If you want your website to do well in the search engines, acquiring more powerful backlinks is critical to success.
In simpler words, there are two types of backlinks that you can generate for your blog. The first category includes low-quality backlinks. They don’t do a lot of good to your blog. Moreover, if you collect too many of those low-quality backlinks, Google may even penalize your blog for it.
On the other hand, there are “powerful” backlinks. These links have at least 3 following qualities:
- The “powerful” backlinks are from a relevant website within your niche.
- They come from a high PR website or blog.
- Such backlinks are natural.
We have seen several changes in the SEO world over the past few years. The infamous Google Panda and Google Penguin updates made a lot of old SEO techniques obsolete, e.g. over-optimization of keywords, link-farming, thin content, etc.
However, year after year, backlinks have always been considered as a primary search engine ranking factor. As a matter of fact, backlinks are now considered as the 3rd most important search engine ranking factor for Google.
And while it is relatively easy for established blogs to generate more backlinks, it is definitely a struggle for new blogs and online businesses. In this post, I’m going to share 6 proven methods to build powerful backlinks for a new blog.
So let’s get started.
1. Content Marketing — Create Free Resources
It does not matter if your blog is an established one or not, content marketing is arguably the best way to generate high-quality and relevant backlinks.
The idea is to create amazing and valuable content for your blog readers and share them for free. You shouldn’t be charging anything for that valuable content. Moreover, those helpful contents can be in any form: blog posts, whitepapers, reports, e-books, guides, etc.
When you create content for the purposes of generating backlinks, use the following tips:
- It should be based on a popular topic. The possibility of a blog post to go viral on social media websites has a huge role to play in this.
- Extensively research once you have finalized the topic of your content. Find some of the best pieces that have been already written and that are available on the web. You can use a free tool like BuzzSumo to find the most popular posts.
- Now, make sure your piece of content is better than the most popular posts you found on the web. This is one of the best ways to acquire relevant and targeted backlinks.
For instance, Neil Patel, who is an internet marketing expert, created a very extensive and comprehensive free guide, Get Your MBA in Internet Marketing with these 12 Guides and 2 Courses.
Because of the fact that this was a very comprehensive and helpful post, it has generated over 125 backlinks from 38 different domains.
Content marketing is arguably one of the best ways to generate powerful and high-quality backlinks.
If you have a new blog, it is definitely one of the best options you have.
2. Guest Blogging
For relatively new blogs, it is one of the most difficult tasks to acquire a loyal readership and stamp their authority in the niche.
Guest blogging gives you that opportunity to get in front of your target audience and prove your credibility. Furthermore, guest blogging also gives you one of the best ways to acquire relevant backlinks.
When it comes to generating backlinks with guest blogging, there are a few things you need to understand.
- Relevancy is the new PR. There was a time when guest bloggers used the PR (page rank) of the other blog to determine if they should guest post there or not. While PR still matters, the relevancy of niches is a more important factor now. So make sure the blogs you target are relevant to your own blogs. A backlink for a relevant website is much more powerful.
- Contextual links are 5x - 10x more powerful than author bio links, but they have to be completely natural. If you can insert a contextual, meaningful backlink in the content of your guest post, it will carry a lot more weight. Here is an example of a well-crafted contextual backlink.
3. Interviewing Other Bloggers and Influencers
Although it may seem difficult for a new blog — and blogger — to interview a successful blogger or influencer from your niche, it is a wonderful technique to acquire powerful backlinks if you can manage the feat.
If you build your network and start connecting with the right people, you can land a good interview. Use Twitter to find influencers within your niche, retweet and share their content on a regular basis, email them, make yourself recognized, and help them in whichever way possible. These are some of the pre-requisites to contacting an established blogger.
Once you are no longer a “stranger” to them, you will find that it is much easier to land an interview.
The idea is that once you interview a blogger, he/she will definitely create a link back to your website. This link will come for their well-established, high PR blog and, therefore, will be a powerful backlink.
4. Leverage Social Media Websites
Although it may seem a very simple and small trick, you better not ignore it. In fact, leveraging social media websites can be the way to start your link-building process for a new blog. It is definitely one of the easiest ways to generate powerful backlinks — which you will see in a minute.
There are 5 main websites that you should target:
These social media websites allow you to use their bio sections to insert links to your blog. These links have great value in search engines.
Pinterest and Facebook allows one link to be included in the bio sections while LinkedIn allows you 3 such links.
On the other hand, Google Plus and Twitter allows you to add unlimited links — Twitter has a limit of 140 characters — as long as those links don’t look spammy.
5. Create Expert Roundup Posts
Creating roundup posts isn’t a particularly difficult task for a new blogger. Anybody with the right attitude and reach can do it. Here’s how you can do it.
Simply put, an expert roundup post is the one in which other professionals and well-established bloggers share their opinions. Those opinions make the entire post.
For instance, if your blog is on “health & nutrition”. you reach out to 10 experts within your niche and request each of them to share one expert opinion on the topic of your blog post.
The good thing about expert roundup posts is that they are backlink magnets. Once you have finalized and published the post, you can share its URL to a lot of people — including the experts you contacted.
Those experts are most likely to share your post with their followers. Moreover, they will also link back to your post. And as they’d all have well-established blogs, the links you get will all be very relevant and powerful.
Here are a few guides to help you get started with expert roundup posts:
- How to Create an Expert Roundup Post?
- The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Expert Roundup Post
- How to Write a Great Roundup Post?
6. Give Testimonials
As a blogger, you must be using a few services and online tools, right? Why not give testimonials and feedbacks to them?
This is a nifty little technique that may help you land really powerful backlinks to your new blog.
For instance, most of bloggers use an email marketing tool to build and manage their email subscription list. Aweber is one of the most popular email marketing tools.
If you are using Aweber, you can send them wonderful feedback/testimonial. Make sure to specify that they can use this testimonial on their website. And that’s it!
You might not know this, but Aweber has a PR6 website. If they do showcase your testimonial on their website — business love to show genuine and credible feedbacks — with your name and a link back to your website, you get a PR6 backlink.
Here is an example of a person who successfully managed to get a PR6 backlink by using the same technique.
Final Words
It can be a bit frustrating for a new blog to get started with the link-building process. But by using the tips that I have mentioned in this post, you should not have too many problems.
Just remember that it can’t be done overnight. Building powerful links is a continuous process that takes time, commitment, and a lot of patience. Keep doing it on a regular basis and soon your new blog will have enough firepower in the form of backlinks that it will start doing very well in the search engines.
Good luck!