Today I’ll discuss about how to get links naturally. Getting natural backlinks is never so easy unless you follow these natural link-building tips. Natural link building is developing your site in a way that people start linking to your site spontaneously. This is also called link baiting. The link building techniques have changed a lot since the birth of the Internet. Previously people were involved in reciprocal and 3 way link exchange with whatever site they wanted. But with the change of Google search algorithm, the relevancy factor came in. Then came the concept of contextual linking i.e. linking your site from other site’s content as anchor text, rather than linking from link page or site wide linking. Recent days, search engines only count relevant natural back links and so it’s important to get natural backlinks rather than wasting your time and money on spamming irrelevant forums or irrelevant commenting on not-moderated blogs, bulk directory submissions or engaging in any bad link marketplace or buying untargeted links.
Find below in brief, some ideas on how to get links more naturally.
- Write compelling content (timeless or regularly updated resource list). Example ‘how to’, ’30 ways of..’ etc.
- Offer a free service or tool relevant to your site, can be a software, CMS plugins, browser plugins, free services, pictures, badges, widgets, games, social applications, WordPress templates etc
- Arrange a monthly or yearly contest and give rewards
- Organize a recurring charitable event
- Organize or run a community with similar interest people
- Offer free quality ebooks
- Maintain a high value informative blog with regular update
- Get your content manually translated in other languages
- Support artists or other influential social groups with free or cheaper services like cheaper web hosting or making their website at half cost or designing something for them for free.
- Be an active participant in popular social sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn or Digg
- Create highly attractive videos and distribute for embedding for free
- Start a green initiative and promote to others for the cause against asking them just a link back
- Give away images using a creative commons license on your website
- Offer guest post
- Offer infographics. Share unique charts, graphs and statistics in visual way.
- Start searching relevant bloggers and follow back them with your quality resourceful comment
- Offer free premium content
- Publish interviews of eminent experts in a field
- Write honest testimonials or reviews for other sites.
- Go after your competitor’s link and try to get links back from them. Though it’s time consuming but whatever effort you give, that will sure add value to your link building effort
- Find out the brand evangelists – find out the most influential person who are talking about your product or service. Contact them to add your link to their social posts or websites
- Crowdsource. If you are in a service field, find out similar independent individuals and form a group with interlinking to each other for a mutual win win set up. Share your ideas with them and crosslink each other contextually.
- If you have a wordpress site, allow automatic trackbacks. It also help getting relevant links
- Blogger relations – Contact different bloggers in a specific niche with your pre-launch product or website and ask them to review on their site. In return you can publish an acknowledgement page on your site with their names, sites and a bit brief about what they do.
- Add fuel to controversial topics in your subject and you’ll definitely get backlinks
- Answer questions well in various forums and groups. It helps in link building.
- Donate to relevant groups. Most of these organizations offer lifetime backlinks
- Offer related cartoons, funny stuff or comic strip in your sector
- Go for event sponsorships or start an appealing affiliate program.
- Link out generously to good websites and definitely you’ll be noticed and linked back. This takes time but effective.
Some Examples:
- Resource list – Web Developers’ Handbook
- Free quality plugin – WordPress SEO by Yoast
- Yearly competition – Web 2.0 awards
- Charitable event – Blog action day
- Support cheaper hosting – Media template
- Free ebooks – O’Reilly
- Visually appealing flash – Simpleviewer
- Comics – The Oatmeal
- Premium content – Hootsuit Social media metrics
- Crowdource – 40+ SEO experts
- Free bar – Hellobar
- Free widget – Linkwithin
- Affiliate marketing – DIY Themes
- Compelling content – Problogger
All these natural link building tips seem easy on paper but in reality, these are also not that easy to get, but yes if you try hard and work continuously on the right track, you’ll definitely get result for whatever effort you have given.
If you have any other ideas for natural link building techniques, feel free to drop me a comment here.
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About Debajyoti
Thanks for listing these free resources in a handy place! I’m sure that there’s lots that I haven’t seen before there. I just wanted to shout out about the 1.) bullet point of the ‘get links more naturally’ list.
I personally think that so many SEOer’s drum on about ‘writing’ compelling content as opposed to ‘developing’ compelling content. It’s interesting to see that top bloggers such as copyblogger and SEOMoz etc using so much video content to acquire links. Let’s face it it’s hard to get links just by writing content alone – the ‘compelling written content’ needs to be seen, promoted and shouted about from the roof tops – but if it’s shabby then you’re gonna be humbled – simple as! I much prefer the userability side of content generation and I believe this earns a heck of a load more. Interract with your users and they will continue to be involved in your community. I think you covered a lot of ground in your post and to elaborate on each and every bullet point would be half way to publishing an O’Reilly series – I hope to see more of these useful posts from you! I especially liked the http://www.debajyoti.net/wordpress/301-permalink-redirect-seo-permalinks-mod-rewrite-adding-html-posts-pages.html page – nice and technical!
@Ed, Thank you Ed for sharing your insights. Yes I agree with you ////the ‘compelling written content’ needs to be seen, promoted and shouted about from the roof tops”
True. Only good content without shout will not be beneficial to get links. Also people need to collaborate with influential bloggers in social media to get noticed. Thanks again for your appreciation.
I am looking for getting some back link to my newly launched website http://www.lankamatters.com. This post really helped me. But some small suggestion, it is difficult to read in this font.
Thank you,
Hey Nish, we have changed the font. Thank you for your suggestion