For some people, backlinks are the number one ranking factor for their websites. If you use this strategy, building high quality backlinks to your website can increase your search engine ranking and subsequently bring you more organic traffic.
And bringing more visitors to your website is what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about, right?
Some backlinks are harder than others to find, but they increase your traffic from the search engines, so it’s worth investing some time and effort to get them.
Try these techniques to get high quality backlinks and ultimately more visitors to your website:
1. The broken-link building method. This method involves contacting a webmaster to report broken links on their website. While doing this, you suggest adding a link to your own website.
- As you are helping the webmaster by finding this broken link, there’s a chance they will want to repay the kindness. Depending on the site, your mileage may vary with this approach.
- Browse through top-notch websites in your field, so any added links will be from other experts in your industry, resulting in a high-quality link.
2. The skyscraper technique. This method has three steps:
- Find a piece of content with lots of links pointing to it.
- Create a piece of content that is better or more valuable than that one, and publish it on your website.
- Contact those who link to the original piece and ask them if they would rather link to your higher quality piece of content, instead. Some will!
3. Create an infographic. This is one of the more popular ways to build backlinks. The reason for this is that infographics are easy to understand and share.
- In order to do this, you will need to find an appropriate topic in your field, perhaps a trending topic, gather the data, and find someone to make this data visually appealing.
- Be sure to include links to your website in the infographic.
- Once the infographic is created, add it to your website and your social media accounts where it can be shared.
4. Write guest articles. When you create articles to place on other websites, you get to put your content in front of a new audience. This increases the exposure to your own website.
- In addition to creating that important backlink, this method can also increase your own reputation and social media following.
5. Glean ideas from your competitors. When you study your competitors, you’ll get a better idea of what type of content they’re creating and the backlinks that they’re building. You can then make (better) content on the same topics and acquire backlinks from many of the same websites that link to your competitor.
6. Promote your content directly. Sometimes the best approach to building backlinks is to approach webmasters yourself via email. Smaller or newer sites are more likely to respond, whereas larger and more established sites will not. Either way, make sure the content you are asking for a link to is high quality and offers a lot of value.
- One easy way to gain a backlink is to find those that create weekly or monthly roundup posts. You can then email these people links to your best guides and ask them to add them to their latest roundup article.
- If you struggle to find the email address of the webmaster, check out their social media profiles. Also, LinkedIn is always a good place for professional contacts.
7. Write a testimonial. Many times, you can get a backlink in exchange for a testimonial. Make a list of any products you are using and contact the owner of the website that promotes this product. Offer to make a testimonial for their product as long as you can put a link to your website.
8. Donate to a nonprofit organization. It’s common practice for nonprofit organizations to include links to the websites of the businesses who donate to them. It is as simple as finding the organization, filling in the amount you wish to donate, and writing your URL.
9. Get interviewed. Once you become known as an authority in your niche, you’ll find that others will come directly to you for an interview. Many will link to your website in their promo materials for the interview as well as in the interview itself.
- In the meantime, before others are coming to you, search for websites that are looking for guests/interviewees. Contact them, telling them you wish to participate in the interviews and include what knowledge you can contribute.
Building backlinks can be a challenge but using these strategies will certainly help you to build the quality backlinks you seek.
