Do you know the success story of Google?

Get Quality Backlinks

With the algorithm that made it possible to organize the World Wide Web like never before. This algorithm, Pagerank, basically gave each web page a value based on the number and nature of the incoming links (backlinks) it received. Therefore, the pages could be classified in order of importance (rankings) in relation to the inbound links they received.

We’re telling you this because, since it was key in the creation of the most popular search engine in the world, it seems that incoming links will always be essential to achieve visibility in search engines. At least, when it comes to natural positioning in Google; so, you have no choice but to do Link Building.

What is Link Building?

The “Link Building“, is nothing more than working to get incoming links. Find websites that can link to you and thus achieve several fundamental things for SEO:

• Let the crawling robots find your brand new content.
• That your domain acquires a higher level of authority (the importance that the classification determines)
• That your domain acquires a tracking budget.
• Achieve more visibility, making a mark, to get users to click on our result ( CTR ) instead of our competitor’s.

Why is it important to do Link Building?

Maybe you are thinking that making a Link Building Campaign is not important for SEO, because if you generate quality content, people will link to you on their own. Well, it is possible that you can achieve very good results in a very specific niche, simply by generating a lot of content that responds to what users are looking for and submitting it to the Google index.

But try trying to position yourself in a competitive sector to sell online. Think that the fundamental thing is that it is more relevant than your competition. And the normal thing is that your competition already has many and very good external links (backlinks) and of different types (which is more natural), because it has been there for a long time. Therefore, to start making yourself known, build user trust and for the crawling robots to consider you relevant, you have to get links in other ways.

How to get external links doing link building?

Maybe you are thinking that when I say “other ways” I mean to carry out an automated Link Building process, which is easy and fast for you. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you. But ever since Google released its Google Penguin algorithm in 2012, building links hasn’t been easy or fast. You need to invest time and/or money.

For this reason, we wanted to create a kind of link building manual, so that you can work it on your own, if you cannot afford to hire an SEO and you do have time.

It is something that always works, as simple as it may seem. Analyze your competition! If they’re out there with those links, why wouldn’t you be able to get it? Of course, improving something to your competition…

Link Building Manual from your competition

1. Extract and organize the backlinks of your competition

With tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush you can extract the inbound links from your main competitors. Export them to an Excel with all the detailed information of these backlinks. These tools, and any other SEO suite, give you the following information:

• URL where the link is
• Anchor text used
• Link type (whether it is trackable or not, Dofollow or Nofollow)
• Domain scoring (different domain authority metrics)
• Detection date
• ….etc.

The first thing I do once exported is to organize the information, eliminating duplicates.

In this way, the list of links to review is considerably reduced. It is not the same to analyze 1000 links than 50 links. Remember that from the same domain your competitor may have 20 different links.

2. Analyze and select quality links that are replicable

All these tools to get backlinks offer quality indicators. Generally, one metric tells about the popularity of the website and another talk about the trust it gives off (if it is linked to spam or other black hat practices).

We like the MOZ ones, the famous DA (domain authority), and Spam Score, but surely you know Ahrefs’ Domain Rating  or  Majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

The important thing is that you have a rough idea of ​​the authority of the domain and the trust you can place in it.

Logically you are not going to try to get all the backlinks that your competitor has, for various reasons: some links will not be of quality (working on them can be more negative than positive), you will find “satellite” pages of your competitor or pages that are unaffordable for you.

AD ≥ Spam Score x 10

3. Get the best links, without forgetting to generate content

Now you have an objective, to get links on a specific list of websites where you know it is feasible to be. So now you can get down to work! As?

Participating in forums

Participate with answers or resources of interest in industry forums (eg web forums). If users ask questions about a certain topic that you can offer them, why not do it? Do it with quality content.

Contacted the webmasters

Contacting the webmasters of these sites to collaborate as partners, offering content that may interest their users, doing guest blogging…

Almost every blog is willing to accept quality content on your blog or at least a link exchange.

Logically you have to be very careful when contacting, because cold approaching someone to ask them for a favor (a link) is not usually successful. But if you manage to connect or get their attention, showing the webmaster that you know them and can contribute something to them, you will have a higher percentage of success.

We leave you here this template that I use for guest blogging, with which it will be easier for you:

Hello [Recipient_Name]!

I’m [Your_name] and I’ve been following you for a long time, as you may have seen in the comments of some articles. For example in this one, which I loved:

[Link_article]

I am writing to you because I am also a blogger as you can see in [Blog URL] and I think I can also provide quality content for your blog and get a good link for mine in return.

I have some topics that might be of interest to your audience:

[Theme_1]
[Theme_2]
[Theme_3]

I am convinced that the content will be of interest to your readers, as it was in the last guest articles that I wrote:

[URL_guest_article_1]
[URL_guest_article_2]

And it will be great for you to reduce your workload for the blog.

Tell me something when you can.

Thank you, regards

[Your_name]

Creating a company or individual profile on specific platforms

Create your company or individual profile on specialized platforms in your sector (eg Behance for designers, Lawyer for lawyers… etc.). Of course, it is important that in addition to creating it, you remain active on these platforms, because we do not want to spam.

Eye! Remember that it is essential that you always have quality content to offer. There’s no use linking like crazy if you have nothing to offer the user and the crawling bots (remember how Google works).

Does it make any sense to send the user to a page with low quality content or without any added value? Remember that if the user experience is bad (click rate, bounce rate… etc.), Google will not position the results related to a specific page. So yes, get good links but don’t forget about content generation. Or at least make sure you have a good product and valuable resources.

It will be a progressive process; it is not something you can do from one day to the next. Among other things, because as I told you, you have to generate quality content, participate in forums, contact potential collaborators… But be patient, it pays off in the long run.

Therefore, you have to stick with the best ones, which you can reproduce yourself. Be careful, only quality links. With the metrics that I have indicated before (DA and Spam Score ) you can obtain a formula to determine numerically if a website is of quality. The websites from which the backlinks come are of quality if they comply with the following:

Where to get quality links?

Maybe you have heard of platforms, where you can buy backlinks at a reasonable price.

In our case, avoid shortcuts of this type, because I have to work to reverse penalties from companies that had used black hat techniques and it is not very rewarding work.

Although I recognize that they are services to take into account when you work on link building. Especially in a second phase, when your site has already achieved a good authority and knowing how to recognize well which sites are worth investing in.

Well, apart from carrying out this analysis of your competition, you should know that there are always general sites where you can get free quality inbound links, to ensure a flow of links while you advance in the process of generating content and reaching collaboration agreements. This is my top open platforms where you can place your site or your content for link building:

1. Gravatar.com: Create a profile and add the websites of your projects.
2. Disqus.com: You create a profile with your website and participate in the websites where it is enabled.
3. Issuu.com: You register your website and share content in PDF format where you include a link.
4. Wellfound.com: You register and add your project.
5. Yellowpages.com: Register your company in the mythical Yellow Pages.
6. scoop.it: On this platform you can share your content in a community that is very active, so it will be easier for you to get diffusion and mentions.

More White Hat Link Building Techniques

Are you not enough with the links of your competition and this small list? Well, you know that we also use another technique that we really like. It is about searching Google for websites that can be used to get links, filtering the type of site and content that interests me to link, through advanced search operators.

Well, we don’t think I left anything to tell you. But if you think I’m forgetting something, you know any technique or website to get good links; we invite you to comment on this post. I will be happy to add it to help the readers of this blog.