Gone are the days when link building was easy and simple.
All you had to do was to write a number of articles, submit them to a website and then get the external link back to your site.
This easy method doesn’t work anymore now.
In order to receive a high page rank on Google, you now need to build the right inbound website link, or you never know what Google might end up doing!
It is a known fact that in order to move your website to the top of the Google search results page, you have to build plenty of high quality backlinks.
But the challenge is to find sites with high reputation and credibility to link to your site.
Even after you find such a website, how can you actually get them to add your link without paying them?
You know that these links control the web world and there is no way that your website can survive without these links.
Building these backlinks or getting one is a critical method, to say the least.
But do not worry, we’ve got you covered.
Here’s everything you need to know about how to build or get quality backlinks to your website. But for that, you need to know what backlinks are.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are nothing but incoming links to a certain website.
These links help the search engines to analyze essential factors like popularity, trust level, the authority that your site has in a particular niche etc.
High quality backlinks from websites that have higher authority will help you to achieve higher ranking in search engine results, or commonly known as SERPs.
Irrespective of how your website is designed that promotes your business or product or service, the online ranking of your website is absolutely important.
In order to make you understand this better, let us give you an example.
For example, you visit a very posh locality which has high-end stores that have established themselves in the market. These are the websites on the internet that have credibility and high authority.
And then you start a new store on the same street. This new store is like a new website that has recently been launched and does not have a lot of traffic.
Now, obviously you would want more customers to visit your newly opened shop, and that is why you will be looking for free publicity.
So what you do is you put up a banner or an advertisement in front of an established shop that would promote your shop.
When customers will visit the high-end shop, they will see that banner or ad and might visit your shop too. This is how slowly more customers will start visiting your shop.
In this case, that banner or advertisement or billboard whatever you had put are the backlinks on those high authority websites.
These websites which hold authority in the particular niche are very established and receive a huge amount of organic traffic, without having to put any efforts for that.
When users visit these websites, there are high chances that they might click on the backlinks to your website and be redirected to your website.
Google’s algorithm is such that it sees these websites as highly trustworthy. This is why backlinks are so important for any new website on the block.
Ways To Get High Quality Backlinks Like a Pro?
Coming to the most important part of the article, now let us see how these backlinks are built or generated.
Now that you have a clear understanding of what backlinks actually are, you will understand the next points better.
1. First, understand what Google actually wants:
The first thing you have to do when you are trying to generate traffic through backlinks is to understand Google’s policies when it comes to various SEO tools.
This understanding will help you to shape your online presence and your search engine rankings ultimately.
Google likes to believe that there is always some more information out there than the one you have covered.
So your mission should be to organize information for your readers at one place and help them access that. If you start understanding what ideally customers and buyers want, you won’t even have to resort to hype to sell your product.
If your ultimate goal is to build backlinks without getting penalized by Google, you have to adhere to and work closely with Google’s missions and guidelines to achieve that mission.
You have to see to it that your blog or website is well organized in terms of content and that your blog provides useful information to the other sites that you want to link your blog too.
2. Do proper marketing of your articles:
Article marketing has been one of the most effective ways to generate quality backlinks to your site for a long time now.
If you market all your articles well, it will help you go a long way in getting backlinks to your blog.
However, there are some factors that you have to keep in mind if you plan to get backlinks through article marketing.
Firstly, make sure that you are doing the article marketing only on relevant websites.
For example, if your website is an SEO company, then you should particularly target websites which deal in the SEO niche.
You also cannot undermine the importance of using anchor texts if you plan to get backlinks through article marketing. The absence of a proper anchor text will make your link completely useless.
You should also make sure that you target only reputed and high authority article websites that have already established high rankings in search engines.
3. Your social networking profiles on various platforms:
You probably have no idea how useful this method can be because it is so underrated and underused.
Social networking sites and other bookmarking sites tend to have tremendously high page rankings on the search engines.
This ranking will inevitably follow your account. This will help you in getting a lot of high quality backlinks to your website if you make proper use of social bookmarking and social networking sites.
A lot of social networking sites enable you to add links to your website in your bio itself. Facebook and Instagram are few such sites.
4. Proper utilization of press release websites:
If you can properly use press release websites, you can effectively get a lot of high quality backlinks from them.
These press release websites are continuously providing content to other smaller and newer websites, and these get easily picked up by other news websites.
Backlinking on such press release websites will give you more exposure and further quality backlinks.
One thing that you have to keep in mind though is that when you are trying to make the best use of press releases, you have to provide titles to your own articles that should be newsworthy and catchy enough.
5. Guest blogging:
Although Google does not want to see the guest posting, a lot of people still do it.
The issue Google has is that guest posting makes the articles of low quality and do not comply with Google’s guidelines.
But if you can make sure that the guest posts are of high quality and targeted towards the right kind of audience, it can work as an effective backlink building tool.
For that, you first need to find and get the best guest blog spot that you can. Then you have to research for and identify websites on the internet that will take your guest posts into account over other guest posts from your competitors in the market.
For this, you need to make an advanced search on Google and use the author’s name and the word ‘guest post’ in the quotation marks. Do not forget to include the author’s home domain in the post.
6. Make sure your articles are actionable enough:
Blogs that are written well and are informative and properly marketed too can generate you lots of high quality backlinks.
But if you want to make the most of your backlinks and want more and more users to come back to your site, just writing informative articles will not be enough.
You have to give them a little more. This means that your article or blog post should have enough actionable tips and points of action.
For this, you can write step by step guides, or DIY guides or something in list format. This will make it easy for users to read and follow and then take an action as asked in the blog post.
7. Blog a lot on various third-party websites:
The best place to publish well constructed and informative posts is on other websites or third party websites.
Even the third party site will have its own benefits and advantages. You just have to make sure to create content for the right place and the right time.
These sites that you use as a third party are generally leaders in their own niches. Sites like LinkedIn and Medium act as great third-party sites to put your content on.
8. Publish various case studies:
When you are writing informative articles, it is best that you should check and research for it properly. This will allow you to present your content backed by proof and statistics.
That will keep readers hooked to your story. And this is why case studies are such big hits and draw so much traffic.
What Makes A Backlink High Quality One?
Not all backlinks are same, some will generate no traffic at all, while others will boost your business to a great extent.
Those are the high quality backlinks. But how can you say if a backlink is of high quality? Here’s how.
1. It should be from a relevant source:
Search engines always focus on providing relevant search results on its pages. So you have to take this factor into account when Google is evaluating backlinks.
Relevant content is actually one of the most important factors that determine the page ranking of different sites or blogs.
Now, a backlink can be ‘relevant’ on many levels. They are
- What search engines focus on while looking for relevance are
- The overall relevance of the site that is being linked
- The relevance of the specific webpage on which the link is placed
- The relevance level of the content that is around where the link is placed.
2. It should be from a trusted source:
It is obvious that a high quality backlink would be coming from a high quality website only.
High quality websites also have a high trust from the readers. To determine how trustworthy a site is, search engines use a set of seed sites, which they know that they are of high quality (like Wikipedia, BBC etc.) and these are very difficult to get links from.
The more trustworthy a site is, the higher the quality of its backlinks are.
3. Backlinks which send traffic:
People often forget this aspect of backlinks, even though it is one of the most important ones.
Even before search engines had started to use this aspect of backlinks as a factor in their respective algorithms, the original purpose of links, in the first place, was to add value and relevance to a webpage by directing users to other resources that are relevant to the particular topic that page is talking about.
Users still click these links often because their trust has been established already. This makes that particular website highly visited and hence brings traffic to the backlinks as well.
To Wrap Up:
Having known everything about backlinks, you now know how important it is for your business, especially if yours is a new website.
Knowing how to build a backlink is as important as having backlinks. Now that you know all the essential ways to build high quality backlinks, go on and market your new website in the best possible way.