What is your top benefit of obtaining quality backlinks? Could it be SEO? Link building is very crucial to rank your sites on search engines.
For example, Google loves sites with a high number of relevant pages linked to them and so ranks such a site higher than the others. But link building or getting quality backlinks is crucial to surviving a Google update like Penguin.
So it is, therefore, essential to have a natural or organic backlink profile to stay on the safe side.
What are organic backlinks?
Organic backlinks are the ones that are naturally created by the sites, social profiles and blogs that refer to your site just because it has great and complete content on a topic and includes a link back to your site as a reference or citation.
One of the greatest examples of a site with huge natural or organic backlinks is Wikipedia, which enjoys huge love from search engines like Google and Bing.
Wikipedia has content that the general world refers to and enjoys a domain authority of 100 (a rare feat) by open site explorer.
Advantages of organic backlinks:
- Organic backlinks help you to get thumbs up by search engines.
- This is a good way to getting known to the audience of a site that you have no access to.
- Eventually, it will increase your credibility in your niche and help you in getting known as an authority figure (just remember it doesn’t happen overnight).
Chris Guillebeau in his book 279 days to overnight success (page 68) has rightly said.
I couldn’t figure out who first said that, but it is true. No one will give you links without you earning them. To earn them, you will need to do something remarkable. When you receive inbound links, it’s like getting paid. This may be literal if you have ads or products, but if not you are being rewarded with new readers.
How to get natural/organic backlinks?
Getting natural or organic backlink is something you earn, so your efforts have to be phenomenal and so luring that linking back is achieved without having to pay or ask someone.
Here are the methods to get quality organic backlinks:
Write great and epic content
Remember Wikipedia above, the single reason for people and sites including blogs linking to it is that, it has content that is rare to find elsewhere.
Similarly, your blog’s content has to be detailed and complete. We also have to keep in mind that detailed and complete posts need not be lengthy always.
Matt Cutts talks about organic link building in his video “Is there such a thing as building too many links“.
Great content can be done in the following ways:
Stir a controversy
Controversial topics tend to grab the eyeballs faster than others, and you can easily get so many backlinks to your site based on the number of people interested in the topic.
Having said this, I would suggest you stay away from the legal side of things.
Write a great case study
Case studies are your observation or log of something that you have been concentrating on for a specific time. Now you write a case study about it on the site.
This type of content enjoys the attention of sites that want to include those details in a project of theirs. This is the safest and easiest way to get organic backlinks.
The backlinks can be obtained by this strategy for years in the future too.
Provide facts and figures on a finding
This is yet a great step to earning backlinks because your facts and figures on a particular topic will be linked by people writing or researching on the topic at the bibliography (the sources found at the end of a book) or footnotes.
One man who has earned a huge status as a social media examiner is Dan Zarella, and people never mind paying him a link.
Vlogging or video blogging
Videos are great tools for expressing your ideas and views and are a magnificent way of backlinking. The two most popular video sites hosting millions of videos are YouTube (of course) and Vimeo.
These sites have tremendous views and subscriber lists, and it is easy for people getting back to your site by the links you provide in the description section.
You don’t have to be a camera specialist nor do you have to buy costly equipment for getting your videos picked up.
A simple PowerPoint presentation converted to video format or a tutorial recorded by you through a screencasting software like Camtasia would be enough.
Remember the content should be quality in the videos too and essentially related to your niche. For example, you can check my Tech niche YouTube channel over here.
Get a “Link To Us Page” or Section:
If you have content worth linking to, there is no harm in making an appeal to your readers to link to your content.
This can be done with CTA or call to action buttons or mere providing with banners and HTML codes that when a reader uses on his site automatically links back to yours.
By networking and getting seen in places with potential readers (read linkers):
Conferences, live events, and press events
These are the best places to hang out in if you want to get noticed. Remember blogging is all about exposure.
Building connections can help you in getting more friends and eventually they will introduce you to their audiences. This way you are sure to create some real meaty organic links.
Forums
Forums had been the go-to places for all sorts of building connections and link backs to your sites pretty some time back. But after the advent of social media forums have been in the backstage through forum marketing still works if you do it smartly.
Q & A based sites
Sites like yahoo answers have great value when building quality and free backlinks are concerned, provided you give quality service to their reader community. Quora is another one that has achieved great success.
Social Media sites
Social media link building works well. Social media sites also allow you to put links in your BIO section and have great value as far as SERPs are concerned.
Twitter offers to add some links in your BIO section provided they are limited to 140 characters. Try not adding more than three or else it might appear spammy.
Facebook’s personal profile, as well as pages, has a huge potential for adding links to sites that you own.
Pinterest gives one high-value backlink to your site that you have chosen to be displayed at your BIO section.
LinkedIn provides an option of three backlinks to your favorite sites along with customized anchor text (though it has little or no value as far as SEO is concerned, using a wise anchor text will provide a great influx of traffic to your site).
Relationship building
Building relationships among fellow bloggers and with authority bloggers in your niche can have surprising benefits in creating natural backlinks. Try hanging out with them on their blog, and on their favorite social media site too.
You can grab their attention by commenting on their posts, asking for help and thanking them for a certain idea that they shared.
When it comes to thanking them, you should always approach a personal way by emailing them. The email should not belong and should be formal, saying them that their post has helped you and would love to read more topics like this.
This way you can come under their radar, and you can soon build a relationship that can result in an exchange of links. I have many good blogging friends among whom is Ana Hoffman of Trafficgenerationcafe.com and this led me to harvest a link on the much looked up to blog.
Organize a link carnival
Many bloggers and pro bloggers conduct a weekly or monthly link carnival or thankful posts in which they place an excerpt of famous bloggers’ (or their friends) posts that have been written within that period.
This is an exceptional way to show your love and build a connection with an additional advantage of building high-quality backlinks too. You should refer to what engagement superstar Adrienne Smith does here.
By giving and conducting interviews
Interviews are the best way to build a relationship with pro bloggers. Interview posts generate huge readership, especially if the interviewee is someone very authoritative in the field.
For taking interviews of such personalities you have to first build rapport with them (check the previous two points for knowing how). If you succeed to entice a figure well known in the niche, you are not only getting a chance of hijacking some of his readers, but also ensuring a link back from his blog.
And if you want yourself to be interviewed you have to first build a solid track record and then help your fellow bloggers and juniors selflessly. This way they will come to know you and might get interested in publishing your interview. You can easily ask for two-three do-follow backlinks as you might seem right.
Create a unique and helpful tool
If you are good at the technical aspect of something or maybe simply the skills like HTML or programming knowledge why not leverages that into something that would earn you tremendous organic backlinks that are Google safe.
Conduct a massive blogger outreach
Conduct a post on the opinion of some influential bloggers on a topic and put up that post. After making the post live don’t hesitate to forward the post link to the members included in the post.
Most will feel happy to share them across their audience, and chances are some might even link them to their posts.
Broken link checking
Over the years, many sites come and go, and it is potentially impossible to keep a record of all the pages that you have linked.
So, find out the broken links of any website and send them a simple formal email saying you have detected a broken link on their website and would replace it with a great resource of yours that has similar content.
Mostly you will hear an approval answer from them. This time, make the reply a bit personal, and you can include the link detected along with the link you want it to be replaced with (obviously from your blog!).
Also, include some additional details that would make a good opinion about your site on them and they wouldn’t deny.
You should check this post of Kristi Hines on Search Engine Journal to learn “How to Use the Broken Link Building Strategy to Get Links.”
Creating graphics, media to be reused
You can also create awesome memes, images, video tutorials and infographics that would go viral in the blogosphere. Try adding a humor quotient or make them a GO-TO complete guide.
This way it will attract sites that would like them to be included in their posts, now make a condition that your products if used should be attributed to a designed backlink. Voila, and you are done. Many sites like Quicksprout, whoishostingthis.com earn a huge number of backlinks through infographics.
Infographics helped me to get a good number of natural backlinks without much effort. Give it a try and surely it will work like a charm for you.
Alexa ranking
Although Alexa ranking has more benefit to your site than link building, decreasing your Alexa ranking to a record low will attract fellow bloggers to include your site in list posts like Top 10 bloggers based on Alexa, etc., and will give you a genuine backlink.
I have earned many quality backlinks for this site from sites like BloggersPassion, SocialSamosa, etc. by this awesome trick.
Guest posting
While Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-spam head, has said that guest posting as a source of link building is severely a crime in the eyes of Google, still genuine guest posts (Not all) including a link (Not always) that is relevant to the context, inside the post can be tried.
If you are not in a hurry, then I recommend you to read this effective guest blogging guide.
Republishing your popular social posts
Sites like Facebook and Tumblr are great places to find creative shareable stuff that can potentially go viral. You can compile a blog post based on some such posts, relevant to your niche.
Remember, social republishing is ethical and legal provided you link back to the original sources of those articles.
Once you do this, such posts tend to go viral because of their visual attributes and many other blogs will possibly link back to your blog while citing them.
Be newsworthy
Being the eye candy of press releases and other top-rated media events and producing newsworthy articles pretty quick will often add a great chance of getting prestigious and high-quality backlinks.
For this, you need to have an eye of potential happenings in your niche and publish posts as and when the event happens.
Liveblogging is also a part of being newsworthy. This will help you earn links from other sites on your niche that write a post on the event later. Sometimes, big sites can also be your source of getting free backlinks.
The bottom line
So, here were the simple yet effective ways to get organic backlinks for your blog. Backlinks thus made will not only make you transparent in the eyes of Google and other search engines but also will help you get quality traffic from these quality backlink building techniques.
I would love to hear what strategies you follow for getting backlinks naturally. Do comment on your backlink building strategies below.
