Your website can’t rank without links! This is a truth that every SEO fully understands. Links continue to remain the number one ranking factor for Google.
You can’t buy links because any link intended to manipulate search results is counted as spam by Google and can result in a Google manually penalizing your site in the search results.
The only way to make people link back to your site is to earn them. Building links by earning them is a penalty-proof action plan for your SEO strategy.
Here are 4 techniques that are extremely effective in building links in 2020 and ahead:
1- Participate in High-Quality Guest Posting
Guest posting still remains the number one link building strategy for most of the SEOs.
Under guest posting, you find websites who are looking for authors to prepare content for them. You approach those webmasters and ask them to allow you to become a contributor on your website. If they accept you then you can start publishing content on their website with a link back to your website.
Please note that guest posting should be done to increase your reputation as an author and genuinely help the readers with the content you are producing. In the process, you earn links. Guest posting is not a way to build anchor text rich links back to your website.
You can find guest posts to publish your article by conducting a Google search. Here are some example search strings:
“Write for us” “your niche”
“Become a contributor” “your niche”
“Guest post for us” “your niche”
“This is a guest post by” “your niche”
A word of caution: Do not carry large scale guest posting campaigns with exact match keyword text because this is a violation of the Google link guidelines and might result in a manual penalty.
2- Spy On Your Competitor Backlinks
Another great way to build links to your website is by spying on your competitor backlinks.
You can use a tool like the free backlink checker by Neil Patel to quickly identify the links your competition has.
Simply enter your competitor’s domain in the search bar and this tool will return all the links your competitor has after sorting them as one link per domain. You will also be able to filter the links on the basis of dofollow and nofollow.
Carefully review all these backlinks and find out the best link opportunities for your website.
3- Conduct Influencer Interviews Or Invite Influencers To Guest Post On Your Blog
You can even network with influencers in your niche via LinkedIn and invite them to guest post on your blog. When influencers will start publishing content on your website then the chances of linking back to your website from their website, social profiles, other websites will also increase.
Identify the best influencers in your niche and approach them for an interview. You can conduct an interview via email. Most of the time, micro-influencers would be happy to give their interviews. Do not forget to send the published link of the interview to the influencers. There are chances that some of the influencers will link back to the interview from their own websites.
4- Use The Skyscraper Method To Produce Quality Content
This is probably the most genuine method of build links and is popularized by Brian Dean of Backlinko.
Under this method, you need to identify the content piece that is ranking on top of Google for keywords related to your business niche. The keyword should be informational in nature.
After identification of content, you need to carefully evaluate those content pieces like their word count, style of writing, use of images and videos, use of linking, use of language, depth of content, etc.
Thereafter, you need to produce content that is 10 times better than the content that is ranking on the first position in Google.
As the last step, you need to email webmasters who are linking to the original content and inform them about this new resource that you have just created. A simple email template that you can use for this task is provided below (as suggested by Brian Dean of Backlinko):
You can take the help of the backlink checker tool in method 2 above to find sites that are linking to the content. Brian Dean was able to build 11 links out of 160 email requests with an 11% success rate.
What’s Next?
Without wasting any more time, start creating backlinks for your website because your competitors are already busy doing this. Earning links is hard but it should be a continuous process. Use the above 4 strategies to earn links in a legit manner that Google approves. Happy link earning!
Also SEE:
Low Quality Vs High Quality Link Profile
Natural Links is What Google is Looking For
Seo Secrets
Checking Whether Your Site is Manually Penalized by Google
How to Write a Reconsideration Request?
Why Paid Links Are a Violation of Webmaster Guidelines
Google Disavow Links Tool
Link Farms
Link Churning
Penguin 2.0 Recovery Guide
What Exactly is a High Quality Backlink?
Link Baiting
Google Search Quality Updates
