As a website owner, of course you must know how to get quality backlinks to maximize your SEO efforts.
An effective backlink strategy helps increase the authority and ranking of a website, resulting in higher organic traffic. Unfortunately, not all backlinks have the same value and impact.
Eits, don’t worry just yet! This article will explain 7+ ways to get backlinks, which you can follow if you want to find quality backlinks. Immediately, let’s start the discussion below!
What are Backlinks? What does it do?
Backlinks are links on other websites whose purpose is to point to your website or one of its pages. Also known as inbound links, backlinks can be embedded in text, images, or as CTA (call-to-action) buttons.
Well, backlinks have an important role in your website’s SEO, especially for:
– Credibility
Google treats backlinks as endorsements of trust or recommendations for specific pages. If there are many websites that place backlinks to your website, it means that your website has relevant and credible content.
– Rankings
Backlinks are one of the determining factors for Google ranking. The more external links your website gets, the higher it will rank in search engines.
– Accessibility
Search engines use links to find, crawl, and index your web pages more quickly.
– Referral traffic
Backlinks provide more detailed information, recommendations, or materials related to certain topics. If there are popular domains referring to your content, some of their readers will also visit your site.
Characteristics of Quality Backlinks
Before starting to discuss the topic of how to get backlinks, you must first know the characteristics of quality backlinks:
– Influential
Backlinks must come from websites that have a ‘high-authority’ domain, such as well-known and leading brand websites in their industry. Inbound links from websites that are full of spam and of low quality can actually harm your website’s reputation and SEO performance.
– Relevant
Google prioritizes backlinks from websites in the same niche. For example for websites about web development, backlinks from technology websites will be more valuable than backlinks from travel blogs. Relevant anchor text also helps readers understand the context of the link.
– Dofollow
Dofollow backlinks are very important for link-building efforts because they will also transfer link equity between web pages. On the other hand, nofollow backlinks do not transfer the influence of the source domain so they are of less benefit in terms of SEO for the destination website.
– Derived from many sources
Google cares about the variety of sources compared to the number of links. So, 10 links from 10 different websites will be much better than 100 links from one source.
Now that you know the factors that affect the quality of backlinks, let’s get down to the main topic.
7+ Ways to Get Quality Backlinks for Websites
Here’s how to get quality backlinks that you can try:
1. Create Quality Unique Content
One of the most effective techniques in link-building is creating assets or content that other people will refer to. Quality content like this will usually attract a lot of organic links and is often shared by readers.
2. Write Complete and Clear Guidelines
Good guide content should have sufficient article length to explain a particular topic in detail, include all related keywords, be concise, and not be verbose.
When writing how-to articles, try to cover timeless topics. Topics like these will remain relevant for a long time to come, so you can promote content without having to regularly do major updates.
After that, search for the target keywords on Google and do an analysis on the articles that appear from those keywords. Identify the structure, the keywords used, and the optimization strategy. Take advantage of this information to write SEO-friendly articles.
You also need to promote content after you’ve finished creating it. Look for other websites in the same niche, then try to contact them. Explain how your guide article can help their readers, then try to offer to place a link pointing to your website.
After that, do an analysis regarding which websites provide links to other articles, then try to offer your tutorial articles as a better alternative.
3. Use Infographics to Get Backlinks
Infographics are representations of data in visual form. You also need to consider this content to get quality backlinks.
Yes, unique infographics can make your articles more interesting than competitors’ articles or other blogs, considering that there are millions of posts published every day.
4. Write a Testimonial or Review
Testimonials also play an important role in building brand reputation. This is because 95% of customers tend to read online reviews before buying something.
Write a review based on your experience using a tool or product. Later, the company that owns it may share your content directly on its platform as social proof.
You can also tell the owner of the tool or product that you reviewed it and then ask them to share your post with their audience.
5. Build Links Through Listicle Content
Listicle content is content that lists a number of products or brands arranged in a list as reviews or recommendations.
How to get quality backlinks through listicle content, you can start by looking for content that doesn’t include your website.
Use Google’s search operators to narrow search results based on specific targets by adding a minus symbol (-) to exclude your brand from the results.
For example, if you type in “website design inspiration –Behance“, Google will return all results that don’t include Behance in their list.
After that, contact the content creator and ask them to include your website in their list. Give promising and rational reasons why your brand deserves to be included.
If your brand or website already has a large audience, find websites that mention your brand in their content but haven’t put a link to your website.
6. Perform Link Gap Analysis
Apart from creating content, analyzing competitor profiles can also be a way to get effective quality backlinks. You can identify the best performing content, keywords, and their traffic sources.
7. Start Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one way to get quality backlinks by writing articles for other websites.
You can search for websites that offer guest posting opportunities with simple search terms on Google, using “keyword target + write for us”.
Then, go to each Write For Us page shown in the results and read their guest posting rules. Find their contact information and send them an email introducing yourself.
Include your article idea and explain the benefits they will get if they publish your guest post. Do this process with other prospects so that you are known as an expert and can get quality backlinks.
8. Look for Broken Links to Build Backlinks
You can also get backlinks by finding broken links. Yup, links like these can be an effective SEO strategy.
Broken links are usually caused by pages being deleted, URLs changed, and domain names expiring.
9. Join Business Organizations
You can learn from experts and get important insights to grow your business. This strategy can also be a way to get free backlinks because websites like this usually include links to their member websites.
If you have a local business, start by finding and joining an organization or community in your area. Then, ask the web administrator to include your website in their directory pages.
10. Participate Actively in the Forum
You can also join discussion forums to get quality backlinks. This strategy not only helps build your reputation as an expert, but also increases targeted traffic to your website.
Well, you can start by finding relevant forums in your niche that offer dofollow backlinks. Or, check competitor websites to find out which forums have links to their websites.
Plus, you can be active on popular question and answer platforms like Quora. Despite using nofollow links, these discussion websites help showcase your knowledge and skills to a wider audience.
11. Make the Website a Journalist Reference
For this strategy, you need to create content that will serve as an important resource for leading media websites.
To do this, promote your content to journalists and news websites through Help a Reporter Out (HARO), a platform that connects you with media websites that need resources.
Register as a source and select one of the three available plans. We recommend the free plan first so you can understand how the platform works before deciding to upgrade.
After registering, you will receive an email from HARO containing requests from various news channels. This email usually contains the reporter’s name, industry, company, query, and special requirements.
Respond to relevant requests with the best methods and actionable tips according to the requirements. If your answer is selected, the news website will place your website link on their page.
12. Use Google Search Console
If you already have backlinks, you still need to monitor their condition and performance. Use Google Search Console to analyze backlink profiles, identify 404 errors, and find new backlink-building opportunities.
Conclusion
Backlinks are a very important part of your SEO strategy. The more backlinks you get, the higher your website will rank on search results pages.
However, the number of backlinks is not the only determining factor in ranking; quality must also be ensured. External links from trusted sources will increase credibility, and spammy links will actually harm your website’s SEO and reputation.
Hopefully this article can help you understand the importance of backlinks and how to get effective backlinks. If you have any other questions, our FAQ section below will answer them.
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