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How to Build the Best Backlinks to Your Website

I know your burning backlink question.

You’ve probably asked yourself, many times, “How do I build backlinks to my website for the best SEO results?”

You’re not alone.

Even people with backlink experience wonder this from time to time.

And we all find ourselves asking this question again after Google releases a new algorithm update.

The Question of Getting Backlinks

So, now you know it’s a commonly-asked question.

That might offer you some relief.

If lots of people are asking, surely someone has answered the question in a satisfying way!

Well, yes and no.

Numerous self-called experts are out there giving different tips and advice but, unfortunately, most of the time, the only thing they do is confuse people.

Today, I’ll make things nice and simple.

I’ll talk about how to get backlinks—and specifically backlinks that deliver real SEO results. Of course, the key word here is “results.”

Who wants to chase links for months, only to see no real SEO success at all?

I’ve got you covered.

How to Build the Best Backlinks to Your Website

In this article, I’ll talk about how to build backlinks to your website, and also tell you about the links that can potentially hurt your rankings.

The old days when all types of backlinks were considered good for SEO are long gone. For years, many webmasters relied on sloppy techniques and used automated tools to build hundreds of backlinks every day. Things have changed a lot since then.

In today’s SEO, high-quality and relevant backlinks have the most value.

But how do you build good backlinks?!

Here are some tips you should follow to get good backlinks to your website.

Trust no one

Don’t rely on the tips you read from unknown sources. If somebody discovers the secret to rank first on Google for competitive keywords, it’s very unlikely that they’ll share it with strangers.

Always do your research and conduct your own experiments. With very little money, you can create a website to test all types of backlinks and have your own case studies.

Build backlinks with patience

If you’ve just created your website, the chances of getting fast and natural links are almost zero. It’s one or the other.

Natural links take time.

Saying your prayers before going to bed, in the hopes that Forbes or the Washington Post will link to you, won’t get you anywhere. Instead, you’ll have to build some links and drive relevant traffic to your website.

How do you do this?

One common method is to write guest posts on reputable websites in your niche.

Write the right guest posts for the right sites

When you write guest posts for other websites, don’t do it just for the purpose of getting a link in the author bio.

This method has been abused a lot lately, but with the right strategy, you can stand out from the crowd.

Here are some tips to scale your guest posting technique:

  • Don’t overlook websites that don’t have a “write for us” page. Not every website has one of these. Some of the best websites for getting backlinks are ones without these pages.
  • Only write for highly reputable websites in your niche. Don’t waste time writing for websites with a Domain Authority lower than that of your site. Your link will have very little value, and you might end up having your link removed without further notice. (To check out a site’s Domain Authority and other key SEO metrics, use our Monitor Backlinks Free Backlink Checker tool.)
  • Write more than one time for each website. Build a relationship. Put effort into an ongoing collaboration. Otherwise, it’ll be obvious you’re writing only to build backlinks.
  • Nofollow links are great. Not for SEO, but for traffic and to get more followers on social media.
  • Monitor the links from your guest posts. Use the Monitor Backlinks SEO tool for automatic updates and keep track of all your backlinks. Sometimes, webmasters remove or change your links from dofollow to nofollow, or remove your backlinks entirely, and you should know about this. Monitor Backlinks will send you an email notification to let you know any time your backlink profile experiences a change like this, so you can take action.
  • Always link to your social media accounts in the author bio of your articles.

By using the techniques I just noted above, I’ve managed to get great SEO results and tons of direct traffic to one of my websites—all from the author bio of my guest posts.

This is a screenshot with the direct visits received over the last month from an article I wrote for a popular website.

how-to-get-backlinks-2

As you can see, the bounce rate is 65% (13% better than my overall website’s performance) and the average visit duration is 2:31 minutes (84% better than my website’s average duration per visit).

I’m getting hundreds of visits every month, just from this article.

Do you need another successful example? Check the results of another guest post I wrote a while ago.

how-to-get-backlinks-1

This time, I’m showing you the results over the last few months so you can see that guest posting is a long-term method to drive traffic. The results are even greater this time.

The bounce rate is 57%, which is 27% better than my overall website’s statistics. The average time duration is 109% better than my average visit length.

Why were the two examples I just shared successful? Because I followed all the rules mentioned above.

I wrote detailed and high-quality articles on reputable websites in my niche and people loved them so much that they decided to check out my personal website as well.

I didn’t write them just to get a backlink, but to get both the benefits of traffic and SEO. Even if these links had been nofollow, I would’ve gained hundreds of visits per month.

Don’t leave footprints on your backlinks

A very common mistake many SEOs make is to leave footprints when building backlinks. All your links should look natural, even those that you’re building for SEO.

  • If you’re doing guest posts, always change your author bio and use different pen names.
  • Don’t use the same description for your website all over the web.
  • Make all your links look natural and untraceable.

The Smartest Ways to Build Good Backlinks

The best links to your website are the ones coming from real websites, with good content and lots of social media shares.

You can either earn these backlinks naturally or build them yourself. As long as they come from the authority websites in your niche, they have great SEO value.

I won’t insist on a specific link building method. What works for me might not work for you. This is the reason why, at the beginning of the article, I said you should do your own experiments and decide what’s best for your website.

You can also check out what your competitors are doing in terms of SEO, and if their strategy works, try to build the same links.

The most common methods to build quality backlinks are:

Which Backlinks You Don’t Want to Build

There are several types of links you should avoid having in your backlinks profile. The worst you can have are the spammy ones you can’t control.

Here are several examples of bad backlinks:

1. Links from pages with thin content. Google devalues pages and websites with very little content, and it’s obvious that links from these types of websites carry little SEO value.

2. Websites that don’t provide value to users. The best examples in this category are social bookmarking websites, directories and article directories. All of these can be used only for the purpose of SEO, and Google doesn’t give them a lot of credit. What’s even worse is that, once you’ve submitted your link to any of these websites, it’s almost impossible to remove it.

3. Comment spam. Nobody likes spam, and neither does Google. If you’re posting spammy comments all over the internet, you’ll lose your website’s reputation, and you might also lose your rankings in search engines. Even nofollow comments can be suspicious if you abuse them. Check out Matt Cutts’s answer to spammy comments:

Final Thoughts on Getting Backlinks

If you want to build backlinks to your website, you have to do it with caution and knowledge.

You should monitor each backlink you create or earn and verify it carries any SEO value.

Always avoid getting backlinks from pages where you don’t have any control. The last thing you’d want is to have hundreds of backlinks you can’t remove.

How’s link building working out for you lately? Reach out to us on Facebook or Twitter to let us know!

Comments

71 Comments

imran

Great info but if we are getting links from high quality directory submission, so is it valuable or not?? Without content how we can create more natural links and what are the source of medium?

monitorbacklinks

Quality directories still have value, but don’t concentrate your efforts only on that method.

jacqueline Kennedy

Im keen to do this to bring my ranking up- just would like to know where to look- blogs and article writing perhaps I will start with. Im sure it gets easier once you get started. Thank you for your articles.

monitorbacklinks

you can start by spying your competitors strategy with our SEO tool.

Tractify

Nice article and information provided is absolutely correct in terms of
building links, I already started following these methods and hopefully
it will help in my website ranking.

Felix

Thank you!

dominique

Learning the proper way of doing the SEO is really essentials, you have to know the basic to have way around on the changes Google’s have done.

Felix

You are right Dominique. I’m glad you found our article useful

Mathias Gilles

Never heard of/used the “broken links method. Very smart, thank you for your help!

Felix

Great. Let us know how it goes

@Allmoh

This is very useful tricks for beginner, but I think guest
posting or contribute other related blogs is still a great way to build
backlinks and become sponsor to the beginner related site can help a thousand
time. Thanks for your valuable opinion.

Felix

I am glad I could help you. Good luck building backlinks 🙂

Wiliam

Nice article, never heard of broken links strategy. going to read it.

Chris

How can one use these strategies for a very specfic niche? I can find semi relevent sites to write for but it is difficult to work my niche into them?

Alqada

thank you for this information am still beginner in seo and hope to be professional.

Felix

Follow the best practices and you’ll become a professional. You might also like the article Link building best practices: https://blog.monitorbacklinks.com/seo/link-building-best-practices/

Bratt

Quality and actionable tips on how to get quality traffics. Thanks for sharing

Felix

My pleasure Bratt.

Suryono

Thanks for sharing, it help me a lot

Felix

That’s great to hear. Good luck with your website.

Bianu Gabriel

these techniques are valid 2015 ?

Felix

They sure are.

Bhumi

Awesome article.Thanks for sharing.

Blippitt

Definitely some good advice here. Slow & steady wins the race, for sure.

Soma Marketing

Great article. Nothing beats some competition keyword analysis for some great link opportunities along with research of who are the authority bloggers in each niche to reach out to.

Aivar Magin

Hi Felix, its 2015 but here I am reading your post. That’s very true what you said about trusting no one. I was once in a stagnated stage trying to adapt all the guides and tips that there is provided online. It is true that to be successful, one has to find his own way to find a strategy that works for you. Cheers, thank you for sharing this to us!

Saurabh tiwari

This is an awesome post with lots of points one need to keep in mind for improving quality back link. Thanks for the good stuff.

Felix

Thank you for your feedback.

Ben

Awesome article 🙂

Thanks for the tips. We are looking at incorporating many of these tips. Good to know about the reputation above 40 🙂

Thanks again for this great list on how to build backlinks 🙂

Bart

Great information, I will test some of these ways for backlinks on my site. thanks

Man

good point … however.. i can’t find guest post websites will you help me to find these???

Felix

Try using some footprints in Google. For example: “keyword” + “write for us” or “keyword” + “contribute”. This should get you started.

uçak bileti

Great article. Nothing beats some competition keyword analysis for some great link opportunities along with research of who are the authority bloggers in each niche to reach out to.

musadun

the most difficult part is to find anyone looking for guest post..great tips..thanks anyway

Nicolas Henin

Definitely. I got some real tips about link building.

Alex Haris

Nice article. if we use your tool, what type of links we get? Can you give me some sample links?

Felix Tarcomnicu

Hi Alex,

Monitor Backlinks is an SEO tool and not a link building tool. You can use Monitor Backlinks to spy your competitors link building strategies and try to replicate their best backlinks.

S.sharanappa

HI THIS IS SHARAN big thanks, great article for sure. I have a question for you. Most of the domains you recommend to post links on have high PR, however the actual internal pages that will contain our links have a PR of 0-1. Doesn’t that devalue the links too much? Is it worth it to put so much effort for PR 0-1 links?

Felix Tarcomnicu

Hi,

Don’t pay too much attention PageRank, as it’s a metric that has not been updated for more than one year. I think it’s already one year and a half, and Google has no plans to update it ever.

Look at Domain Authority and go for any website that’s higher than 25.

Luke wright

Thanks Felix for this great article. It is a very informative article. I am new blogger and i am doing according to your post. I am doing Guest posts, Infographics, Niche forums. I don’t understand about Email outreach. Can you tell me How it works? . I am writing 800-1000 words content for my site. Is it ok?

Norman Risner

I don’t think you worrying about trusting no one when you stick to social media marketing. There are many social media sites such as Google+, LinkedIn, wordpress, tumblr, blogger, pinterest, etc. that have high domain authority and are great for backlinks.

Writing fresh original engaging content to post on these social media sites with anchor text backlinks to your website pages have definitely achieved excellent SERP for my customers and my sites as well.

I would definitely avoid paid directories and server link farms. Opening up your own Google+ community is also another method I’ve tried which works quite well attracting visitors.

Felix Tarcomnicu

social media links will not help you with SEO as most of them are nofollow. You should use social media for outreach and build backlinks that might make a difference.

Thanks for your comment.

Yogesh

Hi,
I was looking for something like and this and after a lot of searches I found your article.
It was very helpful and very enjoyable to read. Creating Backlinks is a crucial task and no one likes to sit and write for others or comment on other blogs just to get a backlink but as we know that to rank above you need a lot of backlinks.
I will surely try Guest Posting method very soon. It may result in a good way (I hope ) 🙂
Thanks for this amazing post. Looking forward for more such posts.
Regards!

Raphael

Thanks alot for this lovely piece of information, its such a great post.

Martin Livingstone

Hi Thanks for your very good post you have a lot of reel good information and I will try some of your tips thanks again
Martin

Jordan

Hi Felix, I just found your blog today. I’ve actually never tried the strategies you mentioned. One of the problems I find about guest posting is that it doesn’t work in ever single niche.

For instance, one of the niches I am in people simply don’t guest post on other blogs. I also tried broken link method, didn’t work well for me. Probably need to try it once more.

Another thing I’ve used to drive traffic to my websites is to write in relevant forums. A few of them allow you to had a signature. It’s quite old school I know but it still works.

Thanks,
Jordan

Felix Tarcomnicu

Howdy Jordan,

Yeah…in boring niches it’s a bit more complicated. But you know what?! If it’s complicated for you to get backlinks, it will be complicated for your competitors as well. This means that with less backlinks you’ll be able to rank higher.

Have you checked your competitors backlinks? I’m sure you can find some good opportunities there.

Regards,
Felix

Madison

Hi Felix, cant say thank you enough for this – from reading everything posted I am going to try your advice above in using the footprints in Google. This really has been a long journey and I am soaking up all the advice and help I can get on all this.. thanks for your blog!
Madison

Colin

I am struggling to get backlinks for an event listing calendar that our company offers. For this, we aren’t writing blog posts about it or anything, we are simply providing great content for people to find things to do for fun with friends, for a date night, or even just events that somebody is passionate about.

I want to do this right and know that it is a useful resource for people to find things to do, however, the hardest part is getting the word out about it. How do I get people to backlink to our calendar?

Matija

Hi there, this is Matija from Slovenia.

Let me first thank you for excellent post.
Your sentence building links with patience is simply the best.

I have been on backlinks building process here on small Slovenian market for years now.
And must say your tip to have patience is the most valuable advise ever.

I used to have no patience, bought many links through Fiverr, creating PBN’s, stuffing my sites into bookmarking lists and so on and so on.

Until I realized it’s actually easier if one settles down and actually start contributing to the net.
And this can be simply done by adding relevant comments to blog posts and adding useful guest posts on other sites. It’s better to give one relevant comment (and get accepted) that stuffing one hundred url’s into bookmarking site.

It works. It is true that all comments are not accepted everwhere.

But I think it is right thing that author doesn’t accept comment, if it is of no value to his audience.
Afterall, the author creates initial content and, we, commenters, only want to get benefit out of it.
At least, let’s contribute something back.
Regards, Matija, Slovenia

Andrea

Hi Felix,

I’m Italian blogger, and I will follow your advices.

Great article. Thanks,

Andrea

Asad Ali

Great tutorial! I agree that people don’t usually share their million-dollars secret with others. SEO is more of an art than science. And at the current time 90% of SEO is all about backlinks. I’ve tried to build some high authority backlinks by commenting but it rarely works, especially for niches other than internet markeeting. there are too many websites an SEO niche can comment and get backlinks but this isn’t true for other niches. Guest posting works for all. I am gonna try it. 🙂

Rajesh Jhamb

Gone those days when everybody could make spammy links and get ranked.
SEO is changing process. It is evolving with the time.
Google want to display quality results to its audience, that’s why It introduces Panda, penguin and other animal updates to knock out the spammy blogs from the Web.
Great article indeed on Backlinks.
Thank You
Cheers!

varyhelp

A bunch of good strategies for beginner’s. But one thing is not clear to me that, when I start link building? I think, frist of all building good relationship with same peers or niche’s is important because, it is all about the crowd and community who is interested to hear from you. So it is very important to build a community or regular audience first and then focus on build the backlinks.

Amyth

Thanks Felix, That is some very good and valuable information. Really appreciate you sharing it. Cheers!

shiv@thedroidcity

I also agree Ashad Ali comment “I agree that people don’t usually share their million-dollars secret with others. SEO is more of an art than science. And at the current time 90% of SEO is all about backlinks. I’ve tried to build some high authority backlinks by commenting but it rarely works, especially for niches other than internet markeeting. there are too many websites an SEO niche can comment and get backlinks but this isn’t true for other niches. Guest posting works for all”. Keep it up.

Maira sheikh

Hey Felix, great to read such informative content. I have developed my website in november 2015 but i am unable to get backlinks. I don’t understand the reason but on checking google analytics i observed that whenever i update 2- 3 articles a day, my page views increases. please help me offering some suggestion.

Himanshu Shakhar

Nice article, love to learn more from you specially Broken link method.
I will definitely follow these methods.

Mohan Desai

Hey Felix,

Thanks for sharing good information about link building, this is really going to help to many newcomers bloggers.

Blair Pettrey

So I am confused – because if I google (which is how I found this article, which I realize was written nearly 2 years ago… but still); Moz and Kissmetrics say that comments can provide quality links if you’re not spammy … you’re saying the exact opposite. Is that because this is old, or would you still hold that statement true in March 2016? :/

Felix Tarcomnicu

That’s exactly what I said. Spammy comments are bad. You shouldn’t post comments just for the sake of getting a link.

Ketki

Wow amazing post .you have given detailed information about backlink.I will definately think about guest posting.looking for such more post.

Regards,

Evans

SEO algorithms is changing daily, but people would hardly share the new tricks and tips. Relevant back-linking will continue dominating 90% of the SEO, the rest 10% to be taken by relevant content.

Thank you.

Carlos Miguel

Hi,

Just want to ask few questions about footprints if you are still there.

Why should we leave no footprints if you are doing legit guest posting? And why use different pen names?

Imagine you have guest posted on sites like Moz, Huffington, Business.com, or any authority sites all with the same pen name directing to your website. Didn’t Google will trust you and your site more?

Or using different pen names build more diversity and look more organic?

How about using real author name in authority sites and pen names on lower tier sites?

Dev

Hi Felix,

Thanks for this detailed article and agreed with your point that “The best websites from where you should get links are the ones without these pages”. It is comparatively easier to get your post live on the website having”write for us” but this is not what I’m looking for. The thing is, how to find such websites which will allow you to write? Typically they don’t respond to contribution email or they ask to us to pay some amount for the post. Is there any specific way to pitch them? May be with some writing sample or any other stuffs. I would appreciate your suggestion/recommendation on this.

Thanks,

Md.Tariqul Islam

Hi Felix,

Thanks for this elaborated article and accept with your point that “The best websites from where you should get links are the ones without these pages”. It is comparatively easier to get your post live on the website having”write for us” but this is not what I’m looking for. The thing is, how to find such websites which will allow you to write? Typically they don’t respond to contribution email or they ask to us to pay some amount for the post. Is there any specific way to pitch them? May be with some writing sample or any other stuffs. I would appreciate your suggestion/recommendation on this.

Thanks,

Geekyard

Hi Felix,
Very detailed information on Backlinks. Today I learnt pros and cons of Backlinks and it’s usage.

Zeeshan Yousaf

Hi,
Link building is very very important for SE, it also imprtant that know to how bhild link buiilding..Nice article and information provided is absolutely correct in terms of
building links.Definitely good advice here.
thanks for sharing

Greg

Hi Felix,

Congratulations for your great post about link building. I am a big fan of the broken link building strategy and have had good success with it. My favorite tool is the “Check my links” Google Chrome extension to check web pages for broken links. If I find a broken link, I email the webmaster and ask him/her if they would like to replace it with my link.

I think the broken link building strategy is a great way to obtain new backlinks because you actually help fellow webmasters fix their websites and you establish a healthy relationship with them in the same time.

With this one strategy, you get more backlinks, your website ranks higher on Google, and you help the Internet be a better place 🙂


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