3 Great Ways to Get High Quality Backlinks
Backlinks, we all want them. For search engine rankings, we all need them. Getting them can seem like a daunting task. It’s time consuming to get high quality links. And getting low quality ones can come across as spammy to Google.
So how do you get high quality backlinks that seem natural and actually help the original content? Here’s 3 ways that we do it, and hopefully it’ll help you.
Find Outdated Materials
Finding outdated material isn’t that hard to do. Google is kind enough to time stamp many articles. So for this example we’ll use the term “how to build a great website.” It brings up an article from 2013, and in our industry, that’s a million years ago.
When browsing this article we find that most of the suggestions are still pretty true, but there is no mention of mobile or responsive. And in today’s mobile first world, that’s really outdated. So while it’s not a terrible resource, it’s not really on point.
Now you have to make sure your content is up to date obviously, but from here it’s as simple as doing a backlink search in tools like SEMRush to see who’s linking to this article.
This article has 5 backlinks, which isn’t a ton. But it makes reaching out much easier. The goal is to have them replace their link or at the very least add your content piece as another link in their article. It helps your website by giving you a natural link (if you build websites that is) and helps them by giving them more relevant information on their website.
Find Broken Links
This is a great way to obtain links from your competitors as well. Searching all the backlinks to blogs they’ve written and have either changed the URL, or didn’t 301 correctly, etc can help you gain and help them decline. (Sorry Ross)
For this we’ll take a look at one of our local friendly competitors, 3.7 Designs. We can scour all the inbound links their website has, and then check it against all the broken links on their website.
Now, luckily for 3.7 they do a really good job of making sure they don’t have a lot of 404’s on their website. (Great job Declan!) So there’s a good chance that any of those backlinks go to good links. So, nothing to steal here. But y’all know I wouldn’t do that anyway. 😉
Find Blogs without Links
To do this you might have to go to page 7 or 8 of Google, it can be a little time consuming but you will find one I assure you. For example I used the same search on how to build a website, and around page 4 I found this really well written article. The website has legit credibility, but only has a bunch of internal links. Nothing to any other resources.
We don’t do DIY website builders, so we aren’t a competitor, but what we do have is a well trafficked blog about website deliverables, and one of the midwest’s premier WordPress designers that can lend some content on building a great website. I’m sure there’s at least 5 extremely opinionated blogs that Ian’s written that could help their SEO juice as well.
Finding blogs without links helps you by getting a new backlink, but it also helps them as it gives reference points for readers to find other helpful information.
Conclusion
Many SEM’s find link building to be tedious and monotonous. But it can be fun. Just think, if you’re stealing competitor links how much joy you’ll get. To me link building is the same art as selling something. I have to communicate the value of building a link to someone, but in this case I’m giving them virtually nothing.
If you can sell that, you’re going to be great at building links. It also doesn’t hurt if you have good content to link to. But if you have all those elements and a little time on your hands, your website rankings are going to start going up.