6 of The Most Effective Tactics For Earning High-Quality Links

The prophets of SEO doom can say whatever they want, but backlinks are here to stay. Unless Google and the other search engines turn belly up and fade into oblivion, link-building will continue to be a crucial part of any SEO strategy.

Your website will always need to be seen by the search engines as valuable to its users, and there’s no better way of letting Google et al. see that value than getting links pointing to your site from other websites. With backlinks, the search engines will conclude that your site has enough authority to recommend it to its users through the search engine results pages or SERPs, which will eventually bring in more traffic, help you generate leads, and get conversions.

While getting backlinks is good, their quality may vary widely. You could get hundreds of backlinks from other legitimate but poorly-performing sites, but none of them will compare to a single, high-quality backlink from popular sites whose levels of traffic and authority are to die for.

Getting a backlink from a website is hard enough, but getting one with high quality from an authority website is even harder. However, it is very doable. Here are some tips that may help you earn high-quality links.

1) Create infographics

Here’s a question for you: If you were asked to choose between a 4,000-word article and an infographic on the same subject matter, which one would you instinctively pick? Unless you have a combination of too much time on your hands and an incredibly passionate love for the written word, you would, of course, go with the infographic. Countless other Internet users will do the same thing.

Infographics get a lot of engagement and have a higher likelihood of getting shared. When they get shared, people will always put the source link—your link—and your engagement will rise as well. If your infographic becomes viral, prepare for a deluge of traffic to your site, thanks to all those backlinks.

2) Write great content

Of course, your site can’t be all infographic, so you will need actually to write content. If your writing is terrible, do you really think people will link to it? Of course not. No person in his or her right mind would share—and link to—laughable web content, unless as a joke.

You can be an SEO genius, yet you will fall extremely short of your goals if your content is atrocious, irrelevant, and completely useless to the reader. Get a good writer so people would think your site is worth linking to and sharing.

If you are looking for relevant content ideas, get your team to suggest them as well. After all, content is not only essential for your sales funnel, but for your whole company’s hourglass.

3) Do local SEO

Don’t look now, but local SEO has become a primary source of high-quality backlinks. If you think the only backlinks you can get from local SEO are from Google+ profiles or citation listings, think again.

You can join industry associations relevant to your niche. Who knows, you might win local awards and therefore elevate your business’ profile. Partnering with local charities would also be a good idea, as their sites will typically reward benefactors with feature articles and even links to your own website. Being chummy with local media would also help. Stories about your business could give you free publicity, and just maybe, a link to your own business.

4) Prospect for broken links

Admittedly, scanning popular websites or blogs for broken links sounds like a lot of work. Broken link prospecting, however, is probably the simplest way to acquire backlinks. Once you find broken links, you just email the owner of the website, inform him or her about the broken link, and recommend one of your own pages as a substitute. If you’re lucky, that webmaster will be thankful for your information and accept your link as a replacement. To avoid being seen as too greedy, you might want to recommend links from other sites as well.

5) Appeal to the egos of industry influencers

Some people have established themselves as primary influencers in any given industry, and it would be wise for you to write flattering features about them. Once they get wind of your ego bait post, they might like it enough to share it on his or her own blog or website. Ego bait posts, in any case, are win-win propositions. You could get a high-quality backlink, and the influencer gains a new audience.

6) Write guest posts

For years, people have been saying that guest posting doesn’t work anymore, that it’s dead. The many websites publishing posts from guest bloggers, however, are effectively putting that idea to rest. The value of guest posting remains undiminished, with countless bloggers getting—and giving—lots of link love to fellow bloggers in the industry. However, it’s still essential that your content is of high-quality as well.

In Conclusion

Getting high-quality links is not easy, but SEO strategy dictates that it must be done. Backlinks have been—and will always be—one of the most effective ways of achieving success with the search engines, after all.

If you want your site to succeed, then quality link-building should be at the top of your list of priorities. Hopefully, the tips above would help you get started.