What Are Backlinks? And How to Build Them in 2021

Do you know how important it is to build backlinks for your website? 

The number of high-quality backlinks an individual has is a significant ranking factor for most search engines, including Google. 

Backlink building is a good strategy for search engine optimization and getting organic traffic to your website, and it is an essential factor in ranking for all search engines.

It doesn’t matter whether you have optimized according to your WordPress SEO plugin mentioned in the toolbar to rank on google. Building high-quality, relevant backlinks are matters.

 As a result of having backlinks from authoritative domains, your website will have a higher reputation with Google.

But did you know the websites literally die due to insufficient backlinks, Report from Ahrefs says that 66.31% of pages or blog posts have no backlinks?

 So that’s why everyone needs to learn about backlinks and leverage them for better search on google.

So in this article, I will illustrate 10 techniques to build high-quality backlinks for your website and a practical approach to increase your ranking in SERPs to stay ahead of your competitors and without spamming other websites. 

What are Backlinks in SEO?

A backlink is not but a link pointing from one website to another; a search engine like google has many factors in ranking a particular website, and backlinks play the most vital role in it. 

If a website gets a backlink from another, it means they believe that the piece of content is outstanding or noteworthy to their audience.

A backlink is a.k.a “inbound link” or “incoming link” coming from another website. 

 Hence, the more high-quality and relevant backlinks you get, the better you rank on Google SERPs. ( Search Engine Optimization ).

Let’s understand why Google dominated the search engine industry as there were many players in the past, yet google manage to outperform other competitors.

Understanding Why Google wanted to Change the Search Engine:

Google was introduced in the year of 1998 until then there was few popular search engine. Still, the biggest drawback was that those search engines were not efficient in terms of providing accurate information and loading speed. 

That’s where Google wanted to change by introducing PageRank. Basically, it was a Standford university project that impacted the search engine market to an entirely different level.

“PageRank is an algorithm that measures the important web page, which has a higher referral domain and relevant, high-quality backlinks to a particular website.”

Earlier, PageRank score was available to the public, but Google has shut down the access for certain reasons in 2016,

 but there are other tools like ahrefs to measure a particular Website’s Authority.

The primary purpose or assumption is that a high-quality content website is likely to receive more backlinks from another website.

When there are more relevant backlinks, Google algorithm, aka bots, will rank a specific page according to their link juice and other factors. 

Primarily to build high-quality backlinks, these 3 compounds play a vital role in ranking in the search engine, 

• Relevance 
• User Signal 
• Authority 

When you have insightful content, other bloggers like to link your blog post for referral purposes to give their audience relevant content and a better user experience. 

When there are more relevant backlinks, you get a lot of traffic coming to your blog post, indicating the user signal to google.

When you have a good amount of traffic ( user signal ) coming in, you earn the authority in your market space. 

And finally, you will have better search results on google.

Before you start building backlinks to your website, go through and see google’s mission to ask these question yourself,

• Am I providing valuable and informational content?
• Is my web page very organized to rank on google?

It might feel a little bit complicated and overwhelming,

But you get my point, right?

Other search engines didn’t provide relevant or accurate information when a user tries to browse, and there were other drawbacks such as user experience and loading speed. 

So that’s how Google started to dominate and changed the way how the search engine works. They literally list out and rectify the problem that other search engine companies were facing. 

Long story short, “They Made a Revolution.”

I am sure that you must have understood why backlinks are crucial to surviving on the google search engine. 

Yes, I can hear your mind voice, “bro, I understand everything till but just tell me how to build backlinks.” 

Let me explain,

How to build high-quality backlinks ( 10 Techniques )

Search engines continue to use link building as one of their most vital ranking signals despite numerous algorithm updates. Establishing solid backlinks can be challenging, and it takes time & effort to build the authority under your niche. 

But with the following 10 techniques, you can consistently build your backlinks portfolio that will increase and impact your search visibility to acquire the authority to stay ahead of your competitors. 

1. Write Evergreen Content

If you want to build backlinks with no effort to reach out to other blog owners, you must write content that attracts the audience. 

Write a solid article that can be a holy book for referring to a particular topic. You must work on finding the keywords with a decent search volume and put your total effort into writing the best article that no one could ever think of. 

Research shows that, on average, an article must contain 1700+ if you want to rank on the first page of the search engine. 

People tend to like long content, and if you have in-depth information about a specific topic in your article. 

Then it’s well and good. 

When I talk about long content doesn’t mean you should write 2000 words of trash. The total number of words is just metrics to rank,

 but your content has to be comprehensive. 

Comprehensive = Long Content

Readers love long content (so does Google).

My mentor always says that,

“ Your keyword research and content writing is 50% of SEO, and the reset is to optimize & to build backlinks.”

No one will ever link to you if there is no reliable information. 

Right?

So make sure to write great content worth linking to; if you have valuable content, you don’t have to put much effort into building backlinks.

Take Wpbeginner, for example, 

One of the best blogging websites that get tons of traffic organically due to the authority and writing solid evergreen content. The below blog post alone gets hundreds of backlinks from various websites. 

The total number of referring domains has increased steadily; they might have taken a lot of time and effort to build backlinks this far.

FYI: This article is ranking on the first page of google search. 

If you see the below screenshot, 1.27k referral domains to this post came in from 2014. Just look at the duration and think of the effort put in from wpbeginner.com

Once you publish content, you must consistently update the article in order to take on the loop of search engines.

2. Guest Blogging 

Writing an article as a guest blogger was always a win-win technique for the publisher and you to get a backlink. It can be a link from the author’s bio or cite information from the article you wrote.

Guest blogging was not has been around before google. For example, people wrote articles for newspapers, and it was famous for online gues blogging. 

Reaching out to other blog owners can be a reciprocation technique, where you give something in return to get their taction and backlinks. 

But the problem is, no blog owner will let you write a guest post once you have reached out via email or social media because contributing a low-quality blog post will eventually damage the authority of your website. 

So people are cautious about giving the guest post to other bloggers,

But what if you make a first impression by infographic or sharing your previous blog post work to get their attention.

You must provide high-quality stuff while dealing with a higher “Domain Authority website,” and not all bloggers successfully do that. So try to leverage as much as you can.

However, you will have questions like, 

How can I find a guest posting website?

No worries, 

You can find guest blogging website by pasting these keyword matching terms in google:

• “Keyword” + “guest post.”
• “Keyword” + “write for us.”
• “Keyword” + “guest article”
• “Keyword” + “guest post opportunities.”
• “Keyword” + “become a guest blogger
• “Keyword” + “contributing writer.”
• “Keyword” + “contributor guidelines.”
• “Keyword” + “submit an article”

3. Stealing The Broken Backlinks

Please do not get excited; you won’t be stealing, but do some work to get some broken backlinks to send traffic back to your site. 

Didn’t understand?

Let me explain with an example, 

There is numerous website out there, right?

Some of the websites might not be live anymore due to specific reasons, those web page come under 404 error which means it has been moved or deleted by the website owner. 

You can find those broken links using Ahrefs broken link checker (free tool) and target them by reaching blog owners in your niche. 

Let them know that one of their web pages has broken links and request them to link back to your blog. 

Believe me; this technique worked for me.

For research purpose, I Sent 10 emails within my niche market and, 

guess what? I got a reply from 2 of my prospect thanking me for alerting them about the broken backlink, 

Still didn’t believe me? 

Check out the screenshot below, 

Do you want to know how did I approach them?

 

check out the process on how you can find broken backlinks below,

Step 1: Search a particular keyword

( Let’s say travel is my niche, and my keyword is “Best Place to Travel in India” )

You will find different websites writing about Travel, right?

For example, in the below screenshot, Planetware.com is the one that comes with the search snippet. 

Now all you need to do is just copy the URL ( only https://domain.com ) of the web page and follow the steps below.

Step 2: Open Ahrefs broken link checker 

Paste the link on the search bar and go further to see if there are broken backlinks or not.

In this case, we have found 154 broken backlinks in,

 which there are 16 Do-Follow backlinks were found. 

So why don’t you use this technique and reach out to other bloggers? 

Step 3: Outreach via Email

You can also find email via prospecting tools to do your outreach.

Trust me; you will get a reply. I got one after 10 days, so don’t lose hope 🙂

4. Finding Competitor’s Backlink

This technique is the same as above; you will not steal but find websites linking to your competitor’s site. You can easily filter out web pages that have higher domain authority. 

Then you can reach out to them for backlinks by reciprocation techniques. You can give something in return to get backlinks. 

Let me explain how you can find backlinks ahrefs free backlink checker tool, 

Let’s assume NeilPatel.com is my competitor and all you need to do is, copy the specific competitor URL.

Furthermore, paste it into the Ahrefs backlink checker website and Boom.

You got all the backlinks pointing to NeilPatel.com; you can do a basic site audit on all the referral domains. 

In this way, you can build backlinks quickly, but time and effort have to be given for reaching out to other bloggers, and the most important in this strategy is to have a follow-up message. 

If the prospects doesn’t reply, make sure you have 3-4 follow-ups. Send at least 100 emails to reply because the law of number works when you have higher ones. 

You can expect at least a 40% open rate and maybe a 5-10% conversion rate. 

5. Write A “Skyscraper” Content

Skyscraper content is a way of finding content that is already performing well in your market space; you just have to write the same topic by outperforming it. This concept of writing content was done by Brian Dean, who is the founder of Backlinko. 

As a result, he got a lot of traffic coming in, and referral domains were increasing consistently; the screenshot below illustrates how he dramatically increased the page backlinks.

 

Do some research and write the article according to the evergreen concept,

skyscraper content is more like high-quality or valuable content out there, which is essential to linkable, but it might be challenging to classify in words.

You are to find those keywords and content ideas. 

 Remember, writing content that is ordinary to explain might not get you high-quality backlinks, something you must outperform your competitor by pushing yourself one step further. 

Things to note as Brian Dean mentions in his to write skyscraper content:

• Find proven linkable assets
• Make it even better ( Longer & up-to-date )
• Better designed
• More thought 
• Finally, reach out to the right people 

6. Build Backlinks with Infographics

Nowadays, Readers are more likely to prefer infographics due to the social media boom in recent years, and people tend to spend less time if there is nothing attractive in it. 

So you can target blog owners who have great content but not having any infographic; you reach out to them via email or social media. 

A report from LuicdPress shows that infographics can increase web traffic by 12%; therefore, why not use the opportunity to improve your backlinks.

 If you want to learn more about infographics, I recommend reading one of 99signal.com’s articles about Getting High-Quality Backlinks with Infographics.

If you have zero knowledge of designing infographics, I suggest hiring a professional designer from Fiverr, paying him $5, and getting the work done. 

FYI: if you BUY backlinks from a provider like SEOClerks, it will literally cost you $100 to $300 to get SINGLE quality backlinks. 

So why do you want to waste more buying the backlinks instead of spending $5 to get infographics to reach out to your potential prospects?

7. Build Authoritative Links With Haro (Help A Reporter Out)

HARO ( a.k.a. Help a report out ) is a service that connects bloggers and journalists in one place with the relevant expert source for you to reach out to them.

 It is an excellent platform for engaging with potential prospects and building a relationship by writing guest blogs or sharing your infographics and other stuff. 

You will get insane results with HARO with their subscription; you can find a high-quality DA news website to get backlinks to your website or blog post. 

Here are the details to follow, 

• Sign up for HARO.
• Every Wednesday, you will receive an email from them, look for similar bloggers with your niche. 
• Send your credentials and some helpful content.

With HARO, you can get backlinks from high DA websites like Mashable, Inc, FastCompany, Reuters, etc.

8. Create A social profile

Yes, even a social profile can give you a backlink; however, I am not just talking about Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter.

But you have plenty of websites that provide backlinks, 

NOTE: Most of the websites do not provide Do-Follow backlinks, but at least you get No-Follow backlinks for listing or post. 

These are few websites where you can create social profiles:

• https://www.behance.net/
• https://triberr.com/
• https://trello.com/
• https://audioboom.com/
• https://disqus.com/
• https://www.blogger.com/
• https://en.gravatar.com/
• livejournal.com
• https://about.me/
• https://www.quora.com/
• https://www.ted.com/
• https://github.com/

9. Comment On Other Relevant Blog Posts

Firstly, let me explain something before you start commenting on other blogs and dropping backlinks everywhere. 

Sometimes a backlink can be tactfully incorporated into a comment, but more often than not, the primary purpose is to build a mutual relationship with the author:

• Make the author’s day if you don’t know what to say.
• Adding some insight to the topic at hand will provide a bit more value.

You can know this, not all blog pages will accept your comments, and the main is to get backlinks. 

So look for websites that are active and posting content consistently. 

Ps: you will earn only Do-Follow backlinks by commenting, but it is also essential to build your authority on the market. 

With google search tools, you can filter active website; check out the below screenshot on how you can find

10. Syndicate Your Content 

Syndicating your content is basically re-publishing on LinkedIn, Quora or medium; it is another way to reach a whole different audience. 

You might think, why I even do that?

See, people love really useful content, so why not use your longer content to re-publish it on one other high-traffic website like medium, Quora or Linkedin. 

You will reach a new set of audiences by not spending a dollar on promoting your content. It drives a lot of traffic and gets you Do-Follow backlinks. Mainly you can also link back to your original blog post where you have published it.

 Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts

So now that you have learned the more powerful techniques, it’s your turn to test and build backlinks using the strategies above. 

You primarily don’t need money to build backlinks; as I mentioned below, use Ahrefs free tools to get your work done. 

But once you have reached a certain level, you will have to purchase the paid version to enhance the backlinks further. 

Only then you can go with paid version Ahrefs or SEMrush. In my opinion, both tools of superb and powerful, so decide what you want. 

Not all strategies above will work for you, but you can test everything in order to find the winning one that works for you.

Ps: if you found this article informative and valuable, do give a backlink to my blog post 😛

And don’t forget to share your thoughts below in the comment section.