Link building is very crucial to rank your sites on search engines. For example Google loves sites with a high number of relevant pages linked to them and so ranks such a site higher than the others. But link building or getting quality backlinks is much crucial to survive a Google update like Penguin. So it is therefore essential to have a natural or organic backlink profile to stay on the safe side.
Basically organic backlinks are the ones that are naturally created by the sites, social profiles and blogs that refer to your site just because it has great and complete content on a topic and include a link back to your site as a reference or citation.
One of the greatest examples of a site with huge natural or organic backlinks isWikipedia which enjoys huge love from search engines like Google and Bing. Wikipedia has content that the general world refers to and enjoys a domain authority of 100 (a rare feat) by open site explorer.
One of the greatest examples of a site with huge natural or organic backlinks isWikipedia which enjoys huge love from search engines like Google and Bing. Wikipedia has content that the general world refers to and enjoys a domain authority of 100 (a rare feat) by open site explorer.
Advantage of organic backlinks:
- Organic backlinks help you to get thumbs up by search engines.
- This is a good way to getting known to the audience of a site that you have no access to.
- Eventually it will increase your credibility in your niche and help you in getting known as an authority figure (just remember it doesn’t happen overnight).
Chris Guillebeau in his book 279 days to overnight success (page 68) has rightly said..
I couldn’t figure out who first said that, but it is absolutely true. No one will give you links without you earning them. To earn them, you will need to do something remarkable. When you receive inbound links it’s like getting paid. This may be literal if you have ads or products, but if not you are being rewarded with new readers.
How to Get Natural / Organic Backlinks:
Getting natural or organic backlink is something you earn so your efforts have to be phenomenal and so luring that linking back is achieved without having to pay or ask someone. Here are the methods to get quality organic backlinks.
1) Write great and epic content:
Remember Wikipedia above, the single reason for people and sites including blogs linking to it is that, it has content that is rare to find elsewhere. Similarly your blog’s content has to be detailed and complete. We have to also keep in mind that detailed and complete posts need not be lengthy always.
Matt Cutts talks about organic link building in his video “Is there such a thing as building too many links“.
Great content can be done with the following ways:
a) Stir a controversy:
Controversial topics tend to grab the eye balls faster than others and you can easily get so many backlinks to your site based on the number of people interested in the topic. Having said this, I would suggest you to stay away from the legal side of things.
b) Write a great case study:
Case studies are your observation or log of something that you have been concentrating on since a specific time. Now you write a case study about it on the site. This type of content enjoys the attention of sites that want to include those details on a project of theirs. This is the safest and the easiest way to get organic backlinks. The backlinks can be obtained by this strategy for years in the future too.
c) Provide facts and figures on a finding:
This is yet a great step to earn backlinks because your facts and figures on a particular topic will be linked by people writing or researching on the topic at the bibliography (the sources found at the end of a book) or footnotes. One man who has earned a huge status as a social media examiner is Dan Zarella, and people never mind paying him a link.
d) vlogging or video blogging:
Videos are great tools of expressing your ideas and views and are a magnificent way of back linking. The two most popular video sites hosting millions of videos are YouTube (of course) and Vimeo. These sites have tremendous views and subscriber list and it is easy for people getting back to your site by the links you provide at the description section.
You don’t have to be a camera specialist nor do you have to buy costly equipment’s for getting your videos picked up. A simple PowerPoint presentation converted to video format or a tutorial recorded by you through a screen casting software like Camtasia would be enough. Remember the content should be quality in the videos too and essentially related to your niche. For example, you can check my Tech niche YouTube channel over here.
2) Get a “Link to us page” or section:
If you have content worth linking to, there is no harm in making an appeal to your readers to link to your content. This can be done with CTA or call to action buttons or mere providing with banners and HTML codes that when a reader uses on his site automatically links back to yours.
3) By networking and getting seen in places with potential readers (read linkers).
a) Conferences, live events and press events:
These are the best places to hangout in if you want to get noticed. Remember blogging is all about exposure. Building connections can help you in getting more friends and eventually they will introduce you to their audiences. This way you are sure to create some real meaty organic links.
b) Forums:
Forums had been the go to places for all sorts of building connections and link backs to your sites pretty some time back. But after the advent of social media forums have been in the backstage though forum marketing still works if you do it smart.
How to get started with forums: Conduct a Google search with “your keyword or niche” + “forum” or you can use boardreader too. Once you have access to a community check if they allow signatures or not (because these are the places you will put your links on). If they provide join them. Write some quality topics and contribute before attaching a signature right away.
c) Q & A based sites:
Sites like yahoo answers have great value when building quality and free backlinks are concerned, provided you give quality service to their reader community. Quora is another one that has achieved great success.
4) Social media sites:
Social media sites also allow you to put links in your BIO section and have a great value as far as SERPs are concerned.
Twitter: Twitter offers to add a number of links in your BIO section provided they are limited to 140 characters. Try not adding more than three or else it might appear spammy.
Facebook: Facebook personal profile as well as pages has a huge potential for adding links to sites that you own.
Google Plus: Google Plus has an unlimited capacity of accumulating your links the only condition being NOT to make it spammy.
Pinterest: Pinterest gives one high value backlink to your site that you have chosen to be displayed at your BIO section.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn provides an option of three backlinks to your favorite sites along with customized anchor text (though it has little or no value as far as SEO is concerned, using a wise anchor text will provide a great influx of traffic to your site).
5. Relationship Blogging,
Building relationship among fellow bloggers and with authority bloggers in your niche can have surprising benefits in creating natural backlinks. Try hanging out with them on their blog, and on their favorite social media site too. You can grab their attention by commenting on their posts, asking for a help and thanking them for a certain idea that they shared.
When it comes to thanking them, you should always approach a personal way by emailing them. The email should not be long and should be formal, saying them that their post has helped you and would love to read more topics like this.
This way you can come under their radar and you can soon build a relationship that can result in an exchange of links. I have many good blogging friends among whom is Ana Hoffman of Trafficgenerationcafe.com and this led me harvest a link on the much looked up to blog.
6. Release your earning report:
Releasing your earning report might not get along well with many but if you are one of them who would proudly show up the result of your hard work you can have an added benefit as well. Yes, many blogs and magazines show up reports based on top bloggers who earned the highest (can be yearly or monthly) and chances are you might get featured in those articles thus making sure a link back to your site or a post.
7. Organize a link carnival:
Many bloggers and pro bloggers conduct a weekly or monthly link carnival or thankful posts in which they place an excerpt of famous bloggers’ (or their friends) posts that has been written within that time period. This is an exceptional way to show your love and build connection with an additional advantage of building high quality backlinks too. You can refer to what engagement superstar Adrienne Smith does here.
8. By giving Interviews and conducting them too
Interviews are the best way to build relationship with pro bloggers. Interview posts generate huge readership, especially if the interviewee is someone very authoritative in the field. For taking interviews of such personalities you have to first build a rapport with them (check the previous two points for knowing how). If you succeed to entice a figure well known in the niche you are not only getting a chance of hijacking some of his readers, but also ensuring a link back from his blog.
And if you want yourself to be interviewed you have to first build a solid track record and then help your fellow bloggers and juniors selflessly. This way they will come to know you and might get interested in publishing your interview. You can easily ask for two three do follow backlinks as you might seem right.
9. Create a unique and helpful tool that comes handy for your industry
If you are good at technical aspect of something or may be simply the skills like HTML or programming knowledge why not leverages that into something that would earn you tremendous organic backlinks that are Google safe.
See here the page findmyfacebookid.com. It’s a single page website offering a great tool and has 20K+ visitors and alexa rank 26K. This type of tolls in your website (although as a PAGE) can help them get linked when users write a topic related to them or on resource pages of websites like mine.
10. Conduct a Massive blogger outreach and a post on what they say on a topic.
Conduct a post on the opinion of a number of influential bloggers on a topic and put up that post. After making the post live don’t hesitate to forward the post link to the members included in the post. Most will feel happy to share them across their audience and chances are some might even link them to their posts.
11. Broken Link checking:
Over the years, many sites come and go and it is potentially impossible to keep a record of all the pages that you have linked. So, find out the broken links of any website and send them a simple formal email saying you have detected a broken link on their website and would replace it with a great resource of yours that has similar content.
Mostly you will hear an approval answer from them. This time, make the reply a bit personal and you can include the link detected along with the link you want it to be replaced with (obviously from your blog!). Also include some additional details that would make a good opinion about your site on them and they wouldn’t deny.
You must check this post of Kristi Hines on Search Engine Journal to learn “How to Use the Broken Link Building Strategy to Get Links”.
12. Benefit from content scrapers
Potential content thieves make it literally impossible to protect content. However you can make use of this opportunity by linking to your own posts within the article (also known as interlinking). These content scrappers are lazy enough to check the internal links and will not remove your links thus you at least enjoy a free backlink.
Secondly, you can use the WordPress plugin called RSS footer to add a link to your blog after every post.
P.S. Although this method might seem lucrative I wouldn’t recommend this method as a free backlink generator as this would include you amongst the known of potentially penalized sites (content scrappers never have a quality blog) and might put you as a thorn in the eyes of Google, doing more harm than good.
13. Creating graphics, media that can be reused:
You can also create awesome memes, images, video tutorials and infographics that would go viral in the blogosphere. Try adding a humor quotient or make them a GO-TO complete guide. This way it will attract sites that would like them to be included in their posts, now make a condition that your products if used should be attributed a designed backlink. Voila and you are done. Many sites like quicksprout, whoishostingthis.com earn HUGE number of backlinks through infographics.
My infographic about Genesis Framework Review helped me to get good number of natural backlinks without much efforts. Give it a try and surely it will work like a charm for you.
My infographic about Genesis Framework Review helped me to get good number of natural backlinks without much efforts. Give it a try and surely it will work like a charm for you.
14. Alexa ranking
Although alexa ranking have more benefit to your own site than link building, decreasing your alexa ranking to a record low will attract fellow bloggers to include your site in list posts like Top 10 bloggers based on alexa etc., and will give you a genuine backlink. I have earned many quality backlinks for this site from sites like BloggersPassion, SocialSamosa etc. by this awesome trick.
15. Profile links:
Many membership sites and forums have option to include your website link in your BIO thus enabling you to get a backlink worth feeling proud of (well, not all sites provide quality backlinks). But if a site does, that should never be missed.
You can also get awesome backlinks (though Nofollow) from social media sites mentioned above on point four.
Example: CrunchBase (sign up here).
16. Be a woman:
Strange as it may sound, this method is potentially proven (read it here). Sending an email or approaching as a woman in order to link exchanges or guest post request has great results as compared to doing the same as a man (P.S. I don’t patron gender based discrimination here, it is the statistically proven data).
17. Guest Posting:
While Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-spam head, has said that guest posting as a source of link building is severely a crime in the eyes of Google, still genuine guest posts (Not all) including a link (Not always) that is relevant to the context, inside the post can be tried.
If you are not in hurry, then I recommend you to read this effective guest blogging guide.
18. Reverse Guest posting:
The reverse guest posting tactic works wonders when done the correct way. By reverse guest posting I mean contacting potential guest poster (people in your niche who know their stuff well), and asking them to write an article on your blog on a topic that is relevant. This way you get free content from a highly qualified person, save your time and also get a link in the person’s portfolio. Eventually the guest writer might link to his, this post on his other subsequent posts, elsewhere. You can use the tool Followerwonk to find potential people to network in your niche.
19. Republishing the social posts that are already viral:
Sites like Facebook and tumblr are great places to find creative shareable stuff that can potentially go viral. You can compile a blog post based on a number of such posts, relevant to your niche. Remember, social republishing is ethical and legal provided you link back to the original sources of those articles.
Once you do this, such posts tend to go viral because of their visual attributes and many other blogs will possibly link back to your blog while citing them.
20. Be Newsworthy:
Being the eye candy of press releases and other top rated media events and producing news worthy articles pretty quick will often add a great chance of getting prestigious and high quality backlinks. For this, you need to have an eye of potential happenings in your niche and publish posts as and when the event happens. Live blogging is also a part of being news worthy. This will help you earn links from other sites on your niche that write a post on the event later. Sometimes, big sites can also be your source of getting free backlinks
