyword “submit news”
- Your Keyword “Become a guest blogger
- “Your Keyword “guest blogger”
- Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
- Your Keyword “looking for guest posts”
- Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
- Your Keyword “guest poster wanted”
- Your Keyword “accepting guest posts”
- Your Keyword “writers wanted”
- Your Keyword “articles wanted”
- Your Keyword “become an author”
- Your Keyword “become a guest writer”
- Your Keyword “become a contributor”
- Your Keyword “submit guest post”
- Your Keyword “submit an article”
- Your Keyword “submit article”
- Your Keyword “guest author”
- Your Keyword “send a tip”
- Your Keyword inurl: “guest blogger”
- Your Keyword inurl: “guest post”
- allintitle: Your Keyword + guest post
2. Building Relationships:
This is one of the interesting methods to find guest blogging sites. By finding someone in your niche who does guest blogging often.
After that use this search operator “Guest post + Influencer name” and make a list of all the sites they post.
Outreach by all the sites and provide them with good quality content. This will directly help you to drive a huge number of traffic to your site.
3. Competitor Analysis:
Head over to your competitor’s backlink profile and see if they have posted any blog posts. For instance, if I analyze the “WebFX” you can see there are so many links essentially contributed by guest bloggers. (backlink webfx pic)
2. Leave Comments:
Leaving comments on relevant blogs can be a valuable tactic for building backlinks, especially for those starting with SEO.
It is one of the effective and good ways to establish yourself in your niche and get noticed by a new audience.
However, the key is to leave thoughtful and insightful comments that add value to their content. This strategy’s main goal is to build relationships with other bloggers in your field.
Usually, when you leave a comment on a site it will more likely seen by the owner of that site, in turn, they will link your content only if valuable.
If you have limited resources and are short on time, you’ll need to spend time leaving valuable comments on authority blogs with “do follow” links that provide them with value.
By implementing this tactic leaving helpful and insightful comments you can gain quality backlinks.
Four things to remember when building backlinks from blog comments:
- Only leave comments on relevant and high-authority sites you get the SEO benefits of strong backlinks and the chance to reach a targeted audience interested in your niche.
- Read carefully the article and try to leave insightful and most importantly relevant comments.
- Avoid keyword stuffing and excessive self-promotion try to make it as much as simple and concise.
- Try to leave conversational comments to start a conversation. Engage with other commenters and authors to position yourself as a trusted authority.
3. Reviews:
Building backlinks from testimonials and reviews is the easiest as well as the most overlooked strategy.
It’s a win-a-win strategy. When you post positive reviews on another website about their service or product they make them feel encouraged and happy. In turn, they will link back to your website.
Is that simple?
Yes, it is a simple and valuable tool that can help to build your strong backlink profile. You just need to add meaningful and impactful reviews with personalization.
Let’s look at the advantages of crafting testimonials and reviews:
- Writing helpful and informative reviews helps to build trust with both the reviewed website and potential customers.
- It is a non-paid advertising trick. You don’t need to spend dollars on this like other advertisement strategies.
- Having a positive review on another website increases your website exposure and drives relevant traffic.
- It helps in building website authority and credibility so people will be more likely to trust you.
- It helps in building and strengthening the relationship with other websites in your niche.
Also, reviews and testimonials can help you improve the ranking for long-tail keywords and create valuable social proofs.
4. Resource Pages:
Building a resource page for backlinks is a popular SEO tactic. However, the resource page is mainly created to list all the useful link resources.
For example, a resource page on fitness and health could list healthy recipes, nutrition exercises, and more related to this.
Building backlinks is challenging, but if you want high-quality links from authority websites, you should go for the resource page link-building tactic.
Here are some reasons why you should perform resource page link-building:
- When you curate a resource page and list all the relevant links it will help to increase your site credibility and authority in the niche.
- The resource page aims to link other quality pages which helps to improve ranking and build high-quality backlinks.
- Resource pages are designed in such a way that it helps to stay up-to-date with the developments and latest trends in the industry.
5. Broken Link Building:
Broken link building is the process of finding broken links on other websites and offering to replace them with a working link to a similar article on your website.
Simply put, it detects another site for dead links (404 pages) and asks them to link to relevant content on your site.
Building backlinks profile is all about quality, quality, and quantity. The higher the number of quality links you have, the more likely you will position your site as an authority.
Besides generating backlinks it helps to drive referral traffic and improve the SEO. It also helps to build relationships with other site owners by detecting and solving their site issues.
6. Content Collaboration:
Collaboration is the common term we hear all the time in the digital marketing world. Like-minded people love to collaborate and blow up their sites with beneficial outcomes.
Building backlinks by content collaboration is an old-school strategy but it still works. There is a strategic partnership between creators where they curate a piece of content with their expertise.
The primary goal of this collaboration is building backlinks across various platforms. Also, each creator promotes the content individually with their audience directly expanding your website reach and source of generating links.
In short content collaboration is considered as a potent strategy for building links in the competitive landscape of SEO.
7. Brand Mentions:
According to a report 42 percent of SEO professionals believe that brand-mention link building is one the most potential ways to build backlinks quickly and effectively.
In addition, it also helps to build a strong brand image. Google treats backlinks as the vote of authority, every time you get a single link.
In simple, brand mentions refer to the process of finding those sites where your website has been mentioned on any kind of content and turning those brand mentions into backlinks.
Key Benefits Brand Mentions:
- Improve search rankings and build authority
- Establish new relationships with authorities
- Improve your site E-E-A-T
- Drive referral traffic
Reach out to journalists and bloggers in your niche to get mentioned in their articles. Also, you can use various online tools to find brand mentions like:
- Brand Watch
- Brand Mentions
- Brand 24
- Mentions
- Scrapebox
- Link Prospector by Citation Labs
- Mentions Tracker by Ahrefs
08. High-Quality Content:
When you talk about organic earning of backlinks, it is through creating and publishing high-quality content.
The core of generating backlinks is generating quality, informative, and engaging content that other websites will want to link to.
Ensure your article is well-optimized, add high-quality images, and a compelling title, and remember to focus on meta tags.
Keep your content detailed, enrich insights, and add so much value. The ideal length for writing long content is between 2000-3000.
However, if you write even 1000 words make sure that the main focus is on delivering valuable insights and in-depth analysis.
By implementing these techniques while writing the article you can easily get valuable backlinks.
09. Linkable Assets:
Linkable assets include blogs, infographics, eBooks, whitepapers, and webinars that other websites will find worth linking.
Linkable assets are designed strategically to attract authority websites rather than merely depending on outreach.
When you create content that is better than others, it will generally attract natural backlinks. This organic linking signals positively to the Google search engine and also improves your site’s overall visibility and ranking.
10. Partnerships:
It is simple to understand and partner with other businesses to get links from their websites.
Build effective partnerships with other authorities in your niche and turn them into long-term collaborations. Later, in the future, they are more likely to recommend and link your website.
Most specifically trusted relationships with website owners will help you significantly to get valuable backlinks and build a solid foundation for future projects.
11. HARO (Help a Reporter Out):
HARO is an online platform that allows journalists to connect with experts to collect deep insights on relative topics.
It is designed for public relations, building brand awareness, and positioning as though leader. Professionals are significantly using it as the backlink-acquiring source.
As HARO is a well-known platform it is pretty competitive and difficult to get attention from others. The only way to do it reply to the pitches as fast as possible.
Here are the reasons and benefits of using HARO as the source of building backlinks.
- Acquire links that your competitors don’t have.
- Build Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) being as an expert
- Get high-quality backlinks that drive referral traffic
- Build brand awareness and authority
- Establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry
12. Reverse Engineer:
Reverse engineering link building is the technique that involves competitor backlink profile analysis. Analyze your competitors’ backlinks and try to get links from the same websites.
It helps you to find out where, what, and who is linking to their website so you can copy and manipulate their links.
It also helps you to understand what type of content you should generate and what works best in your niche.
No doubt, industry leaders are positioned as authorities but every site has some drawbacks, by pinpointing those weak points you can enhance and create something potentially better to outrank them.
15. Local SEO:
Local search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your site for local searches. If you have a local business, focus on getting links from local websites and directories.
Going further local link building involves generating backlinks from websites that have relevant audiences and are active locally.
3 Key benefits of local link building:
- Google considers backlinks a signal of confidence, and your number of backlinks determines your site ranking.
- Local SEO helps you to attract relevant locally specific audiences and also drive referral traffic to your site.
- Local link-building is the best way to boost your brand visibility organically which helps you to position yourself as an authority.
Frequently Asked Questions About Building Backlinks:
What are backlinks and how do you get them free?
Backlinks are links from other websites that help to improve search engine ranking and build site authority. By implementing all the above strategies you are able to generate links organically.
Do websites need to perform link-building?
Link building is an important aspect of SEO. The successful and high-ranked websites usually have a greater number of backlinks. Link building helps to increase the website visibility which translates to a greater number of traffic.
Is link building dead?
There is no precise answer to this. No doubt algorithms have changed a lot and Google is much more sophisticated when deciding the rank of websites. The good news is that link-building is still an essential aspect of SEO and Google stated multiple times that links are the top ranking factors.
Concluding Thoughts:
With focus link-building strategies you can easily get quality links. Hope this comprehensive guide will help you a lot.
Remember, quality is more important than quantity. Focus on getting high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to improve your website’s ranking.