In the never-ending battle for the top spots on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), implementing effective search engine optimization (SEO) methods remains crucial for ongoing success. While ensuring your website adheres to industry standards and trends remains a plausible measure toward achieving your SEO goals, a more calculated and strategic approach is building SEO backlinks.
Imperative to any digital marketing strategy, SEO backlinks refer to links on other websites leading to your website. Beyond simply offering direction to your website, backlinks signify a recommendation of your content from other website publishers, increasing your credibility and overall image. Gathering high-quality backlinks to your website increases its chance of increased domain authority, a metric used to predict how likely a site is to rank on a SERP.
Here are 6 of the most effective ways to build high-quality SEO backlinks:
1. Produce High-Quality Content
Producing exceptional content builds a foundation for building high-quality SEO backlinks. While constantly producing high-caliber content can be time-consuming, the increased appeal it gives your website to external creators pays off. Create compelling content that other websites naturally want to link to by including assets like your own research statistics and infographics.
Topics that are likely candidates to organically earn you backlinks are detailed how-tos, guides, and tutorials. Pair well-researched and accurate information with your website’s unique perspective on a topic to earn the trust of reporters and bloggers so they can confidently endorse your website as a reliable source.
2. Broken Link Building
A calculated strategy for building high-quality SEO backlinks is locating broken links on other websites and contacting their webmaster to suggest your content as a replacement. When successful, reclaiming broken links is a win-win situation — while earning increased exposure for your website, you also help the other website by addressing their broken backlink.
Broken backlinks on a website hinder the user experience and bring the trustworthiness and timeliness of its content into question. as a result, saving the day by presenting webmasters with your content to resolve their broken backlinks can be a critical tactic in improving your SEO and organic traffic.
3. Build Relationships with Reporters and Bloggers
Forging relationships with reporters and bloggers is a strong form of networking that can prove especially advantageous when seeking backlinks. One of the specific benefits yielded from these relationships is backlinks. When navigated correctly, requesting backlinks from industry peers provides a smooth, natural way of building your backlink profile, but be wary of coming across the wrong way. Bluntly requesting backlink placement from content creators without knowing them personally often comes across as disingenuous and pushy, hence why building relationships before asking favors is of the utmost importance. Organically spark and build industry relationships through:
Networking Events: Take advantage of professionals from your industry being in the same place all at once by focusing on meaningful interactions at networking events.
Industry Forums and Groups: Participate in industry forums and groups on popular platforms like LinkedIn to strengthen your presence and increase your reach.
Social Media Activity: Post on your social media channels to regularly engage with and grow your audience. With a broad enough reach, forging relationships with fellow industry professionals whose goals align with your own becomes more viable.
4. Guest Blogging
Writing blogs for websites relevant to your industry offers you exposure that can be further enhanced by including backlinks. Opportunities to guest blog can be found via Google or earned by offering your services to respected websites that fall within your niche. Like broken link building, guest blogging as a method to build your backlink profile is mutually beneficial because you are providing the website for which you are guest blogging content, requiring little to no work from their own employees.
When writing a guest blog, however, it is important to not overtly monopolize the opportunity by linking to any pages without direct relation to the topic. For example, linking to your website’s homepage or storefront would not likely benefit readers as they lack direction and specificity in their relevance to the blog topic. The best place to unapologetically self-promote any aspect of your website with backlinks is not in the content of the blog post, but in your subsequent author bio.
5. Publish Original Research
Conducting research to include in your content is one of the strongest backlink-building methods. As the publisher of your new research, you are its primary source and therefore the sole point of reference for other websites wanting to highlight it themselves. While exclusive statistics inevitably give you an edge in the competition for high-quality backlinks, contextualizing your findings with an in-depth report and/or infographics further increases your odds for backlinks.
Weaving your findings into a story that will resonate with readers makes it far more compelling and therefore more likely to prompt fellow industry professionals into backlinking to your content. Becoming a pivotal resource for journalists and bloggers seeking content to bolster their own views by consistently publishing new research can greatly improve public perception of your website. Though conducting research can be a costly and time-consuming endeavor, the reputability and buzz it could generate for your website could be a worthwhile payoff.
6. Analyze Competitors’ Backlinks
Considering your position in the context of competitors is a general practice for any business. When it comes to backlinks, inspecting how your competitors earn them and their effectiveness in bolstering search engine results is essential to growing your backlink profile accordingly. For example, a common strategy for increasing backlinks is earning features on resource pages, which are webpages that list links tailored to specific topics and are therefore relevant resources for readers.
If you encounter a backlink to a key competitor’s website on said resource page, it could be a worthwhile endeavor to get your own content featured on the page considering the similarities you bear with your competitor.
Transform Your Search Engine Performance with Backlinks
Maximizing the potential of backlinks with the implementation of our strategies can transform your search engine performance. While it is tempting to prioritize backlink quantity over quality, not all backlinks are good news. Backlinks from unrelated and unreliable sources can actually harm your SEO ranking, so abiding by the principles of high-quality backlink building is essential.
At Premiere Creative, we are committed to implementing our tried-and-true practices that have proven successful for our diverse clientele to take your business to the next level. Contact us today at (973) 346-8100 to discover what Premiere Creative has in store for your business.
