25 Ways to Build Backlinks: An Infographic
Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are links pointing to your web pages from external websites. Search engines like Google view these links as an important indicator of your site’s quality, since another webmaster viewed your website as worthy of a link. In fact, links to your site are the #1 SEO Signal considered by Google. Think of it like voting – websites with the most links rank highest.
There are many ethical and useful ways to build backlinks to your site that avoid the tricks and traps of so-called ‘black hat’ or frowned-upon marketing methods. The infographic below shows twenty-five of the more popular and effective ways of building high quality links into your site.
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Two Highly Effective Backlink Generators
The infographic provides 25 backlink ideas, but two are standouts. These include:
- Guest posting: Guest blog posts take time to research, pitch and write, but the links created by this activity can be quite powerful. Guest posting means you write a story for someone else’s website or blog, and in exchange, they include a bio and a link into your own website. It’s an authority and brand-building way of sharing your site, gaining new traffic, broadening your exposure and boosting your SEO. Can’t beat that!
- Infographics: You liked this infographic enough to stay and read this far, right? Infographics are popular methods of sharing tips and hints in a quick, easily scanned format that appeals to many searchers. An infographic can be shared across many platforms, including social media. Thus there’s potential for an additional ‘viral’ impact that many other forms of content marketing do not have. They’re a great link building technique too.
Benefits of Backlinks
We mentioned the boost that backlinks can give to your SEO efforts, but that’s only one of many benefits provided by backlinks. In addition to improving your web page’s position on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), backlinks benefit your website in several other ways:
- Long-term promotion: Backlinks remain in place as long as the webmaster chooses to keep them on their site, which for most sites, means many months or years, if not permanently. That translates into steady online promotions for a long time to come.
- Free advertising: Backlinks funnel traffic into your site at no cost to you except the time and effort you put into generating them. Once you’ve done your homework and gained a backlink, you pay nothing for the additional traffic.
- Authority building: Backlinks contribute to your site’s overall authority. They tell readers and search engines that your site has quality content. After all, content can equal credibility.
- Branding: Readers of The New York Times or The Huffington Post are much more likely to remember you and your business if you’re mentioned on popular websites and niche blogs. In the beginning of your sales funnel, its about building brand awareness and a link on the right site can get you noticed.
- Relationship building: Someone searching for information on a particular topic may come across a page that contains your backlink. You never know where such a search will end up. That person may simply be looking for instructions on how to do something easier or better, or they could be searching for an authority to interview on the topic. If they follow through on the link, they may contact you, building a relationship via the links. It’s an interesting way for people to find you for networking and other professional purposes not to mention the relationships you build with the webmaster linking to you.
Ready to get going on your link building project? These 25 backlink ideas will get you started.
