Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors that Google uses in their search engine. Typically, the more quality backlinks a site has, the more authoritative it is and this can help significantly in ranking for keywords. Although sites that are years old gain some natural backlinks over time, many new sites struggle with getting backlinks and this slows down their SEO campaigns. In this we’ll explore the best strategies blogs can use to gain quality backlinks to their site. The best strategies include:
Internal links:
Internal links are extremely important for ranking blog posts and it’s an easy way to get started with getting more backlinks for your site. With internal links, you can start by link back to relevant blog posts in any of your existing blogs. This will help you rank higher for your existing pages in addition to improving the navigation and the user experience of your site.
By adding more internal links in your post, Google can discover your new blog posters faster and index them. You can start adding internal links to your articles by looking through your existing content and finding related topics. Make sure to optimize the anchor text to give your readers and Google an indication of what the internal link is directing to. For example, if you use the anchor text “content templates”, the user should see a blog on content templates when they click your link.
Guest posting:
Guest posting is an extremely effective way to get backlinks, especially for new sites. In fact, a study from uSERP showed that guest posting is among the top three link building tactics used by SEO experts. Guest posting allows you to write relevant and beneficial content for the readers on another site. Typically, this works best if the site you are guest posting on is in the same niche as you. When you write a guest post, you’ll have the opportunity to include backlinks to your website. This is a very simple way to get started with getting backlinks because it doesn’t require much technical expertise.
With guest posting, you should aim for sites that have a higher domain authority than yours. Getting backlinks from those sites will increase your domain significantly if you have a new or low authority site. You can find guest posting opportunities by searching for “guest post + your niche” in Google. This will likely bring up results with many sites that are accepting guest posts. You can email these sites and ask if you can pitch them on guest posts. Make sure you don’t spam these sites because it can affect your email deliverability.
Broken links
Finding broken links on a high DR site is a great opportunity to potentially get a link to your site. With broken link building, you find links in an internal blog post that no longer link to an actual blog post. These broken links worsen the user experience and you can use these gaps to get links to your site. You can write a new resource that is similar to the old backlink and email the site owners to add your backlink. By providing value for the site owner, you are far more likely to get a backlink in comparison to sending a generic email where you just ask for a link.
There are several tools that you can use to find broken link opportunities. The most popular one is using Ahrefs’ broken link feature to find broken links on sites of interest. You can start by targeting high domain authority sites in your niche and find a couple of broken link opportunities. After finding the opportunities, you can send an email asking them to replace the link with your new resource.
Infographics
Infographics are great tools to get backlinks to your site. When writing an in-depth content piece, it can get very boring for a reader to go through hundreds if not thousands of words of text. Infographics help readers visualize the content being conveyed on the blog and it incentivizes them to share it on their own sites. Typically, infographics have a few statistics on a given topic and your readers sharing them will get them to generate backlinks back to your site.
There are many tools you can use to create infographics and a lot of the options are free. Some guidelines you should follow when making an infographic include:
- Visually appealing: Using brighter colors and colors that are consistent with your site’s design is a great way to make an infographic more visually appealing. The more appealing the infographic is, the more it will catch the reader’s attention and increase the likelihood of it being shared.
- Uses statistics: Using statistics is a key driver of getting backlinks. If your infographic is just visually appealing, it won’t generate as much backlinks in comparison to also having statistics
Writing statistics posts
Writing a statistics post on your industry or trends in your industry is a great way to attract more backlinks to your site. In a typical blog, the writer typically includes a few stats to go along with internal links to their own blog posts. Statistics posts allow you to round up all of the statistics related to a certain topic or industry. For example, if your company is in email marketing, you can make a statistics round post about email marketing open rates, deliverability, conversion rates, etc. As your statistics post ages, you’ll gain more and more natural backlinks to your site.
For your stats to look visually appealing and easy to digest for readers, you can also create pie charts. This will help in helping your site attract more backlinks. Before writing any statistics post, it’s crucial to do keyword research to get an idea for how many people are searching for your keyword. Spending time writing a lengthy statistics post only to have little to no organic views is a waste of your time. If your industry or topic doesn’t have as much search volume for statistics posts, try adjacent keywords that are relevant to your industry. For example, if you’re in the blogging niche, you can write statistics posts on content marketing, email marketing, info products, etc.
