Link Building was quite famous for increasing the PageRank and getting high traffic to your website. But after Google’s algorithm updates it has lost its importance up to some extent. But legitimate link building techniques still work and we have tried to cover most of them in this article.
1. Write Guest Posts on Other High Quality Blogs
Guest posting on high quality blogs has several benefits. The readership for these blogs is huge, so exposure of your website is high and hence the traffic. Good quality blogs have a high PageRank and writing as a guest on them will get you a do-follow backlink from these websites. As a result, your website will receive the PageRank juice and it will be placed higher on Search Engine Results Page.
2. Let People Use Content Created by You For Free
Today everybody owns a camera, use it to capture photos and videos. You can then allow people to use your creations for free and most of them will link to your website for giving you the credit for your work.
3. Writing Unique and Good Quality Content
This technique is known to all, but most of the people do not follow this. People link to the articles which provides some value to their readers. If I am writing on a topic and someone has already written a great article on it, then I might link to it and ask my readers to follow it for further reading. And these links bring the page juice and a lot of targeted readers.
4. Link Exchange
Exchanging links is considered to be a bad practise nowadays, but linking to sites in the same niche can be safe and useful. Search Engines won’t penalise your site for this, because linking to similar sites is considered helpful for your readers. Readers can pursue their interest in a better way if they know where to go for, in case they need more related stuff. So you must exchange links with blog owners within your niche.
5. Leaving Quality Comments
Most of the sites today give rel=”nofollow” attribute to the links in the comments section. This stops the flow of PageRank juice to these links. But people still read the comments and if you leave a provoking or a valuable one, they may visit your website too. This can bring huge traffic to your website and if you have good content on your website then they will surely return.
6. Allowing Guest Posts
People writing guest posts share their article on their brand pages on social media sites and often on their own website too. This is a great way of attracting new audience and to get links both from social networks and your guest author’s website.
7. Take Advantage of Social Media Networks
Social Media networks like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter are great for socializing with people, but don’t underestimate them, they are really very useful for promoting your business too or more specifically your website. Sharing your website’s link on these networks will get you backlinks in the same way as other websites. But you need to make sure that the pages with your links are publicly visible or more technically, crawlable by search engines.
8. Organising Contests
If you have a popular blog then you can get sponsors for the contest or else you can yourself put up a contest and give away some physical stuff to the winner. You can ask new blog owners and your friends to write an article about your contest and this will get you good number of backlinks. It will also make your readers happy and will increase readership. Moreover, you can ask the participants to share the contest page on any social media site to participate in the contest, this will again increase your social media presence and get you a good number of backlinks. Subscribing to your mailing list can be another criteria.
TIP Show a link of the contest on every page of your website. This will increase the awareness of the contest and more and more people will link to you.
9. Making YouTube Videos
YouTube is the best and the most popular video sharing website. Having your website linked from YouTube can help you get good traffic and higher rankings, and accomplishing it is not much difficult. You can create some videos for your articles, be it a tutorial, an explanation of the product or service, a review of a product or anything related to the topic you are working on. And in the description you can leave a link to the page of your website, which can be visited by the user to have a step by step tutorial or a theoretical explanation of what is explained in the video. If your video starts getting traffic then your website will automatically get visitors and the link from the YouTube page is obviously a high quality link.
TIP If you are not good at making videos, then you can hire someone on Fiverr to get it done.
10. Creating Infographics
Today there is a huge trend for infographics. People love reading short and meaningful information along with the charts representing the stats. Even the most popular websites embed infographics on their sites giving a link to the infographic designer’s website. You can create infographic on anything of your interest and people will surely use them on their website giving a link to yours.
TIP Below the infographic, you can add a textarea which contains the embeddable image of the infographic that links to your website. People will copy the whole thing to embed the infographic to their site and you will get a backlink for free.
LINK: Start creating infographics with Visual.ly
11. Link Baiting
Link bait is any content that can be controversial, encouraging or of any other type that gains attention of the reader and fetches author some backlinks to his website. You can write any type of link baiting headlines, some of which are given below :
- How ______ became a millionaire in ______ days/months. –Change the first blank with any millionaire’s name and the second with some number.
- How ______ got ______ monthly visitors on his/her new website. –Change the first blank with a popular name and the second with some huge number.
- The biggest mistake of ______ life. –Change the dash with any celebrity’s name.
12. Add Links within Your Feeds
If you have a website on any Content Management System then the CMS would be creating feeds for your website. But it may/may not add your link to the items in your feed. There are many websites that scrape your content without your permission by making use of your feeds. Adding a link in every item of your feed will get you backlinks from every page of their website.
How to Add Your Link within Your Feeds in WordPress
There are two plugins, both developed by Joost de Valk that can be used for this purpose. One is the RSS Footer and the other one is WordPress SEO by Yoast. Both of these allow you to add anything before or after every item of your feed. You can see the feed for Mstoic which displays our site’s name with the link to our website and the links to our Twitter and Facebook fan pages at the end of each item of our feed.
13. Interlinking your Content
External links are necessary, but we should not overlook the power of internal linking. Internal linking decreases the bounce rate which increases the quality of your website in the eyes of search engines. Increased pageviews is another benefit you get from interlinking your content.
TIP If you have multiple in the same niche, then interlinking them will be of great help, both for backlinks and for increasing traffic and readership. But don’t link two websites with very different content, this can be considered spamming by search bots.
14. Links from Profiles on Other Websites
Most websites nowadays ask you to fill your profile, either to display it in the comments section, or use it for their mailing list or helping other people search for other people on their websites. Most websites have a column where you can enter your website’s URL, this is very useful because most websites give a do-follow backlink to the URL you provide here. It is a great link building technique and will get you many high quality backlinks for your site.
TIP Even ask your friends to fill your URL whenever they are asked for one. This will get you ample number of backlinks in very short period.
15. Get Indulged in Forums and Question Answer Websites
There are many forums today, relating to every topic you can think of. People ask and answer questions on these websites. Giving your opinion will not do any harm, rather it will bring more people to your website if you give them a solution that lies on your website. Take benefit from that, begin by searching a forum related to your niche. Yahoo Answers is one of those forums that have questions on every topic, select the topic of your interest and start answering.
16. Submit Your Website to Web Directories
There are hundreds of web directories that are waiting for you to add your website to their inventory. All of them list your site on their website and you get a backlink from them. Submit your website to as many of them as you can. Just Google with something like “submit my website to web directories” and there will be tons of websites that are willing to add your site to their database.
TIP If you don’t want to take so much pain then use the IMT Website Submitter which will fetch you more than 2500 backlinks for free.
17. Make and Distribute Free Website/CMS Themes
If you have some coding knowledge and know any of the web development languages like PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, then you can easily design themes for CMSes like WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, etc. All the major blogs and popular websites use CMS to manage their websites and all the CMSes require a theme to display the website. Every free theme developer adds a “Developed by” line in the footer with a link to his/her website. This is a clean and easy link building technique that will get your website many high quality backlinks, but you need to know how to develop the theme for the CMS you are targeting.
18. Writing Testimonials
Ever bought a service or a product which has an official website too? If yes, then you should write a testimonial and send it to the administrator of the website. If the company is small then there are good chances that your testimonial will be featured on their “testimonials” page if they have one. And you will most probably be getting a backlink to your site.
TIP Before writing a testimonial for the brand, search for their testimonial page. If you find one, then see if they have linked to the testimonial author’s website. If yes, then go ahead with the writing of testimonial and send it. Keep in mind that you have to write a short testimonial and that too very specific.
19. Take Interviews
If you are one of the kind that can easily talk with other people, then you must take interviews of other people working in your niche. These people will share the interview everywhere they can (social networks, their own website, with their kith and kins) and there will be many backlinks flowing to your website.
20. Get Interviewed
If you ever get a chance of being interviewed, seize the opportunity. It does not matter how big the audience is and how much time it takes, at the end you will have a completely new audience with atleast one backlink from the interviewers website.
21. Start LIVE Blogging
If you are at an event then start live blogging from there and then. People love to see the movie first-day first-show and if you are showing it to them, many will link to you and spread the word. If there are less number of Live bloggers then there will be loads of backlinks coming.
22. Start Writing Series
Writing a single big article may get you SEO benefits, but writing in parts and compiling them to make a series will get attention of many bloggers. If someone writes about any one part from your series, there are chances that they will link to you for further reading. Moreover, compiling series increases pageviews, decreases bounce rate and increases interlinking too.
23. Publishing Seasonal Content
Writing content at the right time can get you much attention. Writing about Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day and various other festivals at their time can get you many backlinks, but remember to write a long and a good quality article. Many others will also mention about your article in their articles on the same topic too.
24. Write Your Personal Experiences
Since your personal experiences are unique and genuine, many will be going to like them, and add something related to their own site and will link back to you. A great way to write your personal experience is to write everything you discovered, divided that into sections and subsections and give more and more stats wherever possible.
25. Be The First to Cover the News
If you ever get to a new invention or any new development in any field, which is still not covered by anyone, don’t let it go waste. Collect whatever data you can and write about it. Anybody who is going to follow, will most likely go through your article and is going to give a backlink to your website as a reference. And these links are going to come from big sites with very high rankings.
26. Make Web Tools or Plugins for Browsers
Designing small plugins is not a big problem, you can easily design plugins for any major browser if you know some coding which is required for it. If you succeed in accomplishing something good, many blog owners are going to write about your creation and are going to link to you. Even if you design any online tool, then links will flow, and not to mention, many are going to use your tool daily.
27. Correcting Other Webmasters
If you are an author you would definitely be reading articles on other websites. If you ever find any grammatical mistake, or some error in the stats, you must steal the opportunity and email the webmaster with the correction. Send your details enclosed in the email, if the webmaster feels like giving you the credit, then you will have a backlink ready.
28. Fill the Missing Content
Like correcting others, you can even throw an email with some addition to any of their articles. But it should be related to the article and should be truly valuable for readers. And if the author agrees for the addition, you can ask for the credit or they might even themselves ask you for details.
29. Provide Free Hosting to Newbies
Hosting costs money and newbies don’t want to invest much until they become sure of returns. You can offer free hosting to newbies. It won’t cost you a cent if you have an unlimited hosting with unlimited domains support, but many newbies will benefit from it. In return you can ask for a backlink from them.
30. Set-up Blogs for others
Most newbies do not know how to create the blog they are dreaming of. Help them set-up their blog in exchange of a backlink. This may increase your labour, but once the blog gets famous, the link juice will help your website greatly.
31. Edit and Improve Wikipedia pages
Wikipedia is a great source of information for all of us. But the information it has is added by the people like us and you can easily become a contributor to Wikipedia by just signing up at their website. It’s not rocket science to edit Wikipedia pages, the editing has been made very easy by Wikipedia. If you add your own content on relevant pages of Wikipedia, then you will get a link back to your website from the “References” section on the Wikipedia page. The link is a nofollow link but will give you a lot of traffic boost and that too very targeted and relevant one.