SEO has gone through sweeping and radical changes, especially over the last one decade or so. From advanced algorithms to the advent of ChatGPT and AI chatbots. However, these revolutionary and groundbreaking changes haven’t even remotely diminished the importance of one underlying SEO factor. That factor is backlinks.
Backlinks still remain the holy grail of SEO. While high-quality backlinks are what ultimately powers website’s ranking on Google, it also help websites in fetching citations in AI search engines like Perplexity and Gemini.
This blog post will shed light on how your website can acquire the most precious thing in the SEO world. However, as is apparent in the title itself, we’ll be discussing only those methods that fully respect Google guidelines. Therefore, this post is not meant for those who love to bend rules.
Broadly speaking, there are only fours ways to acquire backlinks and they are as follows:
- Create high-quality and linkable content.
- Guest post on reputable sites.
- Leverage broken link-building.
- Engage in Digital PR.
Create high-quality and linkable content:
Attracting backlinks purely through high-quality links is by far the most legitimate way of acquiring links. That’s because in this case, people chose to link to your website on their own. People loved and admired your website’s content so much that they were convinced that your website deserves a backlink.
You neither have to do any outreach nor purchase links. This not only makes it legitimate but also the most natural way of attracting backlinks.
Kindly note that content (high-quality or otherwise) in the context of SEO mostly covers blog posts and long articles; though there can be exceptions like videos and podcasts.
Here are some tips for creating high-quality content:
- Conduct a through research before you start writing the article.
- Use statistics and numbers wherever possible (ensure you’re sourcing information from reputable sources).
- Make content readable (use headings, short paragraphs. and bullet points).
- Cover an angle that your competitors have missed.
- Focus on creating skyscraper content (kindly Google if you don’t know what is skyscraper content).
- Make your content media rich by inserting high-quality images like infographics & chart wherever possible (But don’t overuse it).
- Focus on on-page SEO.
Another equally important point to note is the importance of conducting a through keyword research. Keyword research helps in zeroing down on keywords that your website is more likely to rank for, after taking into account website’s domain authority and other critical SEO metrics.
Last but not least, be consistent. Creating high-quality content is not a one-off exercise but a life-long pursuit.
Guest post on reputable sites:
While creating high-quality content is no doubt important, being over-dependent on it can prove counterproductive for your SEO campaign. That’s because attracting backlinks naturally is a painfully slow process, which can lend opportunity to your competitors to leapfrog in the search ranking. This is where guest posting comes into play.
Guest posting is a practice of writing and publishing content on another website or blog in exchange of acquiring backlinks from them. Simply put, you write an article for another website and that same website links back to your own website. The end result is your website ends up earning much-needed backlink.
The best thing about guest posting is that you don’t wait for other people or websites to link back to your website. Rather, you run a dedicated outreach campaign and thereby accelerate the backlink process, which ultimately opens the floodgate for organic traffic.
This is exactly why Guest posting is so popular and has almost become a norm in the SEO industry.
But guest posting is not about randomly reaching out to any website, nor it is about writing articles in a complete haste or without much after-thought.
Guest posting comes with its own set of standard practices. Complying with these standard practices helps in maximizing the potential of guest posting, which essentially makes your backlink far more effective and impactful.
Herre are some of the best practices of guest posting:
- Pitch guest posting only to those websites that belong to your niche or industry.
- Preferably, target websites that have higher domain authority than your website.
- Fully comply with host website’s guest posting rules.
- Make sure that your guest post has all the traits of high-quality content.
- Always try to use diverse anchor texts.
How to find guest posting websites?
There are two simple ways to find guest posting websites. The second one is by far the most effective and reliable.
- Use Google auto-suggestion: In this method, you need to simply type in Google ‘guest posting sites’ followed by your niche or industry and then hit search. You’ll come across scores of list enlisting guest-posting websites belonging to your niche or industry.
Examples:
- Guest posting websites for fashion.
- Guest posting sites for healthcare.
- Guest posting sites for education.
- Guest posting sites for real estate.
- Use SEO tools to spy your competitors’ backlinks: Use SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to finds websites that are linking to your competitors and then reach out them for backlinks.
What makes this method effective is that you get access to backlinks that have powered the searching ranking of your competitor websites. If you can snatch at least 50% – 60% of their backlinks, your website will most likely see a drastic improvement in search ranking and even overtake your competitors.
Notably, you are unlikely to get quality backlinks through Google autosuggestion. But your chances increase manifold with SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, much thanks to the huge repository of website data.
Don’t aggressively buy backlinks:
One of the controversial aspects of guest posting is that sometimes it trespasses into the grey area of buying backlinks. And it won’t take long to get into the troubled area of black hat techniques especially if choose to buy backlinks aggressively.
Buying backlinks must never be part of your core strategy. It is important to remember that buying backlinks goes against Google’s guidelines.
Leverage Broken Link Building:
Broken link building refers to SEO technique that aims to acquire backlinks by identifying dead links on other websites and replacing it with links to your own web pages or website. By dead links, we mean 404 error page (also known as dead page).
This technique takes advantage of the fact that most website owners don’t like having external links that send their users to dead or 404 error page. It simply kills their user experience.
However, make sure that host websites containing broke links belong to your niche or industry.
How to identify broken links:
- Again, use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to identify websites with broken links. You can also manually check websites but this technique is too time consuming and exhausting.
- Once broken link is identified, the next logical step is to either create brand new content from scratch or find an existing content in your website that can contextually match with the broken link.
- Once you’ve created the replacement content, contact the website owner/s (preferably through an email) and inform them about the broken link on their websites. Likewise, suggest them your replacement content and persuade them that the replacement content will help in improving the user-experience of their readers.
If the owner/s do replace the dead links, your website will end up inheriting some of the link equity that the dead link carried, further helping your website’s SERP ranking.
Engage in Digital PR:
Digital PR is a strategic approach to public relations (PR) where you focus on creating linkable assets and effectively distribute it across online channels for building and maintaining relationship with your target audience. This ultimately helps in creating brand awareness, which in-turn benefits your efforts to attract backlinks at an accelerated pace.
It is important to remember that brand awareness and backlinks are proportionately related. The more brand awareness your brand enjoys, the more people are likely to link to your website.
Important steps for performing Digital PR
- As hinted above, one of the primary features of Digital PR is to create high -quality and sharable content. This may include blog posts, social media posts, videos, podcasts, research paper or interactive tools.
- The next step is to pitch these sharable contents to the relevant journalists, PR professionals and influencers. By leveraging their deep connection across media houses and huge user base, they make sure that your linkable content gets wide coverage; ultimately, paving way for more brand awareness.
- To maximize the potential of digital PR, make sure to build a strong and enduring relationship with journalists, PR professionals as well as influencers. Stronger your relationship is, the more your content is likely to get amplified and this in-turn this will increase the chances of securing backlinks.
In most cases, you’ll have to make a commercial agreement with journalists and PR/influencer agencies for lending their PR and influencer services. Make sure to tie up with only the best and experienced folks.
Is Digital PR expensive?
Yes, digital PR can be expensive, especially if you onboard an experienced and highly successful agency. But considering the huge exposure your brand could get, the inflated cost is pretty much worth it.
Conclusion:
Acquiring backlinks is a time-consuming and also requires immense efforts. But all these is justified and absolutely worth it, considering that backlinks are the most precious thing in the SEO world. Many may have the temptation of taking short-cuts by employing black hat techniques. However, these shortcuts come with an apparent risk of your website getting penalized or even deindexed by Google. Therefore, always stick to white hat techniques.
Implement all the methods discussed above with unrelenting consistency and sincerity, and you’ll see the positive results in due course of time.