If you have a website and want traffic from search, you need to consistently secure good links from relevant websites. It means you need to know how to build backink for SEO. Link building requires not only your content, but also social skills, communication skills, persistence, and creativity.
You will learn:
- Basic information about backlinks.
- How to check your backlink profile with useful tools.
- Link-building strategies for your content marketing.
You’re building a business online, and chances are that you want to compete online for many years to come. If you want to do this, then you need to carefully choose the strategies you’re going to use. SEO consists of a lot of parts, and backlinks play a huge role.
You should know how to build backlinks for SEO. In this article, you will know more about backlinks and get to know the best strategies to enhance your backlinks profile.
The fundamentals of building backlinks
The basic information about backlinks
There are 200 known Google ranking factors and backlink counts as one of the most important one among them. Eventhough Google algorithms no longer rely solely on the number of backlinks to rank websites in search results. Experts still agree that backlinks are critical for conquering SEO.
Your backlinks are your reputation. The more backlink you have, the higher ranking you can reach. But here’s the thing, link building is not easy work and it requires a long-term commitment.
In fact, they found that 94% of all online content gets zero backlinks. So if you can enrich yourself with backlink knowledge and earn as many backlinks as you can, you will rank high on the SERPs.
Link building is often referred to as off-page SEO. It is the processing of securing backlinks from external websites to your own. The idea here is to capitalize on the fact that search engines use links to navigate and crawl the web.
However, you must be aware that link building when used as the single ranking strategy is probably not the best move. It is most effective when done hand-in-hand with other online marketing activities such as content marketing, social media, and paid search.
Another benefit of link building is the increase of brand awareness and establishment of authority in your industry. Producing relevant, helpful content for readers shows your expertise on the topic and will help build your name as an expert.
Find high-quality backlinks:
Earning high-quality backlinks is probably the most challenging part of SEO.
Not all backlinks are equal. Quality matters just as much as quantity when it comes to backlinks. Imagine one of the pages on your website has a backlink from 2 web pages on different external domains:
- Page A has 200 backlinks
- Page B has 20 backlinks.
If these 2 pages were about the same topic, Page A would likely rank higher than Page B. This is because Page A would be more authoritative due to the fact that it has 10 times as many links.
Overall, backlinks must have these below characteristics to be valuable.
- Authoritative: It makes sense that links from big brand websites have more domain authority than links from small local businesses. For example, a link from a page on CNN is valuable because CNN is an authoritative website. Lesser-known websites have less authority. Websites with a clean and respectable profile, such as government and educational websites, and in most cases international news and magazine sites, are also precious assets to acquire backlinks from.
- Relevant: This means that the referring page tackles a similar topic or niche as yours. If your technology company’s homepage gets a backlink from a blog post on “how to cook,” this would not be seen as a relevant or quality backlink.
- Unique: You will get an edge if the site refers to you but not your competitors.
- Natural: The link is not sponsored, or the anchor text is not branded or spammy. Thus, the referring page has a natural number of links on it.
Understand your situation – Using a backlink checker tool.
What is a backlink checker?
Regardless of where you stand, it’s essential to learn more about the many backlink tools that are helping other marketing professionals generate positive results for their search engine rankings.
Before building backlinks, you need a backlink checker to discover your current backlink profile. After running your backlink-building strategies, you need a backlink checker to continue tracking your performance.
Top 5 tools:
BacklinkGap
Explore your backlink profile with Backlinkgap is what you need. BacklinkGap will give you tons of backlink data: new & lost backlinks, number of backlinks, friendship score, total referring domain, etc. You can also know your backlink types, attributes, and platform types.
With free access, you can understand the broken link, identify spammy websites, manage disavowed backlinks, export reports, and so on.
If you want to keep monitoring your backlinks, BacklinkGap provides you a feature to do so. You can check the data monthly, annually and sort it out with tag management.
Generally, BacklinkGap supports you all the way through your backlink-building journey with free access.
SEMRush
SEMrush gives you a lot of important information about any URL you enter, including the backlinks pointing to the site.
It also allows you to check the types of backlinks to your site. Knowing this can help you know if a link will add any weight to your domain. You can monitor the ratio of nofollow to follow links, so that you can focus link-building efforts on more dofollow links.
Their website backlink checker allows you to check where competitors get their dofollow links. You can also discover relevant industry sources and find out if websites are interested in referring to your content.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs has a comprehensive backlink database, giving you up-to-date data. In the tool’s free version, Ahrefs shows you the top 100 backlinks, top 5 anchors, and top 5 pages.
Ahrefs can help you grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your backlinks. This backlink analysis tool provides you with all the options you might need to track your backlinks and keywords.
Majestic SEO
This wonderful tool has one of the largest indices of backlinks. It lets you easily find the backlinks. It has a backlink history tool that fetches all backlinks for a given domain, URL or even sub-domains.
It can provide a backlink discovery growth rate for rival domains. One can compare up to five domains simultaneously.
Majestic has one of the the largest link index database and a specialized backlink analysis tool. It has two link indexes, including Historic Index and Fresh Index. The historic index gets refreshed monthly while the fresh index gets refreshed daily.
Moz
Moz Pro is the suite of SEO tools from Moz, includes their Link Explorer tool.
Link Explorer can give you a detailed link profile of your site, which you can compare with the profile of up to 4 competitors. This lets you figure out what they might be doing differently from you. It also has a handy tool called Link Intersect, where you can see which sites are linking to your competitors but not to you. These sites are great ones to target for building links.
6 link building strategies for your business:
There are lots and lots of ways to get links. The right tactics for you depend on the resources you have at your disposal as well as the industry that you’re in.
#1. Create a Linkable Assets
If you want people to link to your website, you need something on your site worth linking to. It means you need some linkable assets. These can be blog posts, videos, software, quizzes, surveys, or even press releases.
Press releases, when crafted effectively, can serve as powerful linkable assets. By distributing well-crafted press releases to relevant media outlets, you can generate valuable backlinks and increase your website’s visibility.
A comprehensive guide like ‘22 Best Press Release Examples [For All Occasions]‘ can provide helpful tips to create effective press releases.
#2. Become a Source for Other Publishers
By using your expertise and unique data, you can become a source for other bloggers and journalists.
Every time someone quotes you, you’ll earn a backlink. But high-domain authority backlinks aren’t the only benefit of this tactic. You’ll also increase your brand awareness and drive referral traffic to your website by becoming a trusted source.
You can create content that suits people’s search intent, for example, an ultimate guide. An ultimate guide is a content designed to be the best, most comprehensive resource on a given topic. It covers enough information that you don’t need to go elsewhere to learn more about that subject. These Ultimate Guides attract inbound backlinks because they help bloggers and journalists reference a concept they mention.
#3. Guest Blogging
Guest posting, most especially for authoritative sites in your industry, builds your reputation online in a big way.
Guest blogging is the process of approaching other websites to see if they’ll publish a piece of content that you write on their blog. This is a great way of getting your name out there, making your content available to new readers, and winning increased online visibility.
As guest blogging became an increasingly common tactic, it became increasingly automated, and the posts’ quality declined considerably. While it’s often an effective way to earn links using high-quality content, Google has cracked down on marketers who abuse this tactic with low-quality content and over-optimized anchor text.
#4. Use The Moving Man Method
The Moving Man Method is similar to broken link building. This method has 3 steps.
First, you need to find web pages, resources or businesses that are outdated, rebranded or recently changed names. Then, find the sites that are still linking to these outdated resources. Finally, you email people to let them know that they’re relating to something that’s out of date. The solution you give them is linking to your blog. You get backlinks, and they can fix their sites.
#5. Reclaim Unlinked Mentions
Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions is probably the easiest, quickest way to build high-quality backlinks.
You’ll notice sometimes the author hasn’t included a link back to your website when they mention your brand, product, or service. That’s when you can send them a quick note, asking for a proper link attribution. This also allows the publisher to give their readers a better experience, letting them click through and learn more about the brand mentioned. It’s a win, win.
#6. Blog and Forum Comments
Everybody finds themselves turning to the blogs they follow for information, but sometimes readers want or need something more than what the post has to offer. This is where you step in.
Find blogs/topics that cover your industry, whether directly or by posting on some of the products and (or) services that form part of your own. Don’t spam your links on the comment sections everywhere unless you want to receive a penalty from Google.
To get the most out of comment backlinks, it’s essential to approach the practice more as a public relations exercise rather than an SEO discipline. It is much better to link to a particular page on your site that is most relevant to the discussion at hand or include your business name on the comment.
TL;DR
Building a backlink profile is an art. A quality and healthy backlink profile consist of inbound links from many different website types who are passing PageRank with pure intentions. As a result, knowing how to build backlink for SEO is essential.
The 6 strategies listed above can help you a lot when building backlinks, such as creating linkable assets, becoming a source for others publishers, doing guest blogging, using the Moving Man Method, reclaiming unlinked mentions, and commenting on blogs and forums.
Among the top 5 backlink checkers, we recommend you to use BacklinkGap to support you in discovering and monitoring your backlink profile. It provides you with a lot of features to keep track of your backlinks and is free for your business.