If you want to earn top spots on search engine results pages (SERPs) and boost traffic to your website, you must build backlinks. Backlinks are search engines’ way to gauge your site’s authority—the more backlinks you have, the better.
Backlinks are also a critical ranking factor. However, you can produce as many high-quality posts as possible and still not get backlinks naturally. That’s why it’s important to include link-building as part of your SEO strategies.
What Are Backlinks?
You might be familiar with backlinks as inbound links or external links. They are links that come from other websites that lead back to yours.
Search engines like Google treat backlinks as a vote of confidence on your site. The more backlinks you have, the more authoritative and credible your site is, especially when the pages that link to yours have a high domain rating (DR) or domain authority (DA).
When you’ve established your site’s authority, you can generate more organic traffic as you rank higher on SERPs and become more visible to users.
We delved deeper into what backlinks are and why they’re important in our previous post. Now, let’s talk about how to get backlinks.
How to get backlinks: 6 Tactics to Earn High-Quality Backlinks
Ideally, other sites should link to yours whenever they use your content or mention your brand. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen all the time. About 94% of web pages have zero external links!
If you’re one of them, it’s never too late. You can do something to build your backlink profile and rank higher on SERPs. A higher ranking helps you generate more organic traffic and attract high-quality leads.
Reach Out to Journalists
Journalist outreach is one of the most effective ways to earn high-quality backlinks, but you have to be strategic about it as well.
Many traditional outreach cold emails get ignored or lost in journalists’ inboxes. What you can do is use outreach platforms like Link Sourcery.
These platforms gather media coverage opportunities from the journalists and publishers themselves. You can sign up as a source, find queries relevant to your expertise, title, and niche, and send your insights.
If your insights get chosen and used in their articles, they can provide you with a backlink. Although some sites will only mention your brand or give you a nofollow link, you have better chances of getting backlinks through these platforms than sending cold emails. But while nofollow link from a website like Forbes might not give you link juice, it will still add to your credibility. How often do people get a mention in Forbes, after all?
Reclaim Unlinked Brand Mentions
Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions is considered one of the easiest methods to get backlinks. Those sites have already mentioned your brand, so you’re more likely to get a link when you ask.
What you can do is keep track of pages that mention your brand. You can use tools like Google Alerts or BuzzSumo to see where the mentions come from. Then, you can contact the author or content editor to ask for proper attribution.
This is most likely to succeed when the site mentioning you is in the same industry, or the content is relevant to your niche. That’s because adding a link to yours can also benefit them in terms of relevancy.
Find Broken Links
Finding broken links can be tedious but effective. Broken links are links that no longer work because the page no longer exists or the site has moved to a new domain.
Broken link building presents an opportunity for you to get backlinks by pitching your own website content as a replacement link.
To find broken links, you can conduct a competitor’s backlink analysis first and gather all their lost backlinks. You can use tools like Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker.
Prioritize the high-DR sites that are relevant to your industry. Reach out to the site owners or content managers with your pitch to replace those broken links with yours.
Remember that you must have quality content to replace them. It’s also important to focus on providing help (because dead links can hurt their sites) rather than on getting backlinks. Keep your email short and simple.
Submit Guest Posts
Guest posting is a tried and proven strategy to get high-quality backlinks, even when your site is new. You can find many websites that accept guest posts, and in turn, you get a link to your website through the author bio.
You can start with a Google search by typing your topic or niche, say “personal finance,” plus “write for us,” “guest article,” or “contributor.”
Alternatively, you can use tools like Ahrefs, which will allow you to filter the results and narrow them down to sites that are highly likely to accept guest articles. At the same time, you can weed out sites that are low authority, have low traffic, and haven’t been updated in the past three months.
You can also use additional metrics, like websites with multiple authors, because they’re most likely to accept guest blogs.
Think of a topic you can talk about very well, write a short description of what you will cover in the article, and explain how it can benefit the site and its readers.
While it would be great to get published on high DR sites like Forbes, it helps to start guest blogging with smaller sites. You have more chances of getting your pitch accepted and published with them.
As you build your online footprint and bring your brand name to the front, you can increase your opportunities to guest blog with high-authority and big-name publications.
Publish Types of Posts that Earn Links
Some posts consistently perform better than others because of the format. If you want to get backlinks, you should focus on these content formats:
- “Why” posts
- “What” posts
- Infographics
- Videos
- “The Ultimate Guide” posts
- Statistics
Infographics are the most common visual assets that get lots of backlinks. You can do an original study and present your results in an infographic.
Videos have also been gaining traction, especially on social media. You can also share your original photos and make them free and downloadable. Others can use them in their reports but will have to cite your page to give credit.
Meanwhile, the “ultimate guide” posts are comprehensive articles on a particular topic. They attract links because they’re excellent references that journalists and bloggers can link to when discussing a concept.
Of course, you have to ensure that you have high-quality, relevant content to attract link-building opportunities.
Get Links from Quality Resource Pages
Resource pages are dedicated to links to other sites, so they’re quite beneficial to link builders.
On Google, search for your topic, say “link building,” and add words like “helpful resources,” “useful resources,” “further reading,” or “additional resources.”
When you find resource pages you want to be part of, reach out and ask for a link. Don’t forget to personalize your email and always focus on the value you can add to their page.
However, you must still check the quality of the publication before asking to be added to the list. Some resource pages are quite spammy, which will only hurt your SEO.
Wrapping Up
Backlinks are a critical part of your SEO strategy. They’re an important ranking factor, so you must build backlinks to rank higher on search engines. There are different strategies to use to earn backlinks organically (without resorting to paid links from link farms), but it can be overwhelming for beginners.
We hope this ‘how to get backlinks’ guide helps you. The above methods are excellent starting points. Remember, though, that nothing’s instant when it comes to link-building. They require effort and patience because it can take time to see significant results.
