The Complete SEO Strategy for Backlinking

Did you know that, according to Search Engine Journal, backlinks are an important part of SEO? Additionally, when these backlinks are high quality, they can have an impressive effect on your SEO, making it easier for your potential clients to come across your website.

Considering this, you might be wondering how to create an SEO strategy for backlinking for your website. However, if you aren’t sure how to get started, this can be stressful. How do you be sure you’re doing it right?

Fortunately, in this article, we’ll review everything you need to know about creating an SEO strategy for backlinking.

Finally, you can strengthen your SEO even more with this strategy, getting more website traffic and ultimately more customers. Read on to learn more.

What Are Backlinks?

Before we go into how to create an SEO strategy for backlinking, we’ll review what backlinks are. Backlinks—also known as one-way links, incoming links, or inbound links—are links that appear on one website’s page that link to another website’s page.

For example, say you create a blog post as part of your content strategy. When you do this, you might link to a statistic or study you found regarding the topic of your blog post.

When you do this, you’re creating a backlink to that website.

Turn this situation around, where someone else is creating a backlink that links to your website, and your SEO strategy will benefit. Why? We’ll cover that now.

Why Backlinks Are an Important Part of Your SEO Strategy

Think about it this way. Let’s say that you just released a study regarding something many other websites could use as a source. For example, maybe this study is about how much time people have been spending on their phones so far in 2022.

Many websites writing blog posts about cell phones, cell phone usage, and even the importance of mobile web design might link back to your website.

As you can imagine, if this happens to a large extent, and often, you’ll start to be considered an authority on the subject. Additionally, if the websites that link back to you are high-quality websites, this is good for your authority, too.

After all, imagine if an official government organization were to link back to you. This would mean the information you’re releasing is authoritative and worthy of trust.

Because of what strong backlinks mean in this way, they demonstrate that your website has value and credibility. These backlinks work like votes from other websites purporting this.

For this reason, search engine algorithms (Google’s, for example) use the number of backlink votes you’ve received as key ranking signals. So if you have high-quality backlinks, your SEO will be impacted positively.

How to Create Your SEO Strategy for Backlinking

Now that you understand how relevant this strategy is to SEO, we’ll review how you can create an effective backlinking strategy. First, we’ll review practices related to avoiding Blackhat SEO. When you engage in this type of SEO, you’re harming your website when trying to get backlinks.

Avoiding BlackHat SEO

Why does this occur? This is because some backlinks aren’t effective and can even be harmful. To ensure that you don’t engage in Blackhat SEO, you should follow strategies such as knowing the difference between no-follow and follow links, looking for high-authority domains, and more.

Knowing the Difference Between No-Follow and Follow Links

A no-follow link does not pass on link equity or link-juice. A follow link, on the other hand, does. If possible, make sure that your backlinks are follow links. Keep in mind, however, that there is an exception to this rule.

If there’s a high-quality website that is backlinking back to your website, then you can still benefit from no-follow links from them.

This said, follow backlinks are still more effective and desirable. So the best possible combination is a follow backlink from a high-quality website.

Looking for High-Authority Domains

When avoiding Blackhat SEO, you must focus on high-authority domains. They have more equity. So check that your backlinks are coming from these types of domains. It’s also important to check whether the domain authority is spam.

A spam website, as you can imagine, does not have high authority, so it’s something you should avoid so that you aren’t practicing Blackhat SEO.

Thinking About Relevance

These days, search engine algorithms are becoming smarter than ever. For this reason, simply having a backlink isn’t going to cut it. Backlinks must be relevant. For example, say you run a company that sells dog products.

If there’s a backlink linking to your website that’s in an entirely different industry, like the IT industry, it isn’t going to be as powerful.

More relevant backlinks will be packing more of a punch in terms of link juice. In the example we’ve just used, you’d want many of the backlinks to your website to appear on websites within the dog industry.

Link Location

Something else that will impact your SEO is where the backlink is located on the webpage leading to your website through the link. If it’s a footer link, for example, it won’t be as effective as a link that’s placed within the post’s body.

Additionally, if there’s a large number of links on the webpage, your backlink will be less powerful. In this case, it will also be challenging for readers to find your link.

Anchor Text

Another factor that will make a difference is what anchor text your backlink is linked to. Anchor text is the character or word upon which the backlink is placed. A more specific anchor text, like “powerful SEO strategies” is more efficient than one like, “click on this link.”

Additional Steps for Creating Your SEO Strategy for Backlinking

Now that we’ve reviewed some of the best ways to ensure that your backlinks are appearing on high-quality websites that will boost your SEO, instead of practicing Blackhat SEO, we’ll review some additional steps you can take to create your SEO strategy for backlinking.

Broken Link-Building

When you use this method, you look for broken links on a webpage. Then, you get in touch with the webmaster about this. You mention to them that the link is broken, and you provide alternatives. In this list of alternatives, you’ll include a link on your website.

Because you’re helping the webmaster out when you do this, they’ll be more inclined to use the backlink you’ve provided them with that links to your website.

To implement this step, you should find websites (within your niche) that have resource pages.

Search for backlinks that are relevant to what you publish and link with keywords that are relevant to the link you include. Then, you can identify the ones that are broken.

Of course, carrying out this step in this way could be quite time-consuming. Fortunately, you can use a plugin like Check My Links to search for broken links.

Publishing Infographics

Another step you can take to get more backlinks to your website is by publishing infographics that would be useful to others publishing posts related to the information you’re providing. However, when you create these infographics, you need to make them appealing.

To do this, ensure that they’re informative, original, and clear. Additionally, if they tell a story, this will be helpful.

Don’t have the design skills needed to create a stunning infographic? Not to worry. You can always hire a freelancer through a platform like Dribble to create it for you.

Another pro tip when using this strategy? If you find other websites where people have linked to infographics like yours in the past, you could send them yours and ask for them to create a backlink with it to your website.

Guest Posting

When you create a guest post, you’re publishing a post by yourself on another website that’s popular. Basically, you’re a guest writer who’s writing something for this website. There are many benefits to using this strategy.

First of all, of course, you can backlink to your website when you complete a guest post. Because the website you’ve posted on is popular, this will make the backlink quite powerful.

Additionally, you’ll get a large amount of new exposure because of all the new readers you can potentially reach through the guest post.

In addition to boosting your reputation online, this could make it more likely that you’d end up having even more backlinks.

To find places to post your guest posts, look for websites in your industry that are popular. Another option is to seek out influencers in your field who are interested in having guest posts published.

Connecting With Journalists

When a journalist is working on an article, they’ll often search for quotations from experts in the industry or field they’re writing about. If you were to give them a quotation that would be useful to them, they could easily put a backlink in the article to a page on your website.

When you use this method, make sure that you only send quotations on subjects that you’re an expert on or know about a lot.

Remember that when you’re getting in touch with journalists to use a sweet, short pitch that demonstrates how you can help them.

If you aren’t sure how to get started, don’t worry. There’s a website, Help A Reporter, where you can connect directly with journalists. To learn more about the process, get more information here.

Interviews

Another way to build up backlinks to your website is by getting interviewed by professionals in your industry. If this interview appears in a blog post on a popular industry website, you can easily have the interviewer post a link to your website in the interview.

To complete this method, we recommend getting in touch with webmasters, authors, and journalists who are active in your industry. It’s also smart to have the interview appear on a high-quality, authoritative website.

This way, the backlink linking to your website will be more powerful. Additionally, this will give you exposure to more readers and potentially more backlinks.

Search for New Websites

While it’s great to stay in touch with the webmasters who’ve already linked to your website, the more backlinks appear in one website, your backlinks leading to your website will actually start to become less powerful. It becomes a situation with diminishing returns.

For this reason, as you start to build up your SEO strategy for backlinking, it’s important to keep reaching out to new people and webmasters.

This way, you can have a large variety of backlinks appearing throughout the Internet. This will be far more effective than having them appear regularly on only a few websites.

Need More Information?

Now that we’ve reviewed the complete SEO strategy for backlinking, you might need more information. Maybe you want to learn about other ways to improve your SEO, get more leads, bring up your conversion rates, or create guest posts.

In this case, you should look no further than SEOJet. We’re experts when it comes to improving your SEO.

We also offer many services that can improve your SEO, such as guest posts, link management software, and more. To learn more about how we can help, contact us now.