How to Build Quality Backlinks for SEO: 11 Strategies and Tips

In the competitive world of SEO, building quality backlinks is crucial for improving your search engine rankings and driving organic traffic to your website. In this guide, we’ll explore effective strategies for acquiring high-quality backlinks and why they are essential for SEO success.

What Are Backlinks?

Backlinks, also known as inbound or incoming links, are links from one website to another. They are a crucial aspect of SEO because they signal to search engines that other websites find your content valuable and trustworthy. Essentially, backlinks act as votes of confidence for your site.

A Backlink is a link to your website from another website. It serves as a signal to both Google and web users that the content you have is of high quality and worthy of being linked to.

There are a few ways to get backlinks: 

• Citations
• Guest Appearances
• Promote your own website & content
• Get Featured 

Why Backlinks Matter for SEO

The Google Algorithm isn’t a human so it relies on a series of signals that show Google content is worth ranking highly. Backlinks are an important factor in how Google ranks your content. High-quality backlinks can help improve your site’s authority, increase its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), and drive more organic traffic. According to Google, backlinks are a major factor in how they rank websites, making them indispensable for any successful SEO strategy.

The Value of Building Backlinks

It’s important to note that not all backlinks are created equal – each website has what is known as a Domain Authority Score assigned by Google based on how trustworthy, established and authoritative it believes it to be in a specific area. 

The higher the Domain Authority and the more relevant to what you do, the higher the perceived value Google sees in the link. I.e. If you’re a Yoga Teacher and a high authority site like Yoga Journal links to your website then there will be a higher perceived value in that link than if a high authority website in the insurance industry links to it or if a low authority discount site links to it.

Effective Strategies for Building Backlinks

Content Creation and Promotion

Creating high-quality, valuable content is the cornerstone of any backlink-building strategy. When you produce content that is informative, engaging, and relevant, other websites are more likely to link to it. Here are some tips for creating link-worthy content:

• Research and Write In-Depth Articles: Comprehensive guides and long-form content often attract more backlinks.
• Use Visuals: Infographics, videos, and images can enhance your content and make it more shareable.
• Promote Your Content: Share your content on social media, email newsletters, and outreach to influencers in your industry.

Guest Blogging and Podcast Guest Expert

Guest blogging involves writing articles for other websites and picking highly rated, authoritative sites in your industry or mainstream media. Alternatively, being a podcast guest expert allows you to share your insights and reach a wider audience. Both methods are excellent for building backlinks and brand awareness. To get started:

• Identify Relevant Blogs and Podcasts: Look for authoritative blogs and podcasts in your niche that accept guest contributions or interviews.
• Pitch High-Quality Content and Expertise: Propose unique, valuable topics that will appeal to the blog’s or podcast’s audience.
• Include a Backlink and Brand Mentions: Ensure your guest post or podcast appearance includes a link back to your website and mentions your brand, enhancing your credibility and authority.

Being featured on reputable blogs and podcasts helps to build your brand’s credibility and authority in the industry. Brand mentions, even without direct backlinks, can positively impact your brand awareness and trustworthiness, contributing to your overall SEO strategy.

Skyscraper Technique

The Skyscraper Technique involves finding popular content in your niche, creating an improved version of it, and then promoting your superior content to gain backlinks. Here’s how to do it:

• Find Popular Content: Identify top-performing content using tools like BuzzSumo.
• Create Better Content: Enhance the content by adding more detailed information, updating outdated data, improving readability, or making it available in different formats i.e. podcast, video, infographic or adding downloadable resources.
• Promote Your Content: Reach out to websites that link to the original content and suggest your improved version.

You can also build your own backlinks to your content via social media, YouTube, Pinterest, relevant Podacst Shownotes etc.

Building ‘Easy-Win’ Backlinks

Building backlinks can be a time-consuming process, but there are some easy wins that you can implement right away to start improving your backlink profile:

Social Media Profiles and Posts

Linking to your website and content from your social media profiles and posts is one of the simplest ways to gain backlinks. Each social media profile you create can be an opportunity to include a link back to your website. Additionally, sharing your blog posts and articles on social media platforms can drive traffic and increase the chances of other sites linking to your content.

• Optimize Social Media Profiles: Ensure your website URL is included in the bio or about section of all your social media profiles.
• Share Content Regularly: Post links to your latest blog posts, articles, and other content on social media to drive engagement and traffic.

Essential Backlinks to build – Social Media 

Make sure that wherever you have a social media account you add a link back to your website.

Posting regularly on social media can provide an ongoing series of backlinks to your website. The best platforms for backlinks tend to be YouTube, Pinterest, and Reddit (more on this later); both are search engines in their own right and provide more options for longer-lasting exposure to evergreen content.

N.B. YouTube is owned by Google and so it’s weighted heavily in terms of domain authority.

Citation Sites and Niche Directories

Adding your site to relevant directories in your niche can provide easy backlinks and improve your site’s authority. Many niche directories are specifically designed to list and promote websites within a particular industry.

• Identify High-Quality Directories: Look for directories that are relevant to your niche and have a good reputation.
• Submit Your Site: Follow the submission guidelines to ensure your site is listed correctly.

Make sure that your business is included in all the main relevant directories and listings. As a minimum, you want to have a listing on Yell (especially since they announced their collaboration with Amazon Alexa voice Search, Yelp, Bing Business pages and Apple Maps. 

You’ll also want to make sure you’re listed in the Top 50 citation sites for your location. 

Professional Listings

Link to your website from any professional listings or registers. These can include industry associations, business directories, or professional networks where your business is listed.

• Update Professional Profiles: Ensure your business profiles on professional networks and directories include a link to your website.
• Join Industry Associations: Joining industry associations often includes a listing in their directory with a backlink to your site.

Using Reddit to Create Backlinks

Reddit, with its high domain authority and vast array of niche communities (subreddits), offers a valuable platform for building backlinks and enhancing your site’s SEO. By engaging authentically in relevant subreddits and sharing high-quality content, you can attract targeted traffic and generate organic backlinks. The recent collaboration between Reddit and Google has further enhanced this strategy, as Google now indexes Reddit content more effectively, increasing the visibility of Reddit posts and comments in search engine results. This means that your contributions on Reddit, including any backlinks, are more likely to appear prominently in Google searches, boosting your site’s SEO performance.

To leverage Reddit for backlinks, identify and participate in subreddits related to your niche, provide valuable insights, and share content that adds value to the discussions. Avoid spamming and focus on genuine engagement to build credibility within the community. With Google’s improved indexing of Reddit, the backlinks you create through thoughtful participation are now more impactful, making Reddit a potent tool for increasing your website’s visibility and authority.

Monitoring and Analyzing Backlinks

Monitoring your backlinks is essential to understand which strategies are working and to maintain a healthy backlink profile. Use tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or Moz to track your backlinks. Regularly check for:

• Quality of Backlinks: Ensure that your backlinks come from reputable, authoritative sites.
• Relevance: Backlinks should be from sites related to your industry.
• Broken Links: Identify and fix any broken backlinks to maintain link equity.

Avoid Paid-for Backlinks

Paying for backlinks is an outdated and increasingly risky SEO tactic. This old-school approach typically involves purchasing links from low-quality or irrelevant websites in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. However, these links often come from spammy sites with little to no authority, and Google’s algorithms are adept at detecting such manipulative practices. Having these kinds of backlinks can result in severe penalties from Google, including drastic drops in search rankings or even complete removal from search results, thereby massively harming your website’s visibility and credibility.

Instead of resorting to paid backlinks, focus on earning high-quality, organic backlinks through legitimate strategies like creating valuable content, engaging in guest blogging, and participating in relevant online communities. Not only are organic backlinks more sustainable, but they also align with Google’s guidelines and enhance your site’s reputation and authority. Building a robust backlink profile through authentic means will lead to better long-term results and protect your website from the risks associated with spammy, low-quality links.

Target Backlinks – News Sites

Many of the large news sites have a high domain authority, which is why you’ll hear about the value of PR and ‘getting featured’. PR can be incredible for your business and if done right can drive a huge amount of traffic to your website via backlinks. 

Whilst you can’t buy this kind of publicity, don’t be tricked into thinking that PR is free. You’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort into targeting the right publications or sites and creating the right content.

If you’re interested in going down this path I highly recommend reading Your Press Release is Breaking my Heart by Janet Murray.

Publishing Original Research is a great way to get links to your website. News sites are always interested in quality research that provides an insightful view into an industry or situation. 

If you have a large following, you can poll your audience, send out questionnaires, or build your research into quizzes. The answers can be used to compile the information into a newsworthy story. Beauty companies like Loreal use this sort of data all the time. Smaller clinics and wellness businesses can take advantage from data from wearable tech like Smart watches or Oura rings.

Google Surveys is another way to reach large audiences if you don’t have your own, and it’s a more affordable option for smaller businesses. You can poll Google’s vast audience to provide relevant insights and research; they allow specific demographic targeting.

Content over Backlinks

The SEO gurus that are ‘Income School’ recommend spending 95% of your time creating quality new content. Specifically original research, Statistics, tables and definitive guides.

This theory is something that is echoed by numerous SEO experts I know and one I would agree with from my own experience.

When I built my site from 300 to 17,000 hits a month, we didn’t reach out to a single site to try and get them to feature us. We simply created lots of high quality content including blog posts, articles and guides.

I’m also a big fan of content repurposing, which is a great way of sharing your content across multiple platforms to gain extra traffic for your content and create organic backlinks of your own.

Whilst you’re spending all that time reaching out to people to try and get your content noticed, you could be creating more incredible content, sharing that and establishing yourself as an expert in your own right.

The Best Way to Build Backlinks in 2024

You’ll hear a lot written about having a backlink strategy, doing backlink outreach and using software to mass email people. But to be honest, none of this is a smart way to build backlinks. 

Targeting blogs with broken links and trying to get your content linked instead is laborious and often fruitless, and it is one that I and many others in the SEO world don’t recommend.

The best way to build backlinks is… wait for it…To create SHAREABLE and COMPELLING CONTENT.

Put simply, create the best, most comprehensive content available on your topic and people will link to it. The types of content that get frequently linked to include

• Original Research
• Comprehensive guides
• Viral/Entertaining content

Build Credibility not just backlinks

Building backlinks is important, but it’s also important to build credibility, especially since Google introduced EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) to its algorithm.

In fact, John Meuller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google reiterated this point stating that “Links are definitely not the most important SEO factor”. It’s important to think beyond the link!

• Start with your About Me page—update it to include your qualifications and credentials plus any industry accreditations. It’s also a good place to include testimonials and ‘social proof,’ such as an ‘as featured in’ section. 

• Include links to any articles, podcasts, blogs, and events you’ve featured in.

• Quality reviews are also a key indicator of trust, so make sure you’re asking all of your clients for Google reviews. Facebook, Yell and Yelp reviews count but aren’t given as much weight when it comes to Google’s own in deciding where you rank.

Build a Brand before Backlinks

It’s no surprise that as a Brand designer & strategist, I’m going to shout about the benefits of branding. And, it turns out, Google agrees. In fact, brand awareness emerged as one of the most important ranking factors in the recent Google Search Algorithm leak. When it comes to your content and driving traffic to your website, it’s so important to 

• Establish yourself as an authority 
• Create an identity for your content 
• Showcase your value 
• Gain people’s trust
• Build a community

Building a brand can accomplish all of this. When you have your own community of loyal brand advocates and followers, you won’t need to spend time begging people to link to your content; you’ll have a whole community ready to share your content.

Start your own podcast, build your own blog, build an audience online, get involved on Pinterest – all of these are a far better use of your time than simply trying to build backlinks, and the benefit is that your content can serve multiple purposes: brand building, provide backlinks, serving your audience etc.

And if you want to learn how to generate more traffic and leads for your website download my Secrets to creating a lead generating website free guide.

Building Backlinks – Key Takewaways

Building high-quality backlinks is an ongoing process that requires time, effort, and strategy. By focusing on creating valuable content, leveraging guest blogging opportunities, appearing as a podcast guest expert, utilizing broken link building, employing the Skyscraper Technique, and capitalizing on easy win backlinks, you can enhance your website’s SEO and drive more organic traffic. Remember to monitor your backlinks regularly to maintain a strong and healthy backlink profile.

For more detailed insights on effective SEO strategies, check out my articles on Google’s E-E-A-T Algorithm Update: Experience, YMYL for Health and Wellness Brands, and