If you’re trying to up your search engine ranking game, generating backlinks for your blog is one of the most essential SEO tactics you can use.
When you have a good number of links going back to your blog from quality sites, Google sees this as a plus and bumps up your ranking for greater visibility. This brings new, organic traffic to your blog, increases the chance of conversions and furthers your digital reach.
Let’s look at three ways you can easily generate more backlinks for your blog.
1. Publish stellar content
First and foremost, you have to have quality content if you’re going to earn backlinks, period. No one’s going to link to your site if it’s not executed well.
Repurpose old content
Go through your blog’s archives. Are there blog posts, resources, or other content that are outdated and could use some work or could be written better with more information added?
Perfect. Edit and rewrite those pieces into ones you believe are worthy of a backlink. If you can make an infographic, video, podcast, or any other medium, this will add to the quality of your posts. People want their content formats switched up. This will continue the drive of organic traffic to your site and further your reach.
Cornerstone content
Cornerstone content — also referred to as pillar content — is content on your site that’s most valuable, informative, and resourceful, and it’s perfect for gaining backlinks and improving your SEO. This teaches readers something new and gives them tangible information they could use to implement into their own strategy. If there’s anything you want new visitors to see on your site, it’s cornerstone content.
This type of content is in-depth and long-form. It goes into great detail about topics in your niche that are normally much broader.
If you want authoritative sites linking back to your blog, create content as not just a resource, but a source. Create case studies that prove points with real numbers. Ask your audience to take a poll or survey and create posts based on the results. Use your blog to its full potential by using it as a resource for your readers and other high-quality sites out there.
2. Guest post
Another great method for bringing in organic traffic is to guest post. When your name is associated with a blog post on a high ranking site, you boost your authenticity as a writer as well as get thousands of new eyes on your content. You’ll likely get compensated too!
Try to guest post for as many different sites under your niche as you can. Guest posting for the same site over and over won’t get you the backlinks you want, so it’s important to reach out to multiple sites to get your name out there. This will also make your link building strategy more natural and appealing to search engines.
You don’t have to link back to your content only within the text of the post. This is a mistake a lot of bloggers make when posting for someone else.
Instead, take advantage of the space you’re given in your author bio.
Rather than referring back to the homepage of your blog, link to a specific page that you think would be beneficial to readers who are reading your guest post. This works best as a freebie, or lead magnet.
3. Use broken link building
Broken link building may sound complicated but it’s fairly simple. The idea is that you scour websites seeing where dead or broken links are, recreate and improve that content, and then inform those who linked to the broken page and direct them to your content.
No one wants to come across dead ends, much less dead links. Seeing that “404 Error” message on a page you were excited to explore is a huge buzzkill and people who have these links on their site are more than willing to replace them.
That’s where your link building strategy comes in. You can use a free tool like Dead Link Checker to check for broken links. If you’re okay with spending a little extra for more features, Ahrefs Broken Link Checker is also a good option.
After you’ve created content that could be a good replacement for the dead link, it’s time to contact the site owner.
Here’s an example of an email Joshua Hardwick of Ahrefs sent to Neil Patel using the broken link building strategy:
In a perfect world, every email you sent out to sites that could replace their broken links with yours would get answered. And every dead link would be replaced with yours. But this isn’t a perfect world and that won’t always happen.
Like pitching, broken link building is a numbers game. You won’t always get a response and sites won’t always choose to use your content in replace of their dead links, and that’s okay. On to the next.
Over to you
Generating quality backlinks to your blog doesn’t have to be a pain. By making the most out of pre-existing content and creating new stuff with a fresh perspective, you have a better chance of high authority sites linking back to you. Putting quality over quantity will always benefit you in the end, but it’s important you take the time to create content people want to divulge in. That’s the key to earning backlinks.
