The Complete Guide to Backlinks | Backlink Like a Pro
- Read chapter 1 now and get an introduction to link building and SEO.
- Read chapter 2 now and learn how content marketing and link building work together.
- Read chapter 3 now and learn white hat vs. black hat link building and SEO.
- Read chapter 4 now and learn guest posting for links.
- Read chapter 5 now and learn about bad links for SEO.
- Read chapter 6 now and learn email outreach and link building.
- Read chapter 7 now and learn how to go viral with backlinks.
- Chapter 8: You are here!
- Read chapter 9 and get a weekly guide to building backlinks.
- Read chapter 10 and learn 70 backlinking resources you need to know.
Now it’s time to hear from some of my favorite experts online.
A big thanks to each of these people for taking the time.
Here’s what some of the biggest names in link building are doing, and what some of the rising stars are doing, too. After each piece of advice, I’ll be adding in my own perspective so you understand why I’ve included that advice and find it so valuable.
John Rampton
“Link building is all about creating the best content in the world and getting people to write about it. I’ve had a lot of success creating long form guides that teach a user everything there is to know about the topic of the guide. I basically give away everything.
One guide that I put together was a freelancer guide. In this guide I made a 10k+ word guide on everything you need to know. I then guest blogged about freelancing and talked about it. This caused many people to see, read and then write about the guide. A year after I produced the guide I still have 1 new person a week talking about the guide and linking to it. It now ranks on page 1 of Google for many keywords. It’s not about the links, it’s about the content that you put out.”
High-Quality Guides can Become Natural Sources for Links
John’s high-quality guide and his ongoing dialogue about the guide has inspired so many people to write about it that it’s a natural source of links that just keeps on working for him. This is a fantastic example of how high-level content along with skilled outreach can build lots of links over the long haul.
—
Neil Patel
“One simple tactic that I use is to be open to interviews. On my contact page, I let people know that I accept them openly. As more people interview me, more people naturally link to me.”
This is important advice, especially from someone like Neil Patel who is clearly famous in the industry.
You might think that it would be very difficult to reach out to Neil, but in fact, it isn’t and he makes it clear that being responsive and open is part of his philosophy. This works for him and pays huge dividends.
—
Brian Dean
“Back in 2013 the big SEO agency BlueGlass went under. And unlike most instances where the site would survive, internal fighting between the founders meant the site went down overnight. Specifically, the site loaded a blank white page. Because BlueGlass produced a ton of top-notch content on their blog (including lots of popular infographics), they had TONS of excellent backlinks. And none of these backlinks were working. Worse yet, broken link checkers wouldn’t find these links because the site technically loaded a (blank) page back. So I swooped in and used The Moving Man Method to let these linkers know that their links to BlueGlass weren’t working. And I offered one of my similar, helpful resources as a replacement. That little campaign netted me a dozen or so excellent contextual links from authority marketing blog posts and resource pages.”
This is a perfect example of both broken link building and competitor backlink analysis rolled into one fast-moving campaign. By keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s happening to competitors and big names in your niche, you can seize upon opportunities when they arise.
Nice move Brian! 🙂
By the way, if you missed the infographic Brian and I did on URL structure you can see it here.
—
Adam Connell
“I use ‘expert roundups’ or ‘group interviews’. They combine the power of long-form content with the reach of influencers in your industry.
- Come up with an interesting question that plenty of people in your industry would love to know the answer(s) to.
- Research a list of the top folks in your space – if you know your industry well, you’ll already know the key players.
- Email everyone on the list and ask them to answer the question – in exchange, they’ll get a link back to their site, social profiles and be mentioned amongst other experts.
- Collate all of the answers into a blog post and publish it – while paying close attention to UX.
- Let everyone know the post is live – email the participants, tag them on social media and leverage other content promotion tactics.
The reason why this process works is because influencers are invested in the success of your content due to being a contributor – when it performs well, it looks good for them.
Adam’s advice is all about learning to work with influencers and build solid relationships.
People are typically more likely to share/link to content that makes them feel good about themselves and that makes them look better to others. Being featured alongside key players in your space can have quite an impact here.
Work on developing those fledgling relationships – they’ll usually open up some great opportunities in the future that wouldn’t have been open to you otherwise.”
Adam’s advice is all about learning to work with influencers and build solid relationships while providing value to your audience and theirs. If you can do those things everyone really does win, and you end up in a much better position than you were when you started.
—
Dom Wells
https://www.humanproofdesigns.com/
“Being a big fan of Brian Dean and his skyscraper technique, I was pretty keen to try this out.
The basic idea is to create some ‘epic content’ that will attract a lot of links. By getting a lot of links to a page on your site, your whole domain will have its ranking boosted, which will result in the rankings of ALL your pages being boosted as well.
So I created one and then proceeded to reach out and let everybody know about it.
Results: I gained about 3 links from this, which wasn’t amazing, but they were quite high-quality links, and the epic post has slowly moved up to page 3 in Google. I struggled with it initially because I didn’t really produce a good enough ‘wow’ post, and it wasn’t really that linkable. On top of that, my outreach strategy wasn’t very good.
I would say that this is the safest way of link building, and outreach in general, is fantastic. As long as you can figure out WHO to outreach to, and HOW to do it, then you will do well.
If you are trying to rank multiple sites at the same time, and want to diversify your portfolio, then sending links to your sites is much more scalable than writing, writing, writing, and hoping for the best.”
Dom’s point is well-taken: creating epic content is easier said than done! But practice really does make perfect, or at least pretty close to epic. And as Dom points out, outreach can mitigate against many ills and deficiencies—at least when your content is already approaching epic.
—
Nate Shivar
https://www.shivarweb.com/about
“Find the *right* person to contact.
The day I began having much more success link building was the day I started spending more time finding the right person to initially contact.
This is especially important if you want to move beyond blogger outreach to organizational outreach. Link-building requires a lot of persuasion, so the fewer people that are involved, the more likely you are to actually get the link.
Too often link builders go through the most crowded channel to reach someone who can’t actually help you. As a link builder, you have to find the person who is not only interested, but also able to actually implement the link. One of my big successes for a former client was building several relevant .gov and .edu links that brought in referral traffic and strong domain signals.
I had been failing until I realized that there were usually *two* decision-makers – someone in the department who was in charge of the content and the IT person who actually edited the website. I changed my process to include both people – and it easier for both to say ‘yes’ and get the link.
Everyone has overflowing inboxes and everyone is busy. You’re more likely to have success if find the right person from start.”
Finding the Right People to Connect With is Just As Important as Your Pitch.
This is great advice, because knowing who to contact to get a link can mean the difference between one quick contact and an endless feeling series of emails and follow ups. It may feel like too much time to research who’s in charge at the outset of your link building project, but the time is well spent in the long run.
—
Chris Makara
“Out of all the ways to build links, for me the easiest to get results quickly is by identifying weekly or monthly round up posts that are related to the topic I have a blog post for.
You can run various search strings in Google and change the search options to show results from the last month. This will deliver fresher results for sites currently posting round ups. You don’t want to waste your time trying to get included in a round up on a site that hasn’t actually created new roundups in the last month or so.
While using Google search is a decent option, I actually find more and better results through Twitter search.
Simply use Twitter search for:
‘your keyword phrase’ roundup
Getting involved with Round-Ups is a great way to be featured and linked to.
If you are a food blogger, get yourself featured in a recipe round up.
Then click on the ‘live’ tab and you will see the latest results.
From there, you can use some Excel or Google Sheet wizardry to remove duplicates and unshorten URLs. Then go through them and find the best opportunities to reach out to for inclusion in their next round up.
You’ll be on your way to getting included on new round up posts.”
Chris’s Twitter method for finding useful, current roundups is a great time-saving strategy. Roundups are especially useful since multiple audiences tend to notice them—one for each contributor.
Hey, I even do a roundup. Feel free to pitch me to be in it.
—
Preston Zeller
“The first thing is to set up at minimum a Google alert for your brand name. TrendKite gets even more sophisticated.
In each alert, inspect the referenced article to ensure the article is a) indeed a backlink you want and b) you are being backlinked correctly. Don’t be shy in asking for the right anchor text or to correct a link location.”
Find Brand Mentions Using the Moz OSE tool
It’s never a bad idea to monitor your brand, and taking this tactic to watch your backlinks is smart. Not only can you make use of and correct existing back links, saving time and effort, you can take brand mentions that are already out there and easily add backlinks to them, usually with very little trouble. This strategy is well worth your time.
There are many ways to see who has mentioned you. Moz and SEM Rush also have great tools.
—
Weslan Micholosky
www.whitespark.ca
“Link building is now about genuine and organic relationships. Buying links, getting involved with too good to be true situations, and copying everyone else is a bad approach. Long story short, link building is more PR and outreach than links.”
It may seem counterintuitive to say that building links is less about links and more about relationships, but it’s really true. Remember to employ best practices of PR, and you’ll be more successful in your link building.
—
Ivan Ciraj
http://squareonelife.com
“One of the best ways to build authentic quality links is to reach out to targeted journalists with article recommendations and contributions in relation to the subject matter they are composing. Utilizing services such as HARO (Help A Reporter Out) can help give this a structured approach. This method works well because you are not spamming journalists and authors, but rather responding to what they need, and then kindly asking for a link if the information you’ve provided is useful. Another great approach if you’re producing marketing material for a local area is to feature other local businesses within the video, images or print advertising. Do not ask for any sort of promotional fee, but kindly request a simple backlink in return for you promoting the business within your own marketing material, and everyone wins.”
HARO’S are a great opportunity to showcase your expertise and earn a backlink.
Reaching out to media contacts who want what you have is the perfect way to secure a link on a national or even international level. Focusing in locally, featuring other local businesses in your promotional materials can help cement business relationships and gain you new local customers.
That is why we built out a whole PR department here at Ignite.
—
Matthew Mercuri
http://www.dupray.com/
“One of the best ways to build links is to simply be ridiculous. The neutral perspective of content publishing simply doesn’t allow you to stand out. The content on your website can likely be found in other places.
How do you become unique? Write pages that are off-the-cuff. Create pages that make people laugh, cry or feel angry—just make them elicit emotions! Chances are that the emotions you elicit will make people talk and share.”
According to Moz, being funny or surprising and eliciting anger are three very effective ways to go viral with your content. Although this advice may seem silly, it works!
—
Brandon Schroth
“One of my favorite link building strategies for helping small business owners stand out is conducting a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). This is a fantastic way to put a brand directly in front of its target audience. It provides people from all over the world the chance to ask direct questions to an expert on the subject at hand. This can create the perfect environment for high engagement that is contextually relevant. The best part about it? It’s fun! And it only takes about an hour of your time.”
This is a fantastic way to build authority and gain traction as an influencer in your niche.
—
Adam Johnson
“When we create educational insurance content we try to interview at least 2 financial experts for each article. These experts come from trade associations, industry organizations or university professors. Once published we share it with the experts and the communications dept of their respective organization. Most often the communications dept will have an In The News Section of the website that will link back to our article. The links earned from this strategy are coming from super high domain authority .org .gov .edu sites.”
This is a smart strategy for several reasons. First, using these authoritative experts makes the content stronger. Second, collaborating with these experts creates automatic backlinks that are from very high authority sites. Third, the end result is content that has a longer lasting impact and can generate shares and discussion for an extended period of time.
—
Allen Walton
http://www.spyguysecurity.com/
“My best link building strategy is to inject myself in the media. Whenever I see relevant stories in the media, I contact the authors to show how I’m related to what they’re talking about. That way, they can cover me or my business, and I have that relationship in the future. This goes for anything. It can be entrepreneurship, business, security….all of that is good. I’m even quoted and linked to on credit card hacking websites!”
This is a great example of an entrepreneur seeking out news stories that are connected to his area of expertise and using those stories to assert himself as an influencer. This strategy creates more authority for him, for sure, but it also cements good relationships and generates back links.
—
Ankit Seth
“My favorite link building strategy is building links using images. The first step is to create high-quality images. I share these images on wikipedia commons under creative commons license. Thousands of bloggers around the globe are now free to use these images in their blog posts. In return, they provide a link to my desired site.
It’s important to note here that while most bloggers will give you a link some might not. I do a reverse image search for my images periodically to find out bloggers who are using my images without attribution and reach out to them on email asking them to do so.”
Embed Codes Allow Your Images to be Easily Sharable, and provide backlinks.
This is a simple yet powerful strategy for businesses that have the capacity to create useful images or infographics—and even images of your product or service can work well. Make sure attribution is part of your creative commons license, and follow up to ensure that you’re getting the attribution you’re looking for.
—
Will Coombe
https://www.sharpedigital.com/
“One of the most effective methods of getting natural links to your website is to create an online tool people in your industry will rave about.
It doesn’t need to have complicated functionality at all but it must be useful. An example would be one page on a plumber’s website that has a unit conversion tool for water pressure, pipe sizes, pipe length, and output pressure.
This would be a surprisingly simple online tool to create, and yet would have people linking to it whilst you sleep! The work and money involved has a non-stop payoff for your SEO. Getting something like this built could cost less than £100 if you use a reputable freelancing website like UpWork. Once built, it would take minimal outreach to get it viral – because tools always perform better for links than written content.”
Creating useful tools and apps, and even amusing tools and apps, can be a powerful backlinking strategy. Consider embedding codes in your tool or app to be sure you get your link.
—
Marcus Burke
www.techspectacle.com
“My favorite way to get quality backlinks is by Newsjacking, a 3 step process that can get you powerful white-hat links on major newspapers websites.
- Setup content alerts in backlink checker of your choice (ahrefs, majestic etc.) for your specific keywords.
- Sort by date and domain rating 75+, this will show all the top news outlets.
- Email the editor with a quote, infographic, informative article etc. that they can add to the article.
Journalists are always looking for quotes to add credibility to their articles. This method is very time-sensitive and requires to you to be quick and alert but the result is a high-quality backlink to your site if successful.”
This is a strong technique, especially if you stay on top of it and make it part of your ongoing routine. It also helps to have a solid library of useful content, infographics, quotes, and other resources to offer journalists that are indexed and ready to go.
—
David James
http://businessgrowthdigitalmarketing.com
“The most successful white-hat link building strategy that I use is outreaching to content curators after publishing high-quality content in a niche. I usually reach out to them on Twitter or via email and I share the content because I believe it is valuable and will aid their curation efforts. I prospect the curators and make sure that the content is specifically targeted to their interests. In the end, I might only reach out to 30 people, but I will get 1-3 links in return.”
Specifically knowing who the strongest curators are in your industry and reaching out to them should certainly be part of your backlinking strategy. Even the best content can get overlooked without exposure, and high-quality curators get lots of traffic and action on their sites.
—
Steven Macdonald
http://www.superoffice.com/blog/
“My best link building strategy for SEO is to create unique images and charts.
When referencing data or a study, articles usually copy and paste the bar chart or graph from the original source to make their content more visual. This works, to a degree, but then you find the same chart being featuring on several articles across the web. Our strategy at SuperOffice is to create our own charts using the original data (all data is correctly attributed) to make the data more visually appealing. All charts are created in PowerPoint and to keep within the brand’s design guidelines. The reason this strategy works so well is that when someone performs an image search in Google, it’s a SuperOffice chart that stands out from the rest and is then referenced or used, which in turn results in a link. A great example is to perform a Google Image search for customer centricity and click on one of the more visually appealing images that explains how customer centricity works. It might be a SuperOffice image.”
Just like a truly useful, visually appealing, and value-adding infographic or tool, a standout chart or image is going to be useful to everyone else writing about the same topic area. For this reason, creating the best chart, image, or graphic on a certain subject and then allowing it to be used by anyone—so long as they attribute your work back to you with a link—is a great back linking strategy.
—
Steve Morgan
http://morganonlinemarketing.co.uk
“I often recommend to clients that they should consider running their own events, especially in their own premises if they’re able to. People often link to webpages or dedicated websites about events, especially when it comes to linking to the event’s venue (i.e. information on how to get there). They may also get inbound links from bloggers who review the event after attending. If running events is not practical or too much hassle, the next best thing is sponsoring them. If you do, make sure that they’re linking to you from the event website.”
Events and giveaways are a good strategy for generating interest anyway, and especially if you can command press coverage or reviews, they can help you drum up some links.
—
Andriy Starchenko
“Global Sponsorship is a great tactic. Instead of searching out for potential local events to sponsor we decided to bring the event organizers knocking on our door. We are also taking a global perspective, and sponsor events in our target markets throughout North America.
We first created a landing page with a form for sponsorship application. We promoted the page on our own blog, on third party blogs and via a press release. Finally, we spent a very small budget on an advertising campaign to promote the new sponsorship program.
We now get 2 to 5 sponsorship requests per week and we can choose which events we want to sponsor. We believe in mutually benefiting relationships so we sponsor events that give us backlinks that we can also help with our product such as stickers, decals or temporary tattoos.”
Affiliate/Sponsorship Marketing
This is a very smart back linking strategy in action. Instead of thinking only locally, this company took the idea of sponsorship and applied it throughout its market. The result was a steady stream of mutually beneficial sponsorship opportunities, and the back links to go with them.
—
Josh Patterson
www.jellyfish.net
“Universities are always looking for PR opportunities, and tend to amplify these mentions through press links and social citations. By compiling a list of those university programs that prepare students the most for a career in your industry, we’ve seen tremendous results in acquiring .edu backlinks and citations. Create a list of criteria to evaluate schools and universities against, relative to the programs associated with your industry. Compile the results from your evaluation and produce a top 10 or top 25 list, highlighting the schools that performed the best against your criteria. Once published, reach out to the PR and marketing teams at each school highlighted, notifying them of the distinction and how they can promote it (i.e. link back to your website).”
This is another good win-win back linking strategy. The universities and colleges enjoy the positive publicity of the distinction, and your business gets the benefit of the links.
—
Davin Gallego
“Reaching out and offering your educational content to colleges and universities that provide resource materials on your specific topic can be a great way to generate quality back links. For example, more academic institutions are offering digital marketing related courses and are in need of quality, third-party content to use to educate their students.”
This is a fantastic way to get high-value .edu links. Offering your professional expertise in the form of reference materials can not only generate back links—it can foster strong, useful relationships in the industry and new contacts as students graduate and join the industry.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these pieces of advice from the experts have been useful to you. By keeping an eye on what both the biggest names and the rising stars in link building are doing, you get a deeper sense of how the art and science of link building works and how it is evolving in real time.
- Read chapter 1 now and get an introduction to link building and SEO.
- Read chapter 2 now and learn how content marketing and link building work together.
- Read chapter 3 now and learn white hat vs. black hat link building and SEO.
- Read chapter 4 now and learn guest posting for links.
- Read chapter 5 now and learn about bad links for SEO.
- Read chapter 6 now and learn email outreach and link building.
- Read chapter 7 now and learn how to go viral with backlinks.
- Chapter 8: You are here!
- Read chapter 9 and get a weekly guide to building backlinks.
- Read chapter 10 and learn 70 backlinking resources you need to know.
