Link Building: Professional Ways to Create Backlinks?

One of the most important strategies to succeed with SEO is Link Building.

Among the more than 170 ranking factors used by Google, three of them have the greatest impact:

The content quality, the ability to respond to user intent, and the backlinks that your site has got.

For this reason, I’ll explain better what backlinks are and why they have such an impact on an SEO strategy.

Maybe you have great content on your site, and a great loading speed, but it’s still not showing up at the top of search engines.

Lack of backlinks could be the main reason. 

What we will discuss in this article (Contents)

• What are Backlinks?
• Things to remember while creating backlinks
• Different types of backlinks, and which type of focus?
• What are the Benefits of creating backlinks
• How to create backlinks (14 Ways)

What are Backlinks?

A backlink is a link made from one website to another. Search engines like Google use the quality and number of backlinks as a ranking signal. Therefore, acquiring backlinks is a fundamental strategy in SEO.

It is currently practically impossible to rank at the top for keywords with a high volume of searches and a lot of competition on the results page (SERP).

Search engines understand backlinks as a good indication, after all, if another site has linked to yours, it is because they believe that your content is of quality.

Thus, with each link received, the sites gain authority. The greater your authority, the greater your chances of achieving good rankings.

But is it enough to get backlinks from any site to gain authority?

Certainly not! We’ll see how to identify a quality backlink, but first, let’s see the power and influence of backlinks.

Things To Remember While Creating Backlinks

• Never Exchange Backlinks –  It means never exchanging backlinks with the site on which you have created backlinks, as the Google Ranking Algorithm is really powerful, they track those links and don’t consider them quality backlinks. So, this can make a negative impact on your blog’s SEO.

• Don’t Buy/Purchase Backlinks – Backlinks that are created automatically (when people link to your content, as they found it helpful) or you manually create them are good quality links. 

Many people sell a number of backlinks for some charge, but it is not the right way to create backlinks, as if that seller is creating backlinks on sites with low DA (Domain Authority)or with High spam score then it will create a negative impact on your blog’s rankings on SERPs. So, it means dealing with only trusted sellers.

• Stop Doing Spammy Blog Comments – New bloggers, even me when I started my first blog, used to do this. But it negatively impacts the SEO of our blog. 

So, I recommend you avoid this thing, but one thing you can do is comment on different high-authority sites, not only on a single site.

• Always Try to Create Do-Follow Backlinks – The majority of new bloggers create no-follow backlinks, they don’t even know what are Do-follow & No-Follow backlinks, as the search engine algorithm doesn’t consider NoFollow links in the ranking factor. Well, I have already shared a detailed article about – What are Do-Follow and No-Follow Backlinks?

Example of Do-Follow Link – 

<a href=”https://bloggingraptor.com”>Blogging Raptor</a>

Example of No-Follow Link – 

<a href=”https://bloggingraptor.com” rel=”nofollow“>Blogging Raptor</a>

The link which referred to a “nofollow” tag is not a followed link, as you can see above.

• Create Backlinks with Proper Anchor Text – This is also an important factor you need to keep in mind while creating backlinks, do create backlinks with proper anchor text, for example – if you are creating a backlink on one of your articles i.e What is On-Page SEO. 

So, your backlink should be created with anchor text: What is On-Page SEO?

<a href=”https://www.bloggingraptor.com/2021/04/on-page-seo.html“>What is On-Page SEO</a>

It creates a good impact on your blog post/article rankings on SERPs. As your backlink has your main keyword. So, the Google ranking algorithm takes it while showing search results to the user, this will lead to a higher position on SERPs.

• Create Backlinks On Authority Sites – Always try to create backlinks on sites that have high DA & PA in comparison to yours, this will help your site to get good rankings in SERPs, as you have backlinks from high authority sites, it gives an indication to search engines, that your site is genuine and that’s why a high authority site has given a backlink to your site.

• Avoid Sites with High Spam Scores – Never create backlinks on sites with high spam scores, it will always create a negative impact on your website’s SEO.

So, I hope understand very well, that what you need to consider while creating backlinks for your site.

Different Types of Backlinks

From here, let’s consider that the received backlinks are good backlinks, ok? However, it is important that you constantly keep an eye on the previous topic. Never stop monitoring your actions and everything that happens to your brand.

So what are the different types of backlinks, well, there are only two types of backlinks (Do-Follow and No-Follow) which we already discussed above, and I had already shared a detailed article about – What are Do-Follow and No-Follow Backlinks?

But, the main point is which one to focus on, the simple answer to this question is “Do-Follow“. As we discussed earlier in this article, search engines count Do-follow backlinks more in the ranking factor, as Do-Follow links are created to guide and navigate the users/readers from one site/page to another.

Whereas No-Follow links are just for reference purposes, that’s why while creating a No-Follow link we give the “rel”(relationship) attribute to mark that link as a no-follow, see the below example again- 

<a href=”https://bloggingraptor.com” rel=”nofollow“>Blogging Raptor</a>

What are the Benefits of Backlinks?

This is a really good question, what are the benefits or importance of backlinks?

Obviously, everyone in the blogging field says to create backlinks for your website, but why? do backlinks affect the rankings of your blog? 

Gaining backlinks to your website is a great way to improve SEO performance, and can help your blog in various ways. So, now let’s see what are the benefits of creating backlinks-

• Helps in getting a higher position on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
• It creates a positive impact and improves your site’s Off-page SEO (don’t forget to check out my Advanced Off-page SEO Guide).
• This leads to getting more organic traffic.
• Helps your new pages, and posts to get indexed on search engines faster.
• Helps in building your blog’s authority and domain authority (don’t miss my best ways to increase domain authority)

So, now you know what are backlinks, things you need to remember while creating backlinks, types of backlinks, and the benefits of backlinks.

Now let’s discuss our main topic and the one that you are waiting too, which is how to create backlinks.

How to Create Backlinks

I would say this is a million-dollar question for all bloggers out there, as gaining backlinks to your website can improve your rankings on Search Engines, create a positive impact on Off-page SEO, leads to more organic traffic, fast indexing of your blog posts or pages, improves your brand as well as Domain Authority that I already discussed above.

So, these are the 14 ways through which you can create backlinks for your blog or website-

1. Create SLR Content
2. Writing Guest Posts/articles
3. Steal Competitor’s Backlinks
4. Find Broken links of competitors and share your links with them.
5. Convert Unlink Mentions into Link mentions
6. Blog Commenting on High-quality Blogs
7. Using Forums
8. Q&A Sites  
9. Social Media Shares
10. Web 2.0 Backlinks
11. Internal Linking
12. Contacting Authors of Big Blogs/News Websites
13. Skyscraper Technique
14. Create linkable Images or Infographics

Create SLR Content 

You might be thinking what is SLR Content?

What is SLR Content?

It’s a short-term “SLR Content” devised by me, it’s not that gun that you may have used in the video game BGMI, it means creating Shareable, Linkable, and Relatable Content.

It’s obvious if your content is of high quality and provides good value to its readers then it will definitely get shared by everyone, and if any blogger found it helpful then he/she may add your post link in their articles too.

Also, if someone finds your article related to their life or any other thing, then they will share it with their contacts, you may have seen this mostly happens with meme posts.

That’s why I always tell my fellow blogger friends always to create SLR content.

Writing Guest Post/Article

Guest Posting is one of the best link-building strategies ever. Although the perception of guest posts has changed for many bloggers in recent years, but guest blogging is still one of the main ways to build quality links for many top bloggers.

If I have to explain it in simple language, guest blogging is about writing content on some other website. In most cases, you will receive a do-follow backlink and that is the end result of your entire guest blogging effort.

We all know that the more high-quality backlinks we get from similar niche blogs, the greater the domain authority of our blog, and it will help to rank your articles easily on Google.

Well, I have done a great job for you, here is a list of 137+ Guest Posting Sites in different niches, which allow free guest posting on their blog. Thank me later.

Steal Competitor’s Backlinks

Why should you steal your competitor’s backlinks?

The simple answer to this question is Google gives priority to sites with top-quality backlinks. If your blog or website has a lot of backlinks from multiple sources, Google thinks you have an authoritative website and increases your rankings, domain authority, search traffic, etc. 

Therefore, the site with the most links usually gets better rankings. That’s why backlink analysis is necessary if you want to legally steal your competitor’s search traffic.

How to Find Competitor’s Backlinks with Semrush Tool

Let’s find out how you can use SEMrush to do backlink analysis. Click on the “Backlink Analytics” tab under the “Link Building” feature in SEMrush to discover your competitor’s backlinks.

Well, I know SEMrush is a paid tool but you can try their premium plan for 7 days for free– CLICK HERE TO TRY SEMRUSH PRO FOR FREE!

Here is ShoutMeLoud’s backlink analysis –

ShoutMeLoud Backlink Analysis

It has a huge number of over 2.1 Million backlinks in total.

You can discover all your do-follow backlink sources. Take a look-

ShoutMeLoud Backlinks

You can also know the anchor text of each link to get a good idea of ​​what kind of content is attracting the most do-follow links. This can be helpful to create a solid link-building strategy for the content on your own site.

What to do after you find your competitor’s backlink sources?

Choose some of these sources, create content around these topics, and tell bloggers that you’ve created even better content around these topics. This is also known as “The Skyscraper Technique” which we will discuss later on in this article.

This way, your content gets do-follow links from multiple sources as soon as you publish. This can have a big impact on your search rankings and thus increase your search traffic very quickly.

Find Broken Links Of Your Competitors & Share Your Links

This is also a great way to create backlinks for your blog, here you can use any dead link or broken link finder on google, the one I found is deadlinkchecker.com

You simply need to put the domain name of the site on which you want to create backlinks as shown in the below image-

Dead Link Checker

After you enter the domain name, just click on the “Check” button just near it.

Then the tool will analyze the whole website and find broken/dead links on that domain, after the scan process gets complete, you will see all dead/broken links result like the below image- 

After that, you need to find, identify and create a list of those broken links which are related to your niche or on which you can create a good article.

Now, you have a list of the best links that you can share with the owner of the site, by telling them all of the broken links on their site, and also sharing your article links with it.

So, if they found your article helpful then they will definitely replace those links, and believe me, this method really works great, as every blogger knows that broken links on their site will negatively impact their site’s SEO. 

That’s why the chances of getting backlinks are really high.

Converting Unlink Mentions into Link Mentions

Another great way of getting quality backlinks is converting unlinked mentions into linked mentions.

What does it mean?

If your blog gets popular or any post of it gets popular, many bloggers will mention your blog or any post of your blog on their blog, but many times they didn’t add your site’s link in that particular article.

So, what you can do is find those unlinked mentions and contact the authors of those sites, and tell them to give a link to your site.

But how to find unlink mentions?

There are some websites like BuzzSumo.com and Mention.com, these sites provide paid services, but they also have free trials and free plans with limitations, which is really helpful for a new blogger.

You can sign up for their free services, you will need to add your blog domain and its related keyword.

After that, your alerts will be set, and whenever some use that keyword in their articles, social media, or anywhere on the web you will receive an alert for the same through an email. 

Then you can contact the blog owner and just don’t ask for backlinks.

Instead of asking them for backlinks directly, firstly appreciate them for their work, then say thanks for mentioning your blog in their post.

After that say, that they haven’t added a link to the text so add your site link to that text. So, it will be easy for the readers to find the website.

Blog Commenting on High-Quality Blogs

One more thing you can do is comment on blogs that are of high quality with a good amount of traffic. This will put your articles in front of many readers who are reading that blog’s comment section.

Do remember one thing these backlinks are No-Follow backlinks. So, it will increase the number of backlinks on your site but didn’t affect the SEO or Ranking of your blog.

But, make sure you don’t overdo it, if you create backlinks by blog commenting on the same blog multiple times, then it will be spam, and it will negatively impact your site’s SEO and rankings, or maybe that site owner will block you. So, the best practice is to create only 1-2 links from a single site that’s it.

And yes I’m saying again it won’t help you in terms of SEO or Search engine rankings as these links are mostly no-follow, but this will surely help you to gain new readers on your blog.

Using Forums

Forums are also a great way to create good backlinks, just prepare a list of forums with active members in your niche and join all of them. Here you can discuss and answer the questions of your fellow bloggers by sharing links to your articles.

But again don’t overdo it as most of the forums allow No-Follow links, and make sure you read all the guidelines of that forums and don’t violate any of them, otherwise, the admins will block you. 

Always stay on the safe side, answer 8-10 questions, and share only 1 or 2 links. There are many active members on forums, they may see your article link and if they are interested in it then they will definitely visit it, which will also drive traffic to your blog too.

Using Q&A Websites

Just like forum posting you can use Q&A (Question & Answer) sites, these sites also have great potential and high-quality traffic, just like forums, you can answer 8-10 questions, and share only 1 or 2 links. 

This way you can create some backlinks for your blog, But again these are also No-follow links so don’t overdo it.

Some most popular used Q&A Sites are-

• Quora.com
• YahooAnswers.com
• Stackoverflow.com
• QsAns.com
• QuestionHub.google.com/
• Ehow.com
• Askdeb.com
• WikiAnswers.com 

There are many more you can find out on google very easily.

Social Media Shares

Sharing your blog articles on social media also give a backlink to your site, again it’s a No-Follow backlink, but it will help to drive some good quality traffic to your blog.

You can use top social media sites like –

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Flickr
• Yara book

These sites have tons of daily traffic and getting social indications on your blog also helps in improving your site’s authority, which will lead to an increase in rankings.

Web 2.0 Backlinks

You might have heard or might be thinking that,

What are Web 2.0 backlinks?

Let me clear this doubt, in simple words Web 2.0 backlink is a way of link building in which you sign up for different sites that provide you a microblog to upload content with a subdomain to your blog.

Let me explain it more clearly with an example –

As you know there are lots of websites that provide a subdomain blog like WordPress, Blogger, Wix, Medium, etc.

When you create a blog with a subdomain (bloggingraptor.wordpress.com) and add some content to that blog, and also add some referring links to your main domain (bloggingraptor.com) it works as a Web 2.0 backlink.

This is the most effective and fast way to get Do-Follow backlinks for your blog as you are the only owner of that subdomain blog, so you can give backlinks without adding any No-Follow tag to it.

Here is a List of Web 2.0 Submission Sites to create your Web 2.0

• WordPress.com
• Blogger.com
• Sites.google.com
• Medium.com
• Quora.com
• Joomla.com
• Wix.com
• Weebly.com
• Squarespace.com
• Tumblr.com
• Rediff.com
• Box.com
• Zoho.com
• Last FM

And many more you can find out on Google. And here is a List of 83+ Profile Creation Sites through which you can create backlinks just by creating normal profiles like Facebook and other social media accounts.

But it’s not limited to just adding links in the content, you can create a complete website, author, and user profiles and add your main blog’s domain name in it to get another do-follow backlink.

Again don’t overdo it. I would recommend creating only 1-2 links per month from these sites. So it won’t affect your SEO negatively.

Internal Linking to Your Articles

Internal links are like backlinks but within your own website. They are links that go from one page on a web domain to another page on the same domain. They are most commonly seen in navigation menus, sidebars, and footers, but also within the body of the article.

Search engines look at many things when trying to determine which pages to rank. One of the things it looks at is internal links.

Through internal links, your site guarantees its own pages, but it’s really useful for search engines and SEO!

If we follow the same rules as off-page SEO, that is, a page with more backlinks is more valuable in the eyes of other sites, in on-page SEO a page with more internal links is more valuable in the eyes of your own site.

Again, Don’t overdo it. Just do internal linking of relatable posts or pages. Then it will help you, otherwise, if you put any link on any page it may affect your site’s SEO negatively.

Contacting Authors of Big Blogs/News Websites

This way of getting backlinks can be a boom for your blog. What you need to do is find big blogs or news websites that have written articles related to your blog posts, and below every article, you will see the author profile box.

That’s what I’m talking about, you can directly contact those authors of big websites, but do not ask for a backlink directly.

Let’s assume you have written a brief article on “What is SEO”, and you found an article on google related to it, and in that article, the author used the term SEO, But they didn’t explain it or didn’t link any article to it.

Don’t worry here is a Professional Email Template that I have created for you, and which I personally use.

So what you can do is send them an email or send a message on their social media account like this-

Believe me, this method works really amazing I have a micro-niche blog, and I had created around 8 backlinks on it with the help of this method and all of them are from high-quality & authoritative sites.

Well, I also texted around 20+ authors, but I get 8 Do-Follow backlinks after approaching 20+ authors is not that bad. So, you can try the same to get backlinks for your site/blog.

Skyscraper Technique

The term “Skyscraper Technique” was introduced by Brian Dean (owner of Backlinko).

In simple words it means, creating exceptional, better, and more engaging content which are already popular or in demand.

This can be done by following three simple steps- 

1. To find popular content which has a great number of backlinks from other websites or blogs, you can use a free tool like UberSuggest for this.

2. Now create exceptional, better, and more engaging articles than others, and publish them on your blog.

3. Then share and promote your articles with the correct audience and the website owners who have given links to the site, that you found in 1st step.

Some benefits of the skyscraper technique are- 

• Helps in increasing the number of quality backlinks of your blog.
• Increases the domain authority of your blog.
• Drives extra traffic to your blog.
• Helps in getting top positions in SERPs.
• Creates personal and good relationships with other bloggers.
• Increases your blog comments.
• More social media shares and engagements.

So, I hope you get an idea of what is skyscraper technique, is and how to use it.

Now, let’s discuss my final way, which is also a great method to create backlinks.

Create Linkable Images and Infographics.

You can also get backlinks by just adding some awesome engaging infographics.

Yes, this method of getting backlinks is also awesome, many people share infographics of other blogs in their blog articles to give a better explanation.

If you have written an article in which you have to share some statistical data, then add infographics like bar graphs, pie charts, lists, flow charts, comparisons, etc.

Source: Pixabay

For example, you can see I found this image regarding SEO, so I added this to my article, and to avoid any copyright or DMCA issues I have also added the source link below it i.e Pixabay. 

These infographics look really amazing and are also easy to understand by anyone, that’s why people share them in their blogs or articles, and when they use infographics from another website they need to give the credits to their respective owners shown in the above image. 

This way you can get a good backlink to your site without doing anything, also you can add your copyright text, i.e your website name or link at the bottom right or left corner of the image.

So, these were 14 ways through which you can get backlinks for your websites or blogs for free. I hope you understand all of them very well. But if you have any doubts feel free to ask in the below comment section, I will try to reply ASAP.

Conclusion

There’s no way, if you want your blog, company website, or virtual store to be at the top of search engines, you absolutely need backlinks to become a reference on the internet.

The process of acquiring quality links to your website is quite ingenious. And the results don’t usually appear right away, but this is the best way and help your blog in the long term.

What you have learned?

First, you get to know what are backlinks and their importance in increasing the domain authority as well as page authority of your blog.

Then you get to know the important things that you must know before creating any backlinks for your blog, and always aim to get quality backlinks,

At the last, the best 14 ways through which you can build those quality backlinks

•  Create SLR Content
• Writing Guest Post/articles
• Steal Competitor’s Backlinks
• Find Broken links of competitors and share your links with them.
• Convert Unlink Mentions into Link mentions
• Blog Commenting on High-quality Blogs
• Using Forums
• Q&A Sites  
• Social Media Shares
• Web 2.0 Backlinks
• Internal Linking
• Contacting Authors of Big Blogs/News Websites
• Skyscraper Technique
• Create linkable Images or Infographics

Some FAQs Regarding Link Building

How to check the backlinks of the website?

There are various tools both free and paid, you can use free tools like Ubersuggest, Free Backlink Checker by Ahrefs, RankWatch, SmallSEOTools, etc. And paid tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, Mangools, etc.

What are backlinks?

A backlink is a link made from one website to another. Search engines like Google use the quality and number of backlinks as a ranking signal. Therefore, acquiring backlinks is a fundamental strategy in SEO.

What is a do-follow backlink?

Suppose you have a blog and you have given a link to my blog anywhere in a post of that blog and I have Do-Followed that HyperLink. (read more about Do-Follow and No-Follow Backlinks).

I hope you found this article helpful, and if yes then do share in your community and help others too.

Thanks for your time and all the very best!