Looking to level up your website’s Google rankings? Then you may want to look into building high-quality backlinks. A backlink is simply a link from an external site to your site. The more high-quality links your website has, the more Google (and other search engines) will trust your website. It is one of Google’s biggest ranking factors and can make or break your SEO rankings.
Building backlinks can be scary, and you might want to palm it off to someone who knows better. But this can be a really expensive investment, especially for a brand-new blog. So to help you lower your costs and improve your results, we’ve made this easy guide to building backlinks for your new blog.
Social Profile
Most social networks have a place for you to add a link to your website. Not only is this a backlink from a trustworthy and authoritative site, but it can also direct traffic from your profile to your website.
Some of the more popular and authoritative websites include:
- YouTube
You should find a place to add a link to your website in your profile bio. But don’t just stop there. Find other social networks that are within your niche, or that you frequently visit, and add your link to those too.
Guest Posts
Guest posts are when you post one of your articles on someone else’s website. This helps both parties: their website gets free content, and your website gets more exposure. And more importantly, they’ll link to your website and add another vote of confidence to the search engines. It can be hard to find websites that allow guest posts, and quite often the ones publicly announce it aren’t worth posting on. We recommend reaching out to other sites in your niche and making an agreement. Sometimes they will try and charge you, but if your content is researched and well-written on a topic they haven’t covered, you can reach an agreement.
Broken Link Building
An old-school technique that still works, broken link-building is the method of searching for websites you want links from (preferably something with a lot of traffic or in your niche), finding broken links on their website, and emailing the webmaster to let them know the link is broken. You then suggest linking to your website instead and offer them a relevant page to link to. This works particularly well if you have an informative blog post on the topic they were discussing, to ensure they’ll find it valuable and appropriate to link to your site. To find broken links on their website, we recommend using free tools such as Screaming Frog, Dead Link Checker and Ahrefs.
HARO
HARO, which stands for Help A Reporter Out, means reaching out to reporters and offering your professional insights to help them write their articles. In return, they will mention your brand and link back to you. The easiest way to get started is to sign up for a free website on Connectively.
The Skyscraper Technique
The Skyscraper Technique was invented by Brian Dean of Backlinko, and is essentially “stealing” backlinks from other websites. The basic idea behind it is you find a keyword you want to rank for, check your top competitors, and then write much better content than them. Then find websites that link to these pages, and ask them to link to your website instead. This works because website owners always prefer to link to the best and most relevant pages so their users have the best experience. As a result, by having better content and more backlinks, you will eventually outrank these competitors.
Create Linkable Assets
This is a less direct approach than the previous suggestions but can provide the best results on auto-pilot. You simply create content that people want to link to. This content may not be too relevant for your audience, and may not get a lot of traffic, but websites will use it as a reference or to back up their point, and will naturally link to your page. The best examples of this are data-driven research studies, infographics and visuals, long-form guides, statistics, free tools and calculators, downloadable documents, free templates and long lists.
However, keep in mind that these are a lot harder to make than a standard blog post, and will take a lot of time and energy to create. But the rewards are worth it, as naturally built backlinks are Google’s favourite, and you may even land links on a website that isn’t possible otherwise.
Conclusion
By creating some of these links, you can save yourself a lot of money while climbing your way to the top of the search results. Of course, this will take some sweat and elbow grease, but the results are worth it.
