September 9, 2015

5 Creative Methods for Natural Backlinks

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Michael Jenkins

CEO - Shout Agency
[email protected]

Overview

The most important part of your off-page search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is link building. The challenge with link building for SEO is that getting backlinks is harder today than it has been in the past for website owners.

In the realm of  SEO, backlinks are the currency of credibility and visibility. They play a pivotal role in determining your website’s authority and search rankings. While acquiring backlinks has been a longstanding practice in the SEO world, the landscape has evolved, and search engines now prioritise quality over quantity. To thrive in this new era, it’s essential to explore creative and authentic methods for building natural backlinks.

In this blog post, we will delve into five innovative strategies that can revolutionize your approach to acquiring backlinks and propel your website to new heights of success. These methods go beyond the traditional link-building techniques, emphasising the importance of genuine relationships, valuable content, and thoughtful engagement within your industry.

With the onerous restrictions Google places on website owners, webmasters need to find creative ways to get natural inbound links. Otherwise, they can find themselves de-listed from Google. Below are some great white hat strategies you can use that not only get you backlinks, but also drive traffic to your site from across the web.

Five Creative Strategies for Backlinks

Make the boring outstanding! 
Backlinko recently displayed a case study from an SEO agency that shows how you can make any industry seem outstanding.  

The case study featured Mike Bonadio. Bonadio runs an Melbourne SEO agency. One of his clients wanted to get traffic to their pest control company. He used guestographics to get this done. Essentially, they created an infographic that websites in similar niches can share to their audience.
The results? In two weeks, his clients received over 1,117 Social Shares, 12 Backlinks, and a 15% increase in organic search traffic from one guestographic discussing Do it Yourself Pest Control for the Savvy Gardener.

Blogger Outreach
The next thing you can take a look at is blogger outreach. While the guestographic requires outreach already, blogger outreach is a more intensive campaign you can run to get natural links to your site.  You can use blogger outreach for a few specific purposes:
First, use blogger outreach for developing guest blogging relationships.
This way you can share your ideas with others on a different platform to attract new visitors. Note: Guest blogging for backlinks is strictly a no-no. However, creating ridiculously amazing content on another person’s website is permitted. The key here is to focus on quality content on quality, relevant blogs. When you do that a backlink comes naturally.
Second, sometimes you want a review of your product.
Bloggers often review products online for traffic and possibly for affiliate revenue (make sure you are in compliance with federal laws). To do this, you need to reach out to various bloggers to find out who would be interested in reviewing your product. This is beneficial, because it gives you additional exposure of your product, and can also provide a backlink back to specific product URLs.
Third, you can use it for round up posts.
We discuss this in more detail in number five. However, outreach is a critical component of creating a round up post. By using blogger outreach, you now have the ability to spread your message through another platform and potentially build your search traffic while doing it.

Broken Link Building
Another idea that works brilliantly is the broken link-building strategy. Many sites over time have links that break. Often this is because links change, but more than likely some sites shut down over time.
Therefore, it can be in your best interest to help those owners out. It makes them look better for two reasons.
First, they do not show readers bum links – Broken links are a sign that the website has not been maintained in a little while. It also is a reason why many readers leave the website.
Second, broken links can affect their search engine rankings – Google looks at the overall health of a website. Therefore, broken links are listed as crawl errors that can negatively impact your search traffic. It is like staring at a beautiful model with a lot of band-aids walking down the runway. Takes away from the image.
A number of resources exists to help you find these links for your business. Some of the best tools for this process are LinkChecker (Firefox plugin), Check My Links (Google Extension), and CognitiveSEO.

Press coverage
The next thing you should look into is getting press coverage. While PR campaigns have been a part of good marketing budgets for years, they also benefit businesses that want additional search traffic. Every major media source on the planet now publishes their content online as well as in print, TV, and other mediums. The benefit of this focus on online content provides a lot of great links from major publications. If you want to get started with publicity, subscribe to HARO. They have a number of different emails that come out throughout the day for businesses in specific niches.
Journalists and bloggers actively use the site to find qualified experts to discuss a wide range of issues. This is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your knowledge of some of the biggest sites on the planet.

Round up posts
The final creative method for getting natural backlinks is round-up posts. Round-up posts are when you ask 30-50 experts their thoughts on a specific topic.  By reaching out to them you can create better, more well-rounded content. Furthermore, all of these experts can share and link back to your content. For example, one round-up post from SEO Hacker had over 400 shares and 6,000 visits. This was largely attributable to the help from the different experts who shared the post. This is a brilliant content marketing strategy.

Final Thoughts

The benefits of creative back linking are that you have the power to do more than the rest of the people in your niche. That is because while they are scrimping for backlinks, you provide valuable information to get those backlinks.

If you still need help creating natural backlinks in creative methods or you are in need of a social media agency or digital marketing agency in Melbourne, feel free to give us a Shout!

 

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        As Founder and Director of Shout Web Strategy, Michael Jenkins is at the forefront of digital marketing. Since it’s inception in 2009, Shout has built a strong reputation as one of Australia’s leading strategic SEO agencies, assisting online businesses to formulate, implement and track successful marketing strategies. Michael is a respected thought leader and digital strategist, specialising in online strategy, corporate SEO, Google retargeting, email and conversion rate optimisation, and online reputation management. Follow Michael on Google+, connect with him through LinkedIn or visit the Shout Web Strategy website.

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