7 Ways to Get Backlinks to Boost Your Traffic

Are you tired of thinking that whenever you just write enough content, people will start putting tons of links back to you?

Of course, in the long run, people will start linking back to your content, but not everyone wants to wait that long.

We all know that quality backlinks can do wonders to improve your search engine rankings and your performance. There is tons of great content available online to show you different tactics.

So what if you don’t want to wait months or maybe even years? How do you proactively get backlinks without spending long hours? In this post, we would like to share some tactics that can help you, so you can start seeing an increase in organic traffic coming toward your website.

Backlink Tip #1 Help A Reporter Out

Did you hear about HARO yet? In case you missed out, HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out. It’s a website journalists go to when they need help writing an article.

The journalists go to HARO to post a question, and if you can help them answer their questions, you can get some free press. There are lots of big international websites like entrepreneur.com, inc.com, etc., that are using HARO. This makes HARO a great place to get some high-quality backlinks to your website.

It won’t result in tons of backlinks to your website, but the links you get will help you drive traffic because these are highly profiled and authoritative sites.

To be able to get these questions and start helping a reporter out, all you have to do is signup, select which categories are categories you know about, and get their daily emails from reporters. Then spend half an hour to an hour each week answering questions and start getting those high-quality links back in your direction.

Backlink Tip #2 Using Guest posts

A bit in the same way as HARO can get you featured on other websites; another great way is by writing guest posts. Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to reach new audiences. If you publish articles on other websites, you’ll get your content in front of new readers and win more exposure. Next to the added benefit of having links back to your website, you will increase your online reputation and social media following.

There are many different ways to find existing websites that accept guest postings. The two most common and easiest ways are:

• Using Google Search, by using Google search for one of the following search queries, it will immediately give you back a list of websites accepting guest writers. Try one of the following:
  • your keyword(s) + inurl:write-for-us
  • your keyword(s) + guest-posts
  • your keyword(s) + inurl:guest-post-guidelines
  • your keyword(s) + become a contributor
  • your keyword(s) + bloggers wanted
  • your keyword(s) + submit an article
  • your keyword(s) + want to write for
  • your keyword(s) + contribute
  • your keyword(s) + become an author
  • your keyword(s) + guest post by
  • your keyword(s) + now accepting guest posts
• Using social media. Twitter search is powerful for this one. By simply searching for “guest post”, “guest article”, or “guest author”, you can find websites that are accepting guest writers.

Backlink Tip #3 The broken link-building method

Over the years, websites have come and gone. As a webmaster, it can become a challenging task to keep checking your pages to see if all the links you ever included in your articles are still working and up-2-date.

This third tip involves you contacting the webmaster of a website to report broken links on his or her website. At the same time, you can recommend other websites to replace the broken links. (see what we are doing here?) Of course, when you suggest a replacement, this will be a link to your website. Since you’re helping out this webmaster, they are usually more than happy to replace the broken link with the one you supplied because you’re doing them a great favor.

So how do you find websites with broken links? Again we start with Google Search for this one. If you search for one of the following:

• your keyword(s) + links
• your keyword(s) + resources
• your keyword(s) inurl:links

For example, in our case, we would search for “WordPress plugins resources”. Of course, it would be a lot of work to check out all the links on the websites you find manually. Thankfully, there is this amazing Chrome extension called ‘Check My Links” or Link Analyzer when you’re using Firefox. Using these plugins, you can easily find out any broken link.

You’ve found some links that are not working anymore? Time to reach out to the webmaster. Be sure always to be friendly and introduce yourself. Tell him that you find pages or resources with broken links, and try to make it as easy as possible for him or her to provide the exact location of the broken link so they can easily find it. Of course, don’t forget to include some alternatives, including your link. The key here is to be helpful.

Backlink Tip #4 Promote your content

The moment you hit publish on a piece of content, you need to start promoting it. Great content will not get you many backlinks just by itself unless you know how to give it that little bit of extra boost.

Instead of using the different social channels and all the other forms we talked about last time, let’s use one of our favorite tools, which we’ve been using in this post a lot: Google. For this tip, we will search for “keyword(s) + roundup”. And then, from the drop-down menu in Google, choose “Past week” or “Past month” to get only recent results.

When looking through the different results in Google, you can find websites recently doing a roundup of content relevant to your keyword. The next step is contacting the authors of these articles. Of course, when contacting the author of these articles, don’t forget to write an introduction to your website and send a link to one of your best tutorials or guides. You’ve got a good chance that they will like your article and they will include you in their next roundup. Every writer always looks for great content, and you’ve just made their lives easier.

Backlink Tip #5 Create a unique and helpful tool that comes in handy for your industry

Ali Mese wrote a brilliant piece about this on Medium called “Side Project Marketing Is the New King.” He writes about how one small side project (Unsplash) saved the startup Crew from falling under.

So why, if you’re good at the building stuff, why not use your HTML or programming skills (or that of your founders) to create a small tool that can be helpful and can earn you tons of organic backlinks?

For example, the amazing folks over at CoSchedule created this helpful tool, which we use a lot here to analyze our headlines, called “Headline Analyser.” If you look at the Alexa website ranking, it has more than 3K backlinks! (and another one just now). This kind of tool on your website can help to get links back when authors write about a related topic.

Backlink Tip #6 Create infographics

In today’s visual world, infographics are one of the most popular methods to help you bring traffic to your website and gain valuable backlinks. One of the big reasons why infographics are so popular it because it help people to understand a subject quickly. Next to that, it makes sharing of the content more likely since everyone loves visual data, right?

Choose the content you want to share via an infographic carefully. Your infographics should include a unique and interesting story for your audience. Look at current trending topics, or maybe you can convert one of your top-performing posts into a more easily digestible format.

Just because you don’t have graphic skills yourself doesn’t mean it should stop you from creating infographics. By looking on platforms like Dribble, or Fiverr, you can easily find good quality designers who can create your infographics. Don’t try to go cheap, though; you want some good quality to help increase the viral possibility and earn even more backlinks.

Once the infographic is ready, you need to make it easy for everyone to share the infographic. The great folks behind Siege Media created an Embed Code Generator to do the heavy work for you on this one. (remember tip 5 with the helpful tool)

Backlink Tip #7 Product Reviews

This last tip can be viewed in two different ways. The first one relates to products you’re using yourself at your company.

List any of the services or products you acquired recently and are working with. Especially smaller companies or startups are always on the lookout for good testimonials to help them get better social proofing of their product. As long as you are a customer of their product so you can write a meaningful review, there’s a high possibility you can get a link back in exchange for a testimonial.

The second way you can use product reviews for getting backlinks is the other way around. If you do a Google search for “inurl:reviews [your keyword(s)]” or even “inurl:reviews [your industry]“. With this search, you can specifically identify bloggers and websites with a track record of writing product reviews related to your business. Once you’ve identified a list of potential websites to reach out to, write a friendly email to the owners of the website and ask them if they want to review your product or service. The extra bonus benefit is that you can use those reviews again on your website as social proof of your awesome product!

Over to you

So that’s it—seven easy-to-implement strategies to get more backlinks to your website. Creating a good product or service or writing great content will not guarantee that people will find and link to you. If you want to generate traffic, you’ve got to be proactive.

By implementing one or more of the above tips, you will notice that you will end up with more backlinks. More backlinks will eventually result in more search traffic and an increase in referral traffic. We would love to hear what strategies you’re using for getting more backlinks naturally, so please leave a comment talking about your backlinks-building strategies below!