How to build powerful backlinks? (AN ACTIONABLE GUIDE)
Backlinks.
If you’ve heard a lot of people stress on the significance of this and are not quite sure how to get this done, my aim today, through this post is to help you understand the concept of backlinks and give some amazing hacks to build them.
First of all, a backlink is an important criterion that Google considers to rank your article. A backlink is nothing but, the number of articles that link to your article. The more, the better. More often than not, we see industry influencers and famous personalities get a lot of references in other articles and earn plenty of backlinks.
If there’s one thing you need to remember, you don’t have to be a great influencer for other folks to link to your posts. Sometimes, you produce amazing content that is original and high-quality. But, it gets buried deep into the plethora of other content.
There’s only one explanation for this. It’s not your article, but the efforts you DID NOT make to help it get noticed.
Let’s go ahead and see some hacks that will help you earn back links.
- Build high- quality content to prevent pogo sticking
So, how does google’s rankbrain work? Google’s ML-based algorithm considers a ton of factors to rank an article on the search results page. One of this is how a user responds to the results on the page upon a search. Let’s say a user searches for a pancake recipe. If the user has a lesser dwell time on the first two links and comes back to the search results page, clicks on the third link and sticks to that article, Google observes this. The user is probably finding the article extremely helpful — reasons being the article is in-depth, resourceful, original and thoroughly researched.
The result?
These articles that are likeable to the users deserve a better ranking and they gradually climb up. This is one way your articles can earn good backlink percentage.
Through the creation of amazing content, you improve rankings and people who write about the same topics are likely to refer and link to your article for references, facts, findings, statistics etc. The very first effort you make to build backlinks is producing high-quality link-worthy content that is the best and plentiful out there.
Note: By simply creating good content and passing the google rank test does not necessarily mean people will always link to you. This is just one way. You must make efforts to earn those backlinks and cannot magically expect people to link to you. Let’s dive into some other hacks now.
2. Ahrefs Link intersect
Okay, so this one is about a tool you can use for building backlinks. So first, why do some of your competitors rank better than you? One of the reasons you are overlooking is the number of articles that are linking to your competitor’s content, but not yours.
Your articles might be equally good, sometimes even more resourceful. Unfortunately, your visibility might have taken a toll due to lack of SEO aggression. That’s okay because SEO is a long process and it will take a while before you begin to perform on the search results. But, you really don’t have to wait to get backlinks that you actually deserve. There are some tools like Moz link intersect and ahrefs link intersect that help you identify posts that are linking to your competitors content but not yours.
Once you identify this, you can for sure assume that these people are interested in the kind of content that you create and are likely to link to your articles too, if you reach out to them. Get in touch with these folks, let them know about you and get a ton of backlinks.
3. Create a boatload of long infographics
You can create your own infographics that are full of information or as suggested by Neil Patel, in this article, you can follow this trick of simply heading over to Ahrefs content explorer, type a keyword related to what you do and lock an article with the highest number of backlinks.
You can simply convert it into an infographic and credit the original source. Now, you can email the folks that linked to the original piece of content stressing on how awesome the article is and that you have a graphic-rich content of the same and insist them to link to it too. You can say how visual content is more effective.
This is a stressful process, but it is sure to get back quite a good number of links.
4. Spy on broken links — The moving man method
SEO wizards like Brian Dean recommend this in a lot of their optimization tactics posts. This is a brilliant tactic to quickly whip up some backlinks. All you have to do is identify name changes, renaming URLs, shutting down and such major changes or events. Once you identify such sites, you must then find out who’s linking to these sites and also inform that these links in their articles are throwing an error.
You can use a tool like ahrefs that’s a backlink checking tool to identify the articles that link to an outdated URL. Make sure that you get in touch with these folks (bear in mind the outreach must be to those with sites that have a high DA).
Inform them that the article they are linking to has a broken URL and you must subtly ask them to link to your article instead.
5. Claim your credits
Many posts link to your articles or use images to which you have ownership. But, they do not link them to their original sources. This is a quite common practice. So, you must never let go of the backlinks that you almost earned. You can use buzzsumo alerts to identify these articles that have mentioned your brand name but did not give you the source credit.
Similarly, your images need mentions too. Especially the infographics that you create with so much efforts should not be simply used by others without crediting you. How do you identify this? Do a simple google image search with your image and identify through the website links in the google image search results.
Once you identify these, write an email to the author appreciating the mention and asking them to provide the link to your article by claiming for it. You really don’t have to sugarcoat this as you are asking something that you deserve.
Wrapping up
Building backlinks are essential to perform well in the search results. It is quite a hectic process, but once you practice them, you will be thankful for the harvest you get out of your efforts. It is a crucial piece to optimization that’s often overlooked. I highly recommend you to begin working on your backlinking strategies if you haven’t already.
Let me know in the comments if you have any other tips or hacks to build powerful backlinks or for any questions you might have!
Originally published at digitaldyno.wordpress.com on January 5, 2019.
