Search engine optimisation (SEO) is now one of the most valuable and cost-effective tools when it comes to getting noticed on the web and outshining the competition. With its help, businesses of all kinds and sizes can appear high in relevant search results and drive non-paid traffic that has the potential to convert into sales. And backlinks play a big role in making this come true.
What Are Backlinks And Why Are They Important for Your Website’s Growth?
A backlink is an incoming hyperlink that directs users to your site from an external source.
In SEO, building backlinks plays a pivotal role as these references to your site serve as affirmation from other sources, signaling to search engines and users that your site is credible and valuable.
When they’re acquired from reputable and trustworthy sources, these references can help you boost your search engine rankings in a number of ways:
- By creating greater exposure and brand awareness
- By driving a larger volume of organic traffic
- By boosting your domain authority
In order to gain all these benefits, you need to find effective ways to build backlinks from trusted sites. Further in this guide, we’re going to tell you how to get backlinks in 5 time-tested ways:
- Shareable content
- Guest blogs
- Networking
- Broken links
- Skyscraper technique
Let’s explore every method in detail.
Creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience is one of the best ways to naturally earn white hat backlinks. Shareable content is informative, visually appealing, and engaging enough to make people eager to share it, hence, referencing your site. Such content significantly enhances the likelihood of your content being featured by others and generates plenty of traffic.
Here are a few tips for creating truly shareable content that delivers quality backlinks:
- Go evergreen. Deliver real value to your audience by creating deep, evergreen content that provides actionable advice. Such copy tends to attract traffic and links naturally over a long period of time.
- Focus on content formats that are most frequently shared. If there are top copy types that generate the most references, these include in-depth, actionable, and authentic pieces in which you offer your unique expertise. For example, how-to guides, listicles, research studies, infographics, and expert roundups.
- Leverage visually rich content. Enhancing your copy with appealing visuals and infographics is a great way to capture readers’ attention while also making the information you deliver even easier to share.
- Feature original data and research. If you want others to feature you on their sites, delivering original data that can’t be found anywhere else is a way to go. So. don’t hesitate to enhance your copy with original statistics, case studies, and research findings.
The Second Way: Guest Blogging on Reputable Sites
Guest blogging is a marketing technique that implies finding guest posting opportunities, creating quality articles, and publishing them on third-party resources, typically featuring a link to your own site.
Guest posting is by far one of the most popular answers to the question of how to build backlinks. This approach is more proactive than others, meaning that it can help you gain more control over your site’s link profile. The main challenge of this method is detecting opportunities to post on respectable sources that are also relevant to your niche and target audience.
So, how do you find relevant guest blogging opportunities?
There are a few tactics you can try using search engines to find high-ranking sources and create opportunities through networking with their owners. If you want to save time, you can compile databases with the best backlink opportunities using specialized tools like SE Ranking’s backlink finder. This tool allows you to scan the profiles of your competitors in a few clicks and access a full list of sites and blogs they receive mentions from. This is a great opportunity to detect lots of relevant and high-authority sources that you can also reach out to with your pitch and, hopefully, get featured.
When you have a list of sources you want to post on, follow a few simple tips to make your communication effective:
- Carefully read the source’s style guide and requirements for third-party publications.
- Prepare a detailed pitch that offers a relevant topic for a publication, keeps in mind the resource’s requirements, and highlights what benefits you can bring with your content to the source (aka actionable tips, unique outlook on the topic, original research data, etc.).
- If possible, submit multiple ideas for a post.
- Provide samples of your writing.
- Share different methods to connect with you.
Lastly, after discussing everything and setting up your future guest posting partnership, focus on delivering high-quality content that’s written for humans and also well-optimized for search engines. And ensure that the chosen website allows you to get backlink to your site.
The Third Way: Build Relationships and Network With Industry Influencers
Networking has long proven to be an important part of business as a whole. It opens up plenty of opportunities, including an opportunity to be mentioned by a high-authority blogger or site. Since you never know where your next quality backlink will come from, fostering strong relationships with bloggers, influencers, and webmasters can be a good way to expand your horizons. Such relationships can naturally lead to new references as long as you handle networking wisely.
So, where can you start conversations with your potential link donors?
More professional channels like Slack, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, and industry forums should work. Leverage these networks to find bloggers and influencers who work with your niche and target audience and use the following tactics to build relationships:
- Comment on their blogs
- Share their content
- Feature them in your content
Such a “giving before asking” approach tends to work best of all. First, you bring some value to potential donors, and then they might say “yes” to your link building request.
Also, don’t hesitate to offer your potential partners some win-win collaboration ideas. For example, offer them to create content together, host joint webinars, or do cross-promotions. Such collaborations can also help you gain quality backlinks while building lasting relationships.
Best part? The networking technique can actually help you gain different types of backlinks, including social media, editorial, webinar, and other kinds of mentions.
The Fourth Way: Broken Link Building
When someone’s wondering how to build backlinks for SEO, it’s impossible not to mention broken links.
In a nutshell, these are the links that take users to pages that don’t exist or can’t be accessed. When people click on them, all they get is an error message, which can be quite irritating and affect the donors’ site UX. An SEO backlinking strategy that targets such links offers benefits to both sites by offering donors the opportunity to replace broken links with working ones leading to your own site and thus extend your backlink profile.
The easiest way to detect broken links is to use specialised tools such as SE Ranking or similar that scrape the web in seconds and detect high-authority sites that feature dead or broken links in their content. Most importantly, such tools enable you to conduct searches within your industry.
Once you detect sites that feature broken references, create or identify content on your website that matches or improves the broken link content. Then, reach out to the website owner with a polite email, offering your content as a replacement. Emphasize the value you can give them by informing them about the broken link, providing high-quality content as a replacement, and suggesting additional ways to improve their site.
The Fifth Way: Utilise Skyscraper Content Technique
The final tip in our link building guide is to benefit from skyscraper content. The concept behind the skyscraper technique is very simple – find top-performing content, replicate it, and earn mentions. Here’s how the process looks step by step:
- Research articles that take the highest positions in search results for your target keyword.
- Analyse the top-performing piece and create a better, deeper, and more authentic alternative and publish it.
- Reach out to webmasters, publishers, and blogs that feature the original copy and offer them to link to your superior version of it. When pitching your content, emphasise how featuring more high-quality copy can help potential donors improve their sites and user experience.
You can use the same steps to use the skyscraper technique for all your primary target keywords and, thus, dominate the web with your excellent content.
Final thoughts on getting backlinks…
Link building is an integral part of SEO and business growth as a whole. With its help, you can create and grow brand awareness, increase the amount of traffic your site receives, and, most importantly, signal to search engines and users that your site is worth trusting, which is pivotal for dominating search results and outshining your competitors.
We hope that after reading this guide, you should have a better idea of how to create backlinks that give you the most benefits.
Start using the techniques we shared with you here to ensure that your site gets featured on the most reputable and trusted sites and attains its business goals in the long run!
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