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g n i d l i u B k n Li 7 1 0 2 r o f s e i S trate g igh Quality H d il u B to s y a W l u rf e 13 P o w bsite Backlinks for Your We
Link Building Strategies 1. Matt Cutts on Link Building 2. Introduction 3. #1 “Best of” Blog Posts 4. #2 HARO (Help A Reporter Out) 5. #3 Leverage Infographics 6. #4 Submit Your Website to Feedback Sites 7. #5 Submit Your Site to Blog Aggregators 8. #6 Link Roundups 9. #7 The Moving Man Method 10. #8 Scoop.it Backlinks
11. #9 Google + Backlinks 12. #10 Provide Testimonials 13. #11 Link Reclamation 14. #12 Pen.io 15. #13 Broken Link Building 16. Thanks For Reading!
n o s t t u C t t Ma g n i d l i u B k L in "Don’t just try and appear for your links to be natural. When you have good content, natural links will come. The objective is not to make your links appear natural; the objective is that your links are natural.� Matt Cutts, Head of Google's Webspam Team
Introduction Link building still remains one of the key factors in improving your site's rankings on search engines. Yet we often rely on posting comments and guest posting to fetch backlinks, ignoring other link building strategies. This eBook will show you 13 powerful link building strategies to build high-quality backlinks for your site. In this eBook, you'll learn: How to build high-quality backlinks for your site How to leverage free tools to build backlinks How to build backlinks FAST How to build post-hummingbird era backlinks How to build links that generate targeted traffic to your site Hope you find this eBook useful.
#1 “Best of” Blog Posts This particular method of getting backlinks is borrowed from Brian Dean at Backlinko and it’s insanely effective. Here’s what you need to do: Step 1: Use these following search strings on Google “Best (TOPIC) Blog Year” “(TOPIC) blogs to read” “My Favorite (TOPIC) blogs”Any of these above searches will show you a list of “best of” blogs in your selected topic.
Step 2: Create a new Google Doc and add links to any quality blog that you’d like to get a backlink from. Also note down the email addresses of the bloggers you’d be reaching out to. In most cases, you can find them in the contact section. If not, use Ninja Outreach Chrome Extension to find their contact details. Step 3: Reach out to these blogs via email and present them with a link to your article and ask them if they can include it in one of their weekly/monthly roundup posts. You can use the below email template to reach out to the bloggers:
Hi [First Name], I’m a digital marketer and regular reader of your Marketing blog posts. I also run the blog at [Your Blog] and today, we published a pretty massive guide ([Number or words] words) on [Subject of Your Blog Post]. I think it might be a good fit for your roundup posts and thought I’d reach out. [Your Blog Post URL] No worries if it’s not a good fit – I’ll be a regular reader regardless! Thanks, [Your Name] Many of these blogs will also allow you to post a comment along with a link to your website. One of the easiest and quickest ways to get a backlink is to post
thoughtful comments on any of the articles on these blogs that you deem worthy to get a link from. Make sure your comment is THOUGHTFUL. Instead of posting “Great article”, think of creative ways to appreciate the kind of information the author has provided in the article. You may even ask a question. But you may be thinking that there are blogs which simply don’t allow you to provide a link to your website. They may be using Facebook comment system or Disqus to manage and moderate their comments. And even if they do, you’ll probably get “nofollow” backlinks which will do nothing to improve your search rankings. In such cases, the best way to get backlinks would to be use the email outreach method. Though it involves some work, the backlink you’ll eventually generate for your site would be worth the time and effort.
#2 HARO (Help A Reporter Out) HARO is one of the best ways to generate high quality backlinks from authority news sites. Here’s how it works: 1. Sign up for HARO as a source here. 2. You’ll receive three emails per day on weekdays from reporters looking for sources. Look out for source requests relevant to you and your niche 3. Respond with some helpful content and your credentials With HARO, you can get backlinks from authority news sites such as WSJ, Mashable, Inc, FastCompany, Reuters, etc.
#3 Leverage Infographics Infographics are not just engaging but they are also great for SEO. Yet most people ignore infographics because they wrongly assume that it's expensive and time-consuming. Using tools such as Canva, Infogr.am, and Piktochart, you can create fancy infographics in a matter of minutes. Another way to create beautiful infographics is to outsource it using sites such as Fiverr or Upwork. Once your infographic is ready, it's time to promote it. Follow these steps:
1. Submit your infographic to these infographic submission sites Here's a list of sites that allow you to submit your infographics for free. I've also mentioned the domain authority of each of these sites to signify the value of each backlink that you'll get, so that you can prioritize your efforts accordingly: Visual.ly (DA - 83) InfographicBee (DA - 15) Infographaholic (DA - 21)
Cool Infographics (DA - 61) NerdGraph (DA - 38) Infographic Journal (DA - 44) Submit Infographics (DA - 45) Only Infographic (DA - 27) Pure Infographics (DA - 28)
2. Reach out to bloggers in your niche and offer them the infographic for free as a guest post This is one of the easiest ways to get high quality backlinks from sites with an impressive domain authority. Everyone loves informative infographics and most of the sites you reach out to will gladly accept to include your infographic in one of their articles.
3. Use Siege Media's Embed Code Generator to generate an embed code for your infographic Siege Media has created its very own embed code generator which allows you to generate embed codes for your infographic. Once the code is generated, all you need to do is copy and paste the code below your infographic.
By generating an embed code for your infographic, you make it easier for others to share and embed your infographic onto their own site. Here's the best part: every time someone includes your infographic in their content, you get an attribution. One of the easiest ways to get a high quality backlink.
#4 Submit Your Website to Feedback Sites
There are many feedback websites out there where you can submit your site and get critiqued on your site’s design and content. The great thing about these feedback sites is that almost of them provide a link back to your site. One of my absolute favorite feedback sites is Criticue.com which has a domain authority (DA) of 40 (not bad for a website review site). Once you sign up on Critique, you’ll be asked to review other
sites to earn free credits. Each review gets you 1 credit. In my experience, posting 3 reviews of other sites will fetch you a review of your own site and a quality backlink.
#5 Submit Your Site to Blog Aggregators Blog Aggregators are sites which list blogs from different industries. Examples include AllTop, BlogCatalog, Blogarama, and BlogEngage.
Though they don't have the same amount of link juice as they once did, you can still get a decent amount of referral traffic from these blogs. You can get a high-quality 'dofollow' links from most blog aggregators for free in three easy steps: Submit your site (in most cases, the RSS feed of your blog) Add a special HTML code to your site to confirm your ownership of the site Wait for the blog aggregator to review your site
When it's approved, you will get your own page on the blog aggregator listing all your articles. Here's a complete list of blog directories/aggregators you can submit your site to.
#6 Link Roundups There are lots of high quality blogs that do link roundups. Link roundups are weekly or monthly blog posts that link out to great content in their respective niche. On Startup Cafe blog, we usually do a weekly roundup of social media news and call it ‘This Week in Social Media’ and provide links to social media sites with interesting news stories that occurred that week. You will find blogs that do similar roundups in your niche as well.
Here’s how it works:
1. Your first task is to find link roundups in your niche. Use the following search strings: “your keyword” + “link roundup” “your keyword” + roundup
“best of” + “your keyword” “your keyword” + “this week”
2. Once you find a blog that you’d like to target for backlinks, pitch your content to the person who runs the blog. You can use the below script: Hey NAME, I know you like to make compilation articles about everything [TOPIC] – so I just wanted to send a few of my recent ones your way. I hope this is OK! [LINK TO ARTICLE] [LINK TO ARTICLE] Cheers, [YOUR NAME] [YOUR BLOG URL] Just sit back and wait for the person to respond. If your content is the right fit for the blog’s roundup, then you’ll get a quality backlink for your site.
#7 The Moving Man Method This is yet another technique which I learned from Brian Dean’s blog and I’ve found it extremely useful. Here’s how the Moving Man Method works: Step 1: Find sites in your niche which have either shut down or changed their names and URLs. Step 2: Find sites linking to the old URL. Step 3: Reach out to these sites and let them know about their outdated link. To explain this technique in a better way, let’s take the example of Moz, a popular SEO tool run by SEO Guru, Rand Fishkin. A while back though, Moz was operating as an SEO agency named SEOMoz. As a result, they had to change the URL from seomoz.org to Moz.com. Sure, if you visit seomoz.org, it redirects to moz.com. So the links used by sites linking to seomoz.org aren’t broken, but they’re outdated. This is because the link points to the old URL and the anchor text has the old brand name. As you may realize, this is a huge opportunity for people running
SEO/Marketing blogs to reach out to sites that are still using the seomoz.org link in their content. And there are plenty of sites doing just that. In order to make this technique work for you, you need to keep an eye out for sites that are either rebranding or changing names. Use PRWeb to see whether there are any brands in your niche that have recently rebranded. Use this search string – “your keyword” + rebrands”. Do a similar check on Google News as well. Once you’ve found a site which has rebranded or changed its URL, it’s time to reach out to sites which are still using the old URL in their content. Just copy the URL and paste into your backlink checking tool of choice (I recommend Ahrefs). You’ll find dozens of sites which are still linking to the old resource. The last step in the Moving Man Method to reach out to these sites and give them a heads up about the outdated link they are using in their content. And then give a subtle suggestion to add your link to their site. To learn more about the Moving Man Method, click here.
#8 Scoop.it Backlinks
Scoop.it is a site where people aggregate their favorite content around the web into a magazine format. It’s also an excellent place to get high-quality “nofollow” backlinks and boost your referral traffic. So how do you go about fetching backlinks on Scoop.it? It’s quite simple really. An active Scoop.it user usually has curated magazines which have hundreds of followers. This means that your content can be get in front of hundreds of people. Follow these two simple steps to get people to share your content on their Scoop.it magazine: Step 1: Give a search on the topic of your content. Ex: Social Media Marketing. Find users who have magazines with lots of
followers and views. Step 2: Pitch your content to these people by using Scoop.it’s ‘suggest’ feature. You can share the same content with 5 people in a day and chances are that about 50% of them will share it with their network.
#9 Google + Backlinks You may have mixed feelings about Google+ as a social network, but it still shows up prominently on Google, mainly because it’s owned by the search engine giant. But did you know Google+ allows you to get ‘dofollow’ backlinks right from your Google+ profile page? Here’s a glimpse of my Google+ profile. As you can see, I’ve given links to my marketing as well as wellness blogs by updating the “Story” section.
Furthermore, you can add links to any number of articles and your social profiles in the “Links” and “Profiles” section as you can see below:
In order to add more link juice to these backlinks, make sure that you are active on Google+. Share content and interact with other people on Google+ regularly.
#10 Provide Testimonials Consider giving a testimonial for a product that you really love using. All companies love showing off customer testimonials on their home page or have a dedicated page for them. Once you’ve written the testimonial, make sure you let them know that they can include your testimonials on their home page or testimonials page.
#11 Link Reclamation Link reclamation is simple and works like magic. Here’s how it works: First, you find mentions of your brand that don’t link back to your site Then you send an email to the person with a friendly reminder to add the link Here’s an email I received from Canva a few weeks ago which serves as a fine example of link reclamation tactic:
It’s that simple and it works in most cases (like it did here in the example above) Here’s how you can go about reclaiming your link:
1. Find unlinked mentions using Buzzsumo A tool like Buzzsumo can help you find unlinked mentions of your brand. Setup a content alert for your brand or domain on
Buzzsumo, so that whenever someone mentions your brand, you get an email alert.
2. Check whether the site has linked back to your site If they have linked back to your site, awesome! If not, then move on to step 3.
3. Reach out and get your link Send them an email with a friendly reminder. You can use the script below (same that was used by Canva):
Hey NAME, I just wanted to reach out and say “thanks” for mentioning (your brand) in your article: [link to the article] We really, really appreciate it. I’m reaching out today to ask if you could add a link back to our site. That way, people can easily find us while reading your article. Either way, thanks for the shout out and keep up the great work! Thanks, (Your Name) Link reclamation is an easy, yet effective way to get quality backlinks for your site.
#12 Pen.io
Pen.io is a web 2.0 strategy to get a backlink, but it's one of the easiest and fastest way to get a quality backlink (pen.io has a DA of 67). Having said that, I'd urge you to proceed with caution. Web 2.0 link building is not exactly black hat, but it's certainly a grey hat technique which may land you a Google penalty. Use this link building technique only if the other techniques listed here are not feasible. With most web 2.0 properties like Blogger, Tumblr, etc. it's often recommended that you spend time writing 300-500 word quality
articles from time to time to make the backlinks seem genuine. Though a few bloggers just post a link and picture on pen.io, I suggest you spend some time on your article so that the link looks authentic.
#13 Broken Link Building A broken link is one that points to a page on a site that has since been moved or deleted. In other words, these are pages that return a 404 error. Broken link building involves some bit of work, but it’s a safe way to generate fresh, high quality backlinks for your site. Here’s what you need to do: 1. Use tools such as Check My Links or Broken Link Checker to find broken links from a site you want to fetch a backlink from. 2. Once you’ve found the broken links, reach out to the site owner and let him know about them. 3. Share relevant links from your site that the site owner could use to replace the broken links with. Voila! You’ve earned yourself a high quality backlink.
Thanks For Reading! Now that you’ve learned these powerful link building techniques, it’s time to get started and test these techniques out. Thanks for taking the time to read this eBook. We hope you found it useful.
For more tips and insights on SEO and content marketing, visit www.99signals.com.