It’s a well-known fact that if you build high-quality backlinks to your blog, they help you increase your authority, boost traffic and search engine rankings. So, getting backlinks to your blog is essential for SEO.
For bloggers, it’s close to impossible to be manually building links to each and every one of your blog posts. Yet, I’m going to share with you 5 link building strategies that will help you to generate organic links to the homepage, category pages, and individual blog posts.
Guest Blogging for Natural Link Building
By now, you probably know what guest blogging is. But for those who don’t (or forget) guest blogging (also known as guest posting), is the process of you writing an article for someone else’s blog with the purpose of growing your brand, generating traffic, and building natural backlinks for your own blog.
It considered being one of the best ways to build natural links and connect with an already established audience.
So, how do you build quality links with guest posting? Let’s take a quick overview.
Find guest blogging opportunities
Start with discovering guest blogging opportunities to submit content pieces. Those should be sites with a similar audience to the one you want to build.
Brainstorm a list of ideas for guest posts
You want to come up with ideas that are perfect for each and every target blog you’re going to reach out to. Note that many blogs have guest post guidelines where some of them even list the topics they tend to accept.
Pitch your guest post
Now when you have a list of good targets and ideas for a guest post, your next step would be blogger outreach.
It means that you would need to write them an email where you introduce yourself and express the interest to contribute to their blog. Share your guest blogging idea(s) or you could even send them the ready article straight away.
This would increase your chances to get your post published. But the drawback of this approach is that you can’t pitch the same article to multiple bloggers. Which means you’ll have to wait for their response in order to submit the article somewhere else. This can drastically slow down your outreach process.
Quick tip: Adam Enfroy says that reaching out to site owners via Facebook messages has worked for him best.
Add links to your own content
So, let’s say you have your article accepted – how exactly are you going to build backlinks to your blog?
Well, this is a great question. Many sites come with a policy that you can’t include links to your products/services (aka lending pages) and you’ll have your backlink in the author bio section.
But what you can do is to produce an excellent content piece where you’ll create a perfect place to linking back to one (or more) of your highly-relevant blog posts.
In other words, you can usually link to your own content from a guest post when it’s done tastefully and has a clear purpose.
Design Cool Infographics
One of the great content ideas is to create infographics. With the help of infographics, you’ll be able to not only grab the attention of your website visitors but also make complicated information more understandable for your audience.
Infographics are considered to be a perfect piece for sharing on social media channels and it’s really an effective way of link building.
The challenge here is to pump out amazing stuff to get noticed.
You don’t have to be a designer or have experience with Photoshop to create an infographic. Programs like Piktochart and Visually provide the means for non-designers to create their own infographics. There are tons of free and paid resources to find stock photos and icons for your infographic.
And well, you can always hire someone from Fiverr or UpWork to do the work for you.
You can embed your infographics in a blog or post them as stand-alone images on your Pinterest account, for example.
Infographics can be also divided into small pieces and you can share them on your Twitter account as a separate post. Well, the sky’s the limit, as you can see.
Use infographics to build backlinks to your blog
To build backlinks to your blog with infographics you’ll need to:
Use Ubersuggest or other content ideas suggesting tools to find articles that are popular in your space. Take that article and create an infographic based on that data.
Reach out to site owners who have linked to the original blog post and show them your visual. Ask them to link to your infographic and/or embed it within their site. Tell them you’ll be happy to write an introductory text to accompany your infographic.
This is a relatively easy way to build links to your blog and help your content rank higher in Google.
And what’s more, is that this strategy works extremely well especially for brand new websites.
And of course, don’t forget about submitting your infographic to infographic submission sites and directories.
In this way, people would be able to find your high-quality infographic and use it on their website and link back to your post.
Create Expert Roundup Posts
Even though this link building strategy is a bit overused these days, roundup posts still work.
Why? Well, because an expert roundup does something extremely valuable: it curates tips, strategies, and thoughts from experts all in one place. And I strongly believe that it’s something that will never go out of style.
So, how do you get backlinks to your blog with this expert roundup strategy?
First, you need to create a list of experts you want to feature in your article. Ideally, they are experts in your niche and can provide a high-quality answer to your question.
Alternatively, you can use such services as HARO to ask a question related to your niche or what you are trying to rank for and collect experts’ responses.
After you publish your roundup, interact with all the bloggers that were featured there. Reply to their comments, follow them on social media, thank them for every share, etc.
If the roundup is good enough they will share it, link to it, and other links follow from that.
Most bloggers have a page where they mention the interviews and roundups they have been featured in – so, they could include your post too.
Reverse Expert Roundups for Quality Link Building
Another way to create backlinks to your blog with expert roundups is actually participating in them.
Contribute to expert roundups and you’ll be able to get a link to your site in your bio section. You find relevant topics for future roundups with the help of the HARO tool.
Or you can find -how I call it- ‘reverse expert roundup opportunities’. So, you need to find relevant already published roundups and offer to write a unique piece (aka your comment on the topic).
In this way, the article would be updated with new content and gets its boost from Google. And well, you’ve got a link as well.
Link out to Influencers in Your Niche
You may be surprised to find that many experts and influencers are actually willing to pay you back when you mention them in your content piece.
Neil Patel calls this method ‘Ego baiting’ and considers it to be one of his favorite, and one of the easiest, link building strategies.
So, how does this work?
When writing a blog post, search for different types of content published by experts and influencers in your niche. It can be an article, ebook, video, infographic, etc.
Once you find the relevant piece, mention, and/or link to it in your content. And when you do that, make sure you let the influencers know. You can reach out to them on social media – Twitter for example. Or send them an email saying that their piece of content is awesome and that you mentioned it in your post.
It won’t always result in a backlink. But as long as you’re not pushy, you can pick up some links and shares from this approach.
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A carefully planned content strategy, excellent on-page SEO complimented with a strong link building strategy will definitely boost your Google rankings and traffic. So, now it’s up to you. Try one or more listed strategies for creating backlinks to your website and let me know if these techniques worked for you.