Not all backlinks are built the same. Some are of higher quality than others. It is difficult for people not familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) to know the difference. The methods to go about getting quality backlinks vary from person to person too. Some approaches are more successful than others.
Here Are 5 Smart Ways to Secure Quality Backlinks
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Guest Posting
Guest posting is one of the most successful ways of building legitimate links within the content. The idea is to provide readable content that suits the publisher’s audience, which will find it acceptable, and schedule the post for future publication.
The guest post contains a backlink within the piece linking back to your site with your chosen anchor text. It may require some additional negotiation to get your ideal anchor text included in the link because some site owners prefer to keep links less commercial. In this case, a fallback plan is a topical link to an informational post, a branded link, or a website URL.
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Broken Link Building
The idea of broken link building is to perform some research to find websites that have outbound links to posts or pages on other sites that no longer exist. Either the page or post has been removed or the site is not live any longer.
It is usually best to hire a Toronto SEO professional to locate the collection of pages or posts with broken links. From there, you can contact each webmaster to point out the broken link and suggest an alternative piece of content on your site to link out to instead.
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Skyscraper Technique
The Skyscraper Technique was first suggested by Brian Dean. The idea here is to come up with a listicle that presents 20+ experts on a topic. Either the piece assembles the opinions of experts on the topic based on published interviews or directly solicits their latest thoughts.
The idea here is they’ll be contacted, mentioning that the piece will be published shortly and asking their opinion. The expert may wish to be included and supply a quote for you to add to the piece. Once published, it’s quite likely they’ll mention that they’ve been included in your roundup of experts and link out to your site. This is not only a good source of new traffic but also a powerful backlink in its own right.
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Networking
Building relationships with experts takes time. It involves reading their publications on their site, following them on social media, and joining in on their discussions. If they’ve commented on something or come up with a fresh approach, the idea is to bolster their standing by giving them props for the idea and if you can, adding to it with a better suggestion.
While getting a backlink from this kind of activity isn’t done directly, quite often it can lead to them offering you a guest post because they believe your voice will be of interest to their readership. In other cases, you might be invited to their podcast to be interviewed. Both opportunities could come up at some later date after networking, but it means you’re not approaching people cold, so the success rate will be several times higher.
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Blog Commenting
Blog commenting has been around forever. The trick here is not to outsource the comments. You need to be the person writing the comments because it has to be in your voice and the English (if you’re a native speaker) has to sound like you.
The point with comments is not to add a one-liner at the end of an article “Good points, excellent article” because while it’s polite, it doesn’t directly add any value. It’s much better to craft a short 1-2 paragraph comment that includes follow-up points or makes a suggestion in keeping with the article itself. This is helpful to the readers and shows the owner that you’ve read his or her article.
While many comments are marked as “no follow” which means technically they do not count towards better ranking, all backlink profiles for websites need a reasonable mixture of nofollow and dofollow links to make them look natural.
Therefore, blog commenting using branded and naked URL links is worth pursuing to give the site’s backlink profile some balance. There’s also a potential traffic source here when readers find your comments insightful and want to see what your site is all about.
