Backlinks are considered one of the most important ranking factors in search engine optimization. Major search engines, like Google, treat backlinks as votes of authority and trustworthiness of a website. When a website passes a link to another, it’s like telling its audience, “Hey, I trust this source. You should check it out.”
By definition, a backlink is an inbound link or a link from another website to yours. Getting a high-quality backlink can be challenging, but it is achievable. Fortunately, there are many ways to build a website’s backlink profile.
Today, we’ve rounded up the top 8 clever ways to gain the maximum benefits of your backlinks.
- Create and Promote High-Value Content
One way to keep the backlinks coming to your site is by creating valuable content. This means content with the purpose of educating, helping, and inspiring your audience. This type of content is not only loved by your audience but also by media, bloggers, or influencers in your industry.
Great content is nothing if no one knows that it exists. Thus, the need to promote it. You can promote it through social media and newsletters. You can also reach out to other bloggers to let them know about its existence. If they find it good, they’ll likely link to your content and even share it to their social media accounts.
It pays off to establish a few good relationships with other bloggers in your niche. It makes sharing your content with a wider audience easier.
- Analyze and Clone Your Competitors’ Prime Backlinks
You may ask, How do I know which keywords work for my business? Well, there are a lot of ways and one of them is by doing competitive analysis. This literally talks about spying on your competitors to know what they’re up to.
This method helps you to see what keywords they are ranking for, where their prime links are coming from, and what strategies are helping them succeed. These details are essential if you want to rank equally or higher than your competitors in SERPs.
You’ll need tools, like Monitor Backlinks, to get a list of your competitors’ best-performing backlinks. The list can help you analyze and clone their backlinking strategy. With some practice, you may be able to outrank your competitors in no time.
- Create a Strong Internal Linking Structure
An internal link is a link from one page of your website to another page that’s also in your website. The fact that this link exists within your site makes it easier to manage. For instance, you can use your preferred anchor text to build links.
Employing a good internal linking network can benefit you in three ways. First, it’s a good way to pass on authority and SEO value from one page to another within your website. Second, it helps users navigate your site easily and lead them to relevant content within your site. Third, it can draw visitors to take action, leading them to your contact page.
While this may be easy to do, take our word of warning. Don’t overdo it if you don’t want your website to look suspicious. According to Matt Cutts, a reasonable amount of internal links per page is below 100.
- Find Strategic Guest Blogging Opportunities
Guest blogging is a popular way to reach a new readership. You can gain more exposure by publishing your content to a popular website with an already established audience.
There are three things to remember when guest posting. First, target popular websites or ones that have high authority in your niche or industry. Second, create unique, high value content for their audience. Third, engage with your new audience by replying to their comments on your post.
For instance, if you offer tree services in Richmond Hill, you can submit guest posts to urban forestry blogs in Canada. That way, you’re not just going to earn backlinks from this article but also acquire new fans.
- Convert Unlinked Brand Mentions to Links
Another tactic is by investigating mentions on social media, forums, or other websites. Check out if someone has mentioned your brand and did not provide a link back to your website.
Use tools like SEMrush or BuzzSumo to find mentions of your brand throughout the web. Inspect for all possible variations of your brand or branded product or service. You may also want to search employee names as prominent ones like your CEO may be featured in an article with no link.
Next, list down all the sites and assess their authority. You can do a manual assessment or use tools like Moz and Ahrefs. Make sure to prioritize reaching out to authoritative sites for maximum benefit.
- Find and Replace Broken Links
Broken links, like error 404, tells the user that the page they are trying to access is unavailable or doesn’t exist. In effect, they cause a bad user experience as well as impede the flow of the link juice throughout one’s site. Eventually, they affect the ranking negatively.
Building a broken links strategy involves contacting the webmaster of a website, letting them know about the broken links in their site, and recommend some link replacement. A webmaster can be the owner, blogger, or developer who maintains the site.
To identify broken links, you can use Check My Links, an extension by Google Chrome, or Broken Link Checker by Ahrefs. Target the sites that are relevant to your industry so you can recommend some valuable resources from your site as replacements.
- Leverage the Power of Infographics
Infographics are a good method to simplify complicated concepts, like research, studies, data, and statistics.
Like guest blogging, creating and distributing infographics is a well-known method in link building. When done right, infographics can drive massive links back to your site with the minimal marketing effort.
A word of caution: Produce infographics that are link-worthy that anyone in your field who sees it will find shareable or linkable.
- Give Interviews or Contribute to Roundup Posts
Interviews are also a good way to get backlinks. Almost every industry has a website that runs an online interview. And if you’re not popular enough to be invited, take the initiative to contact them. Tell them that you’d like to be interviewed and convince them why they should interview you.
For example, you can find a website that interviews CEOs, founders, and prominent digital marketers in Canada. As the CEO of a company that provides internet marketing services in Toronto, you’d like to be interviewed as well and contribute your knowledge and expertise in the field.
On the other hand, you can also contribute to roundup posts. Blogs that run roundup posts usually link back to the featured individual.
Your backlink profile plays a vital role in search engine rankings. It’s not just about the quantity, but rather, the quality of the backlinks you get. More so, it’s not just about earning quality links. It’s also about the experience you create for users.
With these carefully chosen link-building strategies, we hope to help strengthen your backlink profile and improve your ranking in the search engines.
