5 Tips That Must Be Part Of Your Backlink Strategy

January 31, 2019 James McMinn

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Building backlinks is one of the more “ancient” but still relevant and effective SEO tactics. It’s also one of the best ways to increase organic traffic. But certain caution is advised. Links are one of the more crucial parts of how Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines resolve how trustworthy your website is. Soon you will learn 5 tips that must be part of your backlink strategy.

Each link represents a sort of recommendation, so more links going towards a certain website, the more credible and better-ranked that website is. If another website is citing you the source or directing its users away from their own website in favor of yours, then there must be something of value there. Another way if you have a budget is to assign this job to a link service company like OutreachMama that will do that work for you and help you gain more organic traffic and higher rankings.

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Of course, some SEOs and website owners tried to stack the deck and rig the system by amassing links through “black hat” and “grey hat” tactics. Google went to fight these methods and most of Google’s updates have been about banishing these suspicious link building methods. By now we have reached a time where only limited “white hat” link building tactics still work. With some work and sweat it is still possible to earn valid links, and through them boost ranking and credibility.

Without further ado, here are 5 tips that must be part of your backlink strategy.

Quantity Versus Quality

Keep the focus on quality instead of quantity. Even though the total number of unique referring domains is correlated with the high ranking, an approach where more is better isn’t suggested. Higher ranking and credibility are only achievable with links coming from trustworthy and authoritative websites.

A bigger number of links coming from low-quality sites can cause damage because, since 2012, Google started to punish site owners for using link schemes to rig the system. This included selling and purchasing links, a massive exchange of links, using automated programs to build links, and “article marketing” campaigns.

Manual penalties followed, in which a human operator reviews and decides whether a site is violating Google’s guidelines. Even though these penalties still exist today, Google’s algorithm has become much subtler at spotting link practices that are unethical.

Also, don’t spam blogs with comments linking to your site – nobody likes when you do this anyway.

Verifying A Domain Authority

Domain authority is a quantifiable metric of a website’s power or authority. It’s based upon several factors, like link data, popularity, age, and size that when calculated all together show the overall strength of a website and how will it rank in the search engines.

To validate your website’s domain authority, you can use different applications. Some of them are:

For the last one, just enter your web address, deal with the CAPTCHA (if you aren’t a robot from outer space) and press “Perform check”.

Then you’ll be able to see the domain authority score and the quantity of total external links directing towards it. While earning more links, occasionally check this metric so you can measure the impact your efforts have on domain authority.

Checking Backlinks

For this use Google Search Console. Start with logging into Google Webmaster tools and find your domain. After this you will be able to see search traffic, how much up and down it goes and locations of backlink references. Not every single link is listed here, but the majority will be.

Search Operator Query

One more path to finding backlink opportunities. A lot of marketers have used this to search for websites where they can post articles or content for comment opportunities, but this method also comes with some other benefits.

For instance, let’s imagine you have written a post about digital marketing and you want to find some friendly publishers, a search operator query that will help you with this would go like this “digital marketing intitle:“write for us” inurl:“write-for-us””.

Google will then list all the websites that would accept such content, and you can choose which site you want your content submitted to. This search operator query will uncover so-called “write for us” pages in your niche – those created by many sites when they’re actively seeking guest contributions.

You can also change the search query and use different keywords, for example:
inurl:guest-post
inurl:guest-contributor-guidelines
“contribute to”
“write for me”
“become a contributor”
“guest post guidelines”

Google has a limit on the number of search operator queries that can be done in succession before you must complete a captcha. This is a crucial reason why prospecting can be a tiresome and complicated process. You can do this process automatically and save a lot of time and effort if you are using link-building tools.

Search operator queries are thus effective at getting your content on relevant websites that have high authority. Be meticulous and selective when choosing where you wish to post, quality over quantity is again the law here.

Submitting Photos

One part of a good backlink strategy can be submitting your photos to stock photography websites and just asking for some credit in return. Depending on the quality of the photos, there will be the potential to get traction without any bad effects, since it’s a free promotion.

Once you find the website where you will be submitting, make the photo shareable by making an embedded code. You can find different websites where you can easily create an embed code that’s ready to use.