#howtobuildhigh-qualitybacklinks

It’s no secret that a blog is a very effective form of content marketing. If you can get your blog in front of the right eyeballs, you can build your brand whilst building a stronger relationship with your audience. Then, conversions and sales rise. Awesome, huh? If producing all-star content comes easy to you but driving traffic and establishing your brand doesn’t, you’ve probably been told to go and chase some high-quality backlinks. The more top-notch backlinks you have, the higher your blog starts to rank in the SERPs. But what does this mean exactly and how do you capture those A++ backlinks? This article is going to first take a look at what a high-quality backlink is, before demonstrating the steps you need to take to bag yourself more of them.

What Is a High-quality Backlink?

First of all, a backlink is an inbound link from one site to another. Let’s imagine I have a blog for my pet store, and that a dog food company links out to me via an article. That’s a backlink. When folk read that article and see that link, they might be inclined to click on it and come see me. Thus, I’m getting more traffic. However, not all backlinks are good. Low-quality Backlinks If a site has been penalized by Google for spam or other bad activities, their backlinks will be of a poor quality. You can go ahead and grab as many as their links as you want, but they’re going to send you tumbling down the SERPs. Moreover, they’re just a total waste of time. For example, a low-quality backlink doesn’t always come from a site that’s been penalized. The website might be perfectly legit but if its content is wholly unrelated to yours, it’s going to be of no use to you because their audience isn’t your audience. In other words, you might be driving traffic, but it will be the wrong traffic and your bounce rate will soar. And because bounce rate is a ranking factor, your position in the SERPs might change for the worse.   A poor quality backlink is also an inbound link from a low-traffic site. For example, let’s say that I secure a link from a dog food website to my pet store’s blog. I’m pretty happy at first - until I hire an SEO agency who find out that the dog food website has non-existent organic traffic. High-quality Backlinks A high-quality backlink, on the other hand, is an incoming link from any of these sources: A reputable website that’s related to your niche A website that enjoys high Domain Authority (DA) A website that drives a very healthy amount of organic traffic on the regular Recommended: 5 Link-Building Tactics You Should Stick with in 2019 So, you want to avoid all poor quality backlinks and land more superstar ones. Here’s how to do it:

Guest Blog

The most common method most used by those in search of backlinks is guest blogging. What does this mean? Essentially, you come up with an idea for a topic related to your niche, reach out to a blog that’s got a good amount of traffic, and pitch your idea to the owner. If they like your idea, you’ll then write the blog article and publish it on their site. The magic is in the little link you include in the blog post that links out to your website. For example, if I have a social media app, I might go on the offensive and reach out to several related tech blogs with a few topic ideas. I’ll write the articles, they’ll publish them, and I’ll get lots of fresh traffic that’s being driven to my website from theirs. And all because I included a little link in my blog post. Here are some tips: 1) Identify high traffic blogs in your niche. There are tools that help you do this, such as Nightwatch. Nightwatch gives you information regarding how much traffic a website has, as well as what their backlink situation is like. This is key because a bad backlink profile should act as a warning sign that a website is spam. Also, it’s very important that you only target high traffic blogs. These blogs are already seen as experts in your niche, and if you can drive that traffic to your site, you’re onto a winner. 2) Only target related blogs. If a blog doesn’t fall within your niche, always avoid it. 3) Create a list of these blogs and keep them in a document for future use. 4) Carefully read the editorial guidelines before submitting your idea. Some blogs want you to pitch a few lines, while others just want a headline, while still others want the whole article there and then. Moreover, some don’t let you link to any products or services that you’re selling, while others do. 5) Reach out to the blog via a submission form. Introduce yourself and briefly explain why you’d like to post on their blog. What’s your field of expertise, and what kind of value are you going to provide? Remember to demonstrate what you’re going to do for them. Recommended: 4 Ways to Find Best Sites for Guest Blogging

Create Viral Content

Yeah - creating viral content sounds hard. But the thing is that viral content doesn’t become viral by luck - there are certain determining factors that cause internet users to share the heck out of an article. Before I show you how to create viral content, let me explain how viral content can help you gain more top notch backlinks: Essentially, the more your content is shared, the more your name grows, and the more you become known. Before long, there’s a buzz around your brand and blog. People know you, trust you and see you as the expert … and others are now linking out to you! It’s pretty sweet. But how does content go viral? Here are some tips: 1) Nail the headline. Check this stat out: Many of us will share an article without even reading it! This means we share an article on the strength of its headline. 2) Create valuable content. Now, you could create silly content that gets shared like wildfire purely because it’s so silly and internet people like silly stuff. But silly won’t get you high quality backlinks and won’t position you as the expert. Instead, you need to produce in-depth, long-form content that offers the reader an insane amount of value. Just take a look at the content we shared the most in 2016. It was informative, valuable content. People shared it because it actually had a positive impact on them. And if you think long -form content gets shared less than short-form content, reconsider. Kissmetrics checked their own data and found that most of their traffic is heading to their long-form, in-depth content. 3) Tell people you want them to share your content. Look, you’re not Mother Theresa. Sure, you’ve just created a long-form, in-depth, fabulous piece of content that took you a while to write, but you do expect something in return - for example, a share. At the end of each piece of content, and on the accompanying message on social media, tell folk you want them to share it. Don’t be boring, though. Recommended: A Roadmap to Great Content – From Idea to Viral Post 

Get Involved with Influencer Marketing

What is influencer marketing? In a nutshell, it’s when you write a top-notch, high-value post that’s stuffed with facts, data, and numbers, and ask an influencer in your niche if they could kindly take a look at it - and perhaps even share it with their audience. Influencers are big deals on the internet, and especially on social media. They have a lot of power, and they have something you want - a massive audience. There are differences between influencer marketing and guest blogging. Influencers are: Bigger on social media Harder to reach Harder to impress The last two points are worth expanding on. Influencers are harder to reach because they don’t generally have a submission form. They’re not always actively pursuing contact from outside sources. The thing is, though, they, need fresh content. So why wouldn’t they listen to your pitch? Well, you’ve gotta make yourself seen, heard and known. A good way to do this is to build a relationship with them before hitting them with your idea. Engage on their social media profiles. Be active. Ask questions, answer questions. Get in and among the community, add lots of value and make it known that you know your stuff.  Once the influencer has noticed you, it’s easier to DM or email them and be noticed. And the truth is - investing in influencer marketing can be a game changer for your website. To impress them? Well, your piece of content that you want them to share can be nothing short of amazing. These people are the experts in their niche. Their audience turns to them for the raw data, the facts, and the figures. So you need to provide all of that, plus anything they haven’t covered yet. Once you’ve pitched your amazing piece of content and outlined what’s in it for them - your content will reinforce their audience’s perception of them delivering lots of value - kindly ask them to promote and distribute it. Recommended: 10 Influencer Marketing Strategies You Should Follow 

Host an Interview with an Expert

People trust experts. When you interview an expert in your field, your credibility grows - and you gain more backlinks. How? Let’s say I arrange an interview with an expert in my field. I publish the transcript to my blog and the video version, and I then publish it to all my social media profiles. The expert — who has lots of followers — does the same. All of a sudden, I’ve got an influx of top quality backlinks. Simple but magical stuff, huh? Here are some tips: 1) Introduce yourself. The best way to reach an expert you want to interview is via email. If you don’t know someone’s email address, you can use an outreach tool like hunter.io. Then, shoot them an introductory email. Be polite, mention how you know them and what you do. 2) Offer an incentive. What’s in this for them? Often, the answer is “more exposure” and a chance to cement their position as an authority figure. 3) Outline what will happen and how you’ll use the interview. If you don’t plan to publish the interview for another 6 months, by gosh let them know. Be upfront, honest, and transparent. This is crucial for relationship building. 4) Don’t ask too many questions. The last thing you want is for an interviewee to grow tired and frustrated because you’re pumping them with an endless amount of questions.

Collaborate on an eBook

Are you falling behind on your competitors? The natural response to situations like this, is to do all you can to get ahead of the competition. So, if your competitors are ranking at the top of Google for the keywords that you're prioritizing, then it's likely that they have a solid backlink profile. You hear people talking about how important user experiences is, and how exceptional content impacts your audience and your search rankings positively. But included in that list, is the fact that links are perhaps one of the most important pieces of your SEO strategy. You will struggle to achieve the ranking you want on Google search without them. "I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it's links pointing to your site." ~Andrey Lipattsev, Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google. But, your competitors are already way ahead of you. They have tons of backlinks, and you're just barely doing all you can to keep up. That's a bad thing, right? Well, not exactly. Look at it this way. If these same people are linking to your competitors, then chances are, they'll be happy to link to you too. (Since you and your competitors are in the same niche). It's just a question of who has better goods to offer. And this is where you come in…

Identifying Your Competitors in the Same Niche

The general advice would be to keep an eye on the competitors you can easily find on the first page of Google's search results. But don't jump in so hastily. There are two types of competitors that you need to keep an eye on. - Domain competitors: These are the competitor sites that compete with yours for search terms across every page you have in your website. - Page competitors: Some page-level competitors aren't entirely large competitors on a whole. They compete with your site on specific topics and keywords. To locate these two types of competitors, you’re going to have to employ the use of certain tools, like Ahrefs to get a complete backlink profile. And then arrange for a spreadsheet to compile your finds all together.

How to Spy on Your Competitors and Get Their Backlinks

Spying on your competitors doesn’t have to be as seedy as it sounds. It's all about learning and growing. In being aware of what your competitors are doing, or in this case, what kind of links they're getting, you learn their strengths and their weaknesses. You get to find out what works, and what doesn't. So, let's jump into these tactics you should totally do to take advantage of what you can, and improve your brand's link profile. #1 Find sites that link to your competitors You can easily replicate links and find great opportunities by finding a site that links to more than one competitor. "Hub" is the popular term for sites like this. And you can think of them as fertile soil to do some link building. For niche forums, signing up in sites like Medium to showcase your content and your knowledge in a particular subject. Recommended: 5 Link-Building Tactics You Should Stick with in 2019 #2 Use the Skyscraper technique Let's take a little refresher, and recall back in 2015, when Brian Dean first coined the term, "Skyscraper Technique." In a nutshell, you need to find your competitors' most famous piece of content. You create something better. And you promote that remastered article to earn even better links. Recommended: 5 Ways to Create Content that Will Attract Backlinks in 2019 One of the biggest benefits that come with implementing the use of the Skyscraper Technique is that you already have a list of sites you could reach out to once your content is live. #3 Target the same sites for guest posting One of the more well-known and effective ways of link building is guest blogging. And it's not going to be just you doing this, it's your competitors too. It’s safe to say that you’ve probably even spotted a couple of guest post links while you’re scoping out your competitors. Learning how to find the sites that your competitors are guest posting can be accomplished through these three tactics: Reverse Searching Gravatar Images There's a handy-dandy trick you can do with Google's reverse image search function. For those who don't know how it works exactly, right-click an image while you're using Chrome, and click on the option.

When you do so, you can find posts that have the author's Gravatar image.

Using Google Search Type in the author's name into the search bar coupled with the keyword that says 'guest post'.

Utilize a Tool like Ahrefs If you're using a tool like Ahrefs, you can navigate to the tool's Content Explorer. Here, you can find content written by a particular author.

#4 Research Competitors' Homepage Links For research purposes, find one of the best SEO companies. To make it easier, choose one from this list of top ranking ones. To illustrate an example, we'll look at DMA Digital Marketing Agency and use Ahrefs to check out their homepage links.

You will notice that the large majority of links actually use branded anchor texts. That is because people have a large tendency to link to home pages when generally mentioning a brand, rather than something more specific. By analyzing competitors' homepage links, you can find where your competitors are being mentioned. The next thing we'll do is explore DMA's domain-level competitors. Choosing one, we'll paste their link to the Site Explorer. And then we'll navigate to the Backlinks report and add a dofollow filter.

This tool will then show you all the backlinks pointing to your competitors' homepage. The next question you need to ask is why did these links mention your competitor and not you? By looking at the anchor text, the surrounding link text, and the page title, you can easily find the answer. #5 Keep an Eye on New Competitor Backlinks Most of your direct competitors will attract new backlinks regularly. That's the way it is in an active and competitive niche. But does it have to be a bad omen for you? Well, not always... That is proof that there are link opportunities in your niche. Also, you don't have to do most of the heavy lifting. Your competitors can do it for you as you keep an eye on them. Again, the main tool we use for this is Ahrefs; because it presents the opportunity to set up alerts for specific links that you would want to keep a close eye on.

Doing this can help you ensure that you have an endless supply of linking opportunities.

Prioritizing & Qualifying the Links You need

As you plan to gain competitive advantages, you should also know which links are qualified and which ones you should prioritize. Just because there is an endless supply of links, doesn't mean you have to replicate all of them. Beware, because there are spammy pieces of content just lurking everywhere. To qualify a link as your own personal prospect, simply take a look at the site and think about if Google manually reviewed that site or page, would they have problems with the link? In regard to prioritizing links, you should choose the ones that you can easily replicate.

The Takeaway

Are you falling behind on your competitors? The natural response to situations like this, is to do all you can to get ahead of the competition. So, if your competitors are ranking at the top of Google for the keywords that you're prioritizing, then it's likely that they have a solid backlink profile. You hear people talking about how important user experiences is, and how exceptional content impacts your audience and your search rankings positively. But included in that list, is the fact that links are perhaps one of the most important pieces of your SEO strategy. You will struggle to achieve the ranking you want on Google search without them. "I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it's links pointing to your site." ~Andrey Lipattsev, Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google. But, your competitors are already way ahead of you. They have tons of backlinks, and you're just barely doing all you can to keep up. That's a bad thing, right? Well, not exactly. Look at it this way. If these same people are linking to your competitors, then chances are, they'll be happy to link to you too. (Since you and your competitors are in the same niche). It's just a question of who has better goods to offer. And this is where you come in…

Identifying Your Competitors in the Same Niche

The general advice would be to keep an eye on the competitors you can easily find on the first page of Google's search results. But don't jump in so hastily. There are two types of competitors that you need to keep an eye on. - Domain competitors: These are the competitor sites that compete with yours for search terms across every page you have in your website. - Page competitors: Some page-level competitors aren't entirely large competitors on a whole. They compete with your site on specific topics and keywords. To locate these two types of competitors, you’re going to have to employ the use of certain tools, like Ahrefs to get a complete backlink profile. And then arrange for a spreadsheet to compile your finds all together.

How to Spy on Your Competitors and Get Their Backlinks

Spying on your competitors doesn’t have to be as seedy as it sounds. It's all about learning and growing. In being aware of what your competitors are doing, or in this case, what kind of links they're getting, you learn their strengths and their weaknesses. You get to find out what works, and what doesn't. So, let's jump into these tactics you should totally do to take advantage of what you can, and improve your brand's link profile. #1 Find sites that link to your competitors You can easily replicate links and find great opportunities by finding a site that links to more than one competitor. "Hub" is the popular term for sites like this. And you can think of them as fertile soil to do some link building. For niche forums, signing up in sites like Medium to showcase your content and your knowledge in a particular subject. Recommended: 5 Link-Building Tactics You Should Stick with in 2019 #2 Use the Skyscraper technique Let's take a little refresher, and recall back in 2015, when Brian Dean first coined the term, "Skyscraper Technique." In a nutshell, you need to find your competitors' most famous piece of content. You create something better. And you promote that remastered article to earn even better links. Recommended: 5 Ways to Create Content that Will Attract Backlinks in 2019 One of the biggest benefits that come with implementing the use of the Skyscraper Technique is that you already have a list of sites you could reach out to once your content is live. #3 Target the same sites for guest posting One of the more well-known and effective ways of link building is guest blogging. And it's not going to be just you doing this, it's your competitors too. It’s safe to say that you’ve probably even spotted a couple of guest post links while you’re scoping out your competitors. Learning how to find the sites that your competitors are guest posting can be accomplished through these three tactics: Reverse Searching Gravatar Images There's a handy-dandy trick you can do with Google's reverse image search function. For those who don't know how it works exactly, right-click an image while you're using Chrome, and click on the option.

When you do so, you can find posts that have the author's Gravatar image.

Using Google Search Type in the author's name into the search bar coupled with the keyword that says 'guest post'.

Utilize a Tool like Ahrefs If you're using a tool like Ahrefs, you can navigate to the tool's Content Explorer. Here, you can find content written by a particular author.

#4 Research Competitors' Homepage Links For research purposes, find one of the best SEO companies. To make it easier, choose one from this list of top ranking ones. To illustrate an example, we'll look at DMA Digital Marketing Agency and use Ahrefs to check out their homepage links.

You will notice that the large majority of links actually use branded anchor texts. That is because people have a large tendency to link to home pages when generally mentioning a brand, rather than something more specific. By analyzing competitors' homepage links, you can find where your competitors are being mentioned. The next thing we'll do is explore DMA's domain-level competitors. Choosing one, we'll paste their link to the Site Explorer. And then we'll navigate to the Backlinks report and add a dofollow filter.

This tool will then show you all the backlinks pointing to your competitors' homepage. The next question you need to ask is why did these links mention your competitor and not you? By looking at the anchor text, the surrounding link text, and the page title, you can easily find the answer. #5 Keep an Eye on New Competitor Backlinks Most of your direct competitors will attract new backlinks regularly. That's the way it is in an active and competitive niche. But does it have to be a bad omen for you? Well, not always... That is proof that there are link opportunities in your niche. Also, you don't have to do most of the heavy lifting. Your competitors can do it for you as you keep an eye on them. Again, the main tool we use for this is Ahrefs; because it presents the opportunity to set up alerts for specific links that you would want to keep a close eye on.

Doing this can help you ensure that you have an endless supply of linking opportunities.

Prioritizing & Qualifying the Links You need

As you plan to gain competitive advantages, you should also know which links are qualified and which ones you should prioritize. Just because there is an endless supply of links, doesn't mean you have to replicate all of them. Beware, because there are spammy pieces of content just lurking everywhere. To qualify a link as your own personal prospect, simply take a look at the site and think about if Google manually reviewed that site or page, would they have problems with the link? In regard to prioritizing links, you should choose the ones that you can easily replicate.

The Takeaway