Backlinks are one of the most important factors that play a role in your search presence. Every major website that wants to rank high in search results tries to build backlinks to its site. It's no secret that backlinks are crucial for SEO.
Bear in mind that your goal when building backlinks is not to try and get the most amount of backlinks to your site. Google's search advocate, John Mueller, says that:
We try to understand what is relevant for a website, how much should we weigh these individual links, and the total number of links doesn’t matter at all.
What matters more is the quality of the backlinks you gather. You should focus on getting backlinks from domains that already rank high on Google and have a high Website Authority. As John Mueller says:
there could be one really good link from one website out there that is, for us, a really important sign that we should treat this website as something that is relevant because it has that one link. I don’t know, maybe from like a big news site’s home page, for example. So the total number [of backlinks] essentially is completely irrelevant.
There are many techniques to build high-quality backlinks which we will discuss in this article: Good Content, Guest Publishing, Personalized Outreach, and Manual Link-Building.
#1: Good Content
The best way we've seen that helps get the most high-quality backlinks is to focus on publishing high-quality, original content. To help you even more, try to include graphs, images, tables, or other linkable content in your pages. This will make it easy for publishers and other sites to link to your content they can either use text snippets from your content or they can use one of your images/graphs and link to your site as a source.
As an example, Semrush has a case study on this in which they published a blog post on The Top 100 Most Visited Websites in The US, which includes easily linkable images/tables. As reported by Semrush, that post received over 9,500+ backlinks from 1,100+ unique domains.
#2: Guest Publishing
Guest publishing is as simple as it sounds: you write an article for other websites in order for you to promote your site/brand. Although it sounds simple, it may be very difficult for you to perform, especially if you want to guest post for high-quality sites. Many of these sites are very strict about the authors that post on their sites.
Guest publishing may not get you the most amount of backlinks since reaching out to certain sites and asking to guest post will more likely get you rejected. However, as I quoted previously from John Mueller, one high-quality backlink can get you high in search results.
There are a few guidelines for guest posts that should be considered, such as the topic of your guest article. Google mentions on its Google Search Central Blog that:
Google does not discourage [guest articles] in the cases when they inform users, educate another site's audience, or bring awareness to your cause or company. However, what does violate Google's guidelines on link schemes is when the main intent is to build links in a large-scale way back to the author's site.
Guest publishing can be a good way to build backlinks and improve your site's SEO, however, try not to excessively do it and definitely don't violate any of Google's guidelines.
#3: Personalized Outreach
Personalized outreach is a technique in which you reach out to website owners and ask them to link to your articles/website in a few relevant places. What we see many people do is find articles that websites are already linking to, and then they go and write articles about the same topic, often with high quality. After that, they ask website owners to link to their new content. Keep in mind that the higher the quality of the content that you produce, the easier the process will be.
Outreach is related to the first point that we discussed in this article: Good Content. No website wants to link to sites with poor content. Outreach can also be a hit-or-miss method: you will more likely receive rejections on your outreach, so you can't guarantee the success of your outreach.
#4: Manual Link-Building
Manual Link-Building is the easiest way to build backlinks. This is because you take the action yourself and don't need permission. Thankfully for you, there are many websites with a high Domain Rating that allow you to manually insert a link to your website on their site. Some of these sites include:
Product Hunt: Domain Rating of 91/100
Hacker News: Domain Rating of 90/100
Reddit: Domain Rating of 95/100
Twitter/TikTok/Instagram: Domain Rating: 95+/100
And there are many others. As you can see, this is a very easy way for you to build your backlinks.
Backlinks are very important when it comes to SEO, and there are many ways that you can use to build up your backlinks. The most effective way, however, is publishing high-quality & original content. Although backlinks will help you improve your search presence, there are many other factors that you should pay attention to which we look forward to covering in upcoming articles.
