How to Get Quality Backlinks for SEO: 5 Smart Ways

Do you daydream about ranking higher on SERPs and getting more relevant organic traffic? This can be a dream-come-true if you do SEO the right way. One of the most influential aspects of white-hat SEO is building backlinks. Each organic backlink that you get tells Google that your content is of value to Internet users. So, you desperately need them to prosper on the web. How do you get backlinks in 2018? It’s time to figure this out by looking into the 5 most effective present-day ways to get quality backlinks.

It’s common knowledge that a backlink is an inbound link that points to your website. When a website refers to your content by means of a link, this tells Google and other search engines that your content is valuable. The more websites reference you, the more kudos you earn and the higher your website rank.

Driven by search engines’ ambition to bring better content to their users, the techniques that work for getting backlinks to evolve. You’re likely to be penalized to get quality backlinks the way website owners generated them in bulk a couple of years ago. So, such practices as link swapping and purchasing, as well as link-spamming in comments, not only won’t benefit you but would also tank your page rank, getting you just the opposite of the desired result.

In 2018, only the white-hat SEO strategies worked regarding backlink building. A number of these strategies are similar to what content marketers do. However, the two are not the same. To get quality backlinks, you’ll have to jump on the content marketing techniques, such as guest posting and the creation of infographics. At the same time, to gradually increase the number of high-quality backlinks, you’ll have to wrap your head around backlink analysis, spy on your competitors, benefit other websites by tracking the broken links they have, and much more.

It‘s time to learn how to get quality backlinks in 2018, isn’t it? Read on, and you’ll tap into the 5 surefire ways that are the core staples of your successful link building strategy. Let’s get started!

#1: Get Your Links Through Guest Posting

A backlink is a value. To get quality backlinks, you should offer some value in exchange. The value you offer to a website that features your backlink is an article, which, in its turn, drives more traffic and boosts the SEO of that website. Therefore, guest posting creates a win-win situation when you get the much-needed backlink and the website accepts your post guests a fresh, hopefully insightful post.

Guest posting is undeniably an effective backlinking technique. However, since 2017, Google has frowned upon inappropriate link stuffing in lame guest posts. Last May, the leading search engine has warned website owners against low-quality, run-of-the-mill guest posts that target backlink generation rather than add intrinsic value to the web. In its Reminder About Links In Large-Scale Article Campaigns, Google encourages website owners to check the quality and value of guest posts carefully. It reminds us that guest posts should be informative and educational to the audience of the target website. In the meanwhile, it imposes a penalty threat on sites that feature guest posts with spammy links.

So, it’s not you, the guest post provider, who will be punished if Google deems your guest post lame. However, don’t hurry up to feel alleviated. It’s hard to get your guest posts accepted to high-ranking websites with the most value backlinks. So, if one of them gets penalized because of your poorly written post, your tarnished reputation will discourage many other websites to accept your guest posts.

The takeaway from this is that even if your primary guest-posting motivation is increasing the number of backlinks, you should do your best to create an insightful and well-written post that is of value to the target website and the Internet. Let’s now see what it takes to get quality backlinks to your website by finding the right websites to reach out to in this regard.

How To Get Quality Backlinks By Guest-Posting: Step-by-step Guide

Getting your backlinks to the right spot by means of guest posting takes several steps. First of all, you’ve got to track down the websites and the links which would benefit your search engine ranking the most. You may want to dive deep into competitors’ backlinking strategies to identify them. If you locate the websites that accept competitors’ posts, these are the ones that will most likely feature your guest posts as well.

So, your primary task is to pin down the sites that your competitors use as guest posting platforms. The simplest way is to run a Google search with ‘your competitor’s name’ + ‘guest post’ -‘your competitor’s domain(s)’ query. You can use the name of a certain article author or the business itself. See an example below:

Alternatively, you may resort to backlink checker SEO tools. Open up your preferred backlink checker and input a number of competitors URLs one by one. You’ll see all the backlinks they have. Then, you’ll have to manually single out the links that they got by the means of guest posting. Spot the most frequented ones, jot them down and you’re done creating your list of guest posting prospects.

Congrats! You’re through the SEO part of it all. As you have a list of potential gust-posting targets, it’s time to reach out. You can use the ‘Write for us’ forms on their sites or contact the editors directly. Having identified the website that will accept your next post, study their guest-posting guidelines carefully and make sure you adhere to them.

Finally, it’s time to discuss the link placement. The most preferred way to include it is to embed it organically into the article’s content. For this, reference your website as you would reference any other useful material that you link to in your article. By doing so, you’ll give readers and search engines no hint that that’s the dear backlink for the sake of which you’re doing it all.

The alternative to contextual link placement is featuring the link in the author’s bio. This way is less preferred as search engines and readers are less likely to discover the link if it’s down in this small section. At the same time, getting both a contextual link and a bio link is great, though restricted by many sites.

Another important aspect to get the most out of your backlink in the guest post is choosing the most efficient anchor text. We won’t discuss this matter in detail, as one of the top anchor text generator tools can assemble the most appropriate link anchor anchor anchor.

To conclude, the continuous guest-posting practice is a great white-hat strategy to earn link juice, get quality backlinks, and improve your position on SERPs. In this regard, it’s important not to abuse the potential of this tactic by link spamming, as well as use appropriate tools and techniques to locate the best attainable backlink spots, preferably on high-ranking websites.

#2: Filling the Gap: Broken Links

The next perspective of generating high-quality backlinks implies offering your links as alternatives to the broken ones. Every website is subject to link rotting, and, of course, no website keeps checking for broken links 24/7. This is the point where you come in, kindly doing the job of broken link identification for the website you target and offering to link to your article as a substitute for a missing one.

Similarly to guest posting, broken link building creates a mutually beneficial situation. You get the desired inbound link, while the website that features it improves the quality of its content by linking to an up-to-date article and eliminating a malicious broken link. Moreover, you get a doubled benefit as you post the article on your website to substitute for an old one under the broken link. As a result, on top of the desired backlink, you also get a fresh, relevant post that enhances your blog and impacts your SEO strategy in a positive way.

How To Get Backlinks: A Broken Link Building Guide

While discussing guest posting, we’ve tapped into tracking websites likely to accept your backlinks. You’ll need the list of these websites for this tactic as well. Fortunately, this approach is effective when reaching out to those with the best ratings. Broken links are highly adverse for them, so they will likely accept your substitutes for the broken links willingly. Below is a step-by-step guide on getting your link featured instead of a broken one.

First, you have to open one of the internal linking SEO tools and run a broken links checkup for one of the chosen websites. If your tool allows, set it to find only the outbound links that are ‘do-follow.’ These are the links that your website can take over. Do you see any links to informative articles? Great! Just grab the one, the anchor of which rings a bell to you.

Next, click-open the link to make sure you get a 404.

The next thing that you’ve got to do is to figure out what the original content under the broken link is about. Of course, it’s not there for you under the needed domain. Nevertheless, it can be retrieved using one of the tried-and-tested Internet archiving services. Such services regularly backup the web content to prevent them from fading away. We’ll use the classic archive.org service to travel back in time and find out what the content was under the broken link.

To do this, enter the 404 link in the search bar. Then, set it to ‘Search Archived Websites’ below and press ‘Go!’. What you’ll see next is a graph showing the timeline of captures of the needed page. Choose one of the latest page versions before the page went missing and click the date highlighted in the calendar below. As a result, you’ll see the article that went missing some time ago and can figure out what it is about.

Now, you’ve got to move on to the next stage, creating your present-day substitute for the missing article. Sprinkle it with recent research data and make it as relevant as the given article was initially. Next, post the article to your website.

The last thing to do is contact the website’s editor with your target broken link and kindly offer them your article as a substitute for the missing one. Believe me; they’re likely to accept it, as for them, it takes just replacing the link to get rid of the unwanted decayed link. Once your new link is accepted, run a backlink analysis using an SEO backlink checker and see your new backlink joining the crowd.

Broken link building is a great technique to get quality backlinks on high-rating authority sites of your niche. Despite being pretty time-consuming, this method gets you the desired link and benefits your website, supplying it with a fresh SEO-optimized post.

#3: Skyscraping Technique

This way to get quality backlinks was offered by Brian Dean back in 2013, when he managed to double his website’s traffic in 14 days after publishing his first skyscraper article. In the pith of the method lies identifying the best existing content for your target keyword and creating an article that supplants it in quality and quantity. This white-hat strategy bridges marketing and SEO to get you a number of backlinks with just one juggernaut post.

Check out the insightful video presentation by Brian to get to know the basics of skyscraping:

The Nuts and Bolts of Skyscraping

Getting your welcome and valuable backlinks using this technique, you’ve got to accomplish three steps. The first step is about finding ‘link-worthy content.’ This should be the great useful content in your niche that outperforms other target content in terms of the number of backlinks it has. You can find top-ranking articles for the keyword that appeals to you and check the number of backlinks they’ve got. The winner would be the best starting point for your skyscraping efforts. Alternatively, you can find your competitor’s article with the largest backlinks and deliberately outdo it.

The second step is writing your skyscraper article. Here, you aim to create an article significantly better than the original one. The given article is already good, isn’t it? So, this would be a tough yet highly rewarding task to accomplish.

Here, you’ve got a couple of things to consider. If the original article lists the Top 30 of something, turning it into the Top 40 wouldn’t make much difference. If you want to expand an already-existing list, you’ve got to at least double the number of items. For example, to get the 110% increase in traffic, Brian Dean made it from 50 to 200 items. And that was pretty tough:

”The first 50 were a breeze. 50-100 were hard. 100-150 were hard. And 150-200 were damn near impossible.”

Moreover, the quantitative explosion is not the only thing you need. Quality matters even more than quantity. You’ve got to coin an insightful, logically structured and detailed post that brings readers up-to-date information wrapped in great imagery and design. You’ve got to beat the original article in all the ways you can think of.

Once you’re done with the painful ‘write-to-kill’ experience, you’ve got to promote your mega-article. Here again, you’ll need the list of websites that’re likely to backlink you as they backlink your competitors. On top of this, you can reach out to the top websites in the niche. Many of them will be happy to link to your dazzling post. So, you’ve got to spend a couple of hours on email marketing. Brian Dean got 17 backlinks simply by doing this. Most importantly, if your article is really the best on the web for the given topic, you’ll see more high quality backlinks popping up like mushrooms after a rain.

Writing a skyscraper article may be effort- intense and time-consuming. At the same time, with it, your website gets stronger thanks to the true traffic magnet. Most importantly, when done to the best advantage, a skyscraper post yields you a crop of 10+ backlinks at a time. So, if you love trying your hand at writing great articles, skyscraping may be your answer to the question: ‘How to create backlinks?’

#4: Get Quality Backlinks For Infographics

Visualization is all the craze on the web. A well-done infographics tells a story better than an article and sticks in users minds. The next effective way to get backlinks makes you work with representing data visually and creating an infographics.

What’s the trick? Creating a winning example of picture-text amalgamation is time-consuming and requires advanced graphic design skills. That’s why many websites are ready to grant you the desired backlink for using your stunning infographics on their website. The more insightful your infographics, the more high-ranking websites will accept it and backlink to you.

How To Get Quality Backlinks With An Infographics?

First, you’ve got to review the list of websites you want to get the links on. Think of what kind of an infographics would appeal most to them. What will be the topic it covers? What infographics can you already find there? Ardently analyze the infographics these website feature and the topics they blog about. Once you find the matching topic and style, wrap your hand around digital creativity.

Once you’re done creating the infographics, post it on your website first. Then, reach for the editors of target websites and offer them the infographics asking for a backlink to your website. In a couple of days, open up your SEO backlink checker and run a backlink analysis. If your infographics is to-the-point and well-executed, you’re likely to hit a larger number of backlinks with it.

To sprinkle some motivation on you, we bring you a well-designed ‘Backlinking’ infographics by eDigitalEarth.

#5: Interviewing and Reviewing

Public Relations can benefit your search engine marketing strategy in a number of ways. Interacting with others on the web can get you lots of backlinks if done correctly.

To get quality backlinks by interacting with other people across the web, consider doing the following:

• Post press-releases. They help digital journalists and bloggers track something new happening around. So, posting press-releases boosts the likelihood of you being backlinked in a subject-related article.
• Get invited to an online interview. Register on HelpaReporter.com website and be active on this platform. Sooner or later, a reporter will interview you. A backlink comes along.
• Interview authorities in the niche. Then, send the links to the interview posts to them. If they like the interviews, they’ll likely reference them on their websites. You can additionally ask for promoting the interviews through their channels.
• Answer questions on Quora, Yahoo and popular forums. Find the questions that relate to your target keywords and make sure your answer doesn’t look like spam. Include the link as a reference to a helpful resource.
• Give away a freebie. An awesome freebie is likely to be referenced by people and included to related Top freebies posts. This means you will be able to get quality backlinks for your noble offering.
• Drop your links when sharing your posts on social networks. These networks are quite authoritative, so this tactic is supposed to bring some additional benefit in.

Wrapping Up

The old-fashioned backlink trade practices are fading into oblivion. In 2018, you’ve got to earn every backlink by bringing up some worthy pieces of niche-related insights. The more value you add to the global informational space, the larger backlinking explosion awaits you.

Can you point any other ways to get quality backlinks that earned you the desired? Tell others about them in the Comments section below.

Happy link-building!