How To Get More High Quality Backlinks [12 Strategies That Scale]

Are you trying to learn more about backlinks or are trying to get more high quality backlinks to your website?

Every niche has some level of competition, and it turns out that finding and getting high quality backlinks to your website plays an important part in how Google decides how to position your website amongst the millions other websites.

We also live in a society where more and more businesses are turning to the digital space to sell and promote their products, plus, to drive more website traffic to their landing pages and brand.

So this raises the question, the question that you ultimately clicked onto this article for right?

Just how do you go about finding and getting more high quality backlinks to your website then?

That's exactly what I'm going to help you with in this article, are you ready? Let's dive straight in then.

What Are Backlinks In SEO?

Backlinks are links that are created when one website links to another website. You might also refer to these types of links as being "inbound" or "incoming" links, since there's several terms used to describe them.

All links in general are extremely important as they aid Google in identifying exactly what your website and pages are about, without them, Google would have a hard time figuring it out.

There's many best practices when it comes to using backlinks and how to implement them into your website, and you don't just magically grow them without any effort at all.

What Are SEO Backlinks Examples?

When you start a website, you're likely going to have a blog that you're working tirelessly to write and public unique and original content on right?

Over time, you're going to want people to find your content and read it, since that's why you put all that effort into writing content.

When someone finds your content, and they like it, they might decide to link to your article on their website through a hyperlink, or piece of anchor text, maybe even a button.

This process only happens organically, and you only build high quality backlinks this way when you're providing buckets of value - we're not talking about copy and pasting other people's content either, that's not value.

What's The Difference Between An Internal Link And A Backlink?

To your surprise, you might think that internal links and backlinks are the same, well, I'm sorry to break it to you, but there are some differences between them which we can go through right now.

Let's compare each...

Internal links - your content might have links, you might link to another piece of your own content right? This is an internal link, it helps Google find out what your web page or article is about in a more efficient way
Backlinks - these differ from internal links because they're links coming from another website, usually through a piece of text in one of their articles, and these websites typically have a strong DA (Domain Authority)

Are Backlinks Really That Important For SEO?

Yes, they are incredibly important. Backlinks serve as an indicator to Google that your website and web pages are of high quality and are being found by other content creators and businesses online.

Building backlinks, and especially high quality links are also an important factor when it comes to using White Hat SEO methods, there's several different "hats" of SEO, and there's also several illegal ways to build backlinks to your website that aren't advised by Google.

Understanding Google's Ranking Algorithm

If you're really serious about getting high quality backlinks, you're going to need to dive into understanding a bit more about Google's ranking algorithm.

And I've got some statistics from SEO Moz's Biennial Search Ranking Factors which suggests the following breakdown to how Google ranks a website and web page:

23.87% - Trust / Authority of the Host Domain
22.33% - Link Popularity of the Specific Page
20.26% - Anchor Text of External Links to the Page
15.04% - On-Page Keyword Usage
6.91% - Registrations and Hosting data
6.29% - Traffic and CTR (Click Through Rate) data
5.30% - Social Graph Metrics

This data tells us that the top 3 primary ranking factors for Google's algorithm is related around links, backlinks and building authority (which backlinks aid with)

To re enforce my point here, and dive a bit deeper into the importance of building high quality backlinks, CopyBlogger found that domain trust and authority makes up 23.87% of the Google ranking algorithm as well.

So it's clear, links are important and domain authority is also incredibly important, especially if you're looking to build trust with Google and drive more traffic to your website.

12 Strategies For Getting High Quality Backlinks [That Scale]

In the eyes of Google, they put every website and web page through a lot of tests and you can think of it as a points system.

For each goal you miss, a point is going to be deducted, in the end, the total number of points you have will dictate where your website is positioned in the search engine.

Sure, there's some things you can do to prevent losing points, but if you want to build high quality backlinks, you're going to also need to take a look at the Quality Guidelines that Google have issued.

Does your content meet their requirements?

Strategy #1: Write Unique & Original Content

The very first thing that you need to be focussing your efforts on as a website owner, and business owner is providing value to your potential customers and readers of your content.

Even if that individual doesn't buy your product or subscribe to your monthly membership area, they might find the content that you've written to be extremely valuable and useful for them...

If you're able to write high quality content, you're going to build high quality backlinks because your readers will be inclined to link to your website from their website

Think about it for a moment...

If you're able to solve your reader's problems, which is likely why they clicked onto your article, then they're more likely to share that experience with their readers on their website too, either through:

A social share, such as on Facebook or Twitter
By putting a backlink to your website on their site
Maybe they'll email their friends
Or, tell other people in public

All of these are opportunities for you to build trust and credibility as well.

Over 3.6 billion people across the world used social media in 2020, and this number is expected to rise to (and beyond) 4.41 billion people by the year 2025.

That's a lot of people right?

And you probably use social media yourself...

So how do you obtain high quality backlinks from social media? You need to get some kind of social widget plugged into your website, and into your blog articles so that it's easy for your readers to share your content if they find it useful.

AddThis - If you're looking to add social buttons or follow buttons, then I highly recommend integrating this widget into your website
Social Widget For Wordpress - if you've got a WordPress website, you're going to need to take a look at this guide
ShareThis - an easy to use plugin that allows you to integrate social sharing buttons to your website for free

Of course, you can't just go and add social widgets to your blog articles and expect traffic to show up right?

I mean, you can, if you've got website traffic already, but you'll need to implement our essential tips to drive more website traffic to your website as well in order to start building backlinks.

Although social widgets and buttons are great for allowing you to build backlinks on social media, they can also be a credibility killer.

How?

We've got the exact same issue with landing pages, and credibility is great, when done correctly...

Imagine this...

You've got a lot of website traffic landing on your blog article, you might think that you're going to build backlinks and credibility on social media, but in reality, if you've got no social shares yet people might think that your content isn't worth reading...

So this can work against you as well. How do you solve this? You need to build up trust first, with pieces of content that are just giving away value, and you need to grow an initial set of backlinks.

Don't just create a website and start sending traffic to the website that people haven't heard about, start small and build it up.

Strategy #3: Make Your Content Easy To Link To

When was the last time you worked on your website? Today? Yesterday? Or more like months ago?

If it was months ago, when was the last time you checked to make sure that your content is actually easy to link to?

If it's not easy to link to your content, building and getting more backlinks is going to be quite challenging, and actually, making content easier to link to isn't all that hard

Here's some tips to make your content easy to link to...

Provide an element that has your website URL where a user can copy it easily
Add social widgets and sharing buttons
Make sure your article and page headlines are strong
Make your content actionable
Provide answers that promote sharing

If you're able to make it so easy to link to, you're naturally going to be able to build up backlinks with no trouble.

Strategy #4: Build Backlinks By Reaching Out To Others

Here's one of the BEST strategies for building high quality backlinks...

It's going to sound too easy...

You need to create content and where appropriate, link out to other more authoritative websites, this means a website with a high domain authority.

How do you know what websites have a high domain authority? You can use a domain authority checker such as the one from ahrefs.

You can't just add a link to someone's piece of content, reach out to them and expect them to link back to you though, it doesn't really work like that...

You see, someone's only going to link back to you if you word your email in such a way that puts some value in it for them.

Remember, you don't just get backlinks by emailing people, and they don't have to link to you, you're simply asking them to share your content or add a backlink to your article if they find it interesting, and 9 times out of 10, they won't link back to you at all.

But you can increase your chances by:

Being polite and to the point
Don't mention you all the time in the email
Use a template from our article about driving more website traffic

Never expect a backlink when reaching out to someone, if they like the content, they'll link to you.

Strategy #5: Reddit Backlinks And Posts

Back in 2018, Reddit reached 330 million users, and by 2020 grew to over 430 million reddit users, that means that there's likely going to be at least some people on Reddit that will be interested in your website right?

You would think so any way!

I've personally tried Reddit myself to promote the domain monitoring tools that we offer and found incredible results of over 200 page views in a 24 hour period when we had next to zero website traffic the day before...

But here's the thing...

If you're creating posts on Reddit, then you're essentially building up backlinks that have some quality to them given the scale of the platform, you just don't want to go spamming links all over the platform, that'll be the quickest way to get your posts removed and your karma down to zero as well.

I know because that initially happened to me, my account was 3 years old, but I never used Reddit u until recently, in fact, I hated the platform...

But recently, I've been increasing my Karma, commenting on posts and upvoting pieces of content that I find interesting because Reddit can for sure be a great way to drive search traffic to your website as well.

Strategy #6: Create Infographics

Did you know that infographics are a key component of driving traffic to your brand? And what does traffic mean?

It means you're more likely to get a backlink to your infographic since they're great for social sharing.

If somebody finds an infographic that they like, they're probably also going to download it, especially if it looks good, so this is also an opportunity to get your website URL onto that infographic in some way as some kind of your own watermark.

Strategy #7: Replicate Competitor's Backlinks

Okay, so when I tell you to replicate the backlinks that your competitors are doing, I don't mean go and COPY them!

Because this is what most online businesses owners will want to do and it's what other content creators are likely going to want to do as well.

Don't be the person to simply duplicate their content and add links.

Okay, so what do I actually mean here then...

Instead, what you're going to want to do is use a tool to figure out the types of links that your competitors are linking to, and the reason for this is that your competitors have already built up the domain authority from those competitor links right?

You can use a tool such as Link Miner by Mangools which will allow you to dive into some deep analysis of your competitor websites and figure out what high quality backlinks they've got and who they're linking to.

It's a paid product, but extremely worth the investment in my opinion considering I've used their free trial of some of their other products and they are incredibly easy to use.

Strategy #8: Guest Blogging

A great way to create backlinks to your website and earn both:

Residual website traffic
Domain authority

Guest blogging can sometimes be overlooked by some content marketers looking to build more backlinks for their website, are you one of them?

As described above, there's really two key areas to why this works...

Residual website backlinks and traffic

When you guest blog, you're likely going to get a surge of people viewing that piece of content when it's first launched, but gradually, over time the potential for you to receive both backlinks and website traffic from guest blogging will decline as the content ages...

You might not be able to update that piece of content again depending on who you're guest blogging with, but you should still be able to get some traffic.

Authority from the domain you guest blogged on

One of the advantages of guest blogging and backlinks, is that the links back to your website when you guest blog are going to be coming from (hopefully) a domain that's got more domain authority than yours...

After all, that's likely one of the reasons that you wanted to guest blog right? To get more backlinks to your website.

Strategy #9: Build Your SEO and Page Ranking First

How many times have you searched on Google for something only to find the same results keep coming up time and time again from the same website?

Literally, you feel that you can't find articles from any website but one - it sounds silly, but it's actually in your favour to build your SEO and page ranking first before attempting to get more high quality backlinks...

Sure, you can of course get high quality backlinks beforehand since that's a big part of ranking in the search engine any way and will end up providing a tonne of value, but really, you need to find some time to improve your SEO score of your site.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) takes a really long time, it doesn't start to yield results overnight, and in fact can take many years to start yielding some fantastic results.

How Long Does SEO Take?

If you've got a few backlinks on your website from social media, and have been working tirelessly to create content for your website, you should start to see results after about 4 to 6 months.

But this time frame is an absolute minimum, in reality, it's going to take you 18 to 24 months if you keep at it.

Backlinks Help Drive More Traffic With SEO

Backlinks are a type of off-page ranking factor that will help drive more traffic to your website, but not just any traffic...

You see, if you've built up high quality backlinks that naturally work with your niche, and with the keywords your website has been targeting, your backlinks are going to help drive high quality, targeted traffic to your website and landing pages.

Which in turn, has several benefits:

You'll generate more leads
You'll have a higher conversion rate
More social shares
More people opting in to your email list
Product sales and promotions

All of which are great for your business of course.

Strategy #10: Start Your Own Podcast

Did you know that as of the year 2021 there are currently over 850,000 active podcasts and over 30 million podcast episodes?

That means there's a lot of listeners and a booming market for building your brand on these channels right?

The same source found that more than 50% of all US consumers that were above the age of 12 listened to podcasts, and the average number of shows listened to per week is seven.

You might be wondering then...

If we're talking about building high quality backlinks to your website, how a podcast can help right?

People learn in different ways, some prefer to read, some prefer to watch a video, whilst others might be better off listening to audio, and the great thing about listening to audio is that we can do this wherever we are...

Whilst doing household chores, whilst commuting to and from work, or maybe even just whilst we're out on the morning jog.

That means, not only can you start a podcast to share your website and domain name, you can add your website as a link in the show notes, which, you guessed it...

That's a backlink to your website!

Strategy #11: Submit Your Website To CSS Galleries

This is a great strategy for building backlinks, but might come at a small expense, CSS galleries are perfect because it allows other people such as website developers and website designers to visually see your website, and they might decide to link to you.

Actually, with that in mind, just simply adding a link to your website on these galleries is a backlink in itself.

There are many different CSS galleries that you can submit your website to in order to get a link back to your website, here's a few:

If I think of any more, I'll for sure come back and add some more.

I personally use website inspiration sites in order to help build out new features, and that could be another avenue and opportunity for you even if you don't want to add links to the CSS galleries.

Strategy #12: Repurpose Your Old Content On Quora Spaces

Chances are, if you've ever searched for a "How To" question or a "Why" question you would've come across at least one Quora article, and that's because there's tonnes of links and questions answered on there.

But, did you know you can also use Quora for content marketing as well?

That's right, you can take your older content, and repurpose it on here, you'll want to take some of your older content because you need to give your website's new content time to rank and work its way through the ranking process so that it doesn't get flagged as being duplicate content from another website.

Conclusion

Ultimately, you should be on the path to building more backlinks in order to improve your SEO score, because it's your SEO score that matters at the end of the day!

I hope you found this article useful and full of useful information. If you did, feel free to share it with others and feel free to check out some of our other content!

How To Get More High Quality Backlinks [12 Strategies That Scale]