Your Guide to Getting Quality Backlinks

CopyPress

April 27, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

Backlinks are an important component of effective search engine optimization strategies as they essentially allow another authoritative website to vouch for your own website. Backlinks are important because they show search engines like Google that your content is noteworthy and worth being ranked highly on search engine results pages. Good backlinks support the ranking position of your website as well as its visibility to new users. Learn everything you need to know about getting and maintaining quality backlinks with the topics below:

What are Backlinks?
Benefits of Backlinks for Your Website
How to Get Backlinks
Tools for Building Backlinks to Your Website
Important Components of Quality Backlinks

What are Backlinks?

Image via Unsplash by mjessier

A backlink is a link used to connect one website to another. For example, another website may include a link to one of your blog posts related to their particular message. This is considered a backlink, also referred to as an incoming link or an inbound link. When another website uses an external link to connect to your website, your website now has a backlink from the other site. These are the two basic link types you’ll see:

Nofollow backlink: This type of backlink uses a Nofollow tag to inform search engines to ignore the link. Nofollow backlinks do not provide value to either site and are not typically considered helpful in supporting your SEO efforts.
Dofollow backlink: A Dofollow backlink is the ideal type of backlink you want for your website. This type of link holds the most value and tells search engines that the link directs users to a high-quality webpage. Dofollow links that come from highly-respected or authoritative sites offer the most value to your website and can significantly increase your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Benefits of Backlinks for Your Website

Backlinks offer several benefits for your website regarding SEO and how your site ranks in search engines. A few key benefits of backlinks include:

Increased brand awareness: Building quality backlinks that come from highly credible and respected sources is a great way to increase your overall brand awareness. When users read the webpage and then click on the link that leads them to your site, they are more likely to explore your site and become aware of your company or brand. Working with more established brands and websites will support your own brand awareness, ultimately resulting in increased traffic and conversion rates.
Improved SEO optimization: Backlinks are also beneficial because they improve your overall search engine optimization by providing a signal of importance and quality to Google and other search engines. When Google notices that other websites link back to your site, it sends a signal that your website is of quality and worth linking to. Because search engines want to provide the best information available for users, they may rank your website higher on SERPs for a particular topic due to the vote of confidence you’ve received from other sites via backlinks.
They act as a promotion for your organization: When another website links to your website, it is essentially promoting your company and the content on your site. This is another form of digital marketing and can increase your online visibility.
Increased referral traffic: Referral traffic is traffic that comes from other websites than from search engines. While search traffic is typically considered more important than referral traffic, referral traffic still leads more people to your website and increases exposure.
Elevated online authority: Getting backlinks on authoritative sites can increase your website’s overall authority on the internet. The more often users see links to your website on websites they already trust, the more likely they are to trust you, as well.

How To Get Backlinks

There are several steps you can take to increase your number of backlinks. These steps include:

1. Report Broken Links

This method involves finding broken links on websites you’d like to get backlinks from, informing them of the broken link, and then making recommendations of other websites to replace the link with. You would, of course, recommend your own website. Since you are technically doing a favor for the webmaster by notifying them of broken links, they may be more likely to include your link over others.

You can use this method by first finding other sites within your niche that have resource pages. Do a Google search such as “keyword + links” or “keyword + resources.” The Google Chrome software Check My Links is also an excellent tool to find any broken links on the website’s page. Once you’ve found broken links on a website, reach out to the webmaster in a professional and friendly way and inform them of the broken links. Offer alternatives that also include your own website.

2. Make Pitches for Potential Backlink Opportunities

If there’s a particular website you want to get a backlink from, you’ll need to reach out to them to inquire about this. But, it’s important to keep your email short, concise, and easy to read. Many high-quality websites receive several inbound emails each day, so keeping your request to the point and easily skimmable will ensure your message is received and read and that you get a fair chance in terms of pitching your site to the authoritative website.

3. Focus On Catchy Content Formats

Blog posts and articles are typically considered the main type of content that gets backlinks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most effective form of content for backlinks. According to BuzzSumo, a study of one million articles and blog posts found that 75% of online content gets no links. However, certain types of content performed better than others. These types of content include:

Quizzes
Infographics
How-to articles
List posts
Videos
“Why” articles

Creating relevant content in these forms can increase your chances of getting backlinks and increase how long a person spends on your site once they get there.

4. Create Guides Relevant to Your Industry

Comprehensive guides are highly popular in backlinking and can quickly help establish your website as an authority on search engines. Guides perform so well as backlinks and in search engines because they contain a large amount of high-quality content on a single topic. For example, a guide on backlinks will include everything you need to know about getting and maintaining backlinks as well as tips and tools you can use to boost your efforts. This can be incredibly beneficial to readers, as they don’t have to search multiple websites for the information they need but rather can get it all from your guide.

Don’t be afraid to include every detail of your topic in your guide, as this can help set you apart as a resource on the topic and within your industry. Once you create your guide, reach out to relevant and authoritative sites and recommend your guide as a backlink.

5. Ask Companies You Have Existing Relationships With

If you already have existing relationships with authoritative companies in your industry, reach out and request to be included on the resources page or their website’s relevant web pages. If your relationship is good with the company and you offer high-quality backlinks for it to use, they will likely agree to include your links on their page where relevant.

6. Look At Your Competitors’ Backlink Strategies

It’s important to keep track of the tactics your competitors are using for their online SEO strategies. Looking at their social media and link-building techniques can provide you with insight as to what they are doing and if it is working.

You can also use a tool like Monitor Backlinks to get weekly reports on any new backlinks your competitors have earned. You’ll also receive important insights on these links and be able to see various SEO metrics for your competitors. You can then use this information to identify new link-building opportunities that have worked for your competitors’ websites.

7. Promote Your Best Content

Another way to get more backlinks is to effectively promote your best content. Regularly send updates to important sources in your industry about your latest content and post about your new content on social media. You can also reach out to websites or bloggers that regularly run “roundups” of the latest and greatest content. Provide them with a brief introduction to your website and a few links to your best content.

Tools for Building Backlinks to Your Website

There are several tools you can use to support your efforts in getting more backlinks. The most popular backlinking tools include:

Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest is a backlinking tool that gives you access to competitor backlink data and provides you with a better understanding of their link profiles. This tool will show you a site’s domain score, the number of incoming backlinks, and the number of unique domains that link to the site.
Pitchbox: Pitchbox provides more than 20 different prospecting options that allow you to build more links quickly and effectively. Features that come with this tool include roundups, skyscraper outreach, link detox, blogger outreach, and competitor backlinks. It will also provide you with the contact information for webmasters, bloggers, and influencers, reducing the time you spend when reaching out to these people.
Monitor Backlinks: This backlink tool checks the bad and good backlinks for both you and your competition and helps you build great links, recover valuable lost links, and manage all of your backlink information in one location. It has an easy-to-understand dashboard that provides you with various metrics that include keyword rankings and traffic in addition to backlink data.
Linkody: Linkody is a backlink tool that helps you track your link-building campaigns. It gives you access to your competitors’ link-building strategies, an analysis of your own link profile, and alerts when you gain or lose links.

Important Components of Quality Backlinks

Several key components make a quality backlink. These components include:

Relevance: Getting backlinks with websites and authorities in your industry is an important component of a successful backlink strategy. The more relevant the website is that you get a backlink from, the more likely the reader will be interested in your link and visit your site.
Authority: Similar to relevance, you want the websites you get backlinks from to have authority. Just keep in mind that the more authoritative a website is, the more difficult it will likely be to get a link. But, it’s always worth the effort.
Traffic: How much traffic the websites you get backlinks from receive is also an important component of effective backlinks. If the website gets little traffic, there’s less opportunity for users to visit your link from that website.

High-quality backlinks can provide many benefits for your overall SEO strategy. Be sure to use best practices when getting backlinks and create high-quality content to increase your chances of attracting authoritative websites to use your links.