Building backlinks for SEO can work wonders for your website traffic. Back links are basically little votes coming to your website from other websites. It shows to Google that someone has recommended your site for some reason. Generally speaking the more backlinks you have coming to your site, the higher your site will be in the rankings SERPS – search engine results pages. However, this isn’t exactly true because another factor is the quality of the incoming links. Not all links are equal and Google will determine some links to be of far more value than others.
If you think of links as reviews of your site, you can understand that a couple of bad reviews will do more damage than many good reviews can repair. So therefore where your links come from is important to building your website authority. You want the good links not the bad ones!
Generally speaking the rule is that links should be recommending websites which are useful to the visitor. If this isn’t the case, it will generally mean the link is spammy and therefore counterproductive to the growth and authority of your website. So you want to avoid spammy links if your website is to benefit from them.
Building Backlinks For SEO – Spammy Links
Google’s guide outlines some examples which may fall into the category of a spammy link:
- When a link is purchased or sold. Either for money, goods and services or “free” products in exchange for the link.
- You link to me and I’ll link to you schemes or partner pages which are exclusively for the sake of link building
- Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns
- Keyword rich anchor text links
- Using automation to create links
Generally speaking if a link is bought, it’s not a natural link. If you want your link profile to help build your authority, you need naturally occurring links and not spammy links. The above examples are going to look unnatural to Google, and therefore you will be penalised for them.
Building Backlinks For SEO – High Authority Backlinks
High authority backlinks are much harder to obtain because generally the high value websites are such because they are more discerning in who they link to and why! Sites such as The Guardian and The BBC, for example have thousands of high quality links from reputable sources. They will only link to other high quality sources too!
Links from low quality spammy websites covered in adverts and popups are much easier to obtain, and many will even pay for them too! Hence why Google discriminates between the different types of backlinks you can obtain.
To increase your domain authority, you will want more high quality backlinks. As your domain authority increases, you should see your content ranking more highly in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Building Backlinks For SEO
So having determined what we want to help us to build our site’s authority, (more high quality links), how do we go about building them?
One way to build a natural link profile is to create content which is very helpful to people. Resource articles often contain a lot of useful information in one place. Reviews, guides, lists and infographics are just a few examples of useful resources which people will naturally link to over time.
If you create such articles and put them on your website, as people find your content, they are more inclined to link to them freely because of the value they offer. So one key to a natural link profile is to create highly valuable online resources which attract a lot of attention. Promote them too so you get more eyes on them and over time you should earn natural backlinks from them.
Of course getting eyes on your content can be a hurdle to getting your articles naturally shared and linked to. So you also need to promote your content in order to make this happen. See where can I post my blog to get more traffic?.
Building Backlinks For SEO – Guest Posting
Another popular way to build backlinks is to write guest post articles for the sites you want to build links from. You really want links from sites which are relevant to yours. Why build links from sites which bring the wrong kind of visitors? There’s no point! You’ll only be bringing in traffic which isn’t going to be interested in your topic.
To tap into good sources of website traffic from other sites, and boost your site’s authority, you need relevant links from blogs and websites which cover similar topics to your own.
Not all bloggers accept guest posts so you’ll need to find those in your niche which do.
To find guest post opportunities from sites accepting guest posts do a Google search like one of these:
- Target Keyword + guest post
- Main Keyword + guest post service
- Focus Keyword + free guest posting
- Keyword + submit a guest post
Once you find a suitable site, write to the owner of the website and offer to write for them in exchange for a backlink to your site.
Finding Unlinked Brand Mentions
You can also set up a Google search for any mentions of your name or the name of your website. This is useful if you’ve been around for a while. If you’re brand new online, the chances of getting mentions are less, since you’ll have less content which can be found.
You can do this by setting up a Google alert. Use your name and/or the name of your website. When someone uses your brand, name or website name you will get an alert. When someone mentions you, but fails to link to your website, you can approach them and ask directly for a backlink. If they have mentioned you already, they are much more likely to be willing to give you a link; since they are talking about you already!
Fix Broken Links From Websites
Here’s another strategy you can implement which can work towards your link building. Most bloggers are pretty busy and will often have broken links on their websites. Many are too busy to even know this and so neglect to fix these. As a result this can affect their website rankings.
If you find these broken links for them, you can be their knight in shining armour! By reaching out and letting them know about a broken link, you’ve done them a massive favour!
This website lets you find broken links on any website you care to check. Obviously you’ll first want to find those websites which will have the biggest impact on your back link strategy: those which are in your particular niche and of high authority.
Use the tool to find broken links and reach out to the website owner. Offer to replace broken links with links to your own content! Of course how you communicate this message will have a strong bearing on your level of success! You’ll also need to find the appropriate broken links which you can also help replace with your own content.
Getting Your Content Found
Even with superb content on your website, it can be hard to get eyes on it and get the links you deserve. One way of doing this is to create high quality content which targets long tail keywords which has much lower competition in the search results pages.
Use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords with low SEO competition.
Choose a long tail keyword to create some useful content around on your website. Use an SEO plugin to help you optimise your content for the search engines. Write a piece of content which is better, longer and more informative than the currently ranking article on Google.
Rinse and repeat this strategy and over time you should see your content ranking on the SERPS. As it does, more people will find it. If your content is good, you should also naturally get likes, shares and backlinks.
Blog Commenting
Blog commenting and forum commenting are other methods of building backlinks to your site too. Find blogs which offer commenting, which are also in your target niche and have a high domain authority.
Once you find a suitable post on a website, make sure you read the post before leaving a comment. I’ve seen tonnes of spammy blog comments on my posts and unless they are clearly from a reader, who has read my content, I delete them! Don’t be generic with your blog and forum comments. Read the post and try and add some value with your comment.
There’s many people trying to get easy backlinks using this method and they just don’t even bother to read the post. They leave comments like “great post”, or “thanks for the share”. Comments like these are very likely to be removed as spam! But if you take some time over this, your comments are more likely to be approved and this can mean a strong, high authority back link from a relevant site. Here’s a list of high quality blog commenting sites. (That link was also a list I found with a quick search; as I mentioned earlier: high quality content gets natural back links over time).
Competitor Back Links
You can also find a competitor of yours who has a similar site to your own. Type their website address into SEM Rush search tool and find their backlink profile.
If a website has given a back link to your competitor, they are much more likely to offer you one too! You can build content similar to that of your competitor and reach our to ask for a link. You may not always be successful when asking for backlinks, but if you approach a website owner in the right way, and try and build a relationship before asking for something, you can get backlinks in this manner. Try and offer something in exchange though, rather than just asking for a link. You may need to create some new content or write as a contributor to get a link.
Summary
There’s lots of ways of building backlinks for SEO and you can even pay someone else to do it for you if you’re not inclined to do it yourself. I use this company to help me build backlinks as I find it rather difficult and time consuming.
Backlinks are one of the best ways to generate more traffic both directly from the websites themselves and from increasing your domain authority and moving up the search listings with Google. So it’s well worth spending some time doing it if you’re serious about getting free traffic to your website. It can be hard work but it’s worth it in the long run when you’re getting a tonne of free traffic!