Having many good backlinks to your website helps improve your ranking and visibility, which leads to more organic traffic. But SEO link building is the hardest part of SEO because you don’t have full control over it. While content and performance are things you create and control, link building often requires some kind of collaboration.
But how can you get quality backlinks to your website? In this post, I’ll share 10 proven methods that work to get organic links and boost your SEO website rankings.
What is SEO Link Building?
Link building, or backlink building, is the work you do to generate external links to your website, that is, links that lead from other websites to your own. The goal is to increase the number of quality backlinks to improve ranking and visibility in search results. Simply put, links from other websites contribute to your website’s authority – the more relevant and reliable links you get from others, the more credibility you gain in the eyes of search engines.
Example of backlinks: Imagine your website is abc.com, and xyz.com has inserted your www.abc.com/seo article on their website; it’s treated as a backlink.
How do you Get Backlinks?
There are as many ways to get links as there are ideas. The event was exciting but also a little confusing for many. That’s why we’ve collected 10 of the most popular and effective methods for working with SEO link building. Get inspired and find the approaches that suit your business and industry best.
1. Create Valuable Content
The most basic method of getting links is to create top-notch content. This can be a time-consuming task, but if you succeed, it’s worth the effort. If you write enough good and valuable content that others want to recommend or refer to, the chances of them linking to you increase.
What type of content is most relevant and “link-friendly” can vary depending on the industry, but the most common types are blog posts, articles, guides, etc.
A step-by-step guide is a simple and clear way to learn how to do something and, like visual elements, is easy to absorb and is therefore easy to share and link to. One way to build links to your guide is to google content that covers the same topic and ask them to link to your guide.
2. Create Engaging Visual Content
Visual content such as infographics, illustrations, tables, etc. is a way to make your content easier to absorb and increases the likelihood that someone will share it further and thus that they will link to your website. Visual elements are often an easy way to highlight individual paragraphs and create curiosity about a longer text. Examples of interesting infographics are statistics, timelines, maps, flowcharts, how-tos, etc. Make sure to make them graphically appealing and easy to absorb, and the chance that your content will be appreciated increases.
3. Publish Research and Reports
Leverage your expertise and conduct a survey in your industry or among your customers and create a report based on the results. The more informative and trustworthy your content is, the more likely it is to be shared. The great thing about surveys and reports is that if someone references your data and statistics, it becomes a natural reason to link, or to ask them to link, since you are the source.
4. The Skyscraper Technique
This is a method that involves analyzing your competitors’ link profiles, finding content from those who have provided a lot of links, and then creating similar but better content and marketing it to those who have linked to your competitors.
So how do you create better content? Well, by focusing on:
- Greater scope of the subject
- More current data
- Unique graphics, e.g., infographics, etc.
- Stylish design and good structure
The goal of this method is to become the “tallest skyscraper” in your industry and be the obvious choice to link to.
5. Digital PR
Working with PR is a great way to create visibility and authority in your industry, but it is also an effective way to build your link profile. A press release, for example, is a great opportunity to get links from the websites that publish your news.
How to get links from a press release? Here are two quick tips: Add links to the text of your press release, so you don’t have to rely on them actively going in and adding links themselves.
Write your press release like a finished newspaper article. If the person who will be publishing the article already has finished material to work with, the chances of publication increase.
PR also strengthens you or your company as an expert in your industry; the more often you publish useful and relevant information, the more you build your reputation and the higher the chance of getting links.
6. Mentions
Sometimes it may happen that someone shares your content and mentions your company in articles or blog posts, for example, without linking to your website. One tip is to set up Google Alerts or similar tools. You will then receive an email every time a website mentions your company name, and you can easily contact them to ask them to link to you.
7. Guest Blogging
One of the most effective ways to build links is to find opportunities for you to write guest posts on other people’s blogs or websites. Guest blogging gives you the opportunity to build your link profile organically by adding links to your own website in the text.
Keep in mind that:
Find websites that are relevant to your industry or your product/service; then there is a greater chance that the reader will click on your link.
Links from websites with a high domain rating/domain authority are stronger and have a greater impact.
8. Use Bloggers and Influencers
Find relevant bloggers and influencers in your industry who you can send your product to or offer them to use your service for free in exchange for a review and link. If you have a slightly larger budget, you can also pay influencers for reviews. You can also offer them an affiliate link that will earn them a commission if someone clicks on the link and makes a purchase.
This type of link building requires a little more effort but often generates higher quality traffic because visitors are already interested in your product.
9. Look for Broken Backlinks
This method involves finding websites that have URLs that no longer exist (404s) and contacting the websites that link to those pages, informing them that you have a similar resource (i.e., page) to replace them with.
This may take some time, but it is effective. Broken links negatively impact the user experience, and by offering this site a solution , you are also giving their users a better experience.
10. Build a Digital Tool
Is your company in the tech industry? Building a free tool or a light version of your product is an effective way to generate quality links. If they like your tool and find it valuable, they are more likely to share it. It can also generate potential leads because you create an opportunity to test the product before making a purchase.
