Are you looking to take your content marketing strategy to greater heights? If so, then you need to generate quality backlinks.
This way, you will rank better on search engines and drive more targeted traffic to your site.
But how do you build high-quality backlinks for your site in 2020?
Getting other sites to link to yours is no easy task.
It requires one to use practical techniques that work. There’s a lot of try and miss until you become successful in it.
But don’t fret because, in this article, you are going to learn powerful link building techniques that work.
The best part?
The techniques are FREE to use by anyone. Besides, you can use the content you already have to get quality backlinks.
You will just need to know how to work with a few tools.
We will also show you how to use some of the best tools out there, so don’t worry.
Just make sure to read and try all the techniques you will learn here then come back and share your experience with us.
Value (link juice) infused through links from a website to another or one page to another has become one of the most crucial off-page SEO ranking factors.
Evolution of Link Building
In the past, having loads of links coming to your website could get your site on the high ranks of Google’s SERPs.
Unfortunately, these days the emphasis is on quality and not quantity when it comes to link building.
Having high-quality backlinks pointing to your site shows search engines that your site contains valuable content.
So, before you embark on acquiring backlinks from high authority sites, you need to know how to evaluate link quality and value.
We will cover this briefly, but before that, here are a few basic things you need to know.
What Are Backlinks?
Typically, backlinks or inbound links are incoming links from other relevant websites and blogs. You can also build backlinks from social media and other directories although the most known links are from blog posts and articles.
Backlinks are a good Google ranking factor and can help improve your content marketing strategy. Having good quality links pointing to your site could help you drive more passive traffic and leads as well.
That’s why content marketers, bloggers, and online entrepreneurs are looking to accumulate high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites.
This image shows the number of backlinks we have currently.
How to Identify High-Quality Links
It is worth noting that even though everyone is struggling to get other websites to link back to their content, there’s a huge difference between getting a ton of links from low-quality sites and only a few from authoritative sites.
That’s why you need to be careful with your link building strategy.
Knowing whether a link comes from an authoritative site is just easy thanks to the availability of tools like Alexa Rank, Ahrefs, Moz, and many others that can give you an overview of the site you want to get backlinks from.
That being said, here are a few characteristics of authoritative backlinks
Anchor text relevance:
Anchor text is the text with a clickable link on another website or blog pointing to your site. Usually, Google crawlers use the anchor text to determine its relevance to the content of the linked page.
Usually, the anchor text could be the target keyword of the linked page. For instance, responsive WordPress themes would be a relevant anchor text for a site that sells or reviews WordPress themes and not shoes.
Link placement
While you will have backlinks placed at different sections throughout the page of a linking site, links placed within the body content of a page are said to be valuable for your SEO and can survive any Google algorithm change.
The idea of link juice also comes into play when it comes to the link location. Links that appear at the top of a linking page/website will pass more link juice than those placed at the bottom.
Besides, other links placed around the link pointing to your content can hurt your SEO and content marketing strategy as well. All the other links surrounding the link coming to your page need to be high-quality.
The traffic of the linking site
It is also important to get backlinks from a website with a ton of traffic. Even though this doesn’t have many benefits to your SEO, it helps your content marketing efforts.
That said; let’s get into the meat of this article.
How to Generate Quality Backlinks
Here are the nine link building techniques that work. Let’s get into details of each link building method.
Share Read-worthy Content on Your Site
In your effort to attract quality backlinks, you need to create content that people want to read and not what you want them to read.
People want to link to great content. And readers want to read content that helps them achieve their goals. If your content doesn’t meet this criteria, you will take long before you can get a single link coming to your site from high-authority sites.
You can use a range of tools to analyze the competition and get content ideas. SEMrush, BuzzSumo, and Ubersuggest are just a few tools to help you find content that drives traffic and engages with readers.
Take a look at a few content ideas when you want to write great content. We will use “content marketing tips” as our target keyword to look for content ideas.
SEMrush content ideas for “content marketing tips”
BuzzSumo content ideas for “content marketing tips”
Ubersuggest content ideas for “content marketing tips”
When looking for content ideas from top-performing sites (these are sites that are ranking higher in the SERPs), consider the following:
- The quality of the images used in those high performing sites.
- The content length.
- How creative are the titles?
- The type of featured image
- Their SEO title and meta description
Equipped with this info, write great content with good images, make it long-form, include a catchy title, have an interesting and attractive featured image.
Your SEO title and meta description also need to be more focused and compelling as well.
Share Evergreen Content on Your Site
Content marketers, bloggers, and online entrepreneurs are looking to link to content that will remain fresh and relevant for a long period after publishing.
Evergreen content is blog posts that people can’t get tired of reading. Content that provides value to the readers for many years after publishing.
Moz is perhaps one of the leaders when it comes to creating evergreen content and one of their blog posts that people can’t get enough of is Beginners Guide to SEO.
Note that even when not displayed at the top of Google’s SERPs, evergreen content tends to attract a ton of backlinks.
Publishing evergreen content is the best way to build backlinks naturally.
Use Brian Dean’s Skyscraper” Technique To Generate Quality Backlinks
If you have been keen on the content marketing world, you must have heard of Brian Dean. He is the founder of Backlinko, a leading content marketing blog. Through his skyscraper technique, Brian has been able to acquire a ton of high-quality backlinks in all his blog posts.
You can also use this technique.
How does the technique work?
It’s simple.
Search for great content in your niche.
You don’t have to use any tool here (but if you want, you can use Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, Ubersuggest, and many others).
We will show you how to use Google in this case.
So, here is how it goes…
Head over to Google and run a search for your target keyword.
Assuming our target keyword is “make money with WordPress blog”
See the results of our search for that particular keyword.
As mentioned earlier that high-quality backlinks are a good ranking factor, it means that content that appears on the first page of Google’s search results has lots of sites probably linking to it.
Once you’ve identified these sites, go ahead and create content that’s 10 times better than them.
After that, start marketing your content by sharing it on social media, sending updates to your email list, etc.
Share In-depth Content
This is also one of the superior ways to move your content to the top pages of Google search and ultimately earn a ton of quality backlinks.
The good thing about ultimate guides is that they will attract quality backlinks for a long period.
Ideally, a comprehensive guide is one that covers a topic thoroughly. It could be longer, around 2,500+ words.
Some studies have shown that in-depth guides tend to outperform short-from content. They also attract many backlinks.
Start by finding a topic that hasn’t been covered thoroughly on the internet. Conduct a Google search with your target keyword and check all the resulting articles but dwell on those that appear at the top of your search.
Once you’ve found a topic, create a detailed outline of it:
In your outline, list all possible topics and subtopics of your large topic.
For instance, if we were to write an ultimate guide for a topic like how to create a WordPress website we would have created an outline that would cover everything that other blogs haven’t.
When writing, talk about those subtopics and topics thoroughly. That’s how to create long-form content that’s link-worthy.
Claim Backlinks From Brand Mentions
This is perhaps a good idea for established brands or sites.
If your site shares useful and helpful content, other bloggers and content marketers will start to feature your name in their content. But not all will link to your site alongside your mention.
You can set up Google Alerts to know every time your brand is mentioned.
Once you notice someone mentioned your brand without linking to you, you can then reach out to them with a friendly email asking them to include a link to your site. You can use online tools to monitor unlinked mentions as well.
Find Sites Linking to Your Competitors
It goes without saying that if a site can link to your competitor, you can also convince them to link to your site as long as you publish content that’s valuable to their readers.
In this case, you need to conduct a competitor backlink check. Alexa is one of the best tools to use for this task. You can use a tool of your choice as well here. The idea is to identify sites that are linking to your competitors.
Make sure you have content ready that’s worth linking to before reaching out to those sites.
After identifying those sites, you can then reach out to them asking them to link to your content as well.
Use the Broken Link Building Technique
As a rule, you need to monitor your links regularly. Unfortunately, many bloggers link to other sites and forget about it.
Once those sites have changed their URLs the links are broken.
These are the links you should take advantage of. Make sure the broken link is relevant to your content and industry though.
You can use tools like Broken Link Checker or Check My Links in this case.
Broken link building is no easy task though.
Now once you identify broken links related to your content, you can then shoot an email to the site owner letting them know of the broken link and ask them to replace it with yours.
Use Infographics to Generate Quality Backlinks
People are more attracted to visual content. That’s why the demand for infographics is skyrocketing hence making it one of the best ways to build high-quality backlinks.
Infographics are incredible when it comes to driving traffic and acquiring backlinks from authoritative sites.
The good thing is that there are plenty of sites where you can have your infographics at a fee. You can also hire a designer from freelance websites like Upwork, Fiverr, and many others out there.
Once you publish an interesting infographic, most likely you will get people linking to it but you also submit your infographic to directories as well.
Guest Blogging
In his words, Matt Cutts, Google’s former Head of Web Spam declared guest posting dead. This was in 2014.
This is exactly what he said
“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop”.
First-forward to 2020, guest blogging is still one of the fantastic ways of getting your content and business to the world.
Guest blogging helps you tap into already established audiences and get your business known to the world.
It’s also one of the best link building techniques.
So, where is the catch?
If you are doing guest posts solely for link building purposes then guest posting is dead for you.
Google wants to display the most useful and helpful content to its users. You also want to make sure you are giving the search engine a reason to show up your content.
So, to avoid thinking that guest posting is dead you need to focus on creating high-quality guest posts. Post great content that’s valuable to your and the site’s audience.
Well, guest posting is such a huge topic we can’t exhaust the whole of it now, but to find guest posting opportunities, you can use the following search terms on Google:
- “Your keyword + write for us”
- “Your keyword + submit guest posts”
- “Your keyword + become a contributor”
- “Your niche + we accept guest posts”
- “Your keyword + submit guest content”
These are a few key terms you can use to find sites that accept guest posts. Once you find multiple sites, go ahead, submit a guest post pitch, and keep the ball rolling.
Over to You
When you want to generate quality backlinks, you have plenty of link building techniques at your disposal. You just need to know and how to use them.
We hope these nine link building techniques will help you attract good backlinks from authoritative sites.
Please share other or any of the mentioned link building methods you use the work best for you in the comment section.
Boniface Kisina is not your ordinary blog and content writer. Hire him to create for you long-form/short-form blog posts that explode your leads. He helps SMBs maximize their revenue through high-quality content that drives traffic, leads, and builds authority. He is also the owner and founder of bloggingpot.com.