Finding easy backlinks

Building backlinks is one of the best ways to increase your brand awareness, build authority on your subject matter, and increase your visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are a number of tactics when it comes to link building, but the ultimate goal is to build high quality backlinks from other referring domains back to your website in order to appear highly in the search results.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are links on websites that point to another website. In the search engine optimisation (SEO) world, backlinks are signals of confidence – or votes – to Google, and other search engines, that you are a credible source. Link building is a core part of SEO and should be part of your overall SEO strategy.

Backlinks can either be paid for or organic links. Organically-earned links are broken down into follow links and nofollow links. You may also see links that are paid for – these will usually be tagged as ‘UGC’ or ‘Sponsored’.

Organic backlinks must be earned. This means that unlike paid links, a website must have a reason to link back to your website. Only organic links will directly drive SEO value.

To do this, you must implement a thorough link building strategy that aligns your SEO goals to your business goals.

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks, and importantly high quality backlinks, improve your organic search rankings. This is because Google – and other search engines – view both the quality and quantity of backlinks as authoritativeness. Therefore, the more quality and relevant backlinks your website has, the higher it can rank for search terms.

Of course, there are other factors that contribute to your website ranking highly, such as responsiveness and on site content.

As backlinks help your website to rank more highly, it increases your visibility for your key search terms. Search engines work by crawling content. This content is found by searching the pages they have already crawled. As you start to begin earning backlinks and increase the number of links pointing to your website, your content will be easier to find and you will begin to be found more and more by potential customers.

In a similar vein to online visibility, link building also increase brand awareness – both online and offline. While brand awareness can be more difficult to track than other metrics, it is important that companies invest in their brand in order to attract new customers – and maintain front of mind amongst previous and current customers.

By earning high quality backlinks from authoritative websites with wide reach, you can increase your brand awareness by reaching the other websites’ visitors.

Backlinks are also one of the best ways to boost your website’s domain authority – how ‘authoritative’ your website is seen by search engines. And while domain authority isn’t a ranking factor on its own, it is used by industry tools to compare your website to your competitors’. So, in general, the higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to rank highly on search engines.

How do I get easy backlinks?

To build backlinks you must give the external website a reason to link back to your own website.

Digital PR and outreach

Organic and consistent link building is hard. And many in the industry believe it is getting harder. However, there are easy ways to do this.

Finding easy backlinks starts with creating link building strategies. Think about what your business does and where your potential customers are. For instance, if you are a finance business offering business loans to SMEs, your potential customers may be reading websites that focus on start ups and management. But they are not just business owners – so they will probably be reading current affairs and news sites, too. Therefore you will want to create content that is interesting to these websites and its readers.

Campaigns

Creating campaigns is one of the most popular ways to build backlinks. Campaigns give your audience – and the media – a unique story of interest using data. A great example of this would be running a survey amongst small business owners to find out what their main challenges are over the coming 12 months and asking them to disclose whether they felt optimistic about the future of their business, or whether they were feeling less confident.

The results of this survey can then be pulled into a story, with different angles outreached to the media, in order to build high quality backlinks.

Newsjacking and commentary

Commenting on breaking news related to your niche is a great way of building backlinks on a number of referring domains. To do this, you must keep an eye on the news cycle and understand when breaking news, updates and developments related to your niche take place. By monitoring this, you are in a great place to react in a timely manner.

An example of this would be writing a comment from one of your leaders on what government tax changes mean for businesses. By creating an insightful and useful comment that adds value and perspective to a story, you will earn high quality backlinks back to your website.

Resource pages

Creating a resource page on a particular topic can be used to earn backlinks over time. Resource pages give readers insightful, in-depth and valuable information for a specific topic.

An example of this for a business loan provider would be a page entitled ’30 small business statistics you need to know’. The page would then contain a list of interesting statistics about small businesses, such as the number of small businesses per capita in the UK compared to the US, the number of small businesses that open and closed last year, and the average number of employees small businesses have. This data can be collected from credible sources and pulled into one easy to read resource for readers.

Infographics and visual pages are also great for earning backlinks by giving readers the same useful and credible information, but in a more shareable format.

These types of pages earn links by being the resource that others cite when creating their own content.

Improve existing content online

Known as the skyscraper technique, improving existing content that is already online earns you backlinks by being the best. After all, if a website can add even more value to their readers, they keep them on their website for much longer and ensure they keep coming back.

To do this, you need to find relevant content that has earned a lot of high quality backlinks and analyse it. From there, you need to create better content – whether it be more up to date information or better imagery. These pages can be time consuming to create, and often need to be long form with lots of attractive original images.

Essentially, make your content valuable so that people will want to link to it over other pages.

Broken link building

Every website will have broken links at some point. Broken links are where a website’s link to another doesn’t work, and this may occur because the page has been removed or moved and a redirect has not been placed on it. Broken link building is to the process of finding pages, usually resource pages, in your industry with dead backlinks.

To build broken links, you first need to identify any of your competitors’ broken backlinks, or broken links in your niche. From there, look at the type of content the page once had and, if you don’t have a page already, recreate it. Once you have the completed page, you can contact the original website, informing them that the link is broken and recommend that they link to your page instead.

Convert unlinked mentions

If you notice your website has a lot of unlinked brand mentions (or citations) from other websites, you can email the website and ask them to include a link. To do this successfully, you will usually need to show why a link back is valuable to their audience. It could be that relevant information is on that specific page.

Converting unlinked mentions is a popular link building tactic that can deliver results quickly. However, depending on the mention in question, it may have a low success rate.

How do I get backlinks fast?

There is no sure fire way to get backlinks fast. But the earlier you start link building, the earlier you will see results.

It’s important to understand that when outreaching, you will not get success every time, and with every media platform. It can take a while to build up credibility with media platforms and websites, however, it is possible to start earning backlinks quickly by creating relevant, timely, informative and shareable content, such as resource pages, comments, data sets, tips and advice articles.

Where can I find free backlinks?

Earned backlinks are ‘free’ – only paid for backlinks are not free. The majority of media websites will not charge you for adding a link to your website. This is because you are giving them something interesting and newsworthy in exchange for including your brand.

When creating a list of websites to reach out to, it’s a good idea to think about your story and the people who would find this interesting. This will give you the best chance of securing coverage, and hopefully, a backlink.

Is it illegal to buy backlinks?

No, it is not illegal to buy backlinks. However, it is against Google’s guidelines to not disclose that you are paying for backlinks. Unlike follow and nofollow links, any backlink on a website that has been paid for must have a tag in the back end that states it is a paid for link. This tag will usually look like this:

<a href=”https://www.smartmonkeymarketing.com” rel=”sponsored”>

It is the rel=”sponsored” that is important here. This tag tells Google to ignore this link when crawling the website.

What happens if a sponsored tag isn’t used when the link was paid for?

If Google discovers a link that was paid for but isn’t tagged as such, it may remove the post and even fine you.

This is why it is important to only work with credible websites when building both organic links and creating sponsored content.

Are there benefits to buying links?

Yes, there are benefits to buying links. Paid for links are usually part of a paid-for article, meaning you have overall control of the whole story – unlike an earned placement where the story can be used alongside other data and commentary.

Paid for links are also good for building brand awareness so can work well alongside other marketing channels such as earned media, OOO, paid search and social media.