What are backlinks?
Backlinks (also known as “inbound links”, “incoming links” or “one-way links”) are links from one website to another website’s page. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks to be “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have higher organic search engine rankings.
Do you know how important it is to build backlinks for your website?
The number of high-quality backlinks a person has is an important ranking factor for most search engines, including Google.
Backlink building is a good strategy for search engine optimization (SEO) and getting organic traffic to your website, and it is an essential factor in ranking all search engines.
It does not matter whether you have optimized your WordPress SEO plugin as mentioned in the toolbar to rank on Google or not. Creating high-quality, relevant backlinks is what matters.
As a result of having backlinks from official domains, your website will have a high reputation with Google.
But did you know that websites literally die because of insufficient backlinks, with the semrush’s report saying that 66.31% of pages or blog posts have no backlinks?
So everyone needs to know about backlinks and take advantage of them for better search on Google.
So in this article, I will describe techniques to generate high-quality backlinks for your website and a practical approach to stay ahead of your competitors and increase your ranking in SERPs without spamming other websites.
What are Backlinks in SEO?
A backlink is not a link pointing from one website to another; There are many factors involved in the ranking of a particular website in search engines like Google, and backlinks play the most important role in this.
If a website gets a backlink from another, it means that they believe the piece of content is excellent or noteworthy for their audience.
A backlink is site.com an “inbound link” or “incoming link” that comes from another website.
Therefore, the more high-quality and relevant backlinks you get, the better you rank on Google SERPs.
Let us understand why Google dominated the search engine industry as there were many players in the past, yet Google managed to outperform other competitors.
Understanding why Google wanted to change the search engine:
Google was introduced in the year of 1998, by then there were few popular search engines. Still, the biggest drawback was that those search engines were not efficient in terms of providing accurate information and loading speed.
This is where Google wanted to make a difference by introducing PageRank. Originally, it was a Stanford University project that impacted the search engine market on an entirely different level.
“PageRank is an algorithm that measures important web pages that have a high referral domain and relevant, high-quality backlinks to a particular website.”
Previously, the PageRank score was available to the public, but Google has closed access in 2016 for some reason.
but there are other tools like semrush to measure a particular Website’s Authority.
The primary objective or assumption is that a high-quality content website is likely to receive more backlinks than any other website.
When there are more relevant backlinks, Google algorithms, aka bots, will rank a specific page according to their link juice and other factors.
Mainly for creating high quality backlinks, these 3 compounds play a vital role in ranking in search engines,
- Relevance
- User Signal
- Authroity
When you have insightful content, other bloggers like to link your blog posts for referral purposes to give relevant content and a better user experience to their audience.
When there are more relevant backlinks, you get a lot of traffic to your blog posts, which prompts the user to Google.
When you have a good amount of traffic (user signals) coming in, you earn authority in your marketplace.
And finally, you will have better search results on Google.
Before you start building backlinks to your website, check out Google’s mission to ask yourself these questions,
- Am I providing valuable and informative content?
- Is my web page too organized to rank on Google?
This may sound a bit complicated and overwhelming,
But you get my point, don’t you?
Other search engines did not provide relevant or accurate information when a user tried to browse, and there were other drawbacks such as user experience and loading speed.
So this is how Google started to dominate and changed the way search engines work. They literally list and fix the problem that other search engine companies were facing.
I am sure you must have understood why backlinks are important to survive on the Google search engine.
Yes, I can hear your voice saying, “Brother, I understand everything as long as tell me how to build backlinks.”
let me explain
What Kinds of Backlinks Are Valuable?
Not all backlinks are created equal.
In other words, if you want to rank high in SERPs, focus on quality backlinks.
Put it another way:
A single quality backlink can be more powerful than 1,000 low-quality backlinks.
As it turns out, high-quality backlinks share the same key traits.
Attribute #1: They come from reliable, authoritative websites
Would you rather get a backlink from Harvard… or some random guy’s website?
As it turns out, Google feels the same way.
This concept is known as “domain authority”. Essentially, the more authority a site has, the more authority it can grant to your site (via a link).
For example, here’s a link I got from TechCrunch.
According to semrush, TechCrunch is an extremely authoritative domain.
Because that link comes from an authority site, Google puts a lot of weight on it. In fact, I noticed an increase in my organic search engine traffic right after TechCrunch linked me.
Is this link difficult to find? Definitely.
Are they worth it? Absolutely.
Attribute #2: They include your target keyword in the anchor text of the link
As a reminder, anchor text is the visible text portion of a link.
In general, you want your links to have anchor text that includes your target keyword.
In fact, a recent industry study found a correlation between keyword-rich anchor text and higher rankings for that keyword.
Now, a quick word of warning:
You don’t want to go overboard with keyword-rich anchor text. In fact, Google’s algorithm has a filter called “Google Penguin”.
Google Penguin filters out websites that use black hat link-building strategies. And it specifically focuses on sites that build backlinks with exact match anchor text.
Attribute #3: The site (and pages) linking to you is top-notch related to your site
When a website links to another website, Google wants to see that the two sites are related.
It makes sense if you think about it:
Imagine that you just published an article about running a marathon.
In that case, Google will put a lot of weight on links to sites related to marathons, running, fitness versus fishing sites, unicycles, and digital marketing.
Attribute #4: The link is a "Dofollow" link
Google and other search engines ignore links that have a “nofollow” tag.
(In other words, nofollow links do not count for search engine ranking algorithms).
Fortunately, most links on the web are “dofollow” links.
And most links that have a nofollow tag are not valuable to begin with. For example, nofollow links to these sources:
- blog comments
- Press releases
- Paid Ads
These links aren’t super helpful for SEO anyway, so it’s no big deal that they’re nofollow.
Attribute #5: The link is from a domain that hasn't been linked to you before
Suppose you get a link from website A.
Great
Well, let’s say website A reconnects to you. and then
Is the second, third, and fourth link as powerful as the first one?
No.
As it turns out, links to the same website have diminishing returns.
or put another way:
It is usually better to get 100 links from 100 different websites than 1,000 links from a single website.
In fact, our search engine ranking correlation study found that the number of sites linking to you (not the total number of backlinks) correlated more with Google ranking than any other factor.
Now that you’ve seen what types of backlinks are most helpful for your Google rankings, it’s time for me to show you how to start building them.
How to Build High-Quality Backlinks:
Search engines continue to use link building as one of their most important ranking signals, despite numerous algorithmic updates. Establishing solid backlinks can be challenging, and it takes time and effort to build authority under your niche.
But with the following techniques, you can consistently build your backlinks portfolio that will enhance and impact your search visibility to get you right ahead of your competitors.
1. Write Evergreen Content
If you want to build backlinks without any effort to reach other blog owners, then you should write content that attracts the audience.
Write a solid article that can be a sacred text to mention a particular topic. You should work on finding keywords with a good search volume and put your best efforts into writing the best article that no one can think of.
Research shows that, on average, an article should have 1700+ if you want to rank on the first page of search engines.
People like long content, and if you have in-depth knowledge about a specific topic in your article.
Then it’s well and good.
When I talk about long content it doesn’t mean that you should write 2000 words of garbage. The only metric to rank the total number of words is,
But your content should be comprehensive.
Broad = long content
Readers love long content (so does Google).
This is what my guru always says,
“Your keyword research and content writing is 50% of SEO, and the reset is to optimize and build backlinks.”
No one will ever link to you if there is no reliable information.
Correct?
So be sure to write great linking content; If you have valuable content, you don’t need to put much effort in building backlinks.
For example, take Wpbeginner.com,
One of the best blogging websites that systematically gets a lot of traffic because of authorization and writing solid evergreen content. The below blog post alone gets hundreds of backlinks from different websites.
The total number of referring domains has steadily increased; They may have taken a lot of time and effort to build backlinks by now.
FYI: This article is ranking on the first page of google search.
If you look at the screenshot below, 1.27k referral domains came from 2014 for this post. Just look at the duration and think about the efforts made from wpbeginner.com.
Once you’ve published content, you’ll need to continually update the article to take the loop of search engines.
2. Guest Blogging
Writing an article as a guest blogger was always a win-win technique for the publisher and you had to get a backlink. It can link to the author’s bio or cite information from an article you’ve written.
Guest blogging was not around before Google. For example, people wrote articles for newspapers, and it was famous for blogging online guest.
Reaching out to other blog owners can be a reciprocal technique where you give something in return for their behavior and getting backlinks.
But the problem is that no blog owner will let you write a guest post once it is reached through email or social media because contributing low-quality blog posts will ultimately damage the authority of your website.
That’s why people are careful in giving guest posts to other bloggers,
But what if you make a first impression by infographic or share your previous blog post to get their attention.
When working with a high “domain authority website” you must provide high-quality content and not all bloggers do this successfully. So try to take advantage of it as much as you can.
However, you will have questions like,
How can I find a guest posting website?
do not worry,
You can find guest blogging websites by pasting these keyword match terms into Google:
- “keyword” + “guest post.”
- “keyword” + “write for us.”
- “keyword” + “guest article”
- “keyword” + “guest post opportunity.”
- “keyword” + “become guest blogger
- “keyword” + “contributing author.”
- “keywords” + “contributor guidelines.”
- “keyword” + “submit an article”
3.Link correction
Link correction is simple:
First, find a mention of your company that doesn’t link to your site.
Here’s an example:
See how the author of that article above mentioned my website… but didn’t link to it?
This is where link reclamation comes into play.
Instead of saying “I wish they connected with me”, you actively approach and ask them to link.
In my experience, a friendly reminder is usually enough for most people to log into WordPress and add their links.
Here is the step by step process:
1. Use tools like BuzzSumo and Mention.com to get your brand mentioned online.
When you do, you become alert whenever someone writes about you:
2. Check to see if the person who mentioned you also linked back to your site (either your homepage or internal page). If they link to your site, you’re ready.
If not, go to step #3…
3.Send them this friendly email.
Hey [name],
I just wanted to say “thank you” for mentioning [your brand] in your excellent article yesterday.
We really, really appreciate it.
I’m contacting you today to ask if you can add a link back to our site. This way, people can easily find us while reading your article.
Anyhow, thanks for giving a shout out and keep up the great work!
Thank you,
[your first name]
4. Finding Competitor's Backlink
This technique is the same as above; You will not plagiarize but rather find websites that link to your competitors’ sites. You can easily filter web pages with high domain authority.
You can then reach them for backlinks by reciprocal techniques. You can give something in return for getting backlinks.
Let me explain how you can find backlinks semrush free backlink checker tool,
Let’s assume NeilPatel.com is my competitor and all you have to do is copy the specific competitor URL.
Also, paste it into the Semrush Backlink Checker website, and boom.
You’ve got all the backlinks pointing to NeilPatel.com; You can perform a basic site audit on all referral domains.
This way, you can build backlinks quickly, but reaching other bloggers takes time and effort, and the most important thing in this strategy is the follow-up message.
If prospects answer no, make sure you have 3-4 follow-ups. Send at least 100 emails to reply as the rule of numbers works when you have more numbers.
You can expect at least a 40% open rate and maybe a 5-10% conversion rate.
5. Blogger review
If you have a software, physical product, consulting service, or anything valuable you want to sell, you can easily turn that into dozens of high-quality backlinks.
How?
By giving your product to bloggers for free.
This way:
1.Find bloggers in your niche who might be interested in what you have to offer. If you sell an information product that teaches people how to make their own soap, you’ll Google things like “soap making”, “soap making at home”, etc.
2.Your results will be a mixed bag of blogs, news websites, and websites like eHow’s. Filter how-to sites or news sites. You will be left with a solid list of bloggers who may be interested in your offer, such as:
3.Reach them with this email script:
Hey [site owner name],
I was searching for [some homemade soap recipes] today when I came upon [website].
Amazing stuff!
In fact, I just launched a guide that [teaches people to make luxury soap at home]. I usually charge [$$], but I’d be more than happy to send it home to you.Tell me how it feels.
Cheers,
[your first name]
A word of warning: You want to be very careful about the language you use for this strategy.
Note how you don’t offer your product in exchange for a link or review… that would violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Instead, send them the product and let them decide if it’s worth mentioning on their blog.
6. Build Backlinks With Infographics
Nowadays, readers are more likely to like infographics because of the social media boom in recent years, and people spend less time with them if there’s nothing appealing about it.
So you can target blog owners who have great content but no infographic; You reach them via email or social media.
A report by LuicdPress shows that infographics can drive web traffic by up to 12%; So why not use this opportunity to improve your backlinks.
If you want to learn more about infographics, I recommend reading one of 99signal.com’s articles about getting high-quality backlinks with infographics.
If you have zero knowledge of designing infographics, I suggest hiring a professional designer from Fiverr, pay him $5, and get the job done.
FYI: If you buy backlinks from a provider like SEOClerks, it will literally cost you $100 to $300 to get single-quality backlinks.
So why would you want to waste more buying backlinks than spending $5 just to get infographics to reach your potential prospects?
7. Create an Official Link with Haro (Help a Reporter Out)
HARO (short for Help Reporter Out) is one of the best ways to get high-powered backlinks from news sites.
Here’s how HARO works:
1.Sign up for HARO as a source here.
2.You’ll receive three emails a day from journalists looking for sources, like this one:
3.Respond with your credentials and some helpful tips.
Easy isn’t it? You give a quote to a reporter and they will link you with a backlink.
That’s all there is to it.
For example, recently received a sweet link from Entrepreneur.com by answering a HARO request:
8. Create a Social Profile
Yes, a social profile can also give you a backlink; However, I’m not just talking about Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter.
But you have a lot of websites that provide backlinks,
Note: Most websites do not provide do-follow backlinks, but at least you get no-follow backlinks for listings or posts.
These are some websites where you can create social profiles:
- https://www.behance.net/
- https://triberr.com/
- https://trello.com/
- https://audioboom.com/
- https://disqus.com/
- https://www.blogger.com/
- https://en.gravatar.com/
- livejournal.com
- https://about.me/
- https://www.quora.com/
- https://www.ted.com/
- https://github.com/
