If you are into SEO, you would have heard the SEO skill 'The content is king, the outer chain is the emperor'¹, but I think the description here is not accurate, it should be The content is king, backlinks is the emperor, Backlinks contains outbound link and inbound link. A lot of bloggers or web content writers find it challenging to build high-quality backlinks. And some resort to spammy activities to get, at least, something linking back to their web pages. This type of practices isn't to be encouraged.

Whether your website is new or old, I have highlighted 7 different methods you can use to generate high-quality backlinks without breaking search engine rules. These methods are vital if you are new to link building techniques. The more backlinks you have, and the better quality your backlinks are, the more trusted Google will consider your contents.

Before delving into these methods, let's understand what backlinks are and the factors that make a high-quality link.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are hyperlink texts pointing from one web page to another as a reference or resource. Building backlinks are one of the methods of increasing your website or web page relevance to the search engines. With a reasonable amount of websites pointing to yours, its signifies authority. And it makes your website more trustworthy.

Also, search bots use backlinks to identify valued contents. So, if your web page is identified as such, the bots place your website at the top of search results whenever search criteria match your keywords.

As shown in the image below, this is how the backlinks work. Basically, you create links from different platforms to those pages you want to promote.

Backlinks can be in image captions, pages, posts, or any other places of a web page: as long as links to yours, that’s a backlink.

Factors to consider when building backlinks

The factors to consider when choosing a website to get links from are subjected. For this reason, you have to figure what you think may work best for your website.

High-quality backlinks should point to your website from a relevant website. These are the 4 of the factors to think about when you start to build backlinks.

1.Domain authority

Domain authority is a scale between 0 and 100 created by Moz, an SEO Consulting company. The scale determines how authoritative a website is within its industry and how likely it can appear at the top of search results.You can use the Moz Pro Link Explorer to find a site’s authority ranking.

It isn't a must to post on high authority websites, but it's a big advantage. Posting on such website and linking back to yours can boost your ranking much faster than a website without a domain authority. So, this aspect should be highly considered.

2.Dofollow links

Dofollow means search bots are allowed to crawl and index any links within a web page. When search engine bots visit your website, they scout the whole content on the page. And if there are links, they index them all.

However, if a nofollow is specified, then the bots will ignore all the links that have the nofollow tag. For this, you need to be sure that the website you are posting your contents on doesn't have a nofollow setup.

3.Anchor text

An anchor text is a clickable text in a hyperlink that creates a link from one web page to the other. When using anchor text, the best practice is making the text relevant to the web page you are linking to.

💡 Anchor text should not be directly and heavily referenced to your website name or url. To express the natural integration into the article, Google can determine the semantics of the target text before and after, and directly refer to your URL, it will be judged as low quality.
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4.Relevance

It's more logical that you link from a relevant website. Meaning, the web page you are linking from must be related to the one you are linking to. Building backlinks from unrelated websites aren't advisable. It may devalue your web page.

Example: if you write about dental care, the content you are linking from should be discussing topics that are related to teeth treatment.

Methods of building quality backlinks

Let's face it. There is no shortcut to building quality links to your website. You have to be wary of people that promise thousands of backlinks in a few days. To build backlinks there are guidelines to follow. Otherwise, you may get penalised. If you can't do this on your own, seek help from an expert.

Now to the real points. How do you build quality backlinks? In this next phase, I will highlight the 7 different methods you can use to drive traffic to your web page and make it relevant.

Method 1: Create a profile on the social platform

How active your social profiles are, contributes to how easy your target audience can reach you. Almost all the social platforms are high authority domains. Therefore, posting your contents on these channels elevates your relevancy.

Being active on social media doesn't mean to register for all there are. To be successfully making use of social platforms figure out which ones work better for your niche.

Method 2: Create and promote your contents

This is a vital part of link building. Before getting links to your website, you need to have contents that people will be willing to share or link to. So, you need to create contents about the services or products that you offer.

And don't just write contents for the sake of putting something on your website; make the contents relevant to what you do. In other words, write quality and valuable contents.

After creating the content, promote it. Share it on all of your social profile; do paid ads as necessary to reach a larger audience. When people find your content online, they will link to it or connect with you.

Method 3: Be a contributor or guest writer

When you become a contributor to a website, you create awareness of yourself and what you do. Basically, you build an online reputation with your contents. It's practically one of the effective methods to reach a new audience.

There are some high authority websites like Forbes and Entrepreneur that accepts contributors. You don't necessarily have to be a contributor to top platforms. You could start from small ones, and grow gradually into the system.

Method 4: Answer forum questions

Find forums like Reddit and Quora to answer questions that are related to your niche. The more questions you answer, the more exposed you get to different visitors.

Apart from answering questions on these forums, you could share your blog posts and link back to your website.

Method 5: Reach out to similar niche websites

You can reach out to bloggers with high visitors and request to share your content on their website. Sure, not everyone will be willing to accept your request. But, you should continue to search until you find someone who will accept your content.

You may ask yourself why to use your content to build another someone else's website. Well, your content adds value by building the website up. In return, you get links pointing back to your website through that post.

Method 6: Comment on a similar blog

This is another strong method of building backlinks. What this method does is create a relationship between you and the readers of the blog you are commenting on.

As time passes, you will notice that the community will start to develop some interest in your comments. From there, you start to connect with different people and building relationships.

Blog comment is also the easiest way to build backlinks. However, most Chinese blog content quality is relatively low, so the effect is not ideal. It is recommended to choose a blog with higher DA for comment.

Method 7: Broken link strategy

This aspect has to do with searching for blog posts with broken links in your niche. Then request the author of the post or the webmaster to replace the broken link with yours.

The technique with this strategy is to contact the website owner and report the broken link. While doing that, you should suggest your web page as a replacement.