One of our most popular blog articles is an article titled “Quick SEO Wins“. In summary it’s an article that outlines several simple changes you can make to your website to boost your SEO.

One question that has come from that article is “how do I get SEO backlinks for my website?”

And it’s a very good question, but also, it’s worth remembering that link building for SEO is best done after your website is fully optimised “on-site” – Known as technical SEO.

Before chasing backlinks to your website it’s best to go back, find a piece of content that’s out dated, up date it with fresh content for 2019, include some images, infographics and video – if possible – so that you have a killer piece of content that really stands out and is something worth backlinking too.

So below are a few link building strategies that you can use today to start building backlinks to your freshly updated content.

The first 5 techniques are very simple, technique #7 is a little more advanced but gives the best bang for your buck.

How to get backlinks for SEO

#1 Share across Social Media

This one may not seem very effective, but if you do a paid advertising campaign across social media it can help you reach the right audience and get you more retweets/shares which will in turn increase your article reach.

The idea is to get your content seen by a wider relevant market who will then see its value and in turn link back to your content piece.

#2 Do a Press Release

There are a number of platforms out there that specialise in press releases for specific industries such as Web Design for example. A Press Release will enable your content to be blasted out to an industry segment who will then again share and link to your content.

This is one of the easier ways to crate backlinks – But not necessarily the most effective way to improve your SEO and get really high quality unique backlinks to your website.

A Press Release can reach a very targeted audience, so you may want to target influencers in your market or even journalists who will pick up on your content and reference it in their articles.

#3 Submit Quotes to the media

Journalists are always looking for contributions to their articles. You can sign up to a free media outlet such as HARO and start receiving journalist requests almost instantly.

3-4 times a day HARO will email you with a list of journalists looking for quotes in your industry – You simply just fire an email to the journalist and provide a valuable quote for them to use in their article as well as a brand or keyword link back to your website.

#4 Influencers

An influencer is someone in your industry who has a lot of reach to your target market, probably not a Kardashian but someone more locally. Do a YouTube/Instagram search to find influencers in your local area who have a pretty decent following and reach out to them to see if they can mention your product.

They may request being paid for this and it’s not as simple as it sounds.

You could also reach out to industry influencers such as journalists, trade bodies etc and send them a free sample of your product in exchange for a review. They will then link back to you from their blog post/video post description with a link back to your website.

#5 Blog round ups

Often neglected, this is one of the easiest ways to get links back to your content. There are industry blogs out there who post weekly or monthly round ups of the latest industry news.

You can find these very easily by going to google and typing in “[keyword] round up” or “[keyword] latest news”

You then need to reach out with a personal email to the website owner, make them aware of your content and ask if it can be included in their round up.

This is one of the easiest ways to get a backlink.

#6 Buy expired domains

If you are a little more advanced in your link building, then you may consider using something like Sedo or Flippa to purchase an expired domain that already has great SEO authority and backlinks and re-directing it to your website.

There are several ways to do it, the most common easiest being simply buying a relevant expired domain and 301 redirecting it to your website.

You could go one step further and run the website as a separate standalone website and update the content and add fresh content to it and point a link back to your website from an article, but this is more time consuming.

Long form content is one of the best ways to generate interest and natural links to your blog – So if running a blog as a standalone take this into consideration.

One of the best link magnets to your website can be made by spending time creating long form content which fills a gap in the market not adequately catered to. Where article lengths are on average 500-650 words, a 1500-2000 word extensive article outlining all facets of a topic can garner significant mentions in relevant news, blogs and even competitor websites. An example of this is the precisionfunding.com.au blog – which features long form technical blog posts on specific investment finance topics. Because of the very narrow niche specialisation – the content is relatively rare and garners significant links from information sources – and even their own finance competitor blogs.

When purchasing expired domains for SEO there are a number of pitfalls that you need to look out for which make this strategy a little more advanced.

You need to check firstly that the website you are looking to purchase is indexed in Google and not suffering from any sort of indexing penalty.

You will also need to buy a domain that is relevant and makes sense to your industry, buying one that has no relevance will do you more harm than good.

Check the domains history out using a tool such as AHREFS, check it has age and authority and that the backlinks all seem clean and not spammy.

And finally, you want to make sure that the links pointing to the domain you are buying will stay once the site is purchased. For example, you want to check the links pointing to the domain and see what types of websites they are coming from.

If the links are from dated articles a few years old, then there’s probably a lower risk of the link being removed than one for example consists of backlinks that are majority footer links inserted into design templates as these can very easily be removed.

#7 Use AHREFS – Advanced SEO technique

This is probably the most advanced method, takes more time and effort, but, can get the best results.

If you don’t use it already then signing up to ahrefs is well worth it, it’s an SEO tool that we use daily to help grow our own and our client’s SEO efforts, it’s an SEO tool that most good SEO agencies will use.

What ahrefs allows you to do is quite simply out spy on your competitors. You can put your competitor’s URL into their tool and it then puts an output of most of their backlinks.

The reason it gives most of their backlinks is that tools such as ahrefs can be blocked from crawling websites and so the backlinks won’t show.

So, once you have an ahrefs account, simply login and input a competitor’s URL, it will then come back and show you the links pointing to your competitor’s website and which individual pages that they point too.

What you need to do next is audit all the links to find the relevant ones, some will be spammy and low value so ignore them. Some will have exact match keywords as the anchor text such as “web design birmingham” so put them into a list.

Other will have more natural anchor text such as “this article from ALT Agency” or “An additional 10 ways to…” again put these links into a separate list.

What you want to do with your first list of exact match keywords is audit each individual site. Put that site into Ahrefs and see what its backlink profile is, if it has a DR and UR of above 30 then it’s probably worth requesting a link from them if the blog content is relevant to your industry.

You will need to contact the website owner through their contact us method and send them an email asking how it’s possible to also get a backlink to your website from them.

Now, the second list that has the more natural anchor text are the best ones to approach as they may be naturally linking out to resources as references to back up their article and of course not know your website exists.

What you want to do is look at the content that they are linking out too and see if you have anything similar on your website. If you do, then great, read your competitors article that is being linked too and then go back and edit your article to bring it up to at least the same level.

Now you want to give the website owner a real reason to link to your content, let’s say your competitors article is “5 ways to build backlinks for SEO” You would want to make your article “35 ways to build backlinks for SEO” so that you have lots of added value for readers.

Websites want to link out to great content so in the above example, if the 35 ways are relevant and not filler content then it’s likely a website would link out to your content.

You can also add in some images and even an infographic or video just to increase engagement and added value.

You then want to email the website owner who links out to your competitor and say:

“Hi,
I was just reading your article over at: [Article URL] and noticed that you linked out to the great article [competitors URL] that covers 5 ways to build backlinks for SEO.

I’ve actually got an article that covers 35 ways to build backlinks for SEO and not only that, but it also includes screenshots and a walk through for each of the 35 ways detailing exactly how to execute upon the 35 different ways.

Would you be interested in taking a read?”

This isn’t our method or style of email at all, it’s something we were taught by SEO masters Neil Patel & Brian Dean.

What you are doing in the email is referencing the email, referencing the fact it only has 5 ways and not only do you have 35 ways, but you clearly explain and show across different forms of media how to execute upon the 35 ways.

You are adding far more value than the existing link and so stand a better chance of being added as an additional resource or even replacing the existing link to your competitor.

In summary here is how to build SEO backlinks

  • Share across social media
  • Do a Press Release
  • Submit Quotes to the media
  • Influencers
  • Blog Round Ups
  • Buy Expired Domains
  • Blog Outreach

What are backlinks / What is a backlink?

In very simple terms a backlink, for SEO purposes, is a natural link from a website linking back to your website page.

Backlinks from different sites carry different weights and have different trust flows the higher these metrics, which depending on the software you use is based on a rating of 1-100 with 100 being the best, the better.

You can’t just simply buy backlinks as that’s against Googles policy – The idea is to create such an incredible experience on your website that backlinking is natural – People love your content, it’s distributed wide range and creates a snowball effect.

A backlink can point to any of your content, pages, images even infographics and still count towards your SEO efforts.

If you require help with your SEO link building efforts or have any questions regarding link building, then please contact the team at ALT Agency on 0121 663 0202.