As a website owner, you need organic traffic to be directed towards your page to grow your business and maximize your reach. One of the best ways to do this is through backlinking.
Backlinks or inbound links are like votes from other websites that provide links to your page. These “votes” tell search engines about the legitimacy of your website and help it rank higher. The higher the number of backlinks there are for your website, the higher Google and other search engines will rank it.
A 2018 study of 2 million websites by Ahref revealed that nearly 91% of all pages that do not get organic traffic from Google is because they don’t have backlinks.
Last year, general retail companies saw an increase in their sales during the COVID-19 lockdown in France. Carrefour.fr was the leading general retailer with the highest number of 8300 backlinks to its website, and this accounted for 8% of the overall traffic it garnered.
According to Search Engine Watch, quality backlinks and great content are two of the most important factors that Google considers to rank your website.
Read ahead to discover some of the best ways to build quality backlinks to help your website get maximum traffic and a higher rank by search engines.
1. Support Other Blogs
Blogs are social tools that can help you build a healthy network with other bloggers. If you link other websites that have good content, some of them are bound to do the same for you.
Internally linking to other websites is a great way to share more knowledge that you can’t include in your blog. This way, your readers will have a good experience reading your blogs.
2. Create Good Content
One of the best ways to produce more backlinks to your website is to frequently put up quality blog content that other bloggers want to link to. You would never link to a blog that offers repetitive, low-quality information, would you? Try and envision yourself in their shoes, so you know how to appeal to them better.
3. Guest Blog Posts
Guest blog posts help reach out to other websites so that they can post your article. The key is to write a quality blog post and offer it to sites whose interests align with yours. If a blog agrees to post it, it must provide a backlink to your blog so it can drive traffic towards it.
4. Newsjack Posts
Newsjack posts are those that build on a famous new story in a way to increase one’s sales. If a news story breaks and you are the first blogger to write something about it, you’ll be at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) due to your blog’s fresh content according to Google’s algorithm.
This will result in other bloggers linking to your post when they write content related to that story.
5. Conduct Original Studies
Originality is always appreciated regardless of the subject matter of the content. With so much content on the web, it is hard to stand out and reel people in. But one of the best ways to do so is through an original study to create content that will impress readers and encourage more backlinks.
Of course, conducting original studies is no walk in the park, but you can start with surveys. Select the subject matter for which you would like to collect data and create a google form with relevant questions. Then send a link to your target audience to get original data.
The fact that you have original data published on your website, bloggers will have to link back to your site to use it.
6. Create Valuable Infographics
People always seem to be running out of time in today’s world therefore always looking for a way to get things done quicker, that’s why they love infographics. They are visual and easy to browse through, so content marketers also love to share them, increasing their usage to 65% in the last four years.
You can create an original infographic that will generate backlinks if other bloggers use them.
7. Create Other Visual Content
With more appeal of content in the visual form, charts, graphs, etc., have become extremely popular. They engage the readers as they can follow them more than blogs without illustrations.
However, these take some time and money to create, and if you do this, then people who want to skip the effort will link to yours and drive traffic.
8. Create Powerful Content And Get Published
With so much competition in the industry, you can surely stand out if industry publications publish your content. It can help you improve your brand credibility, visibility, and earn inbound links from authorized sources.
Before you reach out to the press or publications, create a page on your website that is solely dedicated to the story you want to get published, which they can link back to. Be as impressive as you can be through your email to them and show how valuable your piece can be.
9. Create Op-Ed Articles
We all have opinions that we would like to share, but they should clearly express our point of view for them to be persuasive. With an exciting and powerful op-ed piece, you can reach out to many people and garner recognition in the industry, which would lead to backlinks to your site.
Once you publish your piece and it turns out to be a success, you can reach out to popular e-newspapers and e-magazines to get published and get authoritative inbound links.
10. Try Co-Marketing
Who says you can’t succeed by working with your competition? Fact is, if you create partnerships with other brands to promote some content or products, you will get more links with less work by leveraging the reach of the other company.
According to a 2018 study, 54% of the companies revealed that more than 20% of their total revenue was due to partnerships!
11. Write Testimonials
It may sound illogical to write reviews or testimonials of products or services related to your industry but trust us; there is a silver lining to it.
It can help SEO and quality backlinking to your website because even though it may feel like you are helping your competition, they will link you back and improve your website’s ranking.
A small review can help you big time!
12. Ask For Reviews
Good reviews are like testaments of your work to convince people of your legitimacy. Reviews and testimonials by your customers, analysts, and industry experts with inbound links will not only promote traffic to your page, but their feedback will help you improve as well.
13. Recognize Broken Links
It is possible that when other websites link to yours, the links may be old or broken because you update or alter your website over time. But, you can still use these backlinks by updating them.
Scan for broken links using tools like Screaming Frog, Link Juice Recovery Tool, etc., and inform the webmasters of the correct link to replace the broken one.
14. Keep An Eye Out For Your Competitors Backlinks
It is beneficial to get high-value links by monitoring your competitions’ backlinks. Weekly or monthly research on this can give opportunities that you can take advantage of.
Analysis tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, etc., can give a list of your competitors’ backlinks that you can use to see which posts get inbound links and from where. You can use this information to create similar subject matter blogs that can earn you links from these websites.
15. Set Social Signals
An effective backlink strategy and SEO optimization technique involve aligning social signals. Social signals inform search engines about your website’s activity level and how it is up to date. The more activity there is on your website, the higher its rank will be.
You do not have to be active on every social platform out there, but the more places you are active on, the better your ranking will be. However, it is normal not to have enough time to engage on various platforms and in that case it is better to choose a few that you can easily manage and update every day at least once.
Another thing to be careful of is that your site’s information aligns with your social profiles. These include brand name, contact number, and address to avoid confusion and alert search engines that your site is updated.
16. Use “Tweet This” Links
The main aim of higher SEO ranks and quality backlinks is to reach out to more people. If you include “Tweet This” frequently in your blogs, people will share it on the social platform and make it visible to a larger audience.
This will result in more visibility in news feeds, search engines, Twitter feeds, etc., and more people will use your content and link to it.
Key Takeaway
There’s no doubt that quality backlinks are hard to build, but they are essential if you want to succeed in the SEO game.
However, having hundreds of backlinks will not matter if they are not of high quality because, as always: quality over quantity! Hence, it is essential to build quality inbound links if you want your website to be ranked higher.
