If you are an entrepreneur or solopreneur and have your own site, it’s a matter of time till you hear that in order to rank in search engines you need SEO backlinks, if possible high-quality backlinks.
All good, but how do you get backlinks? And what are backlinks in SEO, more precisely?
These are links from external websites that point to your site, consider it a “recommendation”, a vote of trust, or a vote of confidence. Simply put they are hyperlinks back from other sites. The more you have the better.
SEO backlinks can also be referred to as inbound links or incoming links.
Why Are SEO Backlinks Important?
Recent studies have shown that SEOs consider backlinks as a significant ranking factor. So, backlinks can be looked at as pathways that represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. They’re essentially signals to search engines that other sites can vouch for your content and this means if you get many quality backlinks on your website then the search engines automatically conclude that your content is credible and therefore worthy of showing them on search engine results pages (SERP).
Source: Moz.com
But besides studies and research, the reality is this: on the first page of Google rank sites with high domain authority and a plethora of backlinks.
Here is proof:
Source: Ahrefs
So, When Should You Build Your Backlinks?
The most important thing to consider before starting the link-building process is that you must first have a strong and properly optimized website. This will ensure that your backlinks are very effective and drive the desired effect. However, if your website is not well-optimized, you lose out on valuable opportunities and waste your time and money.
How do you optimize your website?
Here is a quick checklist to go through.
1. Ensure that you have no UI or technical issues such as site loading speeds, mobile friendliness, or page duplication. Fix all external links by conducting a website audit. (This is crucial)
2. Create high-quality linkable content by generating content that will inform, educate or add value to your audience (and eventually to yourself). Remember, content is the reason the search began in the first place. It should be:
- Relevant
- Highly authoritative
- High quality
3. Create an intelligent site architecture. This simply means – avoiding acquiring backlinks to non-linkable pages and instead using a content-centric approach through a reverse silo to acquire content-rich pages with the goal of distributing link authority from your rich content to your sales-driven pages.
With the above 3 elements checked, you now have a foundation to set your SEO backlinks-building strategy. The strategy, as you may know, means your overall plan. What do you hope to achieve after the entire process? For the purpose of this article, your strategy here should be (as indicated above) credible content that’s worthy of linking. It’s really that simple. This is how to get quality backlinks for free. You must provide quality. The highest possible.
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So, how are you going to proceed with this? Beyond your strategy, you should be and act tactically.
Without further ado, here are the smartest and most effective link-building tactics that will bring you SEO backlinks to strengthen your domain authority.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 1 – Grow Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand is the ultimate scorecard that measures your presence and worth either as a business or as a person. It showcases to the world what you stand for, your skills, and the solutions you’re bringing to the table.
So, much work goes into building a strong brand, but the benefits can be seen when people naturally link to your content, thus building links. This means your content earns you organic traffic.
So for this to work, you need consistent and frequent quality content to share with your audience. Blogging works very well here, improves your search engine rankings, and gains more organic traffic through frequent quality blogging.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 2 – Establish Your Content Pillars
Effective content requires a powerful sense of purpose. You should have identified your goal and target. And it’s on this foundation that you build a theme that will direct your articles, videos, or blogs. You can start with a few great in-depth articles or blogs that are going to act as the bedrock on which many other smaller articles can be linked back.
The key thing to remember here is that the pillar content shouldn’t be too specific; this will allow you to build the smaller articles on it while addressing the needs and values of your target consumer.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 3 – Syndication and Repurposing of Older Content
It’s possible to have an already existing compilation of great content but not sharable on some sites or platforms because of its format. So, instead of losing out on the opportunity to share this information, and be linked to other sites, you can repurpose it to other formats.
You can repurpose your content from text to videos or info-graphics then share it on other fitting platforms and increase your audience.
Syndicating your content to third-party sites is another way to build your links. Other sites can pick up your content alongside a link back or even publish the whole thing or an excerpt but with a link to your site.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 4 – Earn Editorial Links
One of the things that absolutely boosts your SEO is editorial links. And these are earned by writing quality, valuable and relevant content. Studies found that editorial links are the most sought-after links because they don’t cost you anything.
You see, you run a tiresome risk of getting penalized by Google if all your links are manually built, so instead of struggling to retain them, why not just fetch deeper in your creative juice jug and come up with relevant content that compels others to link you?
This means offering solutions that your target is actively seeking.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 5 – Guest Posts
Marketers are incorporating more blogs and more content each day; because it generates an average of 97% more inbound links meaning more traffic. And this is partly why guest blogging is an effective strategic approach to getting backlinks.
It is a win-win scenario that allows you to both earn high-quality backlinks free and also reach a new audience and gain new traffic. It’s just brilliant.
But the tactic that makes this a win situation is relevance and target. You need to know the sites where your content will be relevant to the respective audience. So, the next question is how do you find these sites?
There are a few ways you can do this. First, you can identify prospect sites and then pitch your content to them. You can achieve this with the help of Google Search Operators or “spy” on your competitors and check where they guest post. The important thing is to find a site that accepts guest posts, is connected with your niche, and has high authority and lots of traffic in order for you to maximize the chances of getting your content shared.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 6 – Use Social Media & Network with Peers in Your Niche
Link building is all about forming and cultivating relationships that boost links back to your site. One such place to start is through social media channels including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. These platforms are where you first showcase your brand or business personality and start creating relationships.
Social media can improve your building links efforts through outreach, content ideation, or even content promotion. What you need to do is identify the specific group of people you want to connect with e.g. influencers who are able to offer you a valuable link back to your site.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 7 – Use Infographics
A picture is worth a thousand words.
In 2018, visual content registered the highest number of shares among social media platforms and blogs as well. This means greater opportunities to connect with the audience and to earn SEO backlinks because it’s clear and quick information.
It’s also important to note that infographics continue to drive more and more traffic even if the content is not very new, unlike standard text-based content. The key thing for your infographic to become a sharable asset is its uniqueness, appeal, and ease of understanding. You could, for example, use gifs instead of static images.
Source: Jeffbullas
Building Links Tactic 8 – Broken Link Building
There are a couple of reasons why links can get broken:
- They can either have been removed from the linking page or
- The linked page was deleted and therefore no longer exists.
For this strategy to work though, you need to find out the reasons for either of the above situations before you jump into using them.
So, here the first step would be to identify a related site that you would like a backlink from then to check them out in a tool like Ahrefs to identify pages that have broken links. Broken link reclamation is a great way to build valuable links because it eases the crawling and indexing of websites by search engines and also improves user experience and confidence as a site, by getting rid of the 404 error message.
Once you have identified the broken links, you can offer the site owners a chance of replacing the broken link with a valid link with similar relevant content from your site.
It’s another win-win situation because the site owner will have fewer broken links while you get high-quality backlinks.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 9 – Stay On Top- Check Your Competitors
It’s important to know the tools that your competitors are using and replicate this to achieve their level of authority. This means doing an analysis of their link profile and gaining similar backlinks.
It’s however, important to note that there are 2 types of competitors:
a) Domain Level Competitor
This one competes with you in the SERPs entirely. This means they’re competing with you for many search terms across many pages.
b) Page Level Competitors
These compete with you on the page level for specific keywords or topics.
Your first step would be to do a Google search for important keywords. You could start by writing down URLs for the top ten websites that appear in relation to your search. Then ask yourself important questions like why they linked to your competitor and not you, you can quickly figure this out by looking at the anchor text, surrounding text, and even the page title.
Once you figure out why and where your competitors are getting mentioned, then copy their strategy.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 10 – Create a Link Rate Target
The markets are continually building new links with valuable content and so do your competitors. You, therefore, need to understand the number of links required to earn the first page rankings at one point and which is the earning rate of new links in order to stay on the first page. You can get this information by looking at the Ahrefs affiliate SERP overview.
The key thing here is to pay attention to the relevance and quality of the referring domains. It’s better to have little yet relevant and high-quality content that creates an impact than hundreds of pages of worthless information.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 11 – In Ego They Trust
Using ego as bait simply means creating content that’s intended to appeal to your target and getting a link in return. Your target here must have some authority in your industry else it won’t be of any help. The important thing here is to give them attention and get some back with a link.
This strategy can benefit you by increasing your traffic and also improving your site or post’s authority. Here are a few ways you can get free backlinks:
a) Expert Roundups
This is a quick and easy way to build free backlinks and improve site traffic. You can approach this by asking the experts and influencers in your niche for an opinion on a certain relevant topic, and then consolidate their opinions into a high-quality blog post and then let them know about it and possibly request them to share it.
b) Mentions
This is another sure way of getting the backlinks free. You can mention a top-notch influencer or expert by quoting something they’ve said, you could even add an image of them to boost and catch their attention. Then inform them because this way they will share your content with their followers and this is a win for you.
c) Interviews
Most big names in any industry love interviews, get a contact, approach them with your well-thought-out set of questions and once they respond, publish them and watch them share the interview on their platforms.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 12 – Unlinked Mentions
Quite often, people will mention you and not link to you. But with this kind of mention, you’re halfway through to a link, which means you’re not a stranger to this business. So, it would be easy to convince this person to link to your site.
But how will you find such relevant mentions in the humongous World Wide Web? There are a few tools you can use including Ahrefs Content Explorer or Google Alerts. They search for mentions of your brand or any word or phrase related to a particular topic.
SEO Backlinks Tactic 13 – Create Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that remains fresh and relevant to its target audience and keeps giving value, remains informative, and retains its original quality years on. It’s simply timeless.
Such content includes lists, how-to tutorials, tips, best practices, etc. You can find a smart way to incorporate these kinds of things in your content by following these tips:
- Make sure the keywords are evergreen as well.
- Make your content visually attractive and the text easy to understand
- Make sure it’s current and relevant with actionable tips
- It gives satisfying solutions for the reader
SEO Backlinks Tactic 14 – Good Old PR
Online PR, just like traditional PR is an effective way of spreading the good word about your brand, only that this time it’s through online platforms such as blogs or social media. It’s essential because it helps you build relationships with people, and eventually influence them to give you their trust and this strengthens your authority and delivers organic backlinks.
And because all businesses are different, there is no one size fits all strategy for online PR, but here are a few basic principles that can guide you:
- Understand what you want to gain from the online PR strategy
- Identify who your target is and understand the market
- What are you promoting primarily? Your Brand? Product? Your Authority or Reach?
- Who are the influencers in your field and what kind of content do they respond to?
- With these critical points noted, you can do some research and identify the opportunities you’re missing.
So, since Google revealed that quality backlinks are among the top 3 search ranking factors, you have more than enough strategies to get you high up in the SERP in the near future.
Get working and let me know which one worked the best for you.
