What do you want to accomplish?
Build more backlinks to your website.
What is a backlink? According to Wikipedia:
A backlink for a given web resource is a link from some other website (the referrer) to that web resource (the referent).
Why?
Search engines use the number and quality of backlinks as one of the most important factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking. Writing quality content is a good start, but making sure you have quality backlinks is even more important.
What do you need?
You will need to have access to a tool that can give you the most important backlinks to a given page. We will use Ubersuggest.
Procedure
Backlinks are links from other pages to your pages and are very important if you want to rank well in the search results.
In this hack, we will try to create backlinks (see colored arrows in the image below, marked with BL) from other pages (pages marked with A on the right side). We will basically ask the authors of these pages (A) to link to our page because they already link to similar content as ours (B).
The different steps of this procedure are:
- Write quality content about a topic in your niche.
- Find similar content (B) as our content.
- Find articles (A) linking to this similar content (B).
- Ask the authors of these articles to link to your content (BL=Backlinks).
Let’s have a more detailed look to this procedure:
(1) First and foremost, you need to create quality content on a certain topic: write better than all existing content, go deeper, give your unique view, use the best SEO practices, …
(2) Then, we will use Google to search for similar content based on your topic’s main keywords.
Imagine you have a website called ‘Body & Health’, and you wrote an article about the best skin care products. Then you could search in Google for ‘best skin care products.’
(3) In the search results, we will skip all the advertisements and we only look at the organic search results:
Now you need to repeat the steps below for each of the search results.
(4) We will need a tool that can lookup all pages (A) linking to any given page (B):
We will use Ubersuggest, but feel free to use any other SEO tool.
Open Ubersuggest and perform the following steps:
- select on the left side: ‘Backlinks’
- copy & paste the URL from Google in the top search bar
- select URL (instead of the domain)
- press the ‘Search’ button
This is a screenshot:
If you then scroll down, you get a list of pages that are linking to the requested URL:
So, all these pages are linking to the page (B) you requested. And since that page (B) contains similar content as your own page, these are also candidates to link to you.
But, we first do some quality check to see if it is worth it:
- Check the title: if not relevant, you can skip.
- Is the domain score high enough? Skip the links with a lower domain score than your domain (except if you already have a high score).
- Next, open the page and look if it is still relevant
If all checks are positive you can continue to the next step to reach out.
(5) Now, you can reach out to the site’s publisher or the writer of the content. First, you have to find out their contact details:
- Most articles also mention the author: try to find their contact details
- Go to the contact or about pages of the website
Contact them and introduce yourself and your content. Let them know you have useful content that is more detailed. And ask them to link to you.
Only a certain percentage of the people you contact will agree to make a link to you. But if you do this consistently then you will be able to build a good collection of backlinks over time.
Summary
In this hack we illustrated how you can build backlinks by:
- First creating quality content
- Looking for similar content
- Contacting authors & publishers already linking to this similar content
Try it yourself & let us know if it works!