How to Get High-Quality Backlinks – A Comprehensive Guide

In today’s digital age, the competition to rank high on a search engine results page (SERP) is quite fierce. This requires efficient optimization of a website for search engines for both a start-up or a multinational company. One of the important factors for SEO is ensuring high-quality and a large number of backlinks to your website. In this article, we help provide ways through which you can get high-quality backlinks in 2020. Moreover, we also answer some of the frequently asked questions about backlinks.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks, as the name suggests, are the links from one website page that redirect or link to another website. These are also known as inbound, incoming, or one-way links. Major search engines, such as Google, consider backlinks as “votes” for a specific page. Therefore, pages with a high number of backlinks have been found to have better organic search rankings; this makes backlinks an important factor for SEO. 

Why are backlinks important?

As mentioned in the section above, backlinks are valuable for SEO as they represent a “vote of confidence” of sorts from one website to another. This helps indicate to search engines that other websites vouch for your content and consider it to be reliable. 

If many websites link to the same web page or site, search engines can know that the content being provided is worth linking to and are, therefore, worthy enough to be ranked higher on a SERP.  

Backlinks have been at the foundation of Google’s original algorithm—also known as “PageRank.” And even though Google has made multiple changes to its algorithm since then, backlinks remain one of the three most important factors for search engine rankings.

Traits shared by high-quality backlinks

Focusing on high-quality backlinks can help your website rank higher on the SERPs. Simply put, a single quality backlink can be more powerful than a 1,000 low-quality ones. There are some key traits that can help you identify high-quality backlinks. The following section lists these traits in detail. 

• High-quality links come from trusted, authoritative websites: Would you rather prefer a backlink from a reliable site or from a random, uncited blog? Search engines will choose the former too. This concept is known as Domain Authority; the more authority a site has, the better will be the credibility passed to your website through backlinks. Getting quality backlinks can also help your website boost your organic search engine traffic. Although such links are quite difficult to get, they are worth the effort.

• They include your target keywords in the link’s anchor text: The anchor text is the visible text part of a link. It is important that a link’s anchor text includes your target keyword. A recent study found a correlation between keyword-rich anchor text and higher rankings for that keyword. However, it is important to not have an overly keyword-rich anchor text owing to Google’s filter in their algorithm known as “Google Penguin.” This filters out websites that use black hat link-building strategies and focuses on websites that build backlinks with the exact match for the anchor text.

• The site and page linking to you should be contextually similar: Search engines ensure to check if two sites are related when they link to each other. For example, if you are writing an article on the best places to visit in Dubai, Google will provide more weightage to links from websites that focus on travel and lifestyle rather than sports, digital marketing, or weight loss.

• High-quality links are “do-follow” ones: Links with the no-follow tag attached to it are ignored by Google and other search engines and are not considered as ranking algorithms. However, a majority of links on the internet are do-follow links. Most of the no-follow links are not valuable. For example, links from certain sources—such as blog comments, paid advertisements, and press releases—tend to be no-follow ones; moreover, these links are not helpful for SEO.

• High-quality links are from different websites: It has been found that the number of sites linking to you (and not the number of backlinks) was more important for Google rankings than other factors. Therefore, it is usually better and rewarding to get 100 links from 100 different websites than around 1,000 links from the same website.

Efficient ways to get high-quality backlinks in 2020

Here are a few tried and tested ways that can help you get high-quality backlinks in 2020.

Become a source for reporters and bloggers: If you want to rank higher on a SERP, you will need to build backlinks from high-authority news sites and blogs. Using white hat backlinks from these sites is not as difficult as it sounds. For starters, you can use a free service called Help a Reporter Out (HARO)—this is a free platform where journalists and bloggers can connect to people that want links or exposure to topics related to various industries. This can help you build white hat backlinks from reliable websites. Although this strategy is one of the best ways to build high-quality backlinks, it may not always be an easy task.

The process to register for HARO is quite easy. After you sign up as a source, you can choose a free or paid plan. You can then keep checking for requests you can contribute to, and once you find something and provide a brief but valuable pitch. After this, once your pitch has been accepted, you can get backlinks to your website.

Publish “Skyscraper” content: Skyscraper content is an inbound marketing strategy. This involves finding a content piece that is performing well on social media and search engines and creating a piece that is better than the existing one. 

The first step is to do a simple google search for your intended topic. And as backlinks are an important factor for Google ranking, the article that has ranked first will have the most links added to it. The next step would be to create content that is much better and reliable than the original one. Although this process will not be easy, it is definitely worth the effort; doing so can help you increase the number of backlinks to your article. The final step would be to promote your skyscraper content. There are many ways to promote your content, but one of the effective ways is to promote to people and companies that you have featured in your article. However, it is important to not be assertive or spammy.

Use the Moving Man Method: Using the “Moving Man Method” (a term coined by Brian Dean at Backlinko) can help you build quality backlinks from relevant websites in your field or industry. To do this, you will have to start by finding sites in your industry that have either changed names or URLs, stopped offering a service, stopped updating a resource, or have simply shut down. 

Once you find them, you must look for existing websites that are still linking to the old URLs. This can be done by simply taking the outdated URL and copying it in the backlink checker tool of your choice. This will show up a list of the sites that still have outdated links in them. You can then try and contact the ones with the highest domain authority. By providing them with a heads-up about the link in their website and suggesting them to link your website, you can get quality backlinks.

Use content formats that can help generate links: According to a study conducted by BuzzSumo, it was found that almost 75% of content over the internet does not get any links; however, there were certain content formats, such as the following, that helped generate a lot of backlinks:

• Listicles
• Quizzes
• “Why” posts
• “How-to” posts
• Infographics
• Video content

Of these, listicles were found to outperform the other types of content formats. However, this does not mean that other types of content need to be ignored. The type of content you post should be of great quality and not have forced keywords. This can help you generate high-quality backlinks. 

Publish comprehensive guides: Writing and publishing comprehensive “how-to” guides can help you secure the right high-quality backlinks you need. Such types of articles normally are somewhere around 3000 words or no. Comprehensive articles cover one single topic in-depth that can help users find the information they need. You can simply choose the topic, outline your article, and then write about almost everything related to the topic. This can help you greatly to get high-quality backlinks. 

Use branded strategies and techniques: You can consider building your own strategy or tip to help users for SEO. Once you have come up with a technique, you can name it, and publish it as part of a blog post. The better your strategy for SEO is, the more backlinks will be diverted to your website. 

Besides these ways, you can also choose to try the following:

Resource pages: Resource pages majorly have links to other sites. If you are wondering how to get links from resource pages, you can start by doing a search for the same. However, it is important to note that not many articles will have the term “resource pages” in their title. Once you find the article(s) and you have published an article from the same category, you can contact resource pages and request them to backlink your articles on their site.

Turn mentions into quality backlinks: Every once in a while, you may come across unlinked brand mentions. This means that some web pages may mention you in a blog post but will not actually link to your website. If you notice this, this means that the author of the article has found your article to be reliable enough to backlink to. You can then contact the author and request to add a link to your website. After the author makes the change, you will be able to increase the number of backlinks for your website.

2-step sequence emails: When you are considering reaching out to your prospects via email, you can choose from two options—Ask people for backlinks in your first email itself or use the 2-step sequence. However, it was found that the latter option helps increase conversion rates by around 40%. You can send these emails by asking a prospective client if they would want to go through your article and if they agree to it, then you can send a link to your article. This will help generate quality back-links in 2020.

Popular tools to help monitor backlinks

Without the right tools, analyzing your link profile can be time-consuming, stressful, and even frustrating. In the following, we have listed some of the popular tools, in no particular order, to help you monitor your backlink profile.

Ubersuggest 

Ubersuggest is one of the best tools for monitoring your backlink profile. This tool is both fast and accurate; it can help you have a thorough understanding of your company’s profile at all times. In addition to your website’s domain score (which measures the rating of your website on a scale of 1 to 100), Ubersuggest also provides the following:

• The overall number of backlinks to your website
• The number of no-follow backlinks
• The number of referring domains (also the number of .gov and .edu domains linking to your website)
• An overview of new and lost backlinks and much more. 

The new and lost backlinks include a daily overview of the numbers of:

• New and lost “follow” backlinks
• New and lost “no-follow” backlinks

Ensuring the number of new backlinks outweighs the number of lost backlinks helps promote a positive growth.

Moreover, you will also be able to view a list of every backlink to your website. You will also find information about source page title and URL, domain and page scores, link type (whether it is a text or image), and anchor text. Ubersuggest is a comprehensive backlink monitoring tool that will help provide a clear insight into the statistics for your website.

Ahrefs

This is another popular monitoring tool among online marketing professionals. Ahrefs provides you with the necessary instruments to help track your backlinks and keywords. Moreover, you can get an insight into your competition’s strategies as well. 

Ahrefs provides accurate and current backlink data. And with a 14-day free trial, you can explore this link checker tool and its variety of features. In addition to the total number of backlinks, you can examine each link to ensure that you are satisfied with the quality. This reliable tool can help you gain a better understanding of your website’s performance.

Linkody

Linkody provides an easy and automated process to help you monitor your backlinks. Some of the reasons that makes this one of the popular backlink monitoring tool include the following: 

• You can get notified when you gain and lose links
• You can receive a daily report of your link profile
• You will be able to identify and reject spam links
• You can gain an insight into how your competitors are doing

As your link profile is constantly changing, it is important to keep a constant check on it; Linkody helps you do this and much more. Moreover, you can even check out the features using their 30-day free trial.

SEO PowerSuite

The SEO PowerSuite tool is another popular option that can help you view the following: 

• A list of all the backlinks leading to yours or a competitor’s site
• Anti-penalty audit
• Link quality factors
• Backlink reports

Agencies often create reports that can help them share SEO and link building results with their clients. This can be beneficial for your business as well. With each backlink report, you can access high-level information that includes a number of links and even backlink status.

This tool enables you to run a deep link quality analysis which, in turn, helps gain and build high-quality backlinks. It checks links against more than 50 quality factors; this can let you know which links will have a higher impact on your search engine rankings. The SEO PowerSuite tool provides the right data you need to help increase your ranking and divert traffic to your website. 

Kerboo

Kerboo’s link audit tool helps you monitor links that are live or down. This tool is quite easy to use for many tasks including link building or removal. Moreover, the “monitor” tool by Kerboo enables you to perform a variety of tasks such as creating inks that you consider to be important. With this factor enabled, Kerboo’s system automatically checks the links you shortlist. And if, for any reason, the link becomes obsolete or becomes a no-follow one for three consecutive days, you will be notified. This helps you know which links will be beneficial for your company website’s growth.  

You can also use the tool to remove the links that are not functional or required; moreover, it also monitors these links so that they do not reappear in the future. Familiarizing yourself with the features of Kerboo’s backlink software will make understanding and managing your profile quite easier.

LinkResearchTools

This is also another popular choice to monitor your backlink profile. One of LinkResearchTools’ top features includes its integration with data from 24 link backends; with this, you can rest assured that you are being provided with the best backlink check. With the complete backlink profile view being provided by LinkResearchTools, you can analyze every link through 97 unique metrics. Moreover, you can even customize the filters and metrics—such as the power, trust, contact data, and impact—on this link checker tool to meet your needs. The following features are also included with this tool:

• Improve your existing backlinks
• Remove a Google penalty
• Monitor inbound links
• Discover link opportunities
• Spot link building trends

This is one of the most comprehensive link checker tools available. It also helps audit your link profile.

Monitor Backlinks

This tool not only provides an insight into your link profile but also helps you learn more about your competition. One of its most popular features of this backlink tool is that it helps interconnect with your Google Analytics account.  This enables you to receive email alerts when you lose or gain a backlink.

You can also set up alerts that can notify you about your competitor’s performance with their link building. Monitor Backlinks includes a variety of search engine optimization metrics which include the following:

• External link count
• Backlink status checker
• Page and domain authority
• Referring traffic per backlink

You can know more about your link profile by simply visiting the Monitor Backlinks dashboard.

This tool also monitors three specific scenarios which can help you in your goals:

• When a blogger reviews your service or product
• When you acquire a valuable backlink
• When your competition progresses using their link building efforts.

This is another great tool that can help acquire high-quality backlinks in 2020.

cognitiveSEO

cognitiveSEO provides a variety of internet marketing tools that can help promote your business. The backlink analysis tool by cognitiveSEO has amazing features that make it a great choice. For example, you can use cognitiveSEO’s alert system that can help create triggers and notifications about your website and competitors as well. This information will directly be delivered to your inbox. Moreover, you can also gain access to your backlinks which includes real-time data, historical information, and growth trends. You can also examine link velocity, no-follow and do-follow links, and even link and domain influence. With its 7-day free trial, you can explore all of its features.

Earning and providing backlinks

Earning backlinks is a crucial component of off-site SEO. The process of obtaining these links is known as “link earning” or “link building.” It is important to note that some backlinks are more valuable than others. Backlinks from trustworthy and high-authority websites are considered the most desirable ones as opposed to those from low-authority, potentially spammy websites. By simply being mentioned on high-quality websites can give your company a boost even if a link is followed. 

As the value of backlinks differs, the links you create to other sites will also be different. When you are linking to another website, the factors—such as page and domain authority, type of content, search engine accessibility, and meta tags—you consider when choosing the page will have a great impact on your website pages as well.

These options can help acquire high-quality backlinks for your website. Choosing the right tools and having a great strategy for your company can go a long way in efficiently optimizing your website for search engines and its results page.