How to Get Powerful BackLinks in 2024

What is link building in SEO? And why do you build links?

Imagine you’re writing an article and someone mentions your work in their own article, linking back to yours. That’s kind of like link building in SEO. It’s basically getting other websites to mention and link to yours, which is like getting a thumbs up from them.

Here’s why you’d want that:

1. Search engines love trusted sources: When other reputable websites link to yours, it tells search engines, “Hey, this site is legit and has good stuff!” This can help your website climb the search result ladder.
2. More visitors, more the merrier: Those links act like little pathways from other websites, driving visitors your way. It’s a great way to get more people to see your content and potentially become fans.

Not just any link counts. You want links from websites that are relevant to yours and have a good reputation. Think of it like getting a shoutout from a friend you respect, not a random stranger on the street.

15 Ways To Get High Quality Backlinks That Really Work

Alright, listen up! Here’s the lowdown on getting sweet backlinks that actually work:

1. Craft killer content: This is your golden ticket. Make your stuff so informative, engaging, and awesome that people naturally wanna link to it. Think blog posts, infographics, case studies – anything that folks find mega-helpful or interesting.
2. Guest star on other sites: This is a boss move to get your content seen by new people and score backlinks in the process. Find websites in your area of expertise that accept guest posts, then whip up top-notch content that fits their audience perfectly.
3. Get listed in online directories: There are tons of online directories out there listing businesses and websites. Score a spot in these directories to snag backlinks and boost your search engine ranking.
4. Fix broken link blues: Find broken links on websites in your niche and create amazing content that could replace them. Once you’ve got your masterpiece ready, reach out to the website owner and tell them about the broken link and your awesome content that could be a better fit.
5. Build website bestie bonds: This is key! By getting chummy with other website owners, you increase the chances of them linking to you. Do this by commenting on their blogs, joining forums, or simply introducing yourself.
6. Rock social media: Share your content on social media and encourage others to do the same. This broadens your reach and increases the likelihood of people linking to you.
7. Tell search engines you exist: Make sure your website is submitted to major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This helps them find and index your website, which can improve your ranking and make you more link-worthy.
8. Join the online party: Participating in online communities is a fantastic way to connect with people in your niche and build relationships. You can also promote your content and snag backlinks while you’re at it.
9. Go visual, get noticed: Visual content grabs attention and gets shared. Infographics, charts, and other eye-catching visuals are a great way to earn backlinks.
10. Offer free goodies: Give away free tools and resources to attract visitors and score backlinks. This could include ebooks, white papers, or templates – anything that provides value to your audience.
11. Help a reporter out (HARO): HARO connects journalists with sources. Sign up and respond to queries relevant to your expertise. This is a golden opportunity to get your name and website in front of journalists and potentially earn backlinks.
12. Become an interviewee: Share your expertise and earn backlinks by getting interviewed on other websites. Look for websites in your niche that do interviews, reach out, and see if they’d be interested in featuring you.
13. Sponsor events: Get your brand noticed and earn backlinks by sponsoring events relevant to your niche. Contact event organizers and see if they have sponsorship opportunities.
14. Run contests and giveaways: Generate excitement and get people buzzing about your brand by running contests and giveaways. This can also help you score backlinks as people might link to your website to promote the event.
15. Craft linkable magnets: Create content specifically designed to attract backlinks, like research reports, industry surveys, or unique data sets.

Building backlinks is a marathon, not a sprint. Be patient, keep creating stellar content, and watch those backlinks roll in!

Also read: What is Backlink Strategy?

Creative Ways To Earn or Build DoFollow Links to Your Site

Professional Strategies for Securing High-Quality Dofollow Backlinks:

1. Content Marketing Proficiency: Develop and publish consistently valuable, informative, and engaging content that establishes your website as a thought leader and natural source for link citations.
2. Strategic Guest Blogging: Collaborate with relevant, high-authority websites in your niche by offering well-researched and expertly written guest posts that demonstrate your expertise and value proposition.
3. Broken Link Reclamation: Identify and reach out to website owners with broken links on relevant web pages, offering your high-quality content as a valuable replacement. This demonstrates your industry knowledge and provides a win-win scenario.
4. Niche-Specific Relationship Building: Cultivate genuine relationships with website owners and influencers in your industry through thoughtful engagement, collaboration opportunities, and mutually beneficial partnerships.
5. Compelling Visual Content Creation: Develop visually appealing and informative content such as infographics, charts, and data visualizations to increase shareability and organically attract backlinks.
6. Strategic Freemium Resources: Offer valuable free resources, such as ebooks, white papers, or industry reports, to incentivize website owners to link back to your website as a credible source.
7. Active Online Community Participation: Engage actively in online communities relevant to your niche by sharing valuable insights, engaging in discussions, and building relationships with potential link partners.
8. Targeted Contest and Giveaway Development: Host engaging contests and giveaways strategically designed to generate industry buzz and encourage website owners to promote your initiative via backlinks.
9. Event Sponsorship Opportunities: Explore sponsorship opportunities for relevant industry events to increase brand awareness, cultivate valuable connections, and potentially secure backlinks from event websites or media coverage.
10. Data-Driven Content Creation: Craft “linkable magnets” like unique research reports, industry surveys, or valuable data sets that provide exclusive and insightful information, naturally attracting backlinks from websites seeking to reference credible sources.

types of link building

Building links to your website is kinda like making friends for it. You want the cool kids (high-quality websites) to hang out with you, not the troublemakers (spammy tactics). Here’s the lowdown on the good, the bad, and the ugly of link building:

The Good Stuff (White Hat):

• Create awesome content: Make stuff so informative and interesting that people naturally wanna link to it. Think blog posts, infographics, or anything people find super helpful or cool.
• Guest blog like a boss: This is a great way to get your content seen by new people and score points with other websites (backlinks!). Find websites in your area of expertise and whip up top-notch content for them.
• Fix broken link blues: Find broken links on websites in your niche and create amazing content that could replace them. It’s like helping a friend out and getting a high five (backlink) in return.
• Spread the word: Share your content on social media and encourage others to do the same. The more people see your stuff, the higher the chances of getting linked to.
• Build website besties: Get friendly with other website owners. Comment on their blogs, join forums, or just introduce yourself. The more they know you, the more likely they are to link to you.

The Yikes Stuff (Black Hat):

• Buying links: Paying for links is like bribing someone to be your friend. It might seem cool at first, but it can backfire and hurt you in the long run.
• Link spamming: This is basically digital graffiti. Don’t go around leaving your website link everywhere like it’s nobody’s business. It’s annoying and can get you penalized.
• Shady tricks: Hiding links, creating fake websites, and other sneaky tactics might seem tempting, but they’re not worth the risk. Search engines can catch you and punish you for it.

Focus on building genuine connections and creating awesome content. That’s the real way to earn high-quality links and make your website the coolest kid on the block (search engine results page).

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is the classic go-to for link-building tactics for one simple reason: it works!

This tactic involves contacting blogs and online news sources in your niche and pitching the site owners’ content outlines. If they accept and like your content, you can link back to your target website either as part of an author bio or within the body of the content.

Broken link building

Broken link building is the process of finding backlinks that lead to 404 pages on other sites, contacting those sites, and suggesting they replace the 404 link with the one leading to a similar page on your website. It’s a great way to get backlinks while also offering value to the site giving you the backlink.

Competitor link building

Competitor link building involves analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles to determine which kind of content is most likely to garner high-quality links within your topic focus.

Using a backlinks analytics tool, you’ll be able to see whether your competitors get the lion’s share of their links to infographics, ultimate guides, tutorials or other kinds of content, and also discover the actual focus of the content.

Buying backlinks

Yes, you read that right. Sometimes these kinds of links can be very beneficial; however, they won’t give you the best ROI (Return On Investment).

But if you’re in a competitive space where you need every little bit of help to drive more traffic and rank higher, then it might be a good strategy for your site.

Find broken links

While you’re looking at your competitors, you can also look at their broken links. The broken link building strategy is another quick and easy way of capturing backlinks.

Broken links are links that no longer exist or work on a website. And they may be caused by the source website removing those links (also known as 404 error), have an improper URL, or the destination website might have closed or moved to another domain.

Provide testimonials

Did you know that by writing testimonials on other websites, you can get a backlink for your site?

Many businesses look for testimonials to show as social proof. They even display them on their homepage.

So, if you’re a regular user of a tool or service, you can write a testimonial in exchange for a backlink. Find companies that are relevant to your industry and submit a testimonial.

Publish original research

When considering why and when people share content, you must consider the psychology of content sharing.
A recent study found that 94% of respondents said that they carefully consider how the information they share will be useful to the recipient.

Recover your dead backlinks

Sometimes you might find broken links to your website. This may be the case if the location of your page changes or if another webmaster misspelled your link. In both cases, these backlinks will return a 404 error.
Such issues may also commonly occur after a site was re-launched or migrated to another domain. You should then redirect these backlinks to some other page.

Resource pages

Identify resource pages within your niche and suggest adding your content as a valuable resource. Reach out to the webmasters of these pages and explain why your content is a good fit.

Find the strongest competitors healthy backlinks

Figuring out who’s linking to your competitors is a huge win. Competitor backlinks will almost certainly be on sites that are relevant to your niche, so you know they’d be quality backlinks for SEO.

This could be a massive manual project, but there are tools (free and paid) that help you analyze the backlink profiles of your competitors. I’ll use my free tool, Online Backlink Checker (part of Link-Assistant.com), as an example, but the process would be pretty similar for any other software.

Infographic backlinks

Along with written text, you use infographics to secure backlinks for your website.

Infographics are visual representations of data and information using graphics, images, and charts. They help in providing a quick overview of the topic and break down complex concepts into simple visuals that are easy to understand.

Take the case of WPBeginner. Their infographic on interesting facts about WordPress has over 700 backlinks.

Local directories

List your business in relevant local directories to gain high-quality backlinks.
Ensure your information is consistent across all directories and keep your profiles up-to-date.

Podcast interviews

You can use the same trick to find outdated interviews to refresh and build those relationships with industry experts.

Obviously, most of those links will go to content (versus commercial pages). But you will be able to direct that link equity to your product pages by using internal links.

Publishing

Publish Ultimate And Step By Step Guides

As the name suggests, ultimate guides are the “ultimate” resource on a designated topic.

The word ultimate suggests you have the best, most in-depth current knowledge on the subject, drawing consumers to want to learn more.

A step-by-step guide, in theory, provides an easy way to learn how to do something.

Consumers favor ease and simplicity, which a step-by-step guide aims to accomplish.

Both these types of guides can help a business build its backlink profile.

For example, if you’ve written an ultimate guide to digital marketing, a writer may reference one of your points in a blog post about affiliate marketing.

Social media backlinks

Sharing your content on social media platforms can lead to backlinks as others share and engage with your content.

Adding links to your website in every appropriate place on social media will help you build a strong social backlink profile.

Blog commenting

Engage in industry conversations by leaving thoughtful comments on relevant blogs. Share your expertise by providing insightful and valuable contributions to the discussion. If your website offers relevant information or perspectives, you can strategically include a link within your comment to provide further context (but avoid spamming). This approach helps establish yourself as a thought leader and build connections within your field.

Build links from outdated resources

Your first step is to find sites in your industry that have:

• Changed names
• Moved to a new URL
• Stopped offering a service
• Stopped updating a resource
• Shut down
• How about an example?

A while back SEOMoz changed its name to Moz (and moved its site from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com)

If done right, you get valuable backlinks to your site!

Build relationships

For good link building, you need to build good relationships. There are plenty of opportunities to build new contacts. You should start with niche-related communities: forums, blogs or social groups, such as the Link Building Experts Group on Webmarketer.Help, for example.

Make the first step and start contributing with interesting and relevant comments and posts, providing contextual value to each discussion.

By actively participating in these online communities focused on your niche, you will not only gain some good backlinks, but you will always have access to the newest industry news and be able to connect to some interesting people that share your passions.

Link exchanges

Link exchanges are agreements between websites to link to each other. The goal is to boost SEO by increasing backlinks, which can improve search ranking. However, Google frowns upon manipulative exchanges, so it’s important to focus on natural links between relevant sites.

Links to avoid

Link building is not as easy as it sounds, especially since Google has started keeping a close eye on the link building practices. Build links the wrong way, like spamming over the web, then you’ll get your site penalized, in turn, losing all your search rankings.
The higher the DA of a domain is, the more authority its links will pass.

link building example

Imagine you run a website with delicious vegan dessert recipes. You create a helpful guide on “Top 5 Easy Vegan Cookie Recipes.” You reach out to a popular vegan food blog mentioning your guide and suggesting it as a resource for their readers. If they find your content valuable, they might link to your recipe guide from their blog post on vegan cookies. This creates a natural backlink to your website.

link building in digital marketing

Link building in digital marketing is like getting votes for your website. The more high-quality sites that link to you, the more trustworthy and relevant you appear to search engines, boosting your ranking.

link building websites

Websites don’t directly build links for you, but there are many resources that can teach you link-building strategies and provide tools to help you implement them.

Here are some popular options:

• SEO blogs: Many SEO authorities publish blogs with comprehensive guides on link building. Backlinko, Ahrefs, and SEMrush are all well-respected sources.
• Link building tools: Tools like Ahrefs and Moz can help you find link-building opportunities, track your backlinks, and analyze your competitor’s linking strategy.