A website is a must-have in today’s world for almost every business (probably there are some rare exceptions, but let’s not focus on them). What’s the main point of having a webpage? Firstly, it’s some kind of business card on the Internet for your company. Secondly, it allows your customer and potential clients or business partners to find you. All they need to do is to put a query in the search engine, and they’ll get a direct link to your firm’s website in the results on the first page. Well… that’s what you probably wish for.
How to make a page visible for the audience? That’s what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is for! There are plenty activities you should do on your website, like optimise blog posts, use natural language and keywords, wrap your titles and subtitles in tags (H1 and H2), make your site mobile-friendly and fast, use visuals and so on. When it comes to off-page SEO, there’s also a bunch of things you can do to rock in Google’s results.
What are backlinks?
Off-page SEO is basically every action taken outside your website. Among them, you should focus on acquiring your page’s hyperlinks on other pages. This process is called link building. So that backlinks are incoming links to a site, from different sites. To place the link in the content, you should use anchor – a clickable text. It supposed to be also keywords to work better for SEO.
There are also internal links between subpages in one domain. The process is called interlinking. For example, you can link from a blog post to subpage about a product.
Backlinks can be dofollow and nofollow. The first type is every link just placed on the website (more specifically in its code). Search engines crawl these links and therefore help in SEO. On the contrary, a nofollow link has to be created by implementing in the code this phrase: rel=”nofollow” and as its name indicate – it’s not followed by Google robots, so it’s not taken under consideration by search engine’s algorithm.
Why are backlinks important?
When a backlink is a dofollow link, it passes an external page so-called „link juice” to the site it’s linking to. That means it gives some of its power to the other page, and that consequence in the page ranks. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the better. Definitely, don’t focus just on the quantity. Nowadays Google’s algorithm is designed in favor of humans, so it’s concentrating on the value that the page’s content brings with itself.
Every backlink is a „vote of confidence” for your website from other sites. For search engines, it means that your page is worth visiting and it’s a valuable source of information for Internet users. Therefore, your site’s visibility in ranks will increase, so the possibility of more significant traffic also arises. More visitors equals more potential clients, and that can cause bigger revenue. In the end, that’s the real goal of every marketing activity, including SEO. Can you see the crucial role of backlinks now in developing business?
How to get backlinks for free?
There are many techniques for that, including both paid and free ways of acquiring backlinks. Every business and website is unique, so you need to try various methods and analyze which works for you best. Here we’ve listed ideas, what you can realize without any additional budget:
Create skyscraper content.
It’s one of the most popular and effective techniques, yet very time-consuming. You need to research the excellent article, which is trendy and demanded by your audience. When you identify such piece of content – give it a second life. By making it even better, you have a chance to get many high-quality backlinks. You need to refresh it and recreate to raise the same subject in the new approach. For example, you can update statistics or add attractive visuals. To distribute your content share it in your social media.
Moreover, identify which websites linked to your prototype and suggest the change for your article as it’s more actual and so on. You can offer something in return, like the free access to your tool, share on your social network accounts, etc. Keep your content updated to stay current. The whole process can take a lot of your time with the research, and it takes creative and innovative ideas to design a skyscraper content, but it can bring you great SEO results.
Replace broken links.
Search for websites and blogs which contain inactive or out-of-date links related to your topics. Therefore you can contact page owners and inform them that you’ve created a relevant content which they can link to instead of the broken links. Check out if you have any improper links on your website because too many of them can impact your page’s authority and make it seen as a low-quality by the search engine’s crawlers.
An excellent opportunity is to write guest posts for other companies’ blogs, as well as for industry related media. Usually, you’ll have to follow a guideline for guest publishers to fit into their style. Choose websites which match your brand, so it can be somehow natural that you post there. Consider blogs regarding their value, so you won’t end up with the worse effect than before when it comes to rankings. There are many pages which invite guest bloggers („write for us” section), but you can ask any websites’ admins if they’d be interested in your input.
Create quality content.
The always great idea is to design the finest content to attract your audience. What kinds of articles are in demand? The ones with a real value for readers: educational, top lists, reviews, and comparisons, interviews. For a premium blog post you can turn it into gated content (i.e., prepare an ebook, which can be downloaded after sharing a post in social media). Therefore you can get more backlinks, but remember – this content has to be top-notch!
Any other ideas? Of course! For the most – use your social media reach to get to your followers. Moreover, comment on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn the relevant posts and initiate interactions. Quora is an excellent platform for helping its users with an essential answer (of course you can only give a sneak peek to the full article you link to). Testimonials for products you use can be an effective way for link building. Write a few sentences or a review of the tool to get published on their websites (with a link of course). Research and getting inspired by competitors are always good ideas, as well as reaching to your family and friends with whom you can exchange links.
Paid link building and how much does it cost?
You’ve already got familiar with some free link building methods, and here you can find a few ideas for paid techniques. Nevertheless, one pricing list doesn’t exist. It depends on the method, as well as other factors. How can you buy backlinks?
Sponsored articles.
You can pay for a content publication as well as for copywriting services. It’s also called native advertisement because such an article should seem no to be an ad. Therefore it has to be very valuable, suitable for a specific website and unintrusive. Basically, it’s an ordinary, helpful and interesting text which contains only a link to a sponsored page hidden behind an anchor. How to find the best publishers? There are platforms dedicated for that, like whitepress.net where you can search for websites regarding their topics, price, and localization. It can be a successful method as you’ll get with your content to your target group – people potentially interested in your products or services.
What is the price for a sponsored article?
As it was said before – it depends. Publication prices start even from $20, and copywriting service is an additional cost. Price depends on the website’s traffic – the more unique visitors, the better. Moreover, Trust Flow (based on majestic.com rank) and Domain Rating (based on ahrefs.com) are the measurements that matter – the highest number, the better. It shows if the website was often cited and page’s strength in the rankings — both of the metrics scale from 0 to 100. Price can differ because of the page’s reputation, languages and many other factors. The SEO industry is also a very dynamic field so prices can change very often. Your goal is to find the most relevant publishers for your brand, with the biggest traffic and highest Trust Flow and Domain Rating and pay the lowest possible price for a native ad there.
Web catalogues.
Lists of companies sorted by the industry and specialization. Before the search engines era, it was the only way to look for a website. Now it’s useful because of backlinks as well as the additional way of getting to your page. You need to prepare a brief description of your company (500 characters) and contact information. Price for placement in the catalogues differ, but it’s usually just a few U.S. dollars. By getting into a new catalogue once in a while, you can expand your reach and increase your website’s visibility in search engines results.
Automatic link building generators.
Tools designed for that purpose offer link exchange for their users. Usually, in a free account, you can get as many backlinks as you’ll offer to publish on your website. Additionally, you can buy more links if you don’t want to expose your page for risk of containing too many links. The price depends on the tool you use. It can start even from extremely cheap pricing, but consider generators if they are trustworthy. Otherwise, you can end up with low-quality backlinks which won’t cause any good for your page results
Backlinks are helpful when it comes to page ranks in search engines. They not only increase your brand’s awareness but also referral traffic to your site. Hard work on acquiring high-quality links can certainly pay-off in a long-run. There’s no price list for all the backlinks, as there are many technics and online tools that you can use to achieve the goal. Moreover, there are methods which seem free, but in fact, they cost your company a salary of a content designer or SEO Manager, so at the end, it’s also not cost-free.
