Whether building backlinks is a new concept to you or you have been doing it for a while, we’re sure you’ll find something useful in this guide.
The landscape of SEO and the strategy to build backlinks keeps on changing and the importance of building high quality links has always been higher. This makes the use of effective campaigns to build backlinks even more essential, since you’re going to compete and thrive online. But what does backlinks mean in layman’s language and why is there any need to build backlinks?
A backlink for a given website is a link from some other website to that web resource. A web resource may be a website, web page, web directory etc. In other words, building backlinks is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own.
A backlink is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and there are many methods for building links. SEOs (search engine optimizations) tend to agree that one of the hardest parts of their jobs today tends to be formulating proper planning to build backlinks and executing it.
Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it in the most efficient and effective manner. For this reason, if you learn the art of building high-quality links, it will truly put you ahead of your competitors.
Benefits of building quality backlinks
1. Increasing traffic to your website from referral sites-
The more backlinks your website has, the better are the chances of enhancement in your website traffic from referral sites. It is thus advisable to build backlinks for your website.
2. Help in building trust and authority for your business by being featured on authoritative websites-
The more endorsements you receive from authoritative websites, the higher is the ranking of your website in the search engines. There will be more goodwill or recognition for your brand among your targeted audience.
3. Improvement in SEO optimization-
When the search engines pick up your website from other referral sites that have linking to your website, it sets off an alarm that your website is worthy of linking to. This helps in better ranking of your website and the search engine takes this into account when ranking your website. It is therefore advisable to build backlinks for your website.
Related: Top 10 SEO tools for blogging
4. Promotion for your business-
Simply put, when other websites link to your website, it provides even more consistent visibility for your website. You may consider it a free advertisement.
How to build backlinks for your website?
1.Guest posting-
When it comes to search engine optimization, guest posting/ guest blogging on other sites is five times as valuable as creating new content on your own site ( As long as you get to build backlinks.) In simple words, guest posting means writing and publishing an article on someone else’s website or blog in exchange for a link back to your own site ( thus helping to build backlinks). These links can either be placed in the author’s bio section or somewhere within the body of the post.
High-quality and relevant guest posts are different from the mass-produced, low-value posts that were a staple of many SEO strategies a few years ago. When done right and adequately with aim of providing high-quality content, guest posts can still be an effective link building tool.
But how can you use this tactic correctly?
The first step involved is to identify appropriate sites to which you can contribute. Uncovering these sites is easier than it might sound. To find pages that match this description, all you need to do is a simple Google Search. For example, guest blogging sites for education.
In addition to this, another easiest way to uncover those other options is by scoping out your competitors’ guest posts. If a site was willing to publish a post from a business similar to yours, there’s a strong chance they’ll be open to accepting a contribution from you as well.
Every established guest blog site is familiar with this link building strategy and many of them get dozens of pitches per day. Take your time to follow their pitch requirements, and you’ll be much more successful in your guest posting efforts. After you are provided with a writing space for writing the guest blog, ensure high quality plagiarism free content that you write for them and make sure to review any guidelines the site has for the same.
2. Broken link building-
Each link on a site originally links it to some other page online. But because the websites often move their content around, some of those links eventually might “break” (referring to the act of pointing to the pages that no longer exist.)
When a user clicks on a broken link, they arrive on a 404 error page telling them that the content they’re looking for no longer exists. This not only provides a poor user experience but also makes it difficult for google crawlers to efficiently crawl back and index websites.
Broken link building fixes this problem and is a great way to build backlinks that are quite valuable. In this, instead of creating brand new content and giving it away, you use the content you already own to earn a link. In case you don’t already have any content that meets your target site’s needs, it could also be worth your time to create something new.
Unlike a guest post, broken link building allows complete ownership over whatever you content you create. So even after your target site uses it to fix their broken link other sites can cite it as a resource as well. It is for this reason broken link building is considered one of the best ways to build backlinks.
3. Write testimonials-
An easy method to earn quality backlinks or build backlinks is to write testimonials for the websites you are using. All you’ll need to do is spend only a few minutes and you will be able to build backlinks or earn a backlink from the homepage of an authoritative website. As long as you are a customer of that product, there is always a high possibility that you can easily get a backlink in exchange for a testimonial.
While writing the testimonial, list out all the tools you are currently using and reach out to discuss the likelihood of featuring your testimonial on a desired website.
4. Backlinks through infographics-
Infographics are one of the most popular methods for bringing traffic to your website and to build backlinks. They’re also great because they’re easy to understand and share because everyone loves visual data and visual data is in huge demand these days- from easy understanding purpose to making presentations. That’s why the demand for infographics has increased considerably as they are more eye-catching than texts.
To get started with this process, you first need to research and gather data for your content. Then you need to find someone to make your content visual.
There’s a huge misconception among people that creating an infographic is expensive; that’s not always the case. For example, figure on an average price between $150 and $300. Making an assumption that you may earn 10 backlinks per infographic and you’ll be paying $15 per link, we may conclude that for every five backlinks, the price to be paid will be $30 per link. That’s quite cheap for backlinks earned through webmaster moderation and if your infographic goes viral you win even more traffic.
You can try using Dribble to find designers with good portfolios. You may contact them directly by upgrading your account to PRO status for just $20 a year. Then simply use the search filter and apply filter “infographics.” After finding someone you are interested in hiring, click on “hire me” and send a message detailing your needs and requesting a price. Fiverr is another place where you can easily find great designers willing to create inexpensive infographics.
As soon as the infographic is ready, don’t forget to make it shareable. Once everything is in place, and your infographic shines on your website, it’s time for its distribution. There are numerous infographic directories where you can submit your infographic. Last but not the least step is emailing to outreach to people who have previously linked to similar infographics or have shared them on social media. You must never ask for a link directly though. If they like your infographic, they’ll share it without having to ask them.
5. Publish Skyscraper Content-
It is another effective method to build backlinks. Skyscraper content is an inbound marketing technique used to build backlinks that involves finding topics that are doing well on the search engine as well as social media. It uses reverse engineering technique to create a content piece that is better than an existing one. The tactic also involves backlinking to the existing posts or sharing it with those who have previously shown interest in the same to build backlinks.
Taking in statistics, Brian Dean at Backlinko in a post mentioned how the skyscraping technique was said to increase their search traffic by a whooping 110% in just 14 days. In fact the case study mentioned how the backlinks to the page increased drastically too, thus throwing light on how this technique can be effective to build backlinks.
How to get started with skyscraper content?
1.Find the content that is trending and is link worthy.
2.Plan your skyscraper content out and make something even better.
3.The last step is reaching out and promoting your content to the right people.
6. Create Linkable Assets-
If you want people to link to your website, you need something on your site worth linking to which is also known as “Linkable Assets”.
A Linkable Asset can be a blog post, a video, a piece of software, a quiz, a survey, an image submission, video or basically anything that people will want to link to. It is one of the best indirect way to build backlinks by creation of such valuable content that others will willing link their website content to.
In most cases, your linkable asset is an amazing piece of content (which is why search engine optimization and content marketing are so closely tied to one another).
For example, when I first started my blog, I published an article on digital marketing.
7. Build internal links-
An internal link on a website is the one that links one page of it to another. Both your users and search engines use links on your website to itself sufficiently find the other contents on your website. Your users use links to navigate through your site and eventually find the content they are looking to find. Search engines also navigate through your website. Both of them won’t find a page if there are no links to it. Thus, internal link to another way to build backlinks for your website.
The main benefit of internal linking is that it is something you can control as a site owner. You do not have to depend on other websites or third party to build backlinks for pages of your website. With the right internal links, you can easily guide the users and Google crawlers to your most important pages.
Conclusion
Earning quality backlinks or the task to build backlinks is always challenging but you need to make the best use of every opportunity that falls on your line by using the right resources and methods.
The top ranking sites work their tails off to acquire quality links and build backlinks for their website. To keep pace with them, you need to devote an equal and same level of effort to content strategy and link marketing. If you aim to outrank them, you need to do something even more exceptional. And dumping a dozen comment and spamming links on some poor guy’s “do follow” blog isn’t going to help you in that.
You should always keep track of the backlinks your website is getting by usage of tools like Monitor Backlinks, Ahrefs etc. Also, keep track of your Google rankings and plan your inbound marketing strategy accordingly. Keeping track on your backlinks is as important as building them.
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