For anyone who’s ever tried to build backlinks for their website, you know it’s very time-consuming work when done the right way. Sure you can go on Fiverr and pay someone to spam blog comment sections to get “backlinks,” but that’s not going to help you in your SEO strategy in the long run.
You want to build highly credible, authentic backlinks from reliable sources. You want your backlinks to be high-quality because the more credible each of these links are, the more likely they are to actually help your website out .
You might be asking the questions of, “Can’t I get a bunch of easy, less credible links instead and have the same impact?” No, you actually can’t. A link building strategy that goes after less credible links can be viewed in Google’s eyes as “spammy” and can actually end up doing more harm than good. So much so, that there are companies that specialize in removing these types of backlinks. We get that it can sound a bit confusing, but let’s dive in!
What is link building?
A link is exactly what it sounds like. When a link to your website (socialsurgemarketing.com) is placed on another website, that qualifies as a backlink.
A good link building strategy includes increasing the quantity and quality of inbound links to your website. The goal of doing this is to gain traffic from these links on other websites (or referral traffic), increase your domain authority, and increase your search engine rankings.
Think of each inbound link as a thumbs up on your website.
What is the difference between inbound links and backlinks?
Backlinks and inbound links are actually the same things. Inbound links are referral links from other websites pointing to any area of your website. These backlinks can point to your homepage, a service page, an image on your website, and everything in between.
There is a lot more to backlinks and link building in general, and that’s why we dedicated an entire chapter of our Beginner’s Guide to SEO to Link Building. We recommend reading that chapter if you’d like to learn more.
Inbound Link Building Strategies
There are a lot of strategies on how to get inbound links to your website. The key here is to make sure to stay away from buying links and to spend more time on building relationships and writing good content that is sharable.
Start a blog & update regularly
Consistently creating blogs that people want to naturally link to is one of the most beneficial ways to get more inbound links to your website. Remember to link to other blogs on your blog as well, and they are much more likely to link back!
Write guest blog posts
Maybe you don’t have time to create a blog and update it regularly. That’s fine! Guest blogging is a great way to showcase your knowledge to someone else’s audience and gain an inbound link in the process. Typically when you write a guest blog post, they are willing to link back to your site.
Get involved in your community
Volunteering to talk at events, sponsor events, join local chambers, and just becoming involved can be beneficial on how to get more inbound links to your website as well. This one is certainly one of the most time-consuming that we’ll mention, and they won’t always give you links, but these types of inbound links can be incredibly beneficial and the residual effects you gain in the process are well worth the effort. Plus the added benefit of getting your business exposure in other ways isn’t bad either!
Create free & sharable resources
There are so many beneficial resources you can build such as free tools, sharable templates, infographics, or any other form of visual content that provides people with helpful material. Once someone finds a resource helpful, they’re much more likely to share the content with others.
Sometimes these resources can be a lot of work, but they’ll continue to pay you dividends long after they’re published. An example of an SEO resource that is shareable is our entire Beginner’s guide to SEO. We’ve broken it down into chapters that are able to be shared for more specific information too, such as our Link Building chapter that goes over a lot of the best practices and things to avoid when it comes to learning how to get inbound links to your website.
Partner with companies that compliment you
A perfect example of this is our friends over at Rebel Squid Agency. They are strictly a graphic design agency, and graphic design is something we don’t touch here at SocialSurge. While some people might see this relationship as competition since they’re technically a “marketing agency,” we don’t.
There are so many different needs in the marketing space that we’re able to give them business whenever someone needs a logo created, for example. Since we don’t design logos, the relationship between Rebel Squid and us is a win-win. Bonus: we just gave them an inbound link above!
Search for your competitors’ backlinks
When you can identify how and where your competitors are getting backlinks, you’ll be able to identify potential opportunities for yourself. For example, if your competitors are all listing on a directory you’ve never heard about, chances are that you’ll be able to receive a backlink from them too! Here is a guide we wrote on how to research backlinks for your own website or your competitors’ website too.
While there are a lot of ways to generate inbound links, the strategies above are what we’ve found the best and most effective to start out your link building process! If there are any other ways you link to build links, start a conversation with us and we’ll be sure to add your input to this article and give a backlink to help you start your link building journey!