At this point, you should be aware of what backlinks are and why building them is crucial in getting your website to rank on top of Google rankings for your target keywords and grow its organic traffic.
Now, you must know the different ways on how to build high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites, which is what this post will do.
It also talks about the various tactics you can use for your link building strategy to increase the chances for your site to earn quality backlinks from other websites.
While you can buy backlink packages to improve your rankings from agencies, it’s better to at least know the steps required to secure the best backlinks for your site. This way, you can how to discern a good link from a bad one, which is important once you start buying links from vendors.
Let’s do this!
Identify Potential Link Partners
You want to scour the web for low-hanging fruit domains where you can secure backlinks to your site.
When choosing link prospects, you must keep in mind the following variables:
- Must be relevant to your niche – The domain must cover related topics that your site does. For example, if you have a keto diet site, get links from sites about bodybuilding, weight loss, and lifestyle, among others. The more closely related the website topic is, the stronger the contextual relevance of the backlink will be.
- Hasn’t linked back to you yet – If you already have a backlink from a domain, find another site to acquire a link from. Search engines only take into account a link from a domain. So, even if you have hundreds of backlinks from the same authoritative site, your search rankings won’t increase.
- Is an actual authoritative website – Usually, an authoritative site has a high domain authority using metrics like Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) and Ahrefs’s Domain Rating (DR), among others. But there are sites with high search engine optimization (SEO) metrics that don’t rank for keywords and attract organic traffic. So, don’t simply rely on these metrics to judge which sites to get links from. Also, refer to organic traffic, the number of keywords rankings, and social followers as they indicate a genuinely authoritative site.
By referring to these factors, you should find domains that you should build links on. And to help make the job much easier for you, use tools like SEMrush—particularly its Backlink Gap feature.
It compares your website’s link profile across its top competitors and shows you which domains your competitors have a link from, but you don’t.
Login to your SEMrush account and click on COMPETITIVE RESEARCH > Backlink Gap. After entering your site on the first text bar, the tool will suggest your top competitors to compare with your site.
Once done, click on “Find Prospects.”
The next page will show you the list of sites that your competitors have backlinks on.
Your goal is to secure the same backlinks they have to remain competitive with them on organic search.
Narrow Down the List to Sites that Will Produce the Best Backlinks
But before you start knocking down the domains on the list one by one, you must prioritize domains where you can acquire backlinks that will help push your site to the top of search results.
We already mentioned genuinely authoritative sites as variables to watch out for when looking for link prospects. Another factor to consider is that the link you plan on getting on the site should be dofollow.
A dofollow backlink passes link juice from one site to another. So, if you gain a backlink from a site that generates lots of traffic and has a formidable link profile, expect your site to increase its search rankings over time.
But if the link has a nofollow tag, this means the site won’t pass authority to your website no matter how authoritative the site is.
Going back to SEMrush’s Backlink Gap, you must reorder the list of domains according to its Authority Score (AS), which is similar to Ahrefs’s DR.
Next, click on any sites with a link from the top domains that appear in the list. From here, you will see if the backlink is dofollow or nofollow.
If the backlink has a nofollow tag like in the screenshot above, move to the next site in the list.
Now, just because the backlink has a nofollow attribute, it doesn’t make it useless. While it doesn’t pass link equity as a dofollow link does, Google still treats them as “hints.” This means Google may or may not factor in nofollow links to determine which pages should rank on search results.
At the same time, nofollow links make your link profile look natural. Having a link profile composed of dofollow links is unrealistic and will make Google think you’re manipulating the algorithm, which you most likely are.
So, consider building nofollow links on high-quality sites once you’ve run out of dofollow links to build.
Determine Link Building Opportunities from Prospect Sites
Once you have finalized your link prospects, now’s the time to determine how you plan on getting a link from that site.
A quick visit to the page will get you an idea of how your competitors built your site. For example, if it is a business listing, you can create an account and include a link to your site on the profile, just like how your competitors did it.
For the most part, however, the best backlinks are contextual, i.e., found within the blog post’s content. This link type is also the hardest to secure because you need the site owner to trust you and your website before s/he links to it.
However, it’s possible to secure links from these sites even if you don’t have existing relationships with any of them. The best course of action is to employ link building tactics to provide value to websites, which encourages them to place a link to your site.
Below are examples of techniques that increase your chances of landing a link to your site:
- Guest posting – Pitch writing relevant content on their website. Showcase samples of your work for site owners to give you a chance to send your draft. Include a link to your resource page on the content in the guest post. If not allowed, link to your site on your author bio instead.
- Broken link building – Identify broken links on prospect sites, ideally from resource pages. Then recover the broken page they’re linking to using Wayback Machine and publish a much better version of it on your site. Finally, please send emails to site owners asking them to replace the broken links with your content instead.
- Skyscraper technique – Find competitor content with the most backlinks and create a much better version of it. This is similar to the broken link method, but the difference is that your competitor’s link is working. So, there’s not much incentive for site owners to replace it with your link. Nonetheless, ramp up your content’s quality to compel people to link to yours instead.
Conclusion
There are various ways to get backlinks for your site. But to help you make good use of your time and maximize your campaign results, you must focus on building links guaranteed to increase your website rankings on Google search and generate lots of visitors.
To do this, replicate the process above to find the most authoritative websites where you can get high-quality links.
If you don’t have time to do this yourself, we at Linkplicity offer guest blogging at the core of our link building strategy. This way, you can expect to receive contextual links from our campaign to help round out your site’s SEO performance.
