7 Proven Ways to Build High-Quality Backlinks (2019)
If you’re a blogger, creating backlinks for your blog is one of the most important activities you need to do on a regular basis to improve your domain authority and organic rankings. There are a lot of students who asked me about the best ways to build high-quality backlinks for their blog.
In this article, I’ll talk about all the link building techniques that I have learned over the past 10 years of my blogging experience.
Getting high-quality backlinks for your blog is very important because it helps you in getting better search engine rankings for your keywords. But, link building is not as simple as it seems, you can’t build it overnight.
I have been blogging since 2013 on my blog digitaldeepak.com and it took me almost 6 years to build more than thousands of high-quality backlinks from unique domains.
Having a lot of high-quality backlinks helped my blog to a reliable domain authority above 40. You can check the domain authority of your blog with Moz Link Explorer.
If you are a newbie and just started your blogging journey, you must aim to achieve a domain authority of at least 40 within first 2-3 years, so that you get a fair opportunity to rank for the keyword you are targeting to.
In this article, let’s discuss some of the useful ways that helped me in getting high-quality backlinks for my website.
1. Publish Data Backed Posts
Earlier people used to get a lot of visitors to their website with content marketing because there was a shortage of good content on the internet. But now many people have started taking content marketing seriously and they are publishing high-quality articles in their blog.
Just because you have written high-quality articles on your website doesn’t guarantee you will earn high-quality backlinks to your blog.
If you have a community or an email list of thousands of people you will be able to cater great content by doing some surveys and research among your audiences.
You need to publish data back posts on your blog for more authority and you’ll be able to attract many high-quality backlinks than just opinions or How-to posts.
If your article is data-driven for example – with infographics, it will attract other publications to republish the data on their publication, and they will certainly go ahead and mention your website as a source.
Since I am in the digital marketing space, I keep doing research on what people actually want with digital marketing space. I have done a lot of surveys asking people in which city they want to work, what kind of positions they want to hold, what would be their expected salary and so on.
Once research of mine was picked up by a major Indian publication called YourStory, they published an article about it and linked back to my blog as a source. They also mentioned my brand which positively helped me in SEO.
If you have data collected from a research or a survey, always make an infographic out of it. It will not cost you much to get a designer to work on it. Whenever publications publish an infographic, its a journalism etiquette to link back to the source.
2. Giveaway Review Copies
If you have a product or service that you are selling on your blog, you can giveaway free review copies of your product and ask people to write a review on their blog.
Recently, I created a course on Marketing Automation and Zapier, and I announced on my community that I will give away a free copy of the course if you go ahead and write a review of the product on your blog. In majority cases, bloggers will link back their review to your blog.
Here are the reviews I’ve got for giving away free review copies of my Zapier Course:
- Is the Zapier Mastery Course from Digital Deepak Any Good? [Detailed Review]
- Automate Your Business – Check Out Zapier Mastery Course By Deepak Kanakaraju
Even if you do not get backlinks you will still have brand mentions and you’ll get more visibility for your product. When you do things that help you build a well-known brand, you will naturally earn backlinks.
If you have a SaaS product, you can giveaway free review copies of them as well. You might not be spending money on each copy that you give as they are digital copies. The cost of replication of the product is near to zero, and that makes giving away content and software one of the best ways to create value in the market and gain trust.
3. Interview People and Get Interviewed
People always wish to get featured on other websites and marketing channels. If I am interviewing any digital marketer on my digital marketing blog, I’m satisfying their ego.
There’s a high chance that the person who got interviewed on my blog would go ahead and share it with their audiences and might link back to my blog.
Once they link back the interview page that you have published on your blog, you will end up getting backlinks for your blog. They will link back to you without hesitation because you’ve featured them on your blog.
You can also earn backlinks by getting interviewed in other people’s blogs, for this you need to have a reliable personal brand.
For example, here’s an interview by Anil Agarwal of Blogger’s Passion – Deepak Kanakaraju Interview On Becoming A Successful Digital Marketer In 2019
Personal Branding is not something you can build overnight; it takes some time to build a personal brand but once you build your brand getting backlinks through interviews becomes easy.
Recently I announced on my Learn Digital Marketing Facebook group, that anyone who is interested can interview me and I will answer their questions.
A lot of bloggers reached out to me with their questions and I answered them. In return, they published it on their blog and linked back to my blog.
4. Contribute to Authority Publications
Once you have grown your personal brand and set yourself as a thought leader in a specific industry, you’ll be able to contribute articles to other publications.
I have contributed articles to authority publications like YourStory and Entrepreneur.com, and in every article in the author bio, I am getting a backlink to my blog.
Here’s my author bio on Entrepreneur Magazine
Most of the publications do not give you do-follow backlinks, but it is still going to help you with your SEO.
Publications like Forbes and FastCompany do not give any backlinks at all, but they will mention your brand and Google positively takes notice of your brand being mentioned in reputed publications.
You can also aim for the contextual backlink within the article apart from the link that you get from the author bio. This will be super easy if you add some statistics and data in your posts which are exclusive.
When you have data backed posts in your blog, publications will be obligated to link back to the source. You must be careful that you have a page on your blog with the source data.
Publishing articles in major publications also help in building your author rank.
Google apart from backlinks also looks for the author who has written the article and how much Authority does this particular author have in the market space related to a particular topic.
As a personal brand and a blogger, I recommend every blogger to remain focused on one specific topic. This way the search engines recognize you as an expert in a specific category.
5. Create a Free Tool
Another great way to get backlinks is by creating a free tool which is relevant to your industry. For example, Neil Patel created this free tool called UberSuggest which is an alternative to premium SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs.
Gone are the days when high-quality articles and eBooks were generating lots of backlinks, this is not the case now because there are too many of them on the web now.
Creating a tool is not easy and providing it for free means you need to pay for the server, resources, and development of the tool.
Since not everyone is capable of creating a tool by themselves, you will face less competition and it becomes easier for you to attract backlinks. Creating free tools enhance your brand searches on Google and help you in your SEO as well.
You can create a free tool for any market that you are into. It need not to be on digital marketing or blogging.
For example, I heard a while ago that one person who is running a digital marketing agency targeted all the lawyers in the country had built a tool for them. That tool also acted as a lead generation tool because people had to enter their contact details to use the app for free.
Your app can be a web app or a mobile app depending upon the needs of your customers. In general, tools have a high barrier of entry and this can help you gain a lot of high-quality backlinks in a very short period of time.
6. Write Articles On Current Affairs
A lot of people who publish articles and reports at the right time end up getting a lot of backlinks.
For example, Larry Kim the founder of WordStream published a report on Facebook ads vs Google ads, just before Facebook went public. This helped him to attract more than a million backlinks to his blog and it helped their SEO for a very long time.
With Buzzsumo, you can explore trending articles on your niche. Buzzsumo will show you all the popular articles on your space, you can get fresh content ideas based on social shares. Look out for the most popular posts and write a better version of that.
One of the reasons current affairs perform very well is because the amount of Articles out there on this particular topic is very low with low competition.
Secondly, creating high-quality content is not an easy job, you cannot create high-quality content overnight. That is one of the reasons, you will not face much competition when you are writing on trending topics.
7. Build a Brand
The most neglected method of building backlinks is to build a high-authority brand. If you become a category leader in one particular space, you’ll naturally start attracting backlinks in the long term.
I have never involved in active link building activities for my own blog. I’ve always been focused on understanding what my users want, publishing articles that they love to read, and distributing the article to peoples that might find the article useful.
If you do the creation of the content and the distribution part right, you will be able to attract backlinks over time naturally. This is earning backlinks rather than building backlinks.
If there is one book that I would recommend my readers and followers to read to learn about branding, it would be The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries and Laura Ries.
Building a strong brand is like growing a tree. It takes a long time, but once you build a strong brand, you are going to reap the compounded rewards of it over time.
Conclusion
SEO is the key element of digital marketing and you should be building backlinks on a regular basis to leverage the benefits of SEO. Backlinks and quality content are the two pillars of search engine optimization for any website.
If you are able to build a web property with good domain Authority, you hold the power to rank keywords that most people pay Google for.
Once you understand how the concept of long-tail keywords works and how you can get an edge over your competitors through great content that people would want to read, you will definitely crack the SEO game.
When you started reading this article you might have been looking for some tricks or golden rules that you can take right away and start implementing on your blog. But unfortunately, it does not work that way.
Backlinks are the supreme ranking factor for most of the search engines and building backlinks are as hard as building a brand, it takes a long time to achieve it.
All your efforts in building backlinks for one web property helps you to create an asset in the long-term and the end results will be going to be priceless.
One of the reasons SEO and backlinks are so powerful is that even if someone has money they cannot do it overnight. It needs a lot of planning and strategy to build a good web property with good domain Authority and that can be done only with time.
Thank you for reading this article and if you have any questions go ahead and let me know in the comment section below.