When working with Google, you have to play by the rules. Google won’t let you game its system and earn undeserved traffic. It also won’t stand for black hat strategies that worked in the past. The search engine giant sees itself as a way to deliver quality information to consumers with lightning speed. People who exploit the system for their benefit – well, it simply isn’t an option today. Methods such as paid links and comment spam won’t work today. However, Google will reward you if you build links properly. This post will look at what types of backlinks Google likes. We’ll also explore a handful of strategies to get high-quality backlinks for your website.
What Does Google Want from Backlinks?
Before we dive into backlink strategies and best practices, let’s review the quality guidelines you need to keep in mind.
Quality vs. Quantity of Links
In its Webmaster Guidelines, Google makes it painfully clear that “any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered link spam.” Google doesn’t mess around.
Take the backlink services on Fiverr. Run away if you see an offer for 25,000 top SEO links for $5. Do not use those services. Google will ban your site faster than the speed of light.
Understand the Domain Authority of Inbound Links
This should go without saying, but all links are not created equal. So, make it a point to seek the best ones to add to your site.
To do this, identify the Domain Authority (DA) of inbound links to your competitor’s websites. Then find out where your competitors get their high-DA links with Moz’s Link Explorer.
Maintain a High Standard of Content Quality
High-quality content is equally important as high-quality links.
While there is some overlap between the two, let’s review how quality content results in quality links.
First, your content is what differentiates your site from the rest of the crowd.
For instance, if you have e1,250 articles, roughly 50 of your posts will provide the necessary juice to obtain backlinks.
This means that if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to get wicked good at writing high-quality content.
You can find a fresh angle that’s relevant and reader-centric or you can optimize the copy. Regardless of your method, make darn sure to include a CTA.
Once you have a firm handle on writing stellar copy, make sure to study the following seven strategies that will yield high-level content and links.
1.) Draw Experts Together to Write Roundup Blog Posts
Phenomenal blog posts are unstopable link-building machines. This is why sites with blogs produce 97% more indexed links than sites without a blog. However, the challenge is building an audience, which can be difficult considering that a few million blog posts are published every day.
So, how do you stand out from the crowd? One proven method is roundup blog posts.
When you create content with contributions from multiple thought leaders, you can get your content in front of a massive audience.
Do a quick Google search of the top professionals in your niche and see what pops up.
Next, you’ll want to reach out to them. We’ll explore a few outreach tactics in tip #4.
Ask them relevant questions that your users want to know.
When you compile all of their answers, you’ll have a complete article that the respondents will hopefully share with audience via social media. If you really hit a homerun, they’ll refer back to the post in their own content.
2. Write Your Cornerstone Articles
Roundup posts are an awesome way to gain initial traction, but you also want to publish content that showcases your knowledge of the content you share via your website. A cornerstone post is one way to make this happen.
Cornerstone posts are either a combination of a few posts or a guide of some sort that you create where all of your knowledge is in one central location.
Yoast developed their entire business around their WordPress SEO plugin, so it makes sense that that their cornerstone content is related to SEO. Their WordPress SEO post outlines how bloggers can improve their search strategy with a WordPress site. Naturally, a lot of the methods they discuss tie into their free SEO plugin.
That’s what makes cornerstone content awesome. It earns a lot of shares and links while also promoting the author’s brand.
The next example illustrates how to keep yoru cornerstone content simple.
Lastly, great cornerstone content can supercharge your search traffic.
3.) Create Sharable Infographics
Infographics are the ideal way to present complex data visually pleasingly by marrying visuals our brains find engaging with the data our minds require to back up those images.
Infographics function well as link bait for companies who don’t want or have the capacity to create their own.
The simplest way to create an infographic is to recycle an article or video you’ve already published. All you need to do is take all the data and make it visual.
While I’ve yet to dive into the world of creating my infographics regularly, I have dabbled a bit here and there. One tool that I’ve found helpful is Piktochart.
Piktochart offers free and paid tiers and has more than 600 templates from which you can choose.
Once you create your infographic, you can share it on your website via an embedded link.
Every infographic can generate more backlinks to your website.
4.) Craft an Outreach Strategy
Outreach plays a significant role in any link-building strategy. Thankfully, there are a handful of tools to automate and streamline the process.
One such tool is PItchbox. This automation tool helps you connect with the right contacts to request a backlink. It also provides intelligent templates to follow up with your prospects.
BuzzStream is another option. It helps you develop prospect personas to reach your campaign’s targeted audience. You can then use it to draft automated templates to help you connect with your prospects.
5.) Fix Broken Links with Your Content
Let’s face it – things break over time. This is especially true for links.
Most roundup posts have dozens, if not hundreds, of contributors. Maintaining the links on a few posts can consume tons of your time.
This is where the broken link strategy becomes your ideal solution for the problem at hand.
This strategy relies on the number of bad links you can replace with high-quality content.
The key here is that you must have high-quality content at the ready.
Low-value content wastes your prospect’s time as much as your own.
High-quality content provides value to the website, the reader, and you.
By identifying broken links on a website and offering something valuable to put in its place, you can position yourself and your site as a more extensive authority.
How to Run the Broken Link Playbook
You first need to find broken links. There are a few ways to do this.
You can do a Google search for different prospecting phrases bloggers might use in a roundup post.
For instance, if you want to find broken links for topics such as “search engine optimization” or “digital marketing,” you should combine them with the phrase “useful resources.”
These searches produce resource pages for sites relevant to your niche that might publish your content to fix the broken link.
Once you find a page that fits your needs, you can use a tool such as LinkMiner to scan for broken links.
Next, you’ll want to put a list together of the broken links and potential high-quality content to replace the broken links.
You’ll need an elite tool such as Majestic Bulk Backlink Checker to get the most out of this strategy. This tool is fantastic when you need to identify the relevancy of the dead link to the content you want to create. It also determines how many sites still link to the error page.
Now it’s time to craft engaging content that fills the void for your target website’s dead link(s).
Again, high-quality content is the name of the game. This is especially true since 36% of marketers believe they don’t produce enough engaging content.
6.) Use Internal Linking on Your Website
Linking your content to other content on your website is the easiest way to kickstart your search campaign.
This is another reason why a blog is critical to your long-term SEO success. It provides a steady stream of opportunities to link your articles under a single roof internally.
Google’s bots use this information to see how your link flows through your website. Google crawls your website index to determine the relevant pages that people searching Google will want to see. This is why you must publish new content regularly.
When you create fresh content, add it to your internal linking structure. Over time, this makes it easier for Google to crawl your site. Furthermore, it builds a roadmap for Google to determine which sites are most relevant for users searching for specific topics.
You must use internal linking to increase your page authority if you’re a new website with only a few resources.
Closing Thoughts
If you only take one thing away from this post, let it be that Google hates link building.
All the spam and black hat SEO hacks that worked a decade ago are now banned.
Google has fine-tuned its algorithm to filter out bad practices. This means it’s more important than ever to build your backlinks correctly.
You can successfully build a strong backlink profile if you focus on the three key points in this article.
First, you need to develop high-quality content.
I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but high-quality content is the core of everything on the web. You have nothing to market if you fail to publish high-quality content on your website.
Second, all domains are not created equal.
Check out the domain authority of the sites with which you want to collaborate. Use this metric to identify high-value sites that will produce high-value links, which, in turn, will improve your backlink profile.
However, you don’t want to be a snob. Don’t dismiss sites that don’t have the highest domain authority. But don’t let your standards fall too low because Google might view a pile of links with low domain authorities as a red flag.
Third, make your plan scalable.
You can scale every process we’ve discussed to a certain degree.
For instance, you can do outreach with additional experts for your cornerstone or round-up posts.
You can always create more infographics or content for broken links.
The key to scaling is to keep things simple and not over-complicate your strategy.
With these three core values in mind, you can cultivate links that Google will respect and reward.
Remember that these strategies take time, so start now, and you’ll reap the long-term benefits in due time.
