One great way to rank high on the results pages of search engines is to obtain high-quality backlinks. High-quality backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, they have confirmed. It can, however, be a little difficult to build links in 2019. Acquiring low-quality links is easy enough, but these can actually end up hurting your rankings. 

So how do you go about getting high-quality websites to link to your page? Here are some tips.

1. Create content people want to link to.

This is the most important way to get backlinks. Create valuable content that will help people, give people information they need, or solve someone’s problem. People aren’t going to want to link to product pages or sales pages. If you create an informative guide, however, or an interesting infographic, it’s possible that they will want to link to that. 

2. Build up your relationships.

Build relationships with the people who own relevant sites (that aren’t direct competitors). Go to events or conferences. Reach out to the people in your niche who are important. Follow these people on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and build relationships with them. Get to know them and offer them a valuable resource or asset before you ask for a link. In most cases, these people will be happy to help you, especially if you have helped them.

3. Write guest blog posts.

If you are writing for a site that’s relevant to you and your niche, guest blog links can still be quite valuable. To find these sites you can Google your nice + “write for us”. This will produce a list of relevant sites that accept guest posts. Make sure you read all of the site’s guidelines and you follow them. You also want to make sure your post is well researched and well written. Write a post that is valuable to their readers; don’t write an overly promotional or sales-oriented post about your product or service. Only look for high-quality sites that accept high-quality posts. Not much of a writer? You can outsource the actual post writing if you want to. 

4. Find your competitors’ backlinks and reach out to them.

One great place to start when you’re trying to build backlinks is to look up your competitor and see what sites are linking to their page. There are many tools that will help you find this information, like Ahrefs.com. If you find a website that has a resource page that links to Paleo recipes, for example, and you have a site relevant to that, there’s a good chance they will link to you as well. Try using an outreach program like Buzzstream to easily find contact information.

5. Reach out to link roundup sites.

Finding link roundup sites is easy. It’s just a matter of Googling “keyword” + “weekly roundup” or “keyword” + “link roundup”. This will produce a number of good sites that you can reach out to. This tactic works better with informational guides or pages that solve problems. 

6. Reach out to sites linking to outdated resources.

Find a website that’s similar to your site that has recently changed to another website or has become outdated, and use a tool like Ahrefs to look up sites that link to the outdated website. Then reach out to them and see if they will replace their link to the outdated resource with a link to your website. 

One of the best tactics for search engine optimization — even in 2019 — is still link building. The most important takeaway from this post is that you want to create content that people want to link to. It’s much easier to obtain links to informative or helpful resources than it is to pages that are specifically just promoting something. Follow these guidelines, and you will be on your way to building high-quality links.

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