If you have been blogging since quite a long time, you would know the importance of keywords in SEO, for your blog posts to be in top results of search engines. Another very important tool in blogging is building backlinks.
Yes!
Backlinks.
You may have heard this word a lot many times from fellow bloggers or from some marketing strategies. The idea of backlinks is very intriguing. They can redirect people to your blog posts!
Building a strong backlink is very helpful!
Now you are not a well-known person out there!
Why would your blogs be linked elsewhere?
And guess how many backlinks you need to land on the first page of Google results?
The 10th position on Google results from needs over 30,000 backlinks on an average.
But don’t be disheartened! Let me tell you that you don’t need to be famous to build backlinks. There are numerous ways to build strong backlinks, and many of them don’t require you to have celebrity status.
WHY BACKLINKS?
Now, the question is do you really need backlinks for your website?
If yes!
Why so?
Link building or backlinking as we say, is Link building, or gaining backlinks, is the process of getting other sites to link to your site.
We have often heard of black hats in SEO agencies who can be hired to build backlinks for your website. But the term ‘black hat’ seems fishy. And yes! It is. It’s a dark policy of SEO. These are no way legal, highly unethical and RISKY.
These SEO tactics redirect your website to low-quality domains which are either mostly spam or inactive. They don’t improve your rankings, but in decline your website’s rankings and delete your slight chances of ranking up! And once the search engines catch hold of you, you can expect the worst punishments.
Now, that’s pure crap a deal!
Moving on to white hat SEO, that builds backlinks and rankings with the use of well-trusted websites having high domain authority. Now, that’s pretty good because the top three factors that Google looks for are the authority of your domain, external link anchor text, and the strength of those external links.
Let me tell you one thing here: It’s tempting to build backlinks quickly by hiring black hats SEO techniques, but there’s a lot of risk and uncertainty involved, and it’s better to invest time and build high-quality backlinks from fair policies.
This process can take time to build your domain authority but is totally free of any risks.
At least you won’t run the risks of downgrading your website rankings forever.
Now, coming to the question-
Do backlinks really matter?
Yes, they do.
Because Google loves linking.
The more the credibility of the sites linked to you, the better ranking you hold on Google. So, if you have been wondering as to how to build quality backlinks, we are going to discuss the same over the next section.
How to Build High-Quality Backlinks?
Now, that you have understood the importance of backlinks, lets now discuss how you build quality backlinks. Because building high-quality backlinks isn’t an overnight task! Here are some of the best ways to build quality backlinks:
Leverage Public Relations
Public Relations or PR is one of the best ways to generate high-quality links to your website because I don’t need to tell that the more people know you, more they would associate with you! PR and SEO are so intricately linked in many ways.
Building public relations include cold pitching, establishing relationships with editors and collaboration with other experts.
Public relations help greatly in impacting better opportunities for your website. Though public relations don’t enhance your rankings immediately, they surely ensure your success in the future. So, leveraging public relations is the best way to backlinking. One way you can build healthy public relations and establish yourself is by handling an active social media account.
Some tips to build a great social media profile are:
Post interesting content that would attract people.
Use persuasive statements.
Be transparent in your posts.
The more active you are on social media, the more you get to interact with different people. Meeting people from different fields is great in building a wide relationship.
So, never miss an opportunity. You can also use your social media account to build your own email list, build healthier relationships and in turn, more backlinks.
But what role do email lists and social media play in backlinking?
Well, the fastest way to build backlinks is through building relationships. That means more the engagement to social media, more the opportunities for you.
Write Competitive Content
Good content is always loved by people alike. If the content of your blog isn’t attractive enough, you can never expect to get linked to other popular websites.
Any website with old, very simple and length content is not favored. Therefore, you need to start building good content in order to build a strong backlinking strategy.
You need to write content better than the posts from fellow bloggers.
To start with, search for the topic you wish to write your blog on:
Ignore any promoted links appearing on the top of the search and open all the results in new tabs for a better comparison. The key points you need to look out for while comparing different websites are:
The number of images included in different blogs.
Length of the blogs
Title of the blogs
Description of the blog post.
You can improve the quality of your writeup by considering the following points:
Include more relevant images than any of your competitors.
Use an attractive title.
Prefer writing a more detailed blog post than the one you just visited.
Use a more compelling blog title.
Basically, your goal should be to analyze your competitors and perform better. Once you have finished your writing, do publish your blogs on other popular sites as well. Put it up on Medium or Quora, share it on LinkedIn. This way, you get more reach and backlinking potential than before.
Putting an embedded code
When you create an attractive infographic, people are going to use it. Now, here’s the catch! Suppose you embed code into your infographic so that when they use it, they redirect traffic to your website. There are many ways available to put an embed code. One such form to prepare an embed code is: http://www.siegemedia.com/embed-code-generator
Did you just notice any particular photo of yours being reshared multiple times?
Make a google search or set up an alert to find out exactly who is using your published photo. Next, you can reach up to those sharing your photo and ask them to put up a credits link to the photo that could redirect people to your blog.
Finding emails
One thing you should do to reach out bloggers is to find their email addresses. Now, you can use any of the numerous tools available out there. Some of the best email finder tools are Email Hunter and Rapportive. This way, you get LinkedIn profiles linked to your Gmail inbox.
Create Expert Infographics
Infographics provide a great visual to help readers scan and browse through the content and loved by all. If people share an infographic created by you, they would need to link back to your website. The best way to create your own infographics for free is with Venngage.
Once you create and publish your own infographic, you can reach out a greater number of blogs of your type.
Common mistakes to avoid when creating an infographic:
Don’t create old infographics which have already been used multiple times.
Keep minimal text portion in your infographics.
Avoid misleading information.
Do not copy infographics directly from the internet.
Avoid using too many colors.
Keep it short and precise.
Reach out on Twitter
Twitter is the only platform where you can find all the famous celebrities and entrepreneurs from different industries. You get to know and interact with fellow writers and bloggers from your industry on Twitter.
So, start following and interacting with the bloggers of a matching profile and others to build healthy relationships. They might agree to share links of your blog posts via their accounts.
A step further on Twitter
Look out for mentions to find those who have tweeted your content. Talk to them, thank them for their promotion and ask if they would link your blogs to their future posts.
Use HARO
Using ‘Help A Reporter Out’ can get your site more press and links. Sign up for free alerts and search through them daily to find suitable topics for your business.
Writing Testimonials for others
This might sound as a counterpoint. You might be thinking that writing testimonials or reviews for other websites shall only reduce your audience and divert them to other websites.
But in actual, this is a good SEO idea and backlinking strategy.
When you do so, the website will include a spot for a backlink.
Isn’t it a simple trick?
And while other websites might be benefitted from conversions, you shall also be benefitted at the same time.
This is worth trying!
Running a Blogger Competition
Bloggers try to beat fellow bloggers by a lead, but they are also helpful and cooperative.
After all, united together bloggers can achieve a greater feat. They would surely share each other’s posts and website links in expectation of the same in return.
So, you may use this sharing technique. Creating a blogger competition is one such way to boost this technique.
To enter the competition, they need to nominate fellow bloggers for the competition.
It’s a great interactive way to get bloggers involved and spread the word for this competition along with your link. Competition engines like Gleam.io make the process easier to manage.
Repair broken link
While visiting websites of fellow bloggers, look out for broken links and alert the owners about this. You may also suggest similar posts that could be linked instead. There are chances they would gladly replace the references with a link of yours out of gratitude. Though this process is a bit untrusty, it is worth giving a shot! After all, building thousands of backlinks need high efforts from your part.
Don’t just stop after finding the broken links. Search for other websites using the broken links via the Open Source Explorer. Reach out to all of them and you know what to do next!
Ask your customers to link to your site: If you run a business, build an intake form and include a column for them to input their website URL, if they have their own site.
Keep record of all the customers with their own websites, create a separate mailing list for them and send them your most valuable content, free stuff, attractive infographics with your embedded links and ask them if they would use them in their content.
The more valuable content you send them, the better the chances of them using it on their own site.
Mention bloggers in your posts and reach out
This might sound like a crap deal. Why would you spend time sharing links to other people’s websites? You’re trying to help your SEO, not theirs.
Well, not exactly the way you think! Think it this way. You link to other websites and let them know about how much you enjoyed reading their article, and so you shared them on your own website!
Such interactions are always valuable. You’re building a healthy relationship! And there’s high probability you would get backlinked in the future posts of the websites you just linked. Even they might share your links on Twitter and their newsletters.
So, you see it is a benefit for you too!
Comments on other blogs
This is another awesome way to start building relationships for backlinks.
Yes, simply commenting on other relevant blog posts.
But, wait!
Keep in mind that the comment shouldn’t be simply targeting to improve business and share your website links. You should instead try to build a healthy relationship with the author of the blogs.
Try some flattery, provide an insight upon the blog you are commenting upon and use witty techniques!
If you have nothing to comment, simply impress the author by a sweet and supportive comment. Here’s an example.
So, that’s the perfect recipe for building strong backlinks.
Simple, isn’t it?
CONCLUSION:
So now you know it’s not important whether you are a well-known blogger or not!
If you want to build strong backlinks, you sure enough can!
Now the question as to how to build backlinks when no one even knows the existence of your website is also answered.
Give a try to all the 15 ways I mentioned above, and you would surely be benefitted.
One thing that you must have noticed till now is that all these strategies revolve around one prime goal: Building mutual relationships before building backlinks.
This is the best backlinking strategy when you are new to the business.
Reach out to maximum relevant blogs and try to build healthy relationships with them.
So, which backlinking strategy helped you the most?
Do you have thoughts on some other strategy that helped you build strong backlinks?
Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!