Did you just launch a new website? Congratulations. However, launching a website is just the first step. There are other steps you need to complete to make your new website a successful one. One of them is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Whether your website is a business site, blog, or eCommerce, you need one thing – Traffic! Organic traffic is the best form of traffic you can get and it comes from search engines. Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website and its pages friendly to search engines, most especially Google.
This will make it easier for search engine crawler bots to crawl and index your web pages in their database. That way, when someone searches your website or keywords in your niche, your web pages appear in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
One of the most important SEO strategy is building backlinks. In this post, we’ll be discussing 12 easy ways to build backlinks to your new website.
First of all, what are backlinks and how are they important in SEO?
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are simply links from one website to another website. For example, if your website URL is on a different website, you have a backlink from that website. The backlink can link to your homepage or any other page on your website.
Since SEO became a necessity, it’s proven that websites and web pages with a high number of backlinks rank the highest on SERPs. It’s somewhat like voting; the higher your backlink count, the higher your number of votes and the higher your chance of winning (ranking) on SERPs.
However, not all backlinks are beneficial. The best backlinks are those from top websites with high domain authority. Since these pages are renowned, Google and other search engines will trust the websites they link to.
On the other hand, getting backlinks from low authority domains won’t do much because search engines don’t trust them. The worst is getting backlinks from spammy sites as search engines might consider your new website as spam as well.
Furthermore, the best backlinks come from websites that are related to yours. If you’re an eCommerce, getting a backlink from a football blog won’t do your site much justice. Therefore, it’s not just about building backlinks but building quality backlinks.
12 Easy Ways To Build Backlinks To Your New Website
If you’re ready to optimize your new website for search engines, here are 12 easy ways to begin building backlinks.
1. Publish Good Content
Why would other websites want to include your website hyperlinks in their post? There are two answers to that. The first is if you pay them to do so, while the second is if they find your content worthy of referencing.
As a result, one of the easiest things you can do to build backlinks to your new website is by publishing good content. You might even pay a high authority website for a backlink and if your content is not worth linking to, they’ll decline.
Creating good content involves a lot. First of all, you need to perform in-depth keyword research to know which keywords you’ll write about and include in the content.
You should search Google among other search engines for these keywords and see what other posts others have written. Then, you thrive to make yours better than them. Most of these top websites love linking to well-researched and fact-based content.
2. Link Externally
Think of this as a “one good turn deserves another” backlinking method. If you want others to link to you, you can try linking to them first. Afterwards, reach out to them and inform them of your backlink in a natural way.
For example, you can tell how you enjoyed their content so much that you have to link to it thereby recommending it to your visitors. Most likely, the other website’ owner will check out yours.
If they find content on your website that’s worth linking to, they may link to it if they ever publish something related to it. Many websites in your niche will welcome such a relationship; you just have to look for them.
Therefore, you should look for high-authority websites that are owned by individuals rather than organizations. This will work most for bloggers as there’s always a need for new content.
3. Guest Posting
Guest posting is a very popular way for new websites to get backlinks and it’s very simple. All you need to do is to create quality content for another website; preferably one in the same industry/niche as yours.
After creating your content, you contact the other website and request to submit a guest post. Many websites are open to guest posting such that you don’t need to request. You can just submit your post and if it meets their criteria, it’ll be published.
In the author box, you’ll feature your name, a little bio, and most importantly your website URL. If the guest post is published, you just got a backlink. Also, while writing your guest post, it’s very easy for you to add hyperlinks as references.
These hyperlinks can link to any website including yours. However, it’s very important to make it natural. Your guest post can be rejected if you’re linking to only your website.
4. Drop Blog Comments
Here is another easy way to build backlinks to your new website. Not to mention, commenting is very easy. Visit a blog, type a few words in the comment box, provide your name and other details, submit, and you’re done. However, if you want to build quality backlinks from commenting, a little extra work is required.
First of all, comment on the right websites. You can’t just go on a commenting spree on any website you come across on the internet. That could make your links appear spammy and could lead to a ban.
Comment only on a limited number of websites that are related to your niche. Some comment boxes allow you to hyperlink URLs while others do not. Your website URL will also be added as a hyperlink to your name when your comment is published.
Your comment must be meaningful. If you’re knowledgeable on the content’s topic, you can try contributing or simply commend the writer.
5. Spy On Your Competitors
Not much is unique on the internet these days. Whatever you’re trying to do, there’s the highest possibility that someone has done it before. You can spend hours trying to figure out the best sites to get backlinks. Conversely, you can spy on competitor sites that are ranking to identify the backlinks that are boosting their SEO.
That way, you can easily recreate any of their quality backlinks that you can. This is not just one of the easiest ways to build backlinks but also one of the best. Why? Because not only will you know the sites they get their backlinks from, you’ll also know how the backlink was made – hyperlink, comment, etc. – and the keywords used.
There are so many free tools to use in spying on your competitors. Some recommended ones are SEMRush, Ahrefs Backlink Checker, and UberSuggest. You just need to enter your competitors’ URL on these pages.
6. Make Use of Google Search Console
Let’s assume you own a similar site to your new site. Or perhaps, your new site is a sub-site or an affiliate of a different site. You can make use of Google Search Console to scout prospective backlinks. This, of course, means that the older site must be connected to the search console.
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that helps webmasters measure their search traffic and keep track with the performance of their web pages. The tool tracks all sites that have linked to yours. You can find these in the External Links section.
Since these external websites have linked to your similar site in the past; they’ll likely link to your new website. If you’ve created quality content, you can reach out to these websites and request for a backlink. This method is best if you’re capitalizing on guest posting.
7. Leverage On Dead/Broken Links
The internet is old. While many new websites are created, several others are also taken off the net. This could be due to domain name or hosting expiration. If a website no longer exists, all of its backlinks become dead links. In other words, if you click on them from the linking website, you get nothing.
Similarly, most websites do update their domain name and URL structure over time. Usually, they’ll put a redirect on the old domain or URL to the new one. However, some do not. When you click on their hyperlinks, you get a 404 error page. These are broken links. Unlike dead links, the pages still exist but on a different URL.
You can leverage on these. Dead and broken links can harm a website’s SEO. Therefore, every serious website owner will want to rid their sites of them. All you need to do is to analyze top websites for broken and dead links. There are many free tools online that you can use.
Once you locate these non-useful links, try to recreate whatever content they had on your new site. Then, contact the website owners and alert them of the broken and dead links on their website. Offer your site links as a replacement.
8. Build Online Relationships
Your friend will most likely grant you a favour than a stranger. By building online relationships, you’re simply making friends with others and social media – most especially Twitter – is the right platform to do so. Use social media to connect with others, preferably experts, in your niche.
This doesn’t mean you have to be active on social media 24/7. You just need to engage with the right people and introduce your site. By building a strong relationship with experts, you can collaborate on different projects that’ll involve exchanging links.
Furthermore, you have a higher chance of getting approval for guest posts amongst others. If these niche experts share your page links on their social pages, your new site gets exposed to a larger audience. The more people find your content worthwhile, the more likely they’ll reference it if they are relevant.
9. Write Reviews and Testimonials
Reviews and testimonials are similar to commenting. However, it’s a lot more likely to earn you a backlink. When you visit a business and company website, you can find an invite to write a testimonial or review. These will help other visitors to know about the business’s product and services.
Like with commenting, a space may be available to enter your website address amongst other personal details. That’s how you get your backlink. Alternatively, you can publish a full review on your website about a brand’s product or service related to your niche.
If your review is positive towards the brand, they could feature it on their website and link to you. You may have seen some business websites linking to reviews on top sites like TrustPilot, PCMag, New York Post, and Yelp, amongst others.
10. Create Infographics
Recently, infographics are gold mines for content marketing. These are simply visual representations of information using images and charts amongst other graphical elements. It’s proven that humans process visual data better.
Therefore, you can create infographics as an alternative to writing lengthy content. You can as well feature both side-by-side. Usually, an infographic won’t contain every text in your content but only the most important information.
With an engaging infographic on a topic, product, or service in your niche, you’ll attract so many other websites. Any website that makes use of your infographic must reference your website as the source thereby including your link.
What’s interesting? You don’t need to be an expert designer to create a great infographic or hire a professional. You can make use of free visual content creating tools.
11. Conduct and Perform Interviews
You can reach out to an expert in your niche and request for an interview from them. This can simply be an online interview over the keyboard. Upon publishing the interview on your new site, reach out to the other party informing them and providing a link to the page.
They’re likely to post your link on their social media handles for their followers to read. Also, they could post an update about the interview on their blogs thereby granting you a backlink. While this seems easy, you must come up with constructive and perceptive questions.
Questions that’ll bring interesting answers that they’ll want their followers to read. If you have an audience yourself, you can grant others an interview and they’ll link to your website when they publish it.
12. Use Forums
There are many forums out there where you can easily get quality backlinks. You simply need to create an account and engage or create interesting posts that’ll feature your backlinks. However, it’s very easy to get it wrong with forum backlink building.
A lot of forums aren’t worth getting a backlink from. Only focus on renowned and legit forums; take Quora for example. Furthermore, you shouldn’t overdo it. Don’t build too many links on forums as it could appear spammy.
Most forums you’ll find will allow no-follow backlinks as opposed to do-follow. While you should focus more on do-follow forums, no-follow backlinks are not entirely useless. At the least, they’ll fetch you traffic whenever someone clicks on them.
Bottom Line
A lot of webmasters pay a lot of money to high authority websites for backlinks. As a new website, you might not have much money to spend. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean you can’t get quality backlinks.
You can by following the 12 easy ways to build backlinks to a new website discussed in this post. All of them will cost you $0.
