How to Get High-Quality Backlinks That Will Boost Reach & SEO
Dec 28, by Tanya Alvarez
Michael helps businesses grow through search engine optimization, and he’s mastered a system that enables him to help himself and his clients get high-quality backlinks that boost both reach and SEO.
The Fundamentals
One of the primary things that Michael teaches is that SEO is two parts. He compares it to making ice. Two things are required to make ice: water and cold. Without one of those things, it’s simply not going to come together. When it comes to SEO, the two parts of the equation are on-site SEO and off-site SEO. If you’re just doing one, you’re only working on half of the puzzle.
On-page SEO often happens automatically, especially with a platform like Wordpress. The rest is easy. It involves mobile friendliness, site load speed, page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and heading tags. Off-page SEO is a bit more difficult. It involves branded searches, referral traffic, social traffic, and of course: backlinks.
What’s A Good Backlink?
Not all backlinks are created equal, but learning the difference between a high-value one and one that can actually work against you can prove difficult, especially for those new to SEO. Michael says two things make a good backlink.
First, you want your backlinks to come from a source that is well trusted. There are obviously various levels of credibility, but a top ranking domain like the New York Times will have far more strength than one like Joe’s Home Bakery.
The second thing is making sure that the backlink is related to your business’ niche. An irrelevant backlink is not going to help ranking in any way. Anyone can take a second and name ten authorities in their niche right off the top of their head. That’s where you want to aim to get backlinks from.
Finding Backlink Opportunities
If you’re searching for backlink opportunities, you can discover them if you focus on four things:
1. Producing great content
2. Generating buzz
3. Building an audience online
4. Outreach efforts
The first point, producing great content, is also the most important. Your website will be the foundation of your business’ online presence, and it needs to be intuitively structured and filled with valuable, high-quality content that is completely relevant to your niche.
Once you have that great content, you can begin generating buzz. This can be done both online and offline, but the latter is actually much more valuable than many business owners think when they’re in the SEO mindset. There are countless local outlets you can utilize to build buzz for your brand.
One great example Michael gave is of a local kickboxing company that did an event with outside kickboxing. They had their members outside in front of others using kickboxing bags to get people talking and it increased their brand awareness at the same time.
Also, this event created backlinks to the website because the company got only and began spreading the word about the event in local groups, on local websites, and in other pertinent places.
This goes into building an audience online, which can be done in many different ways. Even if you aren’t local, you can use social media and other outlets to get people interested in your product/service and your message. Outreach is the final big point of focus, and it involves actively reaching out to get backlinks. Michael explains that there are a few ways to handle your outreach efforts, with the first method being dubbed the “big platform bribe”.
This is a three-step process that requires you to find a publication you want to be featured in, find a similar article with a topic you can write about, and then reach out to the person who wrote it.
Let them know that you want to collaborate and create an even better piece that will be their best performing piece of content ever. Be sure to mention what you bring to the table.
Getting Backlinks
Michael has quite a few tricks for getting backlinks, but another top one that he explains is the guest post method. He uses this on his own website and says he gets emails on a daily basis.
Basically, put a link on your website with a link to a form allowing people to request a guest post for your blog with an agreement that you’ll get one on their blog too. You’ll be able to manually review the requests and figure out which requests are worth committing to.
Finally, Michael suggests giving backlinks to other blogs in the content you’re already writing. Again, this goes back to creating really high-quality content. Once you have published it, simply reach out to the creators on social media and ask for a link in return.
These methods are all foolproof and effective. If you follow Michael’s advice, you can begin building high-quality backlinks to your website in no time at all.