Do I really need to state the obvious?
Yes – links back to your website help individual pages and your entire site rank better in search engines.
While this is common knowledge in the SEO community, coming up with creative link building strategies is another can of worms.
Most people take their time to write great content, then hope it’s good enough to get the attention of some influencers on social media or in online forums. The truth is you need to have some rock-solid strategies to earn backlinks that don’t include crossing your fingers.
Most of our sales leads here at WP Buffs find us via search engines. We probably get 5-10 daily leads, but that can stretch to 15-25 on a good day.
To make this happen, we’ve had to build a strong backlink profile to help our site rank in search engine results. Of course, we write valuable content, do thorough keyword research and have other marketing strategies to win new business, but winning backlinks is essential in making sure Google sees our content as authoritative.
According to Google Search Console, here’s how many backlinks we have. We’ve almost hit 60,000 and in just about 10 months. And we’ve earned every one of them.
Here are the exact strategies we’ve used to win backlinks, some of which are old-school classics and others creative new link building strategies that have worked for us. We’ve been around for 10 months and over that time, we’ve used tactical backlink strategies to bring in over 8000 unique visitors through search. We’re talking peanuts in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a start and the curve is proving to be exponential.
We’ve proved that these strategies really work, so if you’re stuck when it comes to link building, these tactics are a good start.
Beginner Link Building Strategies
1. Give a Review
An easy way to get a link back to your site is to give a review of a service or product and ask to be featured on their website. You can either make a purchase yourself or ask for a freebie in return for a friendly review. Be sure to check the other reviews that are posted online to make sure they include do-follow links. You don’t want to ask to be the one person who gets a link when nobody else received one. Here’s a link we got back from WP Like A Pro, a DA 10 website. Not the most authoritative site out there, but it’s tremendously related to the WordPress work we do so this link sends good vibes to Google.2. Guest Post on Related Websites
This is a really popular way to get links back to your site. Write a post on somebody else’s blog and include a link back to your website in the by-line. Make sure you find blogs that include links back to the author’s website. You can find guest posting opportunities by copying and pasting the following search terms into Google and replacing “keyword” with a keyword specific to your industry.- keyword “submit a guest post”
- keyword “guest post”
- keyword “guest post by”
- keyword “accepting guest posts”
- keyword “guest post guidelines”
3. Add Your Feed to a Content Aggregator
Getting your posts added to a content aggregator doesn’t have to be spammy as long as you stay up-to-date with Google search updates. If it’s specific to your industry and fairly well-known, it can send link juice to all of your posts as well as real traffic to your website. The content aggregator World of WP collects posts from all the major blogs in the WordPress space, so having my content there adds to the authority of our website. And the links don’t hurt either!4. Get Your Content Republished
Getting your content republished on other websites in your industry can be an easy way to get links back to your own site. Because you’re allowing somebody else to publish your original content, simply ask them to link back to the originally-published article at the top of the post. You do need to be a bit careful with duplicate content here to avoid any black-hat penalties. To avoid that whole mess, make sure you:- Have your content republished on other blogs after that content has clearly already been indexed in Google search engines.
- Add an attribution link to the top (and bottom) of the post to ensure Google knows exactly where the original post is when they index this new piece of content.
- Make sure the republished article has the correct rel-canonical tag associated with it to tell Google where the originally published article is.
5. Get Listed on a Resources Page
Getting listed on a resource page can be an easy way to earn a backlink. Lots of websites have resource pages where they list helpful places for their readers to visit. Find blogs online in your industry that have resources pages and reach out politely to see if they’d mind adding you to their list. Again, you can find resource page opportunities by copying and pasting the following search terms into Google and replacing “keyword” with a keyword specific to your industry.- Keyword + “resources”
- Keyword + “useful resources”
- Keyword + “helpful resources”
- Keyword + “links”
- Keyword + “useful links”
- Keyword + “helpful links”