Building Backlinks To Increase Website Traffic The Right Way

How does Google determine which website to rank # 1, 2 and 3?  The answer is SEO (search engine optimization), but it’s much more in depth than that. Google has over 200 ranking factors that they use to determine where a website will rank on their search engines.

One of the strongest factors that affect rankings is backlinks. In the simplest of explanations, backlinks refer to one website linking to another website through a link. Think of it as votes; the more links your website has, the higher your going to rank. On top of that, not all links are created equal.

A quality link from as CNN is much more powerful than a link from “Dan’s News” Google is aware of the difficulty of acquiring a link from CNN which is why they more valuer to it.  You also need to make sure that the backlink you acquire relates to your industry, along with having a high domain authority.

So the question is, how do you find high-quality backlinks that relate to your industry? Below we outline some of the most powerful strategies to acquire backlinks in 2019.

Broken Link building is a classic link building strategy that can greatly increase your links to your website. Unlike most pitches that just send generic strategies such as, “Can I have a link to your website please”, which offer zero value, this strategy actually provides value to someone’s website and only then will you ask for a link.

There are many tools out there that can help find broken links but one of my favorites is a chrome extension tool called “check my links”. Check my links is a free Google Chrome tool that is able to find links on any website.

You want to make sure that the website your trying to link to is relevant to your specific industry and the keywords you are targeting (as well as having a high page authority/domain authority)

Doing a simple Google search with your related keywords will give you some great results.  We can also assume that most of these sites have high value since they are appearing on the first page of Google.

Visit some of the pages you’re interested in lining to and simply run the “check my link tool” once you have arrived. This will reveal all the broken links on that page. Then, once you have your broken links, reach out to the website’s owners (either through email or if your bold enough, try calling them); let them know about the broken link and suggest providing them your content/website as a replacement

As you can see, the more you personalize your email, the higher the chance of getting a response back.  Hopefully, when they send you an email back, you can then reply by sending an email with the broken link and requesting that they consider mentioning your website or article you have written) as a replacement for the broken link.

A big shout out to Brian Dean, a pioneer in the link building world for this strategy. Think of link roundups as “daily, weekly, or even monthly blog posts that curate and link to outstanding content” – Brian Dean.

For instance, if you’re in the healthy food industry, you would go to Google and write:

“vegan” +”link roundup”

(hint): To make sure your search results are still relevant, click on the tools tab under the search bar and change the timeframe to the past month)

This approach should help you find tons of high-quality roundups. After going over your results, pick a few websites that relate to your needs and now the real fun part begins.

Here is an email template that you can use for your link building roundup strategy. You want to send this email to the person running the website roundup. The goal is never to come off pushy or insistent but rather helpful. It’s a win-win situation for both parties involved.  If you’re lucky, you’ll get a reply back saying that they would love to link your content to their site and “presto”, you have just got yourself a shiny new link.

Here’s the honest truth, if your industry is highly competitive, you need to build links from authoritative news sites and blogs within your industry if you want to reach the first page of Google.

Rest assured that’s this isn’t as difficult as it might sound. Thanks to new tools and websites such as Haro, you can connect with influencers in no time. Haro is a free service that allows you to connect with a journalist who is looking for someone with expertise in a specific field to write a story about and in return will provide a link to your website. Think of Haro as a dating site for public relations.

This strategy defiantly takes time but, in my experience, it’s definitely worth it to get quality backlinks related to your industry.

Once you sign up, you will get up to 3 emails a day from reports or bloggers looking for sources related to your business.

If you find a request that sounds like a good fit, send them your pitch. For instance, we have a client that specializes in creating unique plant pots. We reached out to reporters and bloggers on the site and came across someone asking about the difference between “pots” and “planters”. It’s as easy as that but only if you know where to search and how to approach them.

If your lucky, you’ll get an awesome backlink when the bloggers write the report that you were a part of.

A few days ago, I was doing some competitive analysis for one of our clients and I noticed that they were getting tons of backlinks from podcasts related to their niche. So, I suggested to my client that they begin appearing on as many podcasts as they can in order to receive new backlinks. Not only does this create authority for your service or product but it also helps your brand awareness in the process.

In no time, you’ll be amazed at the amount of traffic you’ll generate to your website as well as acquiring tons of high-quality backlinks.

Its no secret that educational (.edu) websites are far more powerful than a traditional .com site when looking for backlinks.

But how can you actually get a University site to link to you?

Here’s the deal; most universities have resource pages that are dedicated to providing content for students and facility in various areas.  Let’s say you have a website related to nutrition.

What you want to do is find resource pages that relate to your product and this can be done by searching specific search strings into Google:

Site:.edu “your keyword”

Site:.edu “your keyword” + “resources”

Site:.edu “your keyword” + inurl:links

Site:.edu “your keyword” + other sites

However, you should know that only 5% of the websites you reach out to will add your link. With that said, the good news is that just 1 link from an established university resource page will make a huge difference in your Google rankings.

Companies come and go like the breeze. As such, they leave behind a pile of backlinks. This means that they have tons of pages that are simply not working anymore. (pages that many websites were stilling linking to)

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do this but if you read up on your industry, you have come across businesses that for one reason or another are shutting down. This presents a unique opportunity for you. Think of their website as a fire sale, and the backlinks are the main prize.

To do this, you need a powerful SEO tool such as Ahref. Ahref allows you to see what websites a relinking to specific pages. With that in mind, you can then email to every website that links to those outdated pages to let them know the problem