This article will detail everything you need to know about backlinks and how to generate them for your own site, if you are already familiar with backlinks you can skip to the ‘Guest Posting’ Section.
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks are links present on other websites that link towards a page on your website. For example, if you had an extremely helpful article on your website other writers may reference this post or recommend it for further reading. In doing this they will often link to your website, this link is known as a backlink.
Why Generate Backlinks?
When a website links to another, Google notices this and believes that the website must be helpful if people are referencing it. It can be seen as a vow of trust from one website to another. Google uses this information when determining search rankings, ranking sites with many backlinks over ones with very few or none at all. This technique can greatly improve your search engine optimization or SEO.
An additional benefit of backlinks is they channel organic traffic to your website, provided the website linking has sufficient traffic. As organic traffic is also a consideration for SEO, if your site is engaging enough this can create a feedback loop. Where more traffic leads to higher rankings, leads to more traffic and so forth. This is how newer but high-quality websites can quickly establish themselves in search rankings.
What Makes a Good Backlink?
Not all backlinks are the same, as you could imagine getting a link from Forbes would carry a lot more authority than getting a link from one from your friends’ personal sites. Because of this, it often isn’t worth the effort getting backlinks from low ranking and unauthoritative sites. From an SEO perspective having a handful of high quality backlinks is better than a lot of low-quality unauthoritative backlinks. I use a 4-step checklist to determine if a website is a good backlink source.
-
High Domain Authority: This measures how authoritative the website is as a whole. Domain Authority or DA is measured with a chrome extension called MozBar and is scored from 0-100, the extension can be downloaded here. You will also need to create a Moz account for the extension to work.
Ensure you are signed in within another tab while using the extension. Once downloaded, activate the extension and visit the website you are considering for a backlink. It will display a banner at the top of the page as seen below.
The Domain Authority has been highlighted in red, Telling us Forbes has a DA of 94 out of 100, which is extremely high as you would expect. We recommend only attempting to gather backlinks from websites that have at least 25 DA.
- Keyword Ranking: You want to ensure the pages you are receiving backlinks from are performing well in the search results pages themselves. This can be done through checking how many organic keywords they are ranking for. This metric and the next two can all be checked with the free version of Semrush, you just need to create an account. There is a graphic showing how to find all notable statistics within Semrush at the end of this section.
- Organic Traffic: This is a great indicator of how the website is performing with users, it’s also used by Google to determine authority. Backlinks from sites with little traffic won’t have a major effect, as Google doesn’t view them as reputable. Having reliable traffic will also be beneficial as this will bring more people to your website through the backlink itself. We will only go after backlinks if the domain has at least 500 monthly visitors.
- Referring Domains: This is similar to the amount of backlinks the site has, however it doesn't count multiple links from the same domain. This is the preferred metric over backlinks as it drowns out domains that may have an excessive number of links to the one website. As backlinks are a powerful tool in determining website authority you want to consider this when choosing a backlink source, we require a minimum of 50+ referring domains when generating backlinks.
All these metrics can be found using Semrush under the ‘Domain Overview’ tab, as shown below.
Guest Posting
The most popular method for generating backlinks is known as guest posting. Guest posting is when you write an article for someone else’s blog, and in return you receive a link to your website. This is an effective strategy for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the website owner is receiving something in return for the backlink, very rarely will people link to your content just because you ask them, even if it is good content. This is because people understand the value of a backlink and expect something of value in return. Through offering a free high-quality blog post they are likely to accept this trade-off.
Secondly, this method allows you to determine the anchor text within the link, i.e. the text that people click to reach your website. This is beneficial as Google uses this to learn more about your site. It is important to have a variety of anchor texts, such as brand name, keywords, and just the URL. If you have an overwhelming majority of your backlinks with the same anchor text, especially keywords, then Google may actually penalize your website in the search rankings. This is because it can be seen as inorganic link-building. Therefore, if you are choosing the text yourself you can ensure you have a relatively even ratio of different anchor texts.
To find blogs accepting guest posts you can utilize search operators, search operators allow you to add rules to your Google searches, such as only showing results that have an exact match to a string of text. This is done through quotation marks, thus searching your niche followed by “submit a guest post” will result in all blogs within your niche that allow you to submit guest posts. An example for fashion is shown below.
When submitting articles to sites it is important to thoroughly read all their requirements, such as word count and formatting. Also ensure your content is hand-written as AI-generated content is not only bad for SEO but will also very likely get declined with no chance of working with them again. Before writing an article ensure that they don’t already have a similar post already on their site as they may decline for this reason also.
Some sites will allow you to pitch a topic for consideration rather than having to write your article first, try to have an informative, actionable article with an engaging headline to maximize your chances of being approved. If a blog post gets declined the content does not have to be thrown out, it can often be modified for another website.
Broken Link Building
This method involves finding links that no longer work, i.e. lead to broken pages or return errors. Then trying to get that link replaced with one to your own site. To achieve this you must mimic whatever the link is meant to be pointing to and provide a high quality replacement.
The majority of broken link building is done on resource pages, this is because they contain long lists of links all for the same niche, greatly improving your chances of finding a suitable broken link. To find these resource pages you can once again employ search operators, using ‘inurl:’ will only display results that have the following string in their URL. An example of this for the marketing niche is shown below.
Next you must find broken links within these pages, of course you could manually go through and check every link on the page, but there are much faster ways to do this. The chrome extension Check My Links will automatically highlight broken links in red so all you have to do is click on the extension and then scroll through the page, looking for red links.
Above is an example of a suitable broken link, it should be linking to an article discussing key elements of digital marketing, including PPC. However, upon clicking this link it returns ‘Page not found’.
Assuming marketing is something your website targets, you would then write an article on this topic yourself, ensuring it is informative and as high-quality as possible. After completing the article, reach out to the owner of the website and inform them of the broken link, say you have a similar article on your website that they could replace it with.
This strategy is successful as you are helping them by pointing out their broken link which is detrimental for user experience and SEO, as well as providing an easy solution. If your article is on topic, well written and formatted it is unlikely they will go out of their way to find another article to replace the link with.
Conclusion
Through these techniques you will be able to build a number of high-quality backlinks, boosting your rankings in search engines. Remember to go through the 4 checks outlined under ‘What Makes a Good Backlink’ before attempting to gain any backlink. This will ensure your time is used effectively on links that will generate results.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.