How to Get Backlinks for Better Google Ranking

This article introduces 15 ways of “how to get backlinks” for improving your websites’ Google ranking. But first…

What is Backlink?

Backlinks are links that appear on another website and point to yours. When readers visit another website and click on an anchor text, if this anchor text is linked to one of your webpages, then your webpage will appear on the screen for the readers to view.

Building backlinks is crucial for any website’s SEO (search engine optimization) success. The reason is very simple. The more backlinks there are to your website, the more traffic is guided there. It tells search engines including Google how popular your website content is across the internet, so when a query is searched, search engines give more credits to websites with more quality backlinks.

Backlink = traffic;

More Traffic  = Higher Google ranking;

Higher Google ranking = Even more traffic = More voluntary backlinks from other websites when your informative content are mentioned in others’ articles.

What are the most desired backlinks?

Backlinks are not all equal. Low quality backlinks, which are sometimes called “black hat” links,  are paid, or from link farms, or from any websites that have absolutely no content relationship with yours. The most desired backlinks, or “white hat” links, are those from quality websites with higher Google rankings that have relevant topics to your niche. Building quality backlinks is one of the important and necessary SEO efforts used to improve a website’s Google ranking and grow organic traffic.

How to get quality backlinks? – 15 ways

1. Using affiliate marketing.

If you have something to sell online, either physical products or e-products, you can consider using affiliate networks to announce your products with a great commission rate. There’s bound to be other website owners who are interested in posting them on their websites for a potential extra income. This is a win-win situation for both publishers and advertisers. Publishers can make better use of their websites’ space for generating income , and advertisers can gain a lot of  quality backlinks in a fast manner, most of the time for free as the usual conversion rate of affiliate programs are low.

2. Submit your website to ODPs (open directory projects) and other directories.

You can submit your website URL to Google here. Submitting your website to Bing is free, but it takes months to get listed; maybe you never will. To submit your website to Yahoo!’s Directory, the cost is $299 to apply and $299 annually to be in the directory.  Submitting your website to Dmoz.com could be difficult nowadays, but you can always try.

3. Submitting Guest Posts.

Submit guest posts written for other blogs or websites that are relevant to your niche is a great way to build quality backlinks. This is a time-consuming process. But since every website you contribute to are hand-picked by yourself, every backlink you get through guest posting is a quality backlink that Googlebot loves. Be ethical when you choose to guest blogging is very important to build rapport with  other bloggers: Don’t submit one article to multiple websites as guest posts. There are many free online tool to check if your copy is original, it is not hard to get caught if you do so.

Related article:

Guest posting for a win-win, tips for guest blogging for traffic

4. Comment on other relevant posts.

Many links that appear in comment sections are nofollow links. It is not something you can control. But the more you comment, the greater your chances of building backlinks. If you comments are relevant and make sense to readers, they could follow the link and pay a visit to your website.  Again the relevance is a necessity. For the best quality backlinks, comment on high PageRank websites of your niche.

5. Ask questions and provide answers.

Q.A sites help people to ask questions and get answered. If you like to help people out, these Q.A sites are great places to help build up your backlinks and traffic to your websites.  Popular services are Yahoo Answers,  Linkedin , Google+ communities, Answers.dot.com, askmefast, Warrior Forum, and don’t forget Quora.  Gain credibility and reputation in your niche by providing valuable answers to solve others’ problems. If your answers are very relevant to the questions, you can plant links in your answers.

6. Ping your blog:

As for how often you should ping your website, the rule of thumb is whenever you have updates, you should ping your content. Without any updates, frequent “ping”s won’t benefit your Google ranking. Recommended sites are pingomatic and pingler.

7. Participate in Forums that are relevant to your niche.

Usually forums will allow you to add a bio line with your website URL included. Some internet related forums are Warrior forum, forum.cnet.com, forums.mozillazine.org, forums.digitalpoint.com.

8. Submit articles to article directories.

Use article directories such as Squidoo, hubpages, ezinarticles, goarticles, Technorati, and Pubarticles. For a list of over 1000 websites to submit your articles to, check out Freearticlesubmission.

9. Submit your article to Blog Carnival.

At Onlinebz.com, we hold a monthly blog carnival event. If you are working in the same niche of online business, you are welcome to submit your best articles to this event.

10. Reclaim lost backlinks.

Search Engine Watch has an article written by Garrett French explaining 7 steps to finding your long lost links. 

11. Build Social Media Backlinks.

Create Facebook pages and generate more likes, build up Google+ communities and interact with like-minded people, produce beautiful inforgraphics to share them on Twitter, Facebook, and to pin on Pinterest. All these will help to bring in more traffic and quality backlinks to your websites.

12. Submit press releases.

Tell your story to the world through press releases. Some of the popular services are PRWeb and prlog.org.

13. Submit your article to social bookmarking sites.

There are many social bookmarking sites, such as BlinkList, blogmarks, Connotea, StumbleUpon, or Diigo. To find more social bookmarking sites, using the “share” button above.

14. Sumbit your article to Blogsphere.

Using blog communities that offer shared posts. Some of these sites have been included in the “shared button” above. There are more I found over the web that are very useful to bloggers and website owners for getting backlinks and traffic.

• Chime.in
• Triberr
• Blokube
• Bizsugar
• so.cl
• zimbio
• My opera

15. Using content curation tools for backlinks.

Scoop.it is one of the best content curation tools on the web. I wrote an article before with a list of content curation tools, you can go through the list to use some of those that interest you.

 

 

It looks like a lot work is needed to build quality backlinks for your website. However, considering that quality backlinks will dramatically improve your bet on SEO success, all the effort will pay off eventually.  Always remember one thing: When talking about backlinks, quality trumps quantity. So roll up your sleeves and get to work.