The Seven Best Ways to Get More Authority Backlinks

1. Create More Infographics

Evidence suggests that posts with outstanding infographics attract far more backlinks than traditional textual posts. The same is also true for most types of posts that are predominantly visual in nature, just as long as the visuals in question are both unique and relevant to your brand.

It’s not uncommon for a single infographic to earn dozens (even hundreds) of backlinks. If it provides a huge hit of useful information at a glance, it’s exactly what today’s web user wants.

If running short on inspiration, take a look at your closest (and most successful) competitors to see how they present information in their posts.


2. Tweak Your Outreach

When pitching your posts to potential publishers, try not to focus too much on the post itself. Likewise, don’t spend too much time bragging about how fantastic your company is, or how wonderful your products are.

Instead, base your pitch entirely on how their readers stand to benefit from your content. Talk about the questions your posts answer, the value they bring, and how those who read them stand to benefit from them.

Make it not about you or your content, but about those who will (hopefully) be reading it.

Importantly, make every pitch personal – templated guest post pitches can be spotted from a mile away, and will see you made part of the recipient’s spam filter.

3. Write Testimonials and Reviews

This only works if you can remain 100% impartial and objective, while at the same time being kind and complementary. Hence, it’s only going to work if you target brands, for businesses and websites you genuinely appreciate.

Businesses in general love social proof and user-generated content in all its forms. An extensive, in-depth and hugely positive write-up from a fully neutral party can therefore be pure gold.

If it’s a viable option, it’s worth considering penning these reviews from time to time, and pitching them accordingly. If they like what they see, they’ll be more than happy to link to it.

Or perhaps, publish it on their own website/blog and link back to your other pages.

4. Sponsored Content

Last up, there never has been nor will there ever be anything wrong with sponsored content. It’s the driving force behind the revenues of countless sites of authority, where money changes hands for exposure.

Make no mistake about it – high-authority websites will not accept or published garbage for cash. Sponsored articles from quality websites still need to be of an appropriate quality standard.

Contrary to popular belief, evidence suggests that the words ‘sponsored by...’ or ‘the following article is a sponsored post’ have no bearing on its perceived credibility or appeal. In addition, the placement of backlinks in such content can be just as beneficial from an SEO perspective as would be the case with a non-sponsored post.

Hence, if doing so is within your means financially, considering a few sponsored posts here and there comes highly recommended.

Reciprocal Linking is Not Necessarily Bad

Quite some time ago, Google made its thoughts on unnatural link exchange schemes perfectly clear. The long and short of it being that swapping links for reciprocal benefit was not conducive with quality SEO.

A stance which stands to reason, as reciprocal linking paves the way for black-hat SEO. Where two or more sites agree to link to each other for mutual SEO benefit, they do so without having technically earned these backlinks.
                                     



Backlinks which could be placed on sites of no direct relevance to the other sites included in the exchange scheme.

More grey-hat than black-hat SEO, Google has nonetheless made it clear that backlinks earned through merit are really the only backlinks worth bothering with.

But what about reciprocal linking that takes place following the placement of a link earned through merit? If a relevant business within your niche posts a link to your website, can you return the favour without fear of reprisal?

When Reciprocal Links Are Perfectly Justifiable

Somewhat backtracking on the whole issue, the latest comments direct from Google suggest that reciprocal linking is not always a bad thing. In fact, it is perfectly natural to host a link to a site that links to yours, if the original link was indeed relevant and credible.

Google’s John Mueller took the opportunity to set the record straight last week, during a recent Google Search Central SEO office hours hangout.

Mueller was quizzed by an SEO on Google’s approach to this type of link exchange, and whether it was best avoided to preserve backlink value. Or to put it another way - is it ok to link back to a site that links to you, or is it better for your SEO profile to leave things be?

In response, Mr Mueller offered the following advice:

“That’s perfectly fine. It’s also kind of natural. Especially if you’re a local business, you link to your neighbors. Or if you’re mentioned in the news somewhere you kind of mention that on your website like ‘I was featured here in the news’ and essentially you’re kind of linking back and forth.”

It all comes down to the way in which Google’s crawlers are sophisticated enough to decipher between a synthetic link exchange scheme and natural linking. Which in turn means that if reciprocal linking activities are justified and valid, they are perfectly fine.

“It’s kind of a reciprocal link essentially, but it’s a natural kind of link. It’s not something that’s there because you’re doing some kind of crazy link scheme. So from that point of view, I think it’s easy to overthink it. And if you’re doing something naturally, if you’re not kind of making weird deals, behind the scenes, then I really wouldn’t worry about it.”

In a nutshell - reciprocal links do not always contravene Google’s webmaster guidelines.

It is entirely down to their relevance and value - the natural, 100% organic exchange of relevant backlinks is permitted.