Building More Backlinks: 5 Tactics

Today we are talking about building more backlinks.

This will include why more backlinks is important for the long term growth of your company, as well as five of the most useful tactics for doing so. Let’s get started.

Why Building Backlinks Is Important

Backlinks make your site more authoritative. Search engines (especially Google) sees other sites linking to your own as a “vote of confidence.” More backlinks from more sites shows search engines you are an authority and that people on the internet find your website useful. 

This has many benefits, including:

  • Better SEO over time as your domain authority rises
  • More opportunities to grow your audience with more pathways to your site built
  • The positioning of your company as an authority in your niche, resulting in more sales

Of course, there are a number of best practices you should keep in mind while building backlinks to your site. Backlinks should, for example, always be relevant. This means that they should come from sites that are somehow related to your niche or industry. 

Your backlinks should also be natural. Buying backlinks should never be bought because it’s essentially an attempt to “trick” search engines into giving you unearned authority. This is never a good strategy. You will almost always be caught and will be penalized by search engines once you are.

5 Tactics For Building More Backlinks

1) Guest posts

Content posted on other sites usually gives you the opportunity to include a link to at least one of your site pages. Guest posts are a win-win opportunity: the website you are writing for gets fresh new content to add to their site, and you get a backlink back to your own. 

This is a great long term strategy and you should ideally make it a point to write at least one guest post per month. Maybe you already are if you implement content marketing into your marketing strategy.

Of course, do whatever you can to ensure the content you do write is high quality. You also need to make sure the website you are writing for is somehow related to your niche. This is the only way to ensure that you get quality traffic to your site from the guest post. A good tool here is Ahrefs. This allows you to pinpoint the sites that are the best candidate for your guest posts. 

2) Link exchanges

One of the easiest ways to build more backlinks is to simply ask. Often, however, the person or site you are asking for will want a link in return. This is to be expected, as linking to your site or content in the right place takes action on their part. This is what’s called a “link exchange” and it’s the quickest strategy from today’s post.

That said, you have to be careful with this one. Google’s algorithms have gotten increasingly sophisticated over the years and don’t always look at outright link exchanges in a positive light. Done poorly, this strategy can look somewhat spammy. Remember, you don’t simply want the most amount of backlinks from anybody willing to link to you. What you’re looking for is quality sites relevant to your niche.

Check out this post on link exchange best practices to make sure you do it the right way.

3) Finding broken links

Web pages go down all the time. Maybe they are removed by the original creator or perhaps the website is no longer active. Regardless of the reason, broken links are everywhere and a great opportunity for your own brand.

That’s because no website wants broken links. It looks unprofessional and is often an inconvenience for their readers. They would be more than happy to link to either your website or one of your pieces of content because it’s simply better for their own audience. 

This is an especially useful strategy when targeting “round up” posts. Do you think your site is valuable enough to be included? Then reach out and ask. Like I said, if your site provides enough value, they will often be happy to add it.  

4) Finding unlinked mentions

There are plenty of places on the internet where your company or website is mentioned without a link. And that is completely natural: people often either forget to link to your site or simply don’t have the time. For the strategy for building more backlinks, your mission is to go and find these “unlinked mentions.”

Once again, a great tool for this strategy is Ahrefs. The tool makes it easy to find countless unlinked mentions of your own website that you’d probably never come across searching on your own. This is a very “low stakes” way to build more backlinks to your site. Linking to your company when they’ve already mentioned you, after all, is a huge positive for their own audience. So give it a try!

5) Providing incentives for links

Of course, you can always simply “bribe” people for backlinks. This doesn’t and shouldn’t mean money (remember, this is how you get penalized by Google), but can include any number of other tactics. You simply have to get a little creative here.  

Maybe you agree to do some sort of collaboration. Maybe you add their site to one of your own round-up posts. Perhaps, in exchange for information about a potential client looking for help, they agree to link to your site on their home page.

The possibilities are endless, and this tactic is a good one to keep in mind regardless of any other tactic you choose for building more backlinks. Companies and brands often (justifiably) want something in return for a backlink. So thing first and foremost what kind of value you can provide to them!

Are you an enterprise, nonprofit or small business looking for help on your website? Give us a shout! We provide a free consultation. Email us at info@lughstudio.com or call us at (718) 855-1919!

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