There is no question that it is difficult to build great inbound links to your site. Blog comment spamming is a common tactic used by site owners to get backlinks, however, it is unnecessary and ineffective for improving SEO.
People often talk about generating inbound links, but there are few details about how to actually do that.
Building links isn’t as difficult as people say it is. It’s like social media – if you produce great content and get it in front of the right people, they’ll share it.
Here are some tested and effective tricks to help you build legitimate inbound links. You can use these link building ideas in your SEO strategy by reading on.
What is link building?
The process oflink buildinginvolves adding links to your website on external sources in order to increase referral traffic, boost domain authority, and improve search engine rankings. By improving the quantity and quality of inbound links, you can encourage more visitors to come to your site.
What are backlinks?
Links from other websites that direct readers to your own site are called backlinks, also called inbound links and incoming links. They are a form of off-page SEO.
The person who clicks on a link is the one who refers to it as a backlink.
Backlinks are different from outbound links (links from your website to another website) and internal links (links from one page on your website to another).
The right backlinks can do two great things for your website:
- They can drive traffic to your website. If someone posts a backlink to your website on their website or blog, their readers might click on it — and you’ll benefit from that referral traffic.
- They can help you rank higher in search. Backlinks tell search engines that your website is an authority on a certain subject — so the more backlinks you earn from high-quality, high-authority sites , the better your website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
A good inbound link is from a website that is an authority on the subject, and the link uses text that describes what the linked-to page is about. Anchor text is simply the text copy that’s hyperlinked. If I link to a blog post about backlink strategies, the anchor text is “backlink strategies.”
If you want to have natural anchor text, you shouldn’t just be hyperlinking random keywords. Although anchor text that is keyword-optimized can be valuable, generic anchor text such as “learn more” or “click here” can also be useful to Google. This is because Google is able to understand the context of a link.
1. Get interviewed.
You might be surprised to learn that people would want to interview me.
Well, you’d be surprised.
Blog interviews have been around for a long time, but podcasts are now becoming more popular. Podcasts are generally in the form of an interview, and there are many shows that are looking for people to interview.
Find out which podcasts are popular in your field, and contact the hosts to say that you would be a good person to interview. Explain why you would be a good guest.
And guess what?
The typical podcast has a website that organizes episodes by topic and links to content related to each episode. The website also includes links to the personal websites of the people featured on the show.
Bingo!
2. Do guest writing.
A tactic that has been criticized in recent years following Matt Cutts’ announcement but which can still be effective if done correctly, as evidenced by the fact that I am writing for SEJ here!
The secret to success is to find reputable magazines in your field that your target audience reads and then write high-quality content for them.
Don’t create a link to a website just for the sake of getting a link.
The value of writing for publications increases with frequency and targeting. This not only provides the benefit of great links, but also increased brand awareness and referral traffic that could result in leads and business.
3. Reverse guest writing.
Would you like it if other people wrote on your website instead of you?
But how does that yield links for you?
The vast majority of authors will list and link to articles and places where they have been featured. If you are one of those authors, then this can result in some great links, as well as free content that can continually bring traffic to your site.
4. Traditional PR
I recently wrote an article discussing how PR can have a positive impact on SEO performance, with most of the benefits coming from link building.
Links on well-known publications such as national newspapers and industry magazines have a lot of authority. A small number of people can still have a big effect on your overall ranking.
While newer methods of engaging with the public, such as through Twitter or stunts, may be more effective, good old fashioned PR will never lose its usefulness.
5. Be the source.
If you provide news that people are interested in, people will link to your site as the source of that information.
Although it’s improbable that you’ll be the first person to learn about groundbreaking news, if you have even a small amount of news that you can announce before anyone else, it could result in some substantial links.
You could have a property that celebrities visit for their honeymoon, or you could have information on a recent change in regulation for your industry.
You should always be aware of opportunities, even if they are seemingly small. Make sure you can be used as a source if needed.
Publishing your work on a blog or building relationships with key industry journalists are both great ways to get your name out there as a source for a story.
6. Create linkable assets.
Building links that work on autopilot is the most satisfying approach.
Done right, this is the dream tactic.
This involves creating content that is better than what is already out there and focuses on research to find out which phrases people use to find it.
To check how effective your website is, look at how many links are pointing to the results on Page 1. If your page has a lot of links pointing to it from other pages, it is likely a good page to target for ranking.
A good example of this is the phrase “top travel blogs.” This is a phrase that is packed with pages that have a lot of links pointing to them.
The author is saying that when somebody writes an article about travel bloggers, they will want to reference a list of the best ones. To do this, they will search online and link to one of the results. It’s the link version of the rich getting richer.
7. Content Marketing
We use content marketing to try to get links from high-quality websites that would be hard to get from other sources, except perhaps traditional public relations.
We use a similar approach to public relations, by creating a piece of content – such as an infographic, illustrations, maps, or some other asset – to give to the publication. This can then be used in an article on their site.
This approach has led to media coverage in a wide variety of publications, from national newspapers to specialist places like Lonely Planet.
8. Buy old blogs.
This tactic is successful when it is done in a genuine way instead of spamming a domain for its links. However, if done correctly, it can be a much faster way to get a lot of relevant links and content in a short period of time.
Rand Fishkin from Moz suggested this many years ago and it could still work today.
There are a lot of blogs that haven’t been updated in a while or are only getting minimum attention from their owners.
It’s common for people in the travel industry to develop a blog while they’re traveling, but then forget about it after they come home and rejoin society.
moving the content from those blogs to your domain and redirecting the links to the relative destinations on your site can still have a significant impact.
You should keep the old content and redirect it to similar pages, rather than deleting everything and just redirecting the entire site to your homepage (which is not a good idea).
9. Conduct free webinars, and post archived copies online.
If it’s informative, your attendees will absolutely share it. One way to do this is to embed a SlideShare presentation into a blog post. You can also add the presentation to the webinar’s landing page so that people who are interested in a past webinar can see it.
Partnering up with another company, brand, or influencer for the webinar will give you an even better chance of getting backlinks to your archived webinar pages. Having two brands that are well aligned with each other will create a powerful presentation that will also increase the size of the audience long after the webinar is finished.
10. Create free tools.
When I talked about creating and publishing lists of resources for your blog, did you remember? What do you think people would include on a resource list? Free tools are a big one. You can create free tools that are helpful for your target customers, which will allow you to access resource lists.
At HubSpot, for example, we created Website Grader, a tool that many agencies, partners, and others in our industry have found useful and linked to.
11. Partner with companies in complementary industries.
Channel partners in corporations commonly link to each other’s content because they want each other to succeed.
You can evaluate how much traffic a potential partner can generate for your website by considering their web presence on Alexa and SimilarWeb. You can use these sites to find out how much traffic a site gets, what percentage of visitors leave after looking at only one page, what keywords are being used to find the site, and where the visitors are coming from. You can also find out what people do after they visit the site.
12. Do some co-marketing.
You can also partnering with other companies to create co-marketing campaigns. This involves partnering with another company to promote a piece of content or product, and then sharing the results of that promotion. Working with a partner allows you to tap into their relationships and reach to gain more links and create more buzz with less work.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money or put in a lot of effort to create effective co-marketing. Reach out to a brand that is a similar size in another area and tell them about the project. You can start small by tweeting, then gradually create more marketing materials.
13. Search for and monitor your competitors’ backlinks.
Find opportunities where you can get similar links. You can find high-value link opportunities by using this method. You should research your competitors regularly (either weekly or monthly) to find new opportunities that you can take advantage of while they are still fresh.
Search for one of your competitor’s pages using a link analysis tool like Ahrefs, Majestic, or Moz’s Link Explorer. This will give you a list of the backlinks for that page. Check what types of posts are getting backlinks and benefiting from that off-page SEO.
One way to get exposure for your business is to guest post on publications that your competitors are writing for. This will give you a chance to be featured on similar topics in the same publication, and expand your reach.
14. Incorporate “Tweet This” links into your content.
The way to get inbound links is to share your content with as many people as possible. If you want people to share your content on social media, include “Tweet This” or “Click to Tweet!” links for tweetable nuggets.
The result? More opportunities for your data to appear in search engines, social media, and other people’s content.
Here’s what one of these links can look like:
The researchers found that adding color to visuals increases people’s willingness to read the content by 80%.
The ClickToTweet service makes it easy to create tweetable links without custom coding.
15. Do expert roundups to build relationships.
If you’re looking to build relationships with influencers, experts roundups can be a great tool. The following text discusses the benefits of building relationships with influencers. While rounding up influencers may not result in an immediate increase in inbound links or leads, it can help you build stronger relationships that will pay off in the form of backlinks from authoritative sources in the future.
You can reach out to the experts who contributed to your previous roundup to ask about a guest post opportunity or something else, thanking them again for their previous contribution.
We polled successful marketers and asked them to share their top content marketing tips in one of our expert roundups.
Spamming comment sections and paying for link-building services will no longer be effective. The tips and methods I’ve shared with you will help you build high-quality backlinks using only ethical methods. The more websites that link to your website, the higher your website will rank on search engines, which will result in more people organically finding your website and becoming potential leads and customers.
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