11 Essential Tricks to Create Backlinks
There are many SEO strategies, and honestly, there is no one ideal. Even so, we must implement them in a way that helps us improve the positioning of our page in search engines, also taking into account off-page SEO techniques. Off-page SEO forms a fundamental part of SEO positioning since it focuses on optimization outside the website, which includes the external links used to direct the user to your website.
In addition to the content, keywords, and structure of the web page, which are the essential elements of on-page SEO, search engines pay special attention to the links from other websites that bring traffic to your page. These links are called backlinks.
As backlinks are the most challenging factor in SEO, we have prepared a complete guide to explain the best strategies to obtain quality backlinks. Let us begin!
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks are links that come from other Internet sites and that direct users to your website. Essentially, they appear in the form of text, an image, or a button. Even so, it must be taken into account that not all backlinks are good.
A backlink is much more than a link. This must come from a reliable, relevant, and authoritative page if you want to provide high-quality content to your readers. It is Google’s algorithm that also values good links and usually gives priority to pages that have them.
To obtain high-quality backlinks, you must pay attention to the following aspects:
- Relevance: If a veterinarian has backlinks from two sites, one for animals and one for mobile phones, Google will rate the first one as more relevant. Because? Because a visitor is more likely to click on it.
- Authority: Although this is not always the case, strong pages usually give more authority than those that are not very visible. However, make sure that a page is trustworthy and has internal backlinks that also contribute to the authority.
- Quality: Many parameters determine the quality of a page, but it is best to focus on domain trust, popularity, reputation, and more. Try to avoid sites with suspicious or illegal content.
More factors determine the shape of a high-quality backlink and some of them are going to be explained in the next part. Now that you know what a backlink is and how to recognize one that is worth it, let’s see how to obtain it effectively.
1. Use tools to avoid unwanted mentions
There are many tools you can use to view the pages that contain the link to the content of your website. You can take advantage of free applications like Google Alerts, which provide detailed information about blogs, social networks, and other digital platforms where your brand is mentioned. This information will help you find out if the author of those publications has included the link to your site when mentioning you in their text.
If the author has not included the link, you can send them an email and ask them to add the appropriate link to your product or service. In this way, the author will provide a better experience to his readers and you will have the opportunity to improve SEO positioning. It is also recommended to request link attribution in publications or interviews you have recently done.
2. Try to get contextual links
What are contextual links and why are they so important?
Contextual links are those found in the Read More or Recommended Articles sections. If an author thinks your content is great and wants to recommend it to their readers, the algorithm will consider it trustworthy. In this way, your SEO positioning could be significantly improved.
If you want your link to be in a floating section of the website, you can contact the page administrator, send them your content, and ask them to add the links to the relevant category.
3. Get the link in listings
When we want to buy a product or use some services, we usually search for information about them on the Internet. The articles that give us the most confidence are those that recommend The 10 Cheap Video Games You Should Buy, for example.
You can use some tools to check which are the most searched keywords every month – best video games, for example – and start looking for the web pages where you could get mentions and valuable links. Try to find pages that are dedicated to the same (or similar) branch of industry as yours, because this way you could reinforce your brand, increase the sale of your product or service, and obtain a high-quality backlink.
Don’t forget to include a paragraph that explains the reasons why your product or service deserves to be mentioned on the page when sending an email to the administrator. List its most notable features and benefits that will convince consumers to buy it.
4. Get links on forums
Although it doesn’t sound very likely, a technique like this can give results. Many people consult forums when they don’t know how to solve a problem or how to find a worthwhile product or service. That said, forums can be a perfect place to link to your brand.
Without forgetting, you have to find a forum that is related to your business. Register to the forum, find the relevant topic, and write a detailed comment on the topic – and don’t forget to add the link! For example, if the forum topic is How to find reliable and cheap web hosting? your answer could be like this:
“If you want to find reliable and cheap web hosting, I recommend trying Hostinger . It is a platform suitable for small and medium-sized businesses that want their website to be fast, reliable, and with impeccable performance . There are options including shared hosting, WordPress hosting, dedicated hosting, and many more.”
One of the most well-known and tested forums is Quora. In addition to being a reputable platform, it has a large number of visits, which will increase the traffic to your website.
5. Make your site become a referral source for other publications
We must not forget the content of your website, it has to be detailed, well-developed, and contain abundant information on the topic of your website. In this way, your website can become a very useful source for journalists, bloggers, and writers who publish their works on the Internet.
If each of them mentions you in their post, you will get many backlinks that will help you promote your brand and take your site’s authority to the next level. If you’re not sure how to do this, subscribe to HARO (Help a Reporter Out). HARO is a free tool that connects web pages with journalists looking for field information that will help them write a text.
6. Write definitive guides on different topics
The definitive guides and complete guides are the most valued resources by bloggers and journalists who do their research online. For this reason, it is recommended to write articles that contain detailed information on a given topic as this is one of the best ways to get a good backlink. For example, The definitive guide to writing an article that improves SEO positioning.
Offering detailed and complete content keeps visitors from leaving your website to search for more information elsewhere on the Internet. This also influences SEO and is part of the practices to improve the positioning of your page in search engines.
7. Update content you wrote a long time ago
Your old content can be very valuable when it comes to obtaining backlinks. If you find a blog you wrote a long time ago that already has a lot of relevant backlinks, consider yourself lucky. This means that you can improve the article and provide the freshest, most current content, enriched with the most relevant information. When your content is ready, you should inform bloggers who are linked to your content about the latest updates that deserve to be seen and promoted.
An action like this will cause your content to be published on social networks and other platforms. This will improve your SEO and increase organic traffic to your page.
8. Use images and infographics to earn more mentions
Visual content is convenient for several reasons. In addition to enriching your website and making it more attractive, images and infographics are essential to obtain more links. There are several ways to represent your content through images, including tables, graphs, diagrams, screenshots, photos, and much more.
9. Consider relevant directories
Many internationally recognized directories are advantageous for SEO. TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google My Business are the best-known, but other platforms could be relevant to your niche. These networks are valuable to improve your local SEO strategy and to help your potential customers find your company more easily.
Be careful with directories that tend to provide only spam, these can damage the reputation of your page. Do thorough research before getting mentions in a directory and consider only authoritative ones, like the ones we mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph.
10. Don’t forget to repair broken links
Your page must provide reliable, high-quality content, and it is necessary to avoid potential problems that can arise due to broken links or dead pages (404). From time to time, you should use the tools to identify the websites that contain a broken backlink and fix the errors in time. Potential solutions include:
- Replace the broken link with another relevant resource on your website.
- If it is the page not found (404) issue, recreate the article that used to be there or send the new content link to the website administrator and suggest that they put it in place of the broken link.
11. Find low-quality links and replace them with your own
Don’t think that websites mention only pages with great content. Many times you can see that some backlinks do not provide detailed or relevant information, and if you think you have something better to offer, this is your chance to present yourself – contact the website administrator and tell them your idea.
Several tools can help you find content similar to yours that has backlinks – Ahrefs Site Explorer or Content Explorer – and use them to identify the perfect place to put your link.
Last conclusions
Getting a valuable backlink doesn’t take much time, but it does require your attention and a lot of work. As you have seen, many strategies can be applied, but you have to know how to choose the right ones for your site – try them and see which one works best for you.
