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1 Guide to Building Backlinks for Beginners #2-duplicate-1-duplicate-1-duplicate-1

1 Guide to Building Backlinks for Beginners #2-duplicate-1-duplicate-1-duplicate-1

When another site links back to your site, it is called a backlink called incoming or inbound links. Backlinks are like votes for you. But, the quality also determines the weightage of the backlinks. If your backlinks come from sites with higher DA, you get higher weightage. So, both the quality and quantity of backlinks matter. Websites having plenty of backlinks are considered “authoritative,” and the websites are rewarded top rankings on Google. On the flip side, websites with no backlinks do not find a visible place in the SERPs. They remain hidden and buried somewhere on the internet.

 

Table of Content

 

Chapter 1:

Link Building Basics

Chapter 2:

How to Build Links

Chapter 3:

Features of Good Quality Links

Chapter 4:

Using the Best Link Building Tools

 

LINK BUILDING & ESTABLISHING AUTHORITY

 

You may have created content that gives people the answers to their questions and what they may be searching for, but this is not all. However, search engines are looking for something more, which is authority. You can establish authority as you start earning links from authoritative websites. Apart from this, you must work for building your brand and also take care of your audience which will spread your content across the internet.

What Determines Authority?

 

Google looks into the content and the quality of links. Moreover, it also looks at the trustworthiness of the sites. Websites with high trustworthiness will link to other trustworthy sites. On the other hand, spammy sites link with each other.

Now, let’s Consider What Are Links Exactly?

 

Inbound links are known as backlinks or external links. These are HTML hyperlinks pointing from one website to another to comprehend how the internet sees your website. 

Links are like votes which tell about your popularity on the web. Also, high authority links bring you higher authority and enhance your website’s trustworthiness.

Internal links are meant to connect internal pages in the same domain. When a large number of internal links point to a particular page on your site, it tells Google that the page is important. It must be done to point to the right page.

The engines use algorithms for site and page evaluation based on the links.  And search engine algorithms evaluate all those links with Google’s E-A-T concept.

You are What You E-A-T

 

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines are based on the concept of E-A-T — which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Sites without these characteristics are seen as low-quality by search engines. On the other hand, sites with high authority are preferred. E-A-T is becoming highly important as user intent plays the most important role in Google’s characteristics.

A site should reflect expertise, authority, and trustworthiness through all the SEO practices. This is what offers great value to the users.

What is User Intent?

 

“User intent” is the most important thing for the searcher’s query. While the search for “wedding” may not specify the right intent readily. For example, you may not get it if they want to look at the pictures or the breeds or other kinds of information. However, for queries such as “wedding destination in Seattle, WA” the user intent seems to be stronger with the user wanting to train the puppy. Maybe, they are looking for a venue for a destination wedding in Seattle. You have to create content looking at the intent of the prospective users. 

E-A-T and Links to Your Site

 

The more popular and important a site is, the higher is the weightage of the links coming from the site. Wikipedia, for example, has so many types of websites linking to it. This means that this website provides a great deal of expertise with a lot of cultivated authority, and is also highly trusted by the other sites. So, the task you need to carry out is getting links for sites with a high level of authority and trust factor.

Therefore, link building is an essential aspect of optimizing your website for the world wide web. And you need to optimize your site through backlinks focusing on your audience and the search engine. So, such website optimization is referred to as search engine optimization (SEO).

It is vital to start your SEO as a challenging task, especially if you are doing it yourself first.

With a random inquiry from an SEO, you may get all sorts of advice. Few SEOs may tell you about the importance of creating great content and getting natural backlinks from them.

SEOs will ask you to create great content and wait for links to come naturally. Others will insist on strategic link building through targeted email outreach. And the vaguest answer you could get is building links on PBNs. 

Such random solutions only make you more confused. SEO for your website’s optimization is a customized process. So, referring to any single approach as the best choice may not be the right approach. The best method to build backlinks depends on

Your website,

Your resources,

Your business goals

Though everything seems intriguing, things will get more evident in your mind as you scroll down ahead reading the guide. Here is how you can make things simple and very much possible for you. Beginners can spring into action with this.

Link building is required to rank a vast number of Google’s pages. Google notes:

“In general, webmasters like to improve the site ranks as they go for a large number of high-quality sites linking to their pages.”

 

Chapter 1

Link-Building Basics

 

What is Link Building?

 

Link building is a critical methodology and process involving getting links from other websites to your website.

Moreover, link building boosts the “authority” of your pages and your website if it is done as per Google guidelines. These pages rank higher to bring you a higher amount of search traffic.

Two steps ultimately count when linking the building with the proper techniques.

The first step is creating meaningful and link-worthy content. 

Show it to website owners, especially those related to your niche or having relevant reasons to link to it.

Why is Link Building Important?

 

According to Google, links are among the three most important ranking factors of Google. So if you want your website’s pages to rank high in search, you certainly need links.

Google and the other search engines look at links from different sites, credulous sites. These votes help the search engine understand the right page on a given topic, which will rank at the top of the search results.

In general, pages with more backlinks rank higher in the search results. Different studies from several platforms give you a strong correlation between the number of backlinks from good websites and the right amount of organic traffic.

However, you also need to understand all the other aspects. 

Links aren’t the answer to everything:

You may feel vital to building more backlinks than the ranking pages. This is the only way to rank in first place in Google.

However, it is valid only to a certain extent. In reality, there is much more to it.

As we’ve already given a hint, all links are not equal. Moreover, search engines also influence different variables related to ranking pages. The variables will depend on the search queries you want to rank for.

Consider a situation where you’ve built several links to your page, but it is still ranking poorly. In this situation, you need to consider several ranking factors that do not rank well.

These include the Domain rating and the website’s authority linking back to you. Let us ponder deeply on how we will build the links.

 

Chapter 2

How to Build Links?

 

Different link-building tactics and strategies are related to one of these four categories: 

Manual Addition of Links

Asking for Links: Using targeted outreach to website owners to ask for a link.

Buy. Pay a fixed amount in exchange for links.

Earn. Getting organic links from page visitors.

Link Building

1. Manual Addition of Links

This is one of the best ways of getting backlinks. Certain websites let you create your portfolio on the website and also place your links on them. 

How is it done?

Go to a website belonging to your niche and manually place your link there. This is referred to as link addition. It certainly seems easy to do and fruitful: 

      • Social profile creation
      • Business Directory Submissions
      • Blog commenting
      • Social profile creation
      • Community sites
      • Q&A websites such as Quora
      • Forums
      • Job search listing sites.

This method is popularly practiced because the links added this way have little value and weightage from the search engines. In some cases, such links may also be flagged as SPAM. 

The main problem with this link-building method is that if a website has links, it will make your competitors do the right thing. Moreover, you must leverage the various tactics of search engine optimization here. Even if it does not help you in optimization, it will prove highly useful for the online store in several ways. For example, if you place the links on a local forum or a niche website where you can get so many visitors in your area, it helps you build your reputation and gives you more clicks. It is necessary to understand how you can change things as you move down the page.

Let’s elaborate with a few examples:

Business Directories

While working on getting backlinks from business directories, you do not need to move towards listing on a single directory. Moreover, it is crucial to focus on well-reputed business directories giving you a great deal of traffic to give you many visitors. Many business owners want to work for a great deal of time in their field and are also aware of the local business directories helping entrepreneurs get the leads. You need to ensure that you do not add the link in these directories. You will a link from sensible and niche relevant directories giving you a lot of value in putting the site link in a list of random or generic business directories.

Social Profiles

Ensure that you can claim the brand name on several social media sites like Twitter, YouTube,  Instagram, SlideShare & others at the earliest possible time. Otherwise, you may just leave the things as the brand becomes popular. 

Invest your time and effort to work on the most relevant social media sites as they offer you the right means to get a top-class following to promote your business with them. This also helps your business in several ways, even if the links on social profile pages do not have a direct SEO value. There won’t be a sudden improvement in ranking after signing up for a few dozen social networking sites.

Blog Comments

Leaving a meaningful comment on someone’s article is a great way to get on their radar and kickstart a relationship with them (which might lead to all sorts of good things). However, do not just comment on a blogger’s post to put in your link. Go for it spontaneously by adding valuable content that offers value to the bloggers and readers. 

And besides, links from blog comments usually get no-followed (i.e., might not count as “votes”). So if you’re thinking of leaving someone a comment just to add your link there—don’t.

Such examples give you a great idea of how to “add” your links to other websites without being spammy.

If you think of two ways to “add” links to other websites, such as mentions of “web 2.0s” and “bookmarking sites.” These tactics were good about 15 years ago. However, they are not worth spending your time on them today.

2. Asking for Links

 

As the name suggests, this practice of link building pertains to reaching out to website owners who have a website related to your niche. But, you need to give strong reasons to link back to your website. If doing this does not help them in a certain way, why would they do it? This reason can be creating a blog that interests their readers, adds to their work on the website, adds to their reputation, or gives them some kind of benefit. 

You might be wondering how this is exactly done? We’ll enlist some link-building tactics and strategies that will help you get the strong reason why people should give you a link in place of your competitors. There are many ways of doing the same. The table below tells you about various techniques and how they help build backlinks.

 

Guest-blogging It requires the creation of useful and valuable content which interests the readers on their blog.
Link exchanges. Tell the other bloggers to link back to you, especially if they like to give a link to you.
Resource page link building. Show the bloggers top-quality resources matching their present list.
Broken link building. When you find dead links on their website, offer to fix them with useful content on your website.
HARO & journalist requests: Use HARO or other such platforms for offering “expert quotes” for their blogs.
Image link building. Having great image content on your website can be a great asset. Present images to them and ask them to give you credit for using the image.
Unlinked mentions When a website owner mentions your website on their blog or pages, ask them to add a link to it so that it becomes clickable.
Skyscraper technique. In this method, you put forth high quality or even better resources than the ones they’re linking to.
Link inserts They are highly useful in showing them resources with better information on a topic or thing they have just mentioned.
Ego bait Give them positive mentions in your content for building their reputation. This will help them connect to you. Also, it gives them a reason to link back to you.
Case Studies or Testimonials:  If you give positive feedback about their product or service, it compels them to revert, preferably as they mention your website.
Link moves. You may also ask them to change the already existing links.
PR Is there anything exciting you want to talk about?

Create a top story to publish.

Most strategies are beneficial. But, all this is easier said than done. You need to be consistent and diligently to get your content published or accredited with a link. Outreach and pitching both will play a significant role in this.

Do not feel bogged down due to several hindrances which may come your way. For example, you may get a response such as 

      • Your guest post is not the right fit (perhaps, a better way to say it’s not good enough).
      • Your resource is not adequately unique.
      • Your “Skyscraper” lacks enough height.

The first thing to understand here is that all such link-building tactics only prove effective if you share something exceptional that people like to link to. If you are a celebrity or your website has a lot of credibility and authority attached to it due to one reason or another, it can compensate in another way. 

However, it is hard to make people link back to you. Many SEOs started practicing several methods to make it easier for them. They may offer to: 

      • Share their content on Facebook and Twitter.
      • Promote their content with the email newsletter.
      • Zero cost access for their premium products or services.
      • A link pointing to your site.
      • To pay.

However, such things fall out of Google’s algorithm domain. Following such practices makes the search engine suspect us about things that are taken to be a “link scheme”.

Page rank

By this time, you will understand how hard it can be to get links in a legit manner. But, it is better to strive and struggle for the right approach than go for quick link schemes for which you pay the price later.

Therefore, you have to set the right expectations and take care of factors involved in natural link building, like having great content, pitching in the right tone, and understanding your actual link-building speed. Considering these factors, you can carve an appropriate strategy for building backlinks. 

Consistency will significantly help with this. For example, you might have to try hard to pitch your content with 15 emails to different bloggers to get it published at the right place. It shouldn’t demotivate you as this is the right way to follow. The first thing to understand is that link building is a time taking something and you need to work on it dedicatedly to build a reputation as per Google’s Guidelines. As things catch up, the process can become smoother and streamlined.

 

3. Buying Links

 

Top SEO experts won’t ever recommend you buy links. As it is pretty evident that buying links is a waste of your resources, and rather than getting any benefit, your website ends up being penalized.

However, another vital thing to consider is that many people buy links and get away with that. But, there is a legit way of doing it safely. But, it is not advisable to risk the well-being of your website with an unscrupulous practice that may do more harm than benefit.

4. Earning Links

 

This is one of the highly genuine practices to get backlinks. You can earn links when other people spontaneously link to your website pages in response to high-class content, product, or services. You do not have to ask them to do this. This won’t happen except when your website stands out in offering value that other website owners in your niche cannot. In such situations, people may want to genuinely want to link to you to let their visitors get extra information in such situations.

But, for this also, you have to promote your page to let people know what you have to offer. Use social media to do that and spread your website link on the internet. As more and more people look at your page, it again increases your chances of getting more and more links to your page.

Here are some tactics that will help you earn links:

Using Linkbait or linkable assets. Important data related to awards, data studies, surveys, infographics, and maps.

Podcasts / expert roundups/ interviews: Content promotion can also be directly connected with podcasts, expert roundups, and interviews.

Overall, earning links is surely a highly effective way to get them. 

It is completely worthwhile to invest your time and money in creating valuable pages generating word-of-mouth and getting chosen by people naturally. On the other hand, if you use the other non-legit link prospecting methods to outreach bloggers, you can start building links to your mediocre page.

What Helps You to Earn Backlinks?

Having proprietary and research-backed data will help you immensely. Additionally, you also need a strong team of the best SEO professionals that help you create valuable resources. Having a large database of the audience also helps you promote your content faster and harness the power of word of mouth.

 However, there are several ways of creating great content on a small budget for earning links organically. In the end, it pays well to put in the effort to develop great content in comparison to your competitors.

Monitoring Existing Links

Technically, the most important thing is to take a can of your hard-earned links. However, monitoring the links you have earned through hard work will play an important role. You need to preserve the link you already have. You can use the following techniques to do the same

      • Link reclamation 
      • Fixing 404 pages with links.

Probably, you’ve never bothered about it. Rightly so. It observed that at times, such links which cease to exist might continue to pass the value as link ghost or link echoes, 

Though you do not need to bother about each lost link, surely when it comes to a vital link, which served as social proof of your excellent products or services when it fetched a great amount of organic traffic, you need to bother to restore it fast.

Chapter 3

Features of a Good Quality Link

 

Though it is unclear how Google measures the value of each link. However, there are some great concepts for evaluating links which SEO community considers suitable. They include:

      • Authority
      • Relevance
      • Anchor text
      • Nofollow vs follow
      • Placement
      • Destination

 

1. Authority

SEO gives you two types of “authority”, including one on a particular page and another on an entire website.

Page Authority refers to Google’s PageRank algorithm. It gives you a basic idea of simple things. For example, a page with a higher number of links is considered as a more decisive vote.

Many SEOs help you acquire links from old pages with a strong backlink profile. Such pages can bring you a higher value than a link from a newly-published page lacking its backlinks. However, a newly-published page may acquire top-notch links over time. Therefore,  the value of each such link can improve in the long run.

Getting links from top-quality pages is necessary to attract backlinks over time, and you may not want to hunt for old pages with a strong backlink profile.

Website Authority — Google maintains that the sitewide website authority is not any metric in its system. But, you can very well comprehend why the New York Times brings more value than a link from a random website of someone in your family. 

It is important to understand why “website authority” is another word for getting a high concentration of high-authority pages on any website. Some sites measure website authority using the metric known as Domain Rating (DR) based purely on a website’s backlink profile. 

Ahrefs Links

A common mistake involves neglecting link opportunities from low-authority websites. This proves harmful to your SEO success. A newly published page will help you to acquire backlinks over time and it will also boost the SEO value of the link. The low-authority website won’t be the same in some years’ time.

You can get a high DR or website authority metric if you invest in the right amount of effort to acquire a link from top-quality websites. 

At times, a website owner may ask you to write a 5,000-word guest post, but make sure that you save it for a website of DR 60.

 

2. Relevant

Typically, links from websites in a topic-specific community have a higher value than links from websites that are not relevant to your site. Apart from this, links from niche or topically irrelevant sources confuse signals the search engines about what your page is all about.

Consider this; you publish a review of your favourite luxury chandelier. Later, two of your friends decide to link to it. One from their “Top 10 Designer Lighting Ways” article and the other from their “10 Money-saving Tips” article.

Which of the two pages would cast a more decisive vote in the eyes of Google (given that both these pages have equal authority)? 

The more relevant one!

You’d instead get designer lighting from a home decor specialist rather than a personal finance expert, right?

SEO professionals believe that relevance also applies at the website level. And there’s some evidence for that on Google’s “how search works” page:

If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality.

This means that you must strive to get links from websites that are in some way is relevant to yours. So, in place of pursuing every single link opportunity that pops up, you need to make the most of just the right one.

3. Anchor Text

 

The “anchor text” is a clickable snippet of text linked to another page.

In many cases, anchor text offers ac comprehensive information about what the linked page is all about. Here are a few paragraphs which show what your anchor text is all about.

Google is looking for specific words in anchor text to understand it better. Such content is what we use as keywords in referenced pages. Google’s original patent talks have a comprehensive view on this.

Google uses several techniques for improving search quality for page rank, anchor text, and proximity information. It’s necessary to understand how to leverage anchor text to build links. 

The fact is you do not require doing the same. If you try to control the way various pages link to you and use all the “right words” in the anchor texts of your backlinks, the higher are the chances for Google to penalise you for that.

Most white-hat link building tactics do not offer you much control on the anchor text, and it just lets you do what is needful.

Anchor Text Needs to be Descriptive and Relevant and Not Spammy

 

Anchor text signals to Google what your page is all about. If you have several links from variations of just one phrase or one word, it may mean that your page is ranking well for all such kinds of phrases; this makes Google suspicious of you trying to manipulate its results.

You must use anchor text in the context of your target page. It is necessary to find out what your page is all about. Prefer relevance to avoid spam.

Editorial placement of Links.

Editorial links need to be added naturally by pages and sites you want to link with your website.

You can acquire earned links by creating high-quality content which people will want to refer to. So, you must essentially create top-quality content or 10X content! People will like to link to top quality and unique content naturally. 

Naturally earned links come almost effortlessly. What you require is creating valuable content which can usher awareness for itself.

 

Earn Mentions are Generally Unlinked!

 

Websites may refer to your brand or a certain content piece that you have already published, and they may mention it without linking to it. Earning links from unlinked mentions is a better way to reclaim your votes. To spot such earned mentions on Google, go for site: search using the name of your brand, product, e.tc, in quotes. Analyse some of the initial pages in your results list to make the most of the opportunities. Now, reach out to these publishers, asking them to make the mentions clickable.

 

4. Nofollow vs Dofollow

 

“Nofollow” is a link attribute in Google whereby you need only to link the page without giving the vote to the page it will be referencing.

Historically, Google does not count votes from ‘nofollowed links’. But, in the hint model approach, they will now follow, certain ‘nofollowed’ links will influence search rankings.

Google also introduced several new link attributes on nofollowed link approach.

      • rel=“UGC” must be applied to “user-generated” links, e.g., blog comments and forum posts. 
      • rel=“sponsored” should be applied if the link is a part of a sponsorship, advertisement, or another kind of compensation agreement. 

But, you must build “followed” links (or links without any of the aforementioned attributes), as they are the ones that can cast votes. 

The rel=nofollow attribute defines it as two words such as “no follow”. This link will not follow the page. This means that no-follow tells the search engine not to follow the link. 

However, keep in mind that though these links do not prove equity, they may be helpful in certain situations.  For example, a no-follow link coming to form a Facebook profile, a Yelp page, a Twitter account may not count as votes, but they are natural places for link addition in your website.

However, when you get an opportunity to get a nofollowed link from a relevant high-authority page, make sure that you do not miss it.

Wikipedia is a good example that has all non follow outgoing links. However, getting a link from a resource like Wikipedia is quite hard. This is a reason to believe that such links are precious for Google.

Overall, your site’s link profile must have a balance between nofollowed and followed backlinks. A nofollow link may not send you authority but may pass on a lot of traffic to your site and bring a lot of followed links in coming times.

5. Placement

 

Google’s reasonable surfer patent is related to how likely a user is to click the link and how much authority it will transfer to you. Link placement is something that can affect a website’s CTR.

Suppose a webpage comprises three blocks namely content, sidebar, and footer. In that case, the most important consequence is that its content gets a higher number of clicks because it gets the greatest attention from visitors.

Another thing affecting a link’s CTR is how highly it is placed on the page. Readers are quite likely to follow links at the start of the article than the links present at its end.

In the end, the higher the number of links presents on your page, the more likely it will compete with others to get clicks. This lowers the authority being transferred to the other pages.

In other types of anchor text, you will need certain white-hat link building strategies offering you little control over link placement. 

If you’re writing a guest article for another person’s blog, you need to draw the readers to click on your links. This is needed not only for boosting the SEO value of the links, rather, it also sends a lot of good referral traffic on your way.

 

6. Destination

 

While building links to your website, there are a few destinations that point to them:

      • Your homepage
      • Your linkable assets
      • The pages that you actually need to rank high in Google.

And in most cases, the pages you need to rank for are most hard to rank for. As people only want to link to informational pages whereby your audience gets free value in place of commercial pages where the audience does not like to spend much.

Thus, you also need an answer to some of the commonest questions in SEO is: 

“How to rank boring pages?”

And while there is no single right answer to this question, everyone agrees that you need to leverage the power of internal linking to take care of your “boring pages” so that they can rank better.

You may build as many links as you want for your linkable assets and all that “link juice” will be funnelled towards the pages you really want to rank through the internal links. 

And keep in mind that things like placement, relevance, and anchor text also affects the value of your internal links. 

Having a Healthy Link Profile

Understanding the power of links lets you manipulate the same for your benefit. Moreover, you have to discover the ways to earn top-quality artificial links which just enhance the search engine rankings. You need to comply with Google’s terms of services for choosing a website that gets de-indexed or may result in the removal of web pages. Make sure that you maintain a healthy link profile.

A healthy link profile gives the insight to search engines about their authority in a fair manner. 

Best Link Building Strategies

Now, you can apply a dozen of link building tactics and strategies you want ti to explore. But which of them are the best and most effective ones?

Here at Ahrefs we’re big advocates of the following four:

      • Pursuing competitor’s links.
      • Creating linkable assets.
      • Content promotion.
      • Guest blogging.

a) Pursuing Competitor’s Links

Your competitor link research is one of the highly important activities in link building. Consider this, a top-ranking page can help you in making the desired search query with all right kinds of links that prove it to be the boss on Google. As you study its links, you can easily find the tactics you should use so to get similar links for outranking the page.

A tool like Ahrefs is absolutely indispensable in this respect. Fish out the right keyword that you need to rank for using Keywords Explorer. Scroll down to “SERP Overview” and you can find out the number of backlinks and linking websites all of these top-ranking pages have.

On using the keyword like best productivity apps, you will find all the backlinks and linking websites in the top-ranking pages. Clicking on these, you will be able to get all the website links listed. 

Now, you need to go for a two-fold action path. You can get links from pages linked to your competitors. Find out how you will acquire these links with the right tactics to acquire a higher number of links as compared to your competitors.

b) Creating Linkable Assets

You may build links to any page with the need of great willpower and determination. However, life is easier if you give people something they want to link to.

Linkable assets refer to people considering highly specific things like

      • Online tools & calculators
      • Infographics, GIFographics & “Map-o-graphics”
      • Awards & rankings
      • Studies & research
      • “How to” guides and tutorials

Definitions & Coined Terms

The most boring industries can create a great piece of content which attracts links. It makes perfect sense to study competitors websites to find out if they have linkable assets which you can replicate.

Putting the right domain name in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and going to the Best Buy links report. It reveals to you the pages which have given you a lot of links.

Traffic

In the above screenshot, three out of five highly linked pages on the Ahrefs Blog (except for the homepage) are based on data-driven research studies. It gives you an idea of the kind of content which will gather a lot of links in the industry.

The most prominent type of linkable asset can be highly distinct, for example, an infographic, survey, tool, and ego bait. You need to figure out what it is used for and what kind of knowledge you need to create linkable content for your website.

c) Content Promotion

At times, your pages can be highly linkable, but you may not be able to link to them if you do not know of their presence. Most of the linkable assets need to be promoted to attract links.

In general, there are three ways to promote content:

      • Advertising.
      • Outreach.
      • Communities.
      • Advertising.

Though the process is simple, it is important to pay money to Google, Facebook, and Twitter to receive visitors to your page. It is also quite possible to let your audience reach a website where your audience visits so that you can advertise the deal to them.

The higher the number of people to whom you advertise your content, the more the chances of people linking to the same.

However, there is just one glitch which is going for acquired links for advertising dollars you have invested in.

If you promise your boss 10 top-quality links to a page as they go for investing $1,000 in Facebook Ads.

The page from here from to get links that will serve one or another type of business purpose.

Businesses are going for content marketing as it lets them attract, nurture and retain customers. If the piece of content helps you with this, then you won’t find any problem in your budget to promote it.

Also, if your content piece does not have any business value, you won’t have any reason to spend time creating it.

You must advertise your content as it helps to grow your business, and your links are like its byproduct (especially if your content is not good enough).

d) Outreach

Outreach is the best way to let people with websites and the ability to link to your content. 

Moreover, the same people may reach you through advertising. However, a nicely crafted personal email is a highly effective way of improving your chances of getting a link from people.

Whenever you want to outreach, make sure that you do not go blatantly asking them to link to your website, rather impress them with your content and let them check your content.

Go for a unique idea from your content to them which makes them give you a mention in their article. It is related to having a small research study.

Communities

Communities are going to promote your content for several audiences. Based on your industry, you can get like-minded people to hang out with you based on your industry. Perhaps, you have several groups on Facebook, Slack, and other platforms. You need to go for several standalone community sites in certain niches. But, it’s not easy to promote your content in such communities. If you just drop your link in a community without joining it, you will be banned in a while. 

Active members of a community gain a great deal of respect from their members. This helps you to promote your content on your website. You need to promote your post for each new content piece you will promote in your community. If you annoy the members, it will lower your reputation. Ensure that you keep it in a way that works in your favor.

One more strategy is building your community which will feel happy to get find out about every new content piece which you publish. Give people several options to connect with you, including

      • Twitter.
      • Email newsletter.
      • Private Facebook group.

All these “channels” help to give your published articles a great deal of traction. It took will require you to make quite an effort to build up the website.

e) Guest blogging

Bloggers need to publish top-quality content which provides the audience with a high value. This is the reason why various blog owners accept choose only a few guest articles to publish on their blogs.

Guest blogging is greatly popular in the SEO world. However, you need to make the most of it to a proper extent as earlier on, Google’s webspam team declared the same back in 2014. 

“So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done.”

Matt Cutts, Former Head of Web Spam, Google

But, even after 8 years after this, guest blogging continues to be one of the most important factors in 2022. Various link-building practitioners need to take care of what is considered to be guest blogging which is a highly effective way to build links.

It requires that you will be favored by Google to pick the best blogs and present the content you must publish on your website. What you need is to create top-quality content and get it published on a reputable blog. Paying $10 for a 500-word article to submit to a third-rate blog with zero traffic and no followers is not good.

However, you might face a problem because authentic blogs do not require guest articles as they do quite well on their own and this is exactly what makes them “original.”

The Right Way to Persuade Them to Publish Your Content

 

Apart from this, you must have something meaningful to say to render top-quality copywriting and also give others a great experience. Here are some tips to follow to help you achieve what you want.

Gradually Climb Up 

 

The best blogs in your industry also require serious pitching except if you need to follow a solid track record to publish articles on similar blogs. 

Prior to pitching the #1 blog in your niche, get the #2 blog published first. And before you pitch #2, try to get published at #3.

See how do we proceed with the same. You need to begin with the lesser-known blogs present in the industry and then proceed to build the way up.

You can also look at the lesser-known blogs you can use top-class tools like Content Explorer to explore more.

Here are three simple steps to proceed further:

      • Choose the word or phrase that blogs in your industry would be mentioning.
      • Set the “Domain Rating” between 30 and 40.
      • Go for the “one page per domain” setting to find a single article for every blog.

Google Snippet

 

In the above screenshot, the word “steak” is returning more than 9,227 pages from websites having DR scores between 30 and 40.

All you want now is to examine the blogs for finding out your chances of them getting published for them. Mostly, the blogs that appear may not be strong,  you may adjust the DR filter to find blogs of high “authority” and understand what quality content and topics are. This will let you create the best content that you can easily pitch.

You may further narrow down the results by employing the “website traffic” filter. It helps you focus on blogs that fetch a certain amount of traffic from Google to know what readers prefer to read.

Give an Irresistible Offer

 

A blogger must publish top-quality content which is highly useful for the audience. With better content, you have better chances of getting it published.

The best bloggers in the industry get dozens of similar guest post pitches every week. Your content will only be selected if you offer them “unique, top quality, and highly valuable content”. This is what gives you a chance to stand out and grab the blogger’s attention alongside the best blog pitch post.

You need to take care of the content gap to proceed further. The entire thing is connected to going for popular topics which give you a great deal of search traffic to your competitor. And if this is not covered on the blog, proceed to take all the steps to go for it.

The Content Gap Ahrefs tool provides a great way to help you to discover content gaps on websites.

If you want to pitch a guest post article to XYZ blog. Use Site Explorer to discover the topics which send you a lot of search traffic to your competitor blog but has not been covered in your blog. Steps you need to take:

      • Use the Ahrefs Site Explorer and enter your blog site.
      • Reach to the Content Gap tool.
      • Enter the competitor blog. 
      • Now, hit “Show keywords”.
      • Find out the keywords that interest you.
      • Check the organic traffic.

Content Gap

Keywords

So, this helps you get the right number of links. Publishing on the best blogs can get you about 11k monthly visits after a few seconds of publishing the content. But, it is quite possible that this was not covered on the Backlinko blog.

Pitching also plays an important role here. You need to tell the blogger in what ways your blog will stand out on certain topics. This approach gives you a better chance of it being published. This kind of pitch certainly has more effective outcomes in place of just mentioning that you can write high-quality articles for their blog. You may also offer to rewrite old and low-performing articles.

Chapter 4

Using The Best Link Building Tools

 

Technically, you may feel that building links requires using just a little brain power through your email account. You can use several link-building tools which makes it easier to acquire links in an easier way.

Here are the tools which can help you to build links. These include

      • Backlink research tools.
      • Content research tools.
      • Link prospecting tools.
      • Web Monitoring tools.
      • Email Outreach tools.

Backlink Research Tools

 

A top-quality actionable link-building strategy for your website requires studying the links of your competitors. You need to employ the best backlink-building tools for the same.

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is one of the highly useful backlink research tools. 

Plus, a website or URL gives you an extensive list of backlinks pointing to it. Some metrics and filters help you go for building top-quality actionable link-building opportunities.

Research Tools

Various SEO tool companies operating for link index include Moz, Majestic, and Semrush.

Content Research Tools

 

Content research tools give you the insight to create shareable and link-worthy content. Use them to find content angles that have generated some links and shares. Leverage such findings to create your content.

Ahrefs’ Content Explorer helps you in indexing more than five billion pages which helps you to create top-quality niche-related content.

Search for the topic you need to write about in your page titles and sort the outcomes for referring to the domains or linking websites. Study all these pages alongside the links to give you several ideas on ways to make your content better.

Buzzsumo is another great tool that helps you in finding the trending topics and top blogs in your field. It takes into account the social shares over SEO metrics.

 

Link Prospecting Tools

 

Link prospecting tools help you to understand the important websites which are the best for your link pitches. 

Several SEO professionals carry out link prospecting taking care of Google’s search results for the keywords list related to the main page of the piece. Few websites also do the right thing with the manual use of the SEO toolbar for taking care of the search results. People must also semi-automate the process with top-class tools such as Link Prospector or the Screaming Frog. Ahrefs’ Content Explorer is another trustworthy link prospecting tool you can use. 

An article is known as the “10 Best Mechanical Keyboards” and you need to build a few of its links. The “mechanical keyboard” of the Content Explorer helps you with more than 180, 000 pages from across the website mentioning the keyword in the content.

Tool

Apply the filters for taking care of low-quality pages and spam by listing the link prospects that shrink to just a few thousand. There are again tonnes of opportunities you can make the most of.

 

Web Monitoring Tools

 

Web monitoring tools offer you an insight into the newly-published pages which also mention your keyword. Also, go for new backlinks which your competitors have already acquired. Web monitoring tools give you alerts about high-quality link-building resources.

Ahrefs Alerts also do a good job with such kinds of alerts for keyword mentions and backlinks.

Research

Using the right web monitoring tools, you require to take care of Mentions, Google Alerts, and Brand24.

Email Outreach Tools

 

Email outreach tools are useful in managing and tracking link-building campaigns. They help you to understand the process where you can find them: 

      • Best prospects.
      • Outreach templates.
      • Send follow-ups.
      • And do much more.

There are several options of the best tools which also require you to take care of the right tactics and prospects to maintain the right scale of budget and operations. 

Never bounce and Clearout.io are among the best email outreach tools which are used by SEOs worldwide.

Wrapping Up

 

This guide also takes care of the different aspects of link building related to highly important questions present in your mind. To find the best ways of link building and to make the most of it, you can take expert advice from some of the best SEO experts in the industry at Backlink Monks.