Backlink Building – A Comprehensive guide

What is common between a chiropractor and SEO? Both fix backlinks.

Jokes apart, let us understand what backlinks are and how you go about building them.

What is a backlink?

Any person connected with SEO, blogs, and website content must have heard the term ‘backlinks’. In very simple terms, backlinks are incoming links to a webpage. At one point in time, backlinks were most important metric for ranking a webpage on the search engine. This is true to a great extent even today.

How do you build a backlink?

As with every other activity in the world, taking the first step is the most difficult one. Once you do so, the rest of the steps automatically fall into place. This is a kind of an invisible staircase. You can see the top of the mountain but not the staircase. The beauty of it all is that you will be able to see the second step after you take the first one and third after you take the second. This process goes on till you reach the top.

Hence, taking the first step is all that matters. The question on your mind will be how you take the first step. This guide will help you do so. There was a time when you could actually pay and build directory links and social media bookmarks. Today, these methods are not much effective. You might just end up losing your money, time, and more importantly the enthusiasm. Let us see 4 simple but effective ways to build backlinks.

1. Offer something of value

The problem with any new business in the world is that no one knows you. You have to grab the attention of people. One way is to offer something valuable. Let us see how you can do so.

1. Create an image gallery: Pictures can say it better than words. Almost all bloggers know this fact. Hence, they would be happy to exchange a link to your website if you offer them a free picture. Hire a designer and create a free image gallery. Send this link to the hundreds of bloggers out there on the internet informing them they are free to use the image in return for a backlink to your website. This tactic works nicely if you have catchy images that can make a statement. Ensure that the images pertain to your niche.

   

2. Build a tool: Spread your net wide to catch more fish. In addition to bloggers, you can create something for your entire community. Creating a tool is one way of connecting with a larger section of people. You have the shining example of the keyword research tool Keywordtool.io. It can surprise you that this research tool has linked to over 4000 domains. Now, building a tool cannot be as easy as clicking pictures. It will take time, but it is worth the effort. You can also promote this tool in your forums and on social media.

   

3. Do your own research: It does take time and effort to do your own research. Choose any topic in your niche and do an honest research on it. Share the results with the top bloggers in your niche and seek backlinks. They will be happy to provide.

2. Know your competition

Every business has competition. Your business will have too. You should take advantage of this fact and understand who your competitors are. They must have earned their backlinks from somewhere. You could do the same as well. The question is how to do it.

• Search for your top competitors.

• Find their best backlinks using tools like Ahrefs and Majestic.

• Try to replicate the link. Your marketing skills can come in handy here because each link would require different steps to follow.

3. Take advantage of Forum links

Not all Forum links can be useful, but big forums do give you profitable threads. They carry a lot of weight. This activity requires you to put in a lot of time and effort to check out the right Forums from where to seek your backlinks. This step in combination with the first two mentioned in this post can help you build effective backlinks.

3. Try out Guest Posting

Since you are building links to a new site, it can take time. Seek the services of a guest post. Guest blogging works provided you do your homework properly. One way of doing it is to write a great content and impress them. One blog can lead to another thereby strengthening the chain.
Now, you have taken the first step. The second one will be in sight. Your endeavor is to make it to the second one, and then the third one as well. Very soon, you will find that you have succeeded.

Remember that a new website has it tough nowadays. Google and other search engines have raised the benchmark by introducing several updates. The 2016 Penguin Update has brought in the new concept of Black Hat SEO. Understand the implications of this concept before proceeding further.

The 50-day plan for getting backlinks

We share with you a 50-day plan for getting backlinks. Actually, you can do it in 30 days as well, but it is better to take your time to understand and do it well.

Before we move ahead to the 50-day plan, you should have a basic understanding of certain concepts.

• Seek links from authority websites in your niche. Remember that one link from an authority site is any day better than 100 from any of the Tom, Dick, and Harry kind or websites.

What is an authority site? We shall explain it in brief. An authority site should display the following traits.

• Credibility

• High ranking on search engine

• Get huge traffic

• Influential

Where do you find them? This is a relevant question. This is the first task you have to do in your 50-day plan. Use the services of ‘The Big Daddy of All – Google’. Try to concentrate on websites that use the following extensions: .gov, .org, .edu.

• What is the next step? You will not be able to approach them directly without offering anything in return. What do you offer? Build up a content library in your various niches and share with these websites. If the content is of value, you will get the backlink. Most of these websites will require you to submit your information through a contact form. Share your content through these forms and seek backlinks.

We shall share 10 tips with you that you could try out over the 50-day period. Creativity is very important here. You are always free to try out your own methods if you had achieved success in the past.

1. 1. Write a lot of blogs: Statistics shows that writing blogs on a consistent basis can give you backlinks. Try to offer something of value.

       

   2. Offer something free: There are thousands of people like you on the internet. Offer something for free from your stable with a gentle request to give you a credit in the form of a backlink to your website.

       

   3. Write Press Releases: Since you have a new website, you will be having a lot of things to share. Writing press releases in the proper manner can get you effective backlinks.

       

   4. Infographics can do the trick: Images can always say anything better than words. People tend to remember something easily if there is an accompanying image. It registers on the reader’s mind quickly and effectively. The following example will prove it. “Dog bites man” is not news but “Man bites dog” definitely is.

      

(Disclaimer: This is just a photograph. We do not mean any offense to the animal in any way.)

1. Use Visual representation: It is better if your website has graphs and pie charts to represent your data. This can attract a lot of backlinks. Statistics is very important. Presenting your information in a tabular form generates more interest.

    

2. Build an Image library: We have touched upon this topic earlier in the article. Try to include a detailed description and optimize the image. Offer it free to websites in exchange for a backlink. Most of the time, you will succeed.

    

3. Content is the King: Never plagiarize any content from the internet. Google penalizes such endeavors making it hard for your website to recover. Go through the September 2016 updates to the Penguin algorithm.

    

4. Bridge the gaps: There might be hundreds of articles in your niche. Identify the gaps and try to bridge them. You will succeed.

    

5. Seek out influencers and interact with them: Every niche has its influencers. Seek them out and establish contact over the social media. Interact with them and establish a working relationship. This influencing can help you build backlinks.

    

6. Thrive in the competition: Establish who your competitors are and try to learn from their mistakes.

You have just seen 10 tips that can help you build effective backlinks. We share with you 5 more bonus tips that will keep you busy for the next 50 days as you go about building effective backlinks.

1. Give broken backlinking a shot: Concentrate on broken backlinks and approach the respective site owners suggesting replacement content.

    

2. Acknowledge valuable comments: Reciprocate the comments especially where they deserve.

    

3. Offer to write guest posts: Use your content writing skills to write guest posts in return for a backlink to your website. Most of the time they will oblige you.

    

4. Maintain personal contact: Trade shows are the best places for you to meet prospective clients, competitors, and influencers. Maintain personal contact in the good old traditional manner.

    

5. Social media: This tactic does not need any introduction at all. Everybody knows the power of social media.

Try out these techniques over the next 50 days and see a stream of backlinks to your website. You have done the spadework. The time is ripe for you to reap the benefits.

You must have heard these words, “Strike the iron when it is hot.” We continue by saying, “Make it hotter by striking it repeatedly.”

The Importance of .edu and .gov backlinks

We had stressed upon the importance of seeking links from authority websites. Can there be a better authority than the Government of the land? Similarly, will you not get better information from an educational website? If the answers to both the above questions are YES, you have understood the importance of .edu and .gov backlinks.

One of the most important aspects of the Penguin 2016 Update is the importance of backlinks from authority websites. The search engines do not consider such backlinks as Black Hat SEO. This effectively translates that it is always beneficial to seek such links. Secondly, it is not so easy to find favor with official Government and educational websites. They have a thorough screening procedure. They provide the backlinks only if your post / content satisfies their stringent regulations.

How do you secure .gov and .edu backlinks? This is the way to do so.

The Concept of Broken backlink building

Building a new backlink is hard work, especially for the newcomer websites. It is comparatively easier to fix a broken backlink. In this way, you bypass some of the hard work. That website having the broken link has done it for you. In order to understand this concept, you should know what a broken backlink is.

You must have encountered these 404 Page Error codes many a time on the internet while you search for some web page. These are nothing but broken webpages. Let us see how you build these broken backlinks into something valuable for you.

You can find out such webpages in your niche. Contact the webmaster and seek to replace the broken link with a link to your content. In this way, you provide a valuable resource to the webmaster and help them in cleaning the website. At the same time, you get backlinks as well. However, you still have to be careful about the quality of the website that has the broken backlink.

Building backlinks in a scalable manner

Before going into the intricacies of the topic, have a look at the components of Google’s Ranking Algorithm.

Your objective is to secure effective backlinks for your website. It was easy prior to 2016. Google has changed the goalposts with their Penguin Update. You have to play the game according to the rules formulated by Google. Let us see how you can do so and build scalable backlinks,

1. Understand the rules of the game

This is Google’s mission, and it should be yours as well.

In this connection, let us begin by asking a couple of simple but relevant questions.

Do I have organized content? Is my content useful to the websites that link to mine?

If you have organized content, other websites will find it useful to link to yours. Navigation is important if you wish people and search engines to find useful information from your website. The second step is to create an eager want in the quality websites to link to yours. One way to do it is to help Google find and index your content. Using a simple tool, Alexa can help you in this endeavour. This will help in building trustworthy links to your page.

2. Scale your link building efforts

Cyrus Shepherd, author of “How to Rank” defines the 90/10 rule of link building as 90% creating content and 10% link building. Getting a high quality external link is more important than generating traditional links.

You should concentrate on finding out the authority sites and seek their help in your link building exercise. Naturally, authority sites demand great content. The following key metrics can help you find the most appropriate site.

• • Domain Authority: Tools like Moz Bar help you determine the domain (keyword) authority of any website

     

  • Domain Relevancy: Relevancy of the keyword is very important. Using the right anchor text is the solution to increasing the domain relevancy.

     

  • Trust flow: This is important to determine the quality of links pointing to a website. On a scale of 1 to 100, the higher score is obviously the better one. If your backlinks come from websites with high trust flow score, you get a higher rank in SEO.

     

  • Citation flow: This flow determines the influential factor of any website. You should use this metric in combination with the trust flow.You can take the example of Bing.com. This is one of most trusted search engines after Google.com. You can see from the table below that it has a trust flow of 86. That is an impressive number. What does it signify? It entails that any data procured through this search engine is reliable. Consumers trust Bing as much as they do Google.

• • Keyword targeting: Using long tail keywords is beneficial in attracting quality links. This explains why Amazon has these long product titles. They display a longer reach. The following graphic will make things clear.

Using the right keyword is very important. This might require you to do deep research into metrics like customer demographics to understand the needs of the customers.

Consider the example of Metacafe, an entertainment cum social media website. Statistics show that males in the age group of 35 to 44 dominate the audience. It has a sizeable number of people in the age group of 25 to 34 as well. This could be true of many other social media channels.

• Earn editorial links: Editorial links from authority websites can do wonders to your link building strategy. Statistics show that 2 million blogs are published daily. Your content should be compelling enough to gain editorial links. This is not so easy. However, the best things in life are never easy. You have to struggle for them.

 

Turn Images into links

“A picture can convey what a thousand words cannot.” The person who framed this quote might never have known about computers. However, he is perfectly right in his assessment. This logic works effectively. Let us see how to convert images into effective backlinks for your websites.

• Do your research: You need to have a unique Infographic. Search the internet for something that is not available. You can do so at Google, Visual.ly, or Pinterest.

• Find a topic that is interesting, hot, and not yet covered.

• Collect the requisite information and assimilate the data.

• Make your design visually appealing. If needed, you can hire a professional to do it for you.

• Get your Embed code. This necessary to increase the number of backlinks.

• Marketing your Infographic is the next step to do. Use sources like your email database, social media and websites like Reddit to do effective marketing.

This is a sure-shot method to obtain quality backlinks from your images / Infographics.

Look out for the best tools for effective backlinking

You have high-quality content with you. A well-planned strategy will help you ace the SEO rankings. You need the help of SEO tools to achieve this objective. We list the 10 most effective tools that can enable your website to achieve a high SEO rank.

1. Check My Links: This is a Google Chrome Extension and hence one of the easiest tools to build up your backlinking strategy. This is an effective backlink checker. Enabling this extension can help you do a quick backlink check on any webpage. The red colored ones are the broken links. You can use the broken link building tactics to good effect.
2. Broken Link Builder: This tool is a good alternative to the one mentioned above. The advantage of using this tool is that you need do it on one page at a time but conduct a search for the entire website. This saves you a lot of time and allows you to improve your link popularity as well.
3. Linkbird: Use this tool to track your rankings, conduct keyword research, and analyze your backlink popularity. This is a comprehensive SEO tool that helps you to locate websites for high quality incoming links.
4. Pitchbox: This is a powerful tool that allows you to do link prospecting and connects you with people you want to reach. The automated follow-up feature is a novel one. This is one of the most efficient tools for link building.
5. Whitespark: Businesses interested in local SEO rankings can do well to use this tool. This link prospector tool also allows you to find guest posting, donations, reviews, directories, and professional organizations.
6. Monitor Backlinks: Though not a traditional backlinks tool, Monitor Backlinks can provide information on keyword rankings, site speed, new backlinks, and send alerts whenever your competitor obtains a new link. This could be a clinching factor for any business.
7. Linkstant: Having quality links is important. At the same time, one should be aware as and when you secure a new incoming link. Linkstant provides you with such information on a real time basis.
8. Linkody: This tool is similar to Linkstant in many ways. One of the better features is that it provides you with an email whenever your competitor gets a new backlink. This is a valuable alert.
9. GroupHigh: This tool is a bit different from the others because it is a much more difficult tool to use. However, it has additional features such as reaching out to the best bloggers and influencers.
10. BuzzStream: Tracking your link development projects and sharing tasks is possible with this tool. This tool saves you a lot of time while delivering quality results.

The above ten tool can help you improve your backlink building strategy thereby enabling you to achieve a high SEO rank.

SEO is simple and these SEO tools make it even simpler. Use them to your advantage.

Know the Content that get you quality backlinks

Your objective is to ensure a high count of backlinks to boost your SEO rankings. You have seen that content is important. The way you present the content is as important as the content you have. Some content might be great for sharing on social media but not generate effective backlinks. Some might be able to generate backlinks but look too dry for a social media post. The trick is to arrive at the right balance. Let us look at some content types that can attract high quality links as well as a good number of links as well.

This graph will make it very clear to you.

• 1. List posts have their faithful audience

  People love list posts such as the Top 10 / Top 7 type of articles. We shall look at the reasons why people love such posts. There are three specific reasons for the same.

  • Specific number: The reader knows how much time he will have to spend on the post.

  • Scanning is easy: The sub-headers allow the people to scan through the post and get the central idea quickly.

  • Invoke curiosity: This is a countdown. People are curious to know which item tops the list and why.

  This is not a tough list to make. You can find usually a dozen posts for each topic. One way of garnering interest is to make your list bigger or include an odd figure. Adding visuals to the post increases the viewership. Presenting the information in the right format is important. Each list should have an introduction, list, and finally a conclusion.

  2. Guides have their importance

  Guides can attract a lot of traffic because of various reasons. People who wish to go deep into the subject would love to read these “Ultimate Guides”. They would love to understand the concept behind the project, the working, the advantages and disadvantages, and reasons why a particular product is better than the others. You can incorporate all this information in a guide. The best aspect of writing a guide is that you need not limit your word count. The main objective is to make customers fully aware of the product or services. The following tips can be helpful.

  • Choosing the right topic is important. You have to define the scope as well. Having a topic such as “The Guide to Successful marketing” can well become a novel.

  • The layout is an essential aspect as well. A professional writer will be able to present the subject matter in the right sequence.

  • Designs and images should form an important aspect as well. Choosing the right kind of images is vital. The images should complement the content in a big way.

  • Promotion is the key. This is true in every aspect. People should know that you have this product. Otherwise, you will not have a standing in the market.

  3. Infographics work as well

  There is a difference in an Infographic and a guide. A guide is a comprehensive work whereas an Infographic is at best a teasing content. You have to make the content go viral. Hence, the presentation should have a healthy sense of humor as well. Let us list out the important points to note in an Infographic.

  • The topic should be a current one and be of interest to people.

  • Researching is essential.

  • You need to have great pictures in the Infographic. In fact, pictures alone should be able to convey the message.

  • Promotion is vital.

  4. Influence the influencer

  A high profile influencer can do wonders to your post. One link from such an influencer can result in hundreds of links from his followers. How do you make this happen? Let us look at the procedure that could help you to influence the influencer.

  • Your content should be good to impress the influencer.

  • Make a list of influencers you can target.

  • Choose a couple of them at a time.

  • Follow every letter that he or she says.

  • You will attain a certain level of popularity.

  • Share your results with the influencer and thank him / her for influencing your posts.

  • Present the information in an attractive manner.

  • Include the solution and show how to achieve it as well.

  Final thoughts

  You have just gone through a comprehensive guide on how to build backlinks. Use this information to build up quality content and acquire backlinks from authority and reliable websites. This can go a long way in improving your SEO rankings.