Link building is a part of off-page search engine optimization. This means that backlinks are all links from all other websites that lead to your own. In other words, off-site means you cannot have a direct impact on the publishing of these links. To build them, you will have to build relationships with website publishers. Be sure to invest plenty of time and resources into this long-term marketing strategy.
Google loves when your website traffic comes from other websites. However, traffic from Forbes which is a high-authority website is not equally viewed as traffic from SmallExemplaryBlog.
In other words, you want to focus on building high-quality links. Not just scattering backlinks wherever you have the chance to do so.
Image source: Neil Patel
Above is a great illustration of the importance of backlinks for search engine ranking. As you can see, websites that rank number one on Google have an average of 100,000 backlinks. This is not surprising. What’s especially interesting is that even 9th or 10th-ranked websites have tens of thousands of backlinks.
Now that we’ve reiterated the importance of building backlinks for your SEO. Here are some of the best ways to build high-quality backlinks in 2020:
1. Do Original Research or Studies
In many of our articles, you might have noticed that we often refer to studies, surveys and research results. Obviously, these kinds of data are always more valuable than intuitive speculations or subjective commentary. Especially when we’re talking about marketing and efficient SEO investments.
So, if you often link to research, stats and numerical examples (and you likely do), why not think the other way around? If you post research that has interesting results with highly applicable conclusions for the industry, it’s likely that these results will be shared, commented and linked to.
The reason is that many content marketers are creating blog posts and articles. But they simply don’t have the time to carry out research for every topic they’re working on.
Now, let’s say you carry out a simple research study on this topic – building high-quality backlinks. You can craft a simple survey in Google Forms where you can ask the questions and share the link on social media, forums and groups. In this example, you would ask:
- How important are backlinks to your SEO strategy? (1-10)
- How much do you invest in building high-quality backlinks?
- Where do you find websites where you can build backlinks? (Previous relationships, social media, recommendations, guest posting lists, etc.)
- How do you approach your backlinking prospects?
These questions might spark some interesting responses from your audience. Make sure you send out the form (survey) to a relevant audience that will actually take the time to provide this info to you. For example, the results might turn to be something like this, according to the questions you have asked:
- 90% of marketers consider backlinks crucial to their SEO strategy
- On average, marketers invest 50% of their SEO budget into backlink building
- The majority of marketers find high-quality backlinks prospects via Google search
- The majority of marketers approaches backlink prospects with a semi-personalized email
As you can see, these stats are something that would be interesting to know for any marketer. It’s likely they would share them in their own posts related to backlinking and SEO.
2. Craft an Infographic
Another effective and fun way to get links from sites that you’ve never even heard of is to get your visual content to the top results of the Google Image search.
Just like with research and stats, many marketers simply don’t have the time to craft visuals of their own. So they search for related and relevant images on search engines. Also, every time they use someone else’s visual content (be it photographs, images, illustrations or icons), they have to link to the source – which means your original blog post that contains the image!
In this regard, an infographic is a great way to combine the power of research and findings with the appeal of visual content. When someone who’s writing a blog posts searches for an image, they are more likely to be attracted to your educational infographic than a random generic image.
According to SMA Marketing, marketers who utilize infographics in their blog posts grow 12% faster than those who don’t.
3. Link to Other Websites
What’s the most obvious way to get someone to do you a favour? Do a favour for them first!
Linking to other websites and giving them SEO power might seem counter-intuitive when you’re trying to build up your own backlinks, but this approach actually works, and it’s most effective when you reach out to the websites after you link to them.
Most of the time, high-quality backlinks are enabled by high-quality relationships, which means that you communicate and interact with actual humans who are working on the website, exchanging ideas and mutually benefitting from your backlinks.
You can also link to other blogs and websites in your email newsletter campaign. After you start email list building, you can use this marketing channel in alignment with your SEO efforts to combine the power of search engine ranking and email marketing.
4. Post Top-Notch, Shareable Content
All over digital marketing courses, guides, books and literature, the biggest accent in content marketing is always on its very cornerstone: consistently publishing high-quality content that provides value to readers.
We are going to reiterate this rule because it’s basically impossible to talk about boosting backlinks and increasing the authority of your website without talking about the quality of content.
Quality, however, is not a ready-made formula and great content comes in many shapes and sizes. Many marketers like to share tips on the best way to get Google to like your posts, but at the end of the day, it’s all about providing value to your readers, whatever form your content might be.
If you want to outsource some of your writing work and focus solely on building high-quality backlinks, you can use some of the following services: GrabMyEssay (a website where you can find writers for any type of work), WritingJudge (a writing service platform for outsourcing your content writing), Fiverr (a comparison website where you can find freelancer for your writings) or you can check LinksManagement for quality links.
5. Comment on Other WordPress Sites
To circle back to the important ingredient of backlinking that we’ve previously talked about – building relationships – let’s mention one of the most effective ways to do both at the same time: commenting on other WordPress sites.
Remember when you received the first comment on your WordPress site? It’s an awesome feeling to know that your content has helped someone and that they were kind enough to set aside some time to write a comment on your post. Why not do the same for others, both beginner and veteran sites, and share the link to your website at the same time?
Here is an example of a good backlinking comment:
Awesome stuff! Thank you for clarifying what needs to be done in order to build high-quality backlinks. Keep up the good work!
We’re doing similar work on our blog and we’d appreciate if you could take a look: ourwebsite.com.
Thanks!
If and when you decide to use this tactic and start commenting on other WordPress sites with your link, you have to remember that it’s all about quality and relevancy. Authors and website owners will quickly notice if you’re just copy-pasting the same comment to multiple websites.
The approach that will definitely bring you more effective results and build strong, long-lasting relationships with other websites is to actually take some time and read their content and then respond with a relevant comment. If the post author recognizes that you really read their article, they will be super-grateful and happy and they won’t mind that you included a link to your own website.
Conclusion
Backlink building is a long game, but it’s definitely worth every second and penny you put into it. If you want to rank on the first page of Google for a highly competitive keyword, building links should be the priority of your search engine optimization efforts.
In the long run, it’s also better to focus on building high-quality backlinks exclusively, because they might seem more expensive in the short-term, but will bring you more benefits over the years. Remember: be patient and don’t try to rush things because succeeding at the SEO game can take months and years.
Kristin Savage is a blog writer at SupremeDissertations, also she does some editing work at FlyWriting blog. Along with pursuing her degree in Creative Writing, Kristin was gaining experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in marketing strategy for publishers and authors.
Comments
It’s so usefull.. thanks..