What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks (also known as “inbound links”, “incoming links” or “one way links”) are links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are basically votes from other websites. Each of these votes tells search engines: “This content is valuable, credible and useful”.
So the more of these “votes” you have, the higher your site will rank in Google and other search engines.
What Types of Backlinks are Valuable?
Not all backlinks are created equal.
In other words, if you want to rank higher in the SERPs, focus on quality backlinks.
Put another way:
A single quality backlink can be more powerful than 1,000 low-quality backlinks.
As it turns out, high-quality backlinks tend to share the same key traits.
Trait #1: They Come From Trusted, Authoritative Websites
Would you rather get a backlink from Harvard… or a random guy’s website?
As it turns out, Google feels the same way.
This concept is known as “Domain Authority”. Essentially, the more authority a site has, the more authority it can pass on to your site (via a link).
Find Link Roundups In Your Niche: Use search strings in Google search, like ““Keyword” + “link roundup”.
Pitch Your Resource: (Gently) suggest that they include your linkable asset to the roundup.
And if your post is a good fit for that person’s roundup, you’ll get a high-quality link.
Use The Moving Man Method
Here is the 3-step process:
First, you find web pages, resources or businesses that are outdated, rebranded or recently changed names.
Then, find the sites that are still linking to these outdated resources.
Finally, you email people to let them know that they’re linking to something that’s out of date.
Let me show you how this works with a real-life example…
A while back I read that a website for a big SEO agency website suddenly shut down.
This meant that they had lots of pages on their site that weren’t working anymore…
…pages that lots of people were still linking to.
Specifically, I noticed that an infographic about SEO on their site wasn’t working anymore. Which was perfect , because I had just published my own SEO-focused infographic.
So that was the first step.
Next, I had to see who actually linked to that infographic.
So I fired up Ahrefs and pulled all of their links:
Finally, I emailed everyone that linked to the infographic to let them know the image wasn’t working anymore. I also let them know that my infographic would make a great replacement for the BlueGlass one.
Broken Link Building
This strategy is similar to the Moving Man Method you just learned about.
The difference is that with broken link building, you’re only looking for pages that have 404 errors.
To find these 404 links, you want to focus on resource pages in your niche. So if you’re in the fitness niche you’d search in Google using these search strings:
"fitness" + "resource page"
"fitness" + "resources"
"fitness" + "recommended sites"
"fitness" + "links"
That said, I was very strategic about things. I made sure to only write guest posts for quality sites in my niche.
So if you run a site about the Paleo Diet, and write a guest post on a site about iPhones, that’s going to look spammy to Google.
But when you write mind-blowing guest posts for quality websites in your industry, those links DO help.
The thing is, finding places to guest post can be a HUGE pain.
But there’s an easier way…
Here’s how it works:
First, find someone in your industry that writes a lot of guest posts.
Next, go to one of their published guest posts. And grab the headshot they use in their author bio:
To be clear: I didn’t just publish my infographic and hope for the best.
Like any piece of content that you publish, you need to strategically promote your infographic. And to do that, I recommend using a strategy called “Guestographics”.
I outline exactly how Guestographics work in this post.
Submit Testimonials
Companies big and small love to show off customer testimonials.
And you’re using a product or service that you love (or at least like), consider sending them a testimonial.
To show that you’re a real person they’ll often add a link to your website… without you even having to ask.
