Building backlinks pointing from someone else’s website to your brand-new site is more challenging than with an older site. For one thing, you must be careful about the kind of links you get. Also, it’s necessary to be wary of both the quality and the link velocity (the speed at which new links are acquired). They must be spaced out to look natural. As such, building backlinks for new sites requires a different discipline than for older websites.
Here Are Some Tips On How To Build Backlinks For a New Website.
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Guest Posting the Right Way
Guest posting is the act of getting another website owner to accept a guest post – an article – on their website. The benefit for them is a decent piece of content essentially for free and the benefit for your site is a new inbound link. You may also receive some referral traffic from people visiting your site from the site with the guest post published on it too.
Most SEO Agencies do guest posting incorrectly. It must be particularly relevant to the audience where it will be published. The content must speak to their audience and not your own. While there’s often some overlap between the two, that’s not always the case.
The guest post should be a reasonable length. Usually 1,000 words or greater. It’s not likely that a detailed post can impart useful information when it’s only 500 words. The article will barely touch the surface of any topic that it covers and provide poor value for the readers’ time.
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Using Broken Link Building
The broken link-building method isn’t new, but it still works incredibly well because it involves helping another website owner with a problem they didn’t even know they had and providing a ready-made solution too. Sounds good? Dig in!
The broken link-building link-building plan works around finding links on other websites that are no longer valid. In other words, a website is linking out to a page/post on a website that’s no longer there. Perhaps they deleted the page and failed to set up a 301 redirect or the website is no longer live.
Using scanner apps that can check sites for broken links on a website, it’s possible to find pages or posts with outbound links that go nowhere. Once a list has been built, a plan can be devised. Either you already have a published article that would be a great replacement for the link, or you can have one written, publish it and then get a link to that news article put in place of the one that isn’t resolving any longer.
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See What Your Competitors Are Doing
Finding good backlinks to go after is never easy. But if you look at what your competitors have already done, it gives you a leg up. Let’s say that you have a similar post to theirs where you’re reviewing an almost identical collection of products. They could have one or more links pointing to their review and that same site might be willing to link out to your review too.
Using a tool like Ahrefs, it’s possible to enter the full URL of the site and post directly. The online SEO tool will then spit out information about how many inbound links that post has. By looking up the backlinks page, it’s possible to get a full list of all the visible backlinks pointing to the page. At that point, an assessment can be made as to which links are valuable and worth trying to get the same or similar link for your post, and which are low-quality and best avoided.
Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to!
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HARO
Help a reporter out (HARO) is a network for journalists who need reputable sources. When you read an article in Forbes where they’ve gotten quotes from people in the industry that the article is reporting in, these usually use established contacts. The reporter gets new information and the brands mentioned received a bit of promotion and often a backlink too.
The benefit of HARO is that articles by journalists tend to be published on good reputation websites like newspapers where they have a high domain authority and page authority. This makes these links very valuable. Google also pays attention to brand mentions within an article even if their site wasn’t linked to it.
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Reddit & Industry Sites
Reddit and other conversational sites are good places to get links pointing to your site.
Not every link needs to be a do-follow one. After all, most websites have 60% do-follow links and 40% no-follow links that supposedly Google ignores. Therefore, it’s necessary to get a good bunch of no-follow links so that your new site looks natural to avoid getting penalized for unnatural link building.
A Final Word
When adding backlinks to a new site, it’s important to space them out. Too many too fast look unrealistic and risk a penalty from Google. Rushing to rank too soon is just as bad as not bothering with backlinking at all.
In terms of the anchor text – the text within the link itself – it should only have a low single-digit percentage of relevant terms. Mostly, links should be brand or site-related. This is normal and expected. Therefore, most backlinks will have the name of the site, the URL, and a bunch of mixed terms that don’t help rank the site for valuable search terms. And then a few powerful links that do help rank for commercial terms. It’s all in getting the balance right.
