You have created amazing content, but you’re not getting any organic traffic to your website. Yes, content is the king, but quality backlinks are queen.

Actually, backlink is among the top-ranking factors for Google. Building backlinks is one of the best strategies to boost traffic and domain authority. As a website owner, you must learn how to get backlinks to your website. 

Today you’re going to learn how to get backlinks in 2021. By the end of this post, you’ll know 21 amazing ways for link building.

1.     Become a Source for Reporters and Bloggers (HARO)

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Help A Reporter Out more commonly known as HARO, is a service that connects journalists with a wide range of sources and provides you with the opportunity to get useful media coverage for your business.

You can join HARO either as a source or a journalist, depending on your goals. If your aim is to get PR exposure, links, traffic and leads like us, you want to sign up as a source.

Here’s how you can get started with HARO and secure your first backlink.

Step #1. Sign Up and Create Your Account

Go to the HARO website and click “Sign Up”. Choose ‘I’m a Source’ and then click Subscribe Now to view all the plans available. HARO provides three plans including, Free plan, Standard plan, Advanced plan and the Premium Plan. Once you choose a plan, you can fill in your company information and get registered to receive emails.

Step #2. Filter Out Emails and Find Opportunities

After registration with HARO, you will receive three emails daily from Monday to Friday at the time 5:35 a.m., 12:35 p.m. and 5:35 p.m. ET. These emails will contain queries organized into different categories such as business, technology, healthcare etc.

In the beginning, two things will happen:

1. You will feel overwhelmed with the number of emails.
2. You will try to respond to every query you get.

Your job is to monitor these emails on a daily basis and only respond to those queries where you can provide a relevant opinion and where you have actual hands-on experience.

Step #3. Pitch Your Responses

Once you have identified good queries, it’s time to write your HARO pitch.

When doing so, makes sure that you:

• Write the journalist’s name correctly.
• Include everything the journalist requires.
• Mention why you are qualified to reply.
• Offer a surprising/unusual point of view or a controversial opinion.
• Only add relevant details. Most journalists won’t spend more than a few seconds deciding whether to move on or not.
• Use bullet points so journalists can scan your pitch and see if it’s what they are looking for.
• Include tidbits the journalist can copy-paste into the article (something they often do).
• Make sure there are no typos or errors. Journalists don’t want to waste time editing what you write and will move on if using your pitch is too much work.

Step #4. Look Out for your Placement

Now that you have made a pitch you are satisfied with, you must be eagerly waiting to get a placement.

However, you are not guaranteed to get a backlink from every single HARO query you respond to. From my experience, roughly 20% of pitches will get a reply and 10% will be used but this could vary depending on your niche so don’t be discouraged if you don’t see results at first.

2.     Publish “Skyscraper” Content

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The skyscraper technique is about finding popular content, creating even a better copy, and getting backlinks both naturally and after reaching out to the right people. 

Step #1. Find Relevant Content with Lots of Backlinks

The first step in any Skyscraper SEO campaign is to find some relevant pages with lots of backlinks. A simple Google search for your main key phrase will bring you the first content ideas to toy with. 

But how do you know which of these top results have the biggest number of backlinks? Is it potential skyscraper content? Obviously, you need to check the pages using some backlink research tools. We rely on Ahrefs, but you may also try other services like SEMrush, Majestic, and so on.

Step 2: Make the Original Content Much Better

Okay, you’ve found the content to top. Now it’s high time for you to beat the original. Here are some tips for you to win the game.

Make it longer

If there is anything you can add to the existing post, don’t miss a chance. Add more information, list more items if possible, in short, extend the existing piece so that it could provide more value to the audience.

Make it more detailed

Think of how you can present facts in more detail and make the post juicy. You’ll need to present more thorough research to ensure people you are knowledgeable and very generous to share this knowledge in your post.

For instance, you may:

• Provide descriptions to only-listed items
• Add statistical data
• Explain difficult terms
• Add examples or use cases, and so on

Make it More Up-To-Date

Skyscraping a high-performing piece of content by using the latest information can have a huge impact. Create something that covers many of the same points, but update it with cutting-edge research, data and other time-sensitive information.

Step #3: Reach Out to The Right People

The main idea behind the Skyscraper Technique is to find people who have already been engaged with similar content. This means that your quality prospects are those who:

• Are inhabiting your niche
• Are interested in your topic
• Have already linked to one similar post(s)

You can start by pasting the URL of the original piece into Ahrefs Site Explorer, then go to the Backlinks report. Then, you can narrow down the list by adding the filters for:

• Language: English (Choose your Post language）
• Link type: Dofollow
• One link per domain

Also, you can continue to remove the pages that wouldn’t make much sense for you to reach out to for a link. These include forums, directories, etc.

Step #4. Sending Your Outreach Emails

As soon as you have a list of prospects, it’s high time you prepare your email campaign.

First, you’ve got to compile an email list for your backlink prospects. However, finding the right contacts, even when they are honestly mentioned on a website, can be a tough task. In this case, you can get by with Hunter.io or with the Chrome extension Email Extractor to help you.

Now, you can write the email. Here’s are the basic things to include in your outreach email:

• Why you’re reaching out
• A link to your content
• Why it’s better than the content they currently link to
• CTA asking them to swap out the link

3.     Publish Original Data Analysis (Or Research)

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Another type of content you can publish on your website to attract high quality backlinks is original data or research.

Advice, tips, news, trends, how-tos – they’ve all been done before. But original research is new. 

Conduct surveys, use your business data, produce case studies, and create other content that is focused on original research that can’t be found on other sites. When you publish original stats and data, other sites will be likely to link back to your fresh and new information.

Here are five types of research you can add to your content mix. 

1. Observe and analyze
2. Results from experiments
3. Aggregate existing data
4. Online surveys
5. Phone surveys

4.     Find Broken Links to Build Backlinks

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A broken link is a link that does not work, in other words it links to the Page Not Found error. Broken link building is a white-hat tactic that involves building backlinks to your own recreated content instead of 404 pages on other sites. It is one of the most scalable link building tactics around.

However, many people will abandon this method at the very beginning because it is very time-consuming.

No pains, no gains. We’ll check how to set up a broken link building strategy successfully.

Step #1. Find Broken Backlinks

There are many ways to find a broken backlink. The difficult part is how you could quickly turn that into 50, 100, or even 1,000 broken links to chase after?

Luckily, many backlink analytics tools can help you to find the opportunities quickly. Here, I use Ahrefs’ Broken Link Building Tool in the demo.

Way 1: Find Dead Pages On the Top Sites in Your Niche 

Go to Ahrefs > Site explorer -> Pages -> Best by Links -> filter for HTTP 404 errors.

Take Ahrefs as an example. As you can see in the screenshot below, the most linked-to page that no longer exists on ahrefs.com still has 211 referring domains! And the second most linked-to page has 46. The third has 45. And so forth.

From the URL, you can guess what all these 404 pages are. Then, you’ll find hundreds of opportunities for your broken link building campaign.

Way 2. Find Broken Outlinks On Those Same Websites

Again, take Ahrefs as an example. As you can see in the screenshot below, they have 234,224 links to their domain that currently lead to pages that 404.

If we export these and group them by the pages they link to, that’s a lot of opportunities for a competitor to pursue with broken link building. 

Way 3. Find Outgoing Broken Links

Go to “Outgoing Links” > “Broken Links. This will show you all of the broken links on that entire site.

In this example, when you find the broken outgoing links, you can contact Ahrefs for replacement.

Step #2. Develop or Create Replacement Content

To get publishers to replace a broken link on their site with a link back to your content, you must have a valuable resource to link to. In other words, searching for broken links is not enough. You need to create high-value replacement content that will lead to a link. You should give the publisher a “reason” to link back to your content.

Step #3. Reach Out to The Publishers

Once you have a strong piece of replacement content for a site with a broken link, you need to catch the attention of the publisher and encourage them to make the switch.

In this part, the most difficult part is how to send your email to the right people. Otherwise, your email is going to end up in the trash folder (or worse yet, the spam folder). Therefore, figure out who is maintaining that page before you send the email.

Now, send an email to the publisher. To save time, you can create a few different templates for your broken link building emails. Each of your emails can follow a similar formula where you:

• Address the contact by name
• Highlight the broken link and its URL
• Introduce your replacement link
• Explain why it’s a good replacement

5.     Use the Moving Man Method

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The Moving Man Method, a term coined by Brian Dean at Backlinko, is a similar strategy to fixing broken links.

Below is a quick video by Brian Dean as he explains the concept of the Moving Man Method.

As you’ve just seen in the video above, there are three main steps to the Moving Man Method.

Step #1: Find Outdated Resources

Your first step is to find sites in your industry that have:

• Changed names
• Moved to a new URL
• Stopped offering a service
• Stopped updating a resource
• Shut down

To find pages that have changed or moved you can:

• Keep an eye out for sites in your industry that rebrand or change names.
• Do a simple Google search like: KEYWORD + “page no longer exists”, KEYWORD + “service no longer available”, KEYWORD + “no longer available”, KEYWORD + “website closed” and so on.

Step #2: Find Sites Linking to The Old Resource

Once you find a page that meets the criteria, you can use a tool like Ahrefs to find all of the links pointing to the outdated page.

Step #3: Reach Out and Get Your Links

Your last step is to reach out to all of the people that still link to the outdated resource. You can give them a quick note about their outdated link, and gently suggest that they add your link to their site.

6.      Find Competitors’ Backlinks and “Steal” Them

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For backlinks building, the most common starting point is to analyze the websites and backlink profiles from our competitors and peers.

Yes, stealing your competitor’s backlinks can be a very effective way of getting quality links. As a general rule, if a website links to one of your competitors, they’re likely to accept one from you too. And, if you are able to provide something better, you should be well on your way to securing some high-quality backlinks. 

There are a number of tools you can use to monitor your competitor’s links. Here, I recommend Ahrefs again. Go to Site Explorer > enter your competitor’s URL > Backlinks to find your competitor’s backlinks.

Once you have created a backlink list of your main competitor, you can find the domains that are likely to link to your site by identifying the ones that have linked to at least 2 of your competitors.

Doing this will enable you to start contacting the websites that clearly link to more than one of your competitors, which increases the likelihood that those websites would be willing to create new backlinks to your site as well.

7.     Guest Post on Related Websites

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Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to reach new audiences. To find guest blogging opportunities, we recommend keeping an eye on where your competitors are regularly contributing content to and reaching out yourself. 

Alternatively, you can use Google search to find active blogs currently accepting guest contributors. To do this simply input:

• your keyword + inurl:write-for-us
• your keyword + guest-posts
• your keyword + inurl:guest-post-guidelines
• your keyword + become a guest writer
• your keyword + become a contributor
• your keyword + submit an article
• your keyword + want to write for
• your keyword + accepting guest posts
• your keyword + become an author
• your keyword + guest post by
• your keyword + contribute

When you generate a list of websites that accept guest posts, don’t send email to each website. Before you write an article somewhere, make sure that:

• the website or blog is relevant to your topic;
• the article is NOT about how great you are/ your company is;
• you have a focus on quality (well written, professional, and interesting);
• you keep in mind that a poor article can bring bad reputation.
• you have read the guest post guidelines completely.

Otherwise, you won’t get a reply and you won’t success to get your guest post published.

8.     Request Links with Your Brand Mentions

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This is probably one of the easiest ways to gain some new backlinks. All you need to do is keep an eye on who is mentioning your brand, on blogs or in the news.

To find these mentions, you can use Google Alerts, which issues a notification whenever your brand (or any terms you define) is mentioned.

When somebody already mentioned your brand or product but they have not linked to your website, you can send them a quick note, asking for a proper link attribution. With a friendly approach, you have a good chance of getting that link.

This method may be not effective for small businesses or individuals who haven’t built up their brand.

9.     Get Links from The Companies with Whom You Have Existing Relationships

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Instead of looking at what other websites can “give” you a link, it is a good idea to identify the potential links that can be generated through existing relationships the company has naturally established from standard day-to-day business practices.

The same, this method may be not effective for small businesses or individuals who haven’t built up their basic relationship network.

10. Respond to Questions On Quora

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Quora is one of my favorite websites for getting backlinks. However, if your only goal in getting backlinks is to rank higher in Google results, the knowledge that Quora only gives nofollow backlinks probably turned you off.

Quora’s no-follow backlinks do not directly help your rankings. However, there is a linking signal from a nofollow link that Google acknowledges for your website. In the long run, great Quora answers help generate future follow links for your website.

Here’s how to get backlinks from Quora.

• Find a question on Quora by searching for something that can easily be answered by your blog post.
• If one Question has a lot of views, but no answer, feel free to answer that question.
• Make sure that you use the linking feature in Quora to post a link to your website’s blog with the keyword that your blog is optimized for as the anchor text.
• Give helpful, genuine answers that will help the one asking the question

11. Participate in Different Forums (Yes, Forums!)

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When it comes to backlink building, forums may not get as much love and attention these days. That’s because many forums are inactive or provide no-follow links. Also, building backlinks on forums may lead to Google penalty.

Google specifically mentions on their Link Schemes Guidelines (a set of rules for website owners), that you should not build backlinks on forums with over-optimized anchor text.

However, a large number of online forums still allow do-follow links, making them prime territory for scoring valuable authoritative backlinks. What we need to do is find out and avoid those forums provide little value.

For example, you should avoid forums in such kind of list shown in below. They are spammy which will hurt your SEO when you submit a link in those websites.

In order for a forum to be considered valuable for your SEO efforts, it needs to:

• Have an active and vibrant community
• Allow do-follow links that give your site valuable link juice
• Be related to your site’s industry or niche

Use any of the variations to find relevant forums for your niche:

• [your niche] + forums
• Forums + [your niche]
• [your niche] + discussion

Another way of finding forums is by looking at your competitors. Using Ahrefs, you can see which forums they used to get backlinks and then you can do the same.

After you’ve found some valuable forums to join, there are three main ways to earn do-follow forum backlinks:

• Forum profile page
• Forum signature
• In-post links

Important Tips and Recommendations

• First off, your goal is to provide valuable and accurate information to users. Answer their questions thoroughly and they’ll be more likely to trust you. Then, you can direct them to additional resources or information on your website.
• Remember that you need only best forums for backlinks. Don’t use forums which are full of links promoting everything. Spammy neighborhood can ruin your reputation.
• Don’t place links instantly once you registered on forum as you most probably will get banned.

12. Digital PR

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PR link-building is all about collaborating with journalists and influencers who can connect you with a story or piece of content published in press and popular online publications.

Different from guest posting, PR link-building depends heavily on having relationships with journalists, bloggers, publishers, and influencers. It is about developing healthy relations resulting in high-quality opportunities for the placement of content.

Focus on quality rather than quantity and take time to build these relations. Begin by targeting a few people and nurture a relationship with them. Like and comment on what they post on social media. Send some useful information to them, even if it is not about you. This will create a positive impression about you in their minds. This way, they will be ready to work with you when the time comes.

Important Note:

In the earlier days of SEO, sending out press releases with keyword optimized anchor texts would get you a dozens of backlinks. Then, lots of people wrote pretty lousy press releases, then publishing these on newswire services (e.g. PR Newswire). 

To put a stop to this nonsense, Google started penalizing sites who were openly exploiting press release newswire services as a way of growing their backlink profile. Then, newswire services make all links within press releases ‘nofollow’ which delivers zero ‘link equity’. Then, many people believe that press release no longer have any SEO value

If you simply write a lot of company news and publishing it on a newswire service, I too would say they no longer have any SEO value. Also, this is no the PR link-building we discussed in this post.

You should always keep in mind that spam is what brought press releases down in the past. So try to avoid that at all costs. 

13. Use Infographics to Capture Backlinks

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Infographics are one of the most popular methods for bringing traffic to your website and gaining valuable backlinks. They’re easy to share. Everyone loves visual data, right? 

However, if you want your infographic to go viral and get tons of authoritative backlinks, you’ve got to spend a considerable amount of time designing an infographic that is share-worthy! Here are a few steps you can follow.

Step #1. Research your Topic

An awesome infographic starts with awesome content.

No matter how well designed your infographic is, if it doesn’t provide readers with new, relevant, useful or inspiring information, they’re not going to be interested.

Carefully collect the data and content you’ll use on your infographic. Accuracy is extremely important in case it goes viral.

If you already have something in mind, do some research and see what infographics are already covering that topic. Then, make sure yours will be ten times more informative and attractive.

Step #2. Design Your Infographic

After you are done documenting the content for your infographic, it’s time to put your data into a nice design. If your infographic has an eye-catching and outstanding design, you are up for a good start.

If you are like me, design might not be your best skill. Then, why not use a tool like Canve to help us?

Step #3. Publish Your Infographic

After creating the infographic, publish it on your site. However, that’s not enough to make it popular. You should also publish it to infographic submission sites and social media platforms.

There are tons of infographic submission sites where you can submit your infographic for free or for a small fee. Here are just a few of the popular ones:

Graphs.net (DA – 55)

Visual.ly (DA – 78)

Cool Infographics (DA – 60)

Infographic Journal (DA – 55)

Submit Infographics (DA – 46)

For social media, it is a good idea to promote your infographic on Reddit and Pinterest.

Step #4. Try the Guestographic Link Building Method

The guestographic link building method, spearheaded by Brian Dean, is another useful way to help you get backlinks with infographics.

In short, the guestographic link building method goes something like this:

• Publish a high-quality infographic
• Find other interesting sites that write on the same topic
• Send them your infographic
• Offer them unique content
• Get your contextual backlinks

14. Get Listed On Relevant Best X in Y Lists

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You should also not overlook the power that list-based articles or listicles have when it comes to attracting natural backlinks or backlink building. 

On one side, creating high quality articles presented wholly or partly in the form of a list is effective link building strategy, which is oftentimes underrated. Listicles can in fact sometimes generate more backlinks than even other popular types of content formats, like videos and infographics.

On the other side, getting mentioned on articles that list the best products like the one you offer is a fantastic way to reinforce your brand, get more people to try out your product and, of course, earn high-quality backlinks.

To get your product or service included in a list round-up, start with a simple Google search to find high-ranking blogs that write about your product or industry.

Here are some useful search terms to help you find relevant prospects:

• Best [X] e.g. Best Keyword Research Tools
• Best [X] for [Y]
• Top [X] e.g. Top 10 Page Speed Test Tools
• Top [X] for [Y] e.g. 

After collecting the list, you need to be reaching out to a journalist or blogger on corresponding websites. Also, you should justify why your content or product is better than some of those that are already on the list. 

Sometimes, you’ll find the writer will be happy to add your content or product in the list if the content can add value to users. Of course, no matter how good you are, some writes will not reply your email.

15. Resource Page Link Building

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Resource page link building is where you get backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to useful industry resources.

As a link building tactics, it is nothing new. The process is pretty straightforward and goes something like this:

Step #1. Find Resource Page Opportunities

The easiest and most direct way to find resource pages is through a simple Google search. As you perform your searches, there are a variety of search combinations you can use.

• Keyword + “resources”
• Keyword + “useful resources”
• Keyword + “helpful resources
• Keyword + “links”
• Keyword + “useful links”
• Keyword + “helpful links”
• Keyword + inurl:resources
• Keyword + intitle:resources
• Keyword + inurl:links
• Keyword + intitle:links

For example,

Step #2. Narrow Down the Results

As you perform the various searches outlined above, you’ll likely find thousands of resource pages. Your task now is to find those that are the most relevant, reputable and of highest quality.

First, you should check the relevance, and then focus on the page authority and the domain authority. 

Step #3. Reach out

In some cases, resource pages will actually have a line encouraging you to email them with relevant resources to add. They may even have a form on the page itself to submit resources.

However, in most cases, you need to contact the writer.

16. Link Roundup Link Building

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Link roundups are a great way to drive traffic to your website while simultaneously building backlinks from authority websites. 

But wait, what is a link round up? Most of the time, link roundups are weekly or monthly summaries of top links that sites share. If you have such content pieces that are worth getting a link from the roundups, you can reach out to them.

Let’s see how the process works.

Step #1. Create High-Quality Content

The first step of building links with roundups is often overlooked. Remember, link roundups are curated lists of the best content in your niche. Therefore, without high-quality content, you’re just going to be wasting your efforts.

Step #2. Find Link Roundups

You can look for link roundup in your niche using the following search operators.

• “Keyword” + “link roundup”
• “Keyword” + “weekly roundup”
• “Keyword” + “weekly link”
• “Keyword” + inurl:roundup
• “Keyword” + intitle:roundup
• “Keyword” + best posts of the week
• “Keyword” + best blogs of the week

Pro Tips:

When you’re doing this, you want to make sure that you’re finding link roundups that are active and new. Otherwise, you could be wasting your time pitching to sites that are no longer doing roundups. So click on the “tools” button and narrow the results to “past month.” Here’s an example of what this looks like when I searched for link roundups related to SEO.

Step #3. Link Roundup Outreach

Once you have your list of websites that have active link roundups, it’s time for you to contact them and pitch your content.

17. Use Images to Earn Links & Mentions

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Are your surprised that you can even use images to attracts links? Usually, when people embed your images in their content, some of them will link back to the source while some won’t.

Except for those who link back, our main task is chasing for attribution from those who ignore attribution.

Check out the following steps to learn how to use images to generate backlinks.

Step #1. Create Images That Others Want to Engage With

First of all, you should have some images that other people will be interested in. Usually, the following types of images are easier going viral.

• Charts and graphs with original data
• Diagrams to visually explain complex concepts
• One-page templates
• Free photo galleries for others to use
• Infographics
• Drawings/illustrations
• Memes
• GIF (Graphic interchange format)
• Comic strips

Step #2. Optimize and Distribute Your Image

Optimizing and distributing your images is ultimately about making sure they get found. You can share your images on related website or social media. When distrusting them, you can follow the tips below whenever possible.

• Save files with a relevant filename
• Create a keyword rich title for the album that will contain your bank of images on a similar theme
• Include “Creative Commons,” within the text on title and description where possible
• Ensure every single image has a unique, keyword relevant title
• Include a request within the description for users to credit you by linking to the appropriate website
• Make use of tags

Step #3. Gather A List of Website Using Your Images

Using Google’s Image Search  is a very effective way to find and track your original images that may have been used by other webmasters (and haven’t provided link attribution to your site), 

There are three options in using these image search engines:

• Uploading your image(s) to find possible matches
• Entering your image(s)’ URL
• Or using keywords on Google’s image search (like “brand + logo” or the image’s file name).

The search engine will then display a list of websites that use your or your competitors’ images. Extract the sites who have used your images that didn’t provide credits to you as the originator, and list them in an excel spreadsheet.

Step #4. Chasing Attribution

Find the email address of a person associated with each website, then send a quick email requesting a link change It’ll be easier to contact and get links from these sites, since they’ve already used your image(s).

18.   Write Reviews and Testimonials

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Most businesses, especially those that offer business-to-business (B2B) services, use testimonials and reviews as a way to build trust with their customers. And, an easy method to earn quality backlinks is to write testimonials for websites you are using.

Here’s how to do it.

Step #1. Make a List of Relevant Sites

• Make a list of products or services you use daily and relevant to your website. Focus on products you already know how to use or even pay for
• Choose companies with active blogs and thoughtful keyword researched titles
• Pick the website with a domain rating higher than 50
• Look for startups or companies that are Series A funded or earlier

Step #2. Check for Opportunities

Visit each of their websites to determine whether or not other customer testimonials are present. If a particular company doesn’t display testimonials, or if the testimonials don’t include the customer’s website address, it’s probably best to avoid them.

Step #3. Write or Create a Unique Review

Now, you should write an authentic review. Here are some tips that may help you.

• Focus on features and benefits
• Be authentic, personal, and point out a few shortcomings
• Use annotations to showcase how you use it
• Use stats to backup your opinions

Step #4. Reach Out

Once you’ve narrowed down your list of prospects to those which display testimonials and website addresses, send the owner an email, telling them what you thought about their product or service.

At the end of your email, tell the owner that you would be grateful if he or she could include a link to your official website within the testimonial. Most will gladly oblige, as long as they’ve posted previous testimonial links in the past.

19. Get Listed in Local and Niche Directories

Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐

Time-Consuming: ⭐ ⭐

Effectiveness: ⭐ ⭐

Many people said that directories were dead. That’s partially right.

There are many online directories that provide no real value to the internet users and Google has excluded them from its search results.

However, not all online directories are bad. Directories are probably one of the best ways to improve your local SEO and help potential customers find your business.

If a directory not only gives you the chance to post a link to your website, but also provides useful information for your potential customers, why not get listed on it?

The directories you need to be on are the ones people actually use – like Google My Business, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Beyond these famous ones, there are many other general and niche directories that can help your rankings and traffic.

Just head over to Google and use some of these search operators to discover some easy backlink opportunities:

• “industry” inurl:directory
• “industry” intitle:directory
• “city” intitle:directory
• “niche” + directory (Example: “fitness + directory”)
• “niche” directories
• “niche” + “submit site”
• “city” + directory
• directory + “city”
• submit my site + “city”
• “niche + city” + directory
• “city” + directories

20. Donate

Difficulty: ⭐

Time-Consuming: ⭐

Effectiveness: ⭐ ⭐

Yes, you can earn backlinks by donating to nonprofit organizations. This method is quick and straightforward. All you have to do is find websites in your niche that accept donations and link back to sites that have donated. 

Finding these websites requires some searches in Google. These are some queries that usually give good results:

• contributors page + donate + your keyword
• donation + contributors + your keyword
• contributors page + your keyword

This method is not always effective because small business may don’t have the budget.

21. Conduct Interviews and be Interviewed

Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐⭐⭐

Time-Consuming: ⭐ ⭐⭐⭐

Effectiveness: ⭐ ⭐

Getting an online interview published is a great way to earn a backlink to your site. If you’re a good public speaker or have time to type a thoughtful reply to a list of suggested interview questions, you can reach out to publications, bloggers, and even vloggers to get interviewed.

Wrap Up

There you have it! You now have 21 ways to get more high quality backlinks and boost your search engine ranking.

No matter which method you will use, you need to have valuable content first to earn backlinks. Also, if you’ve just created your website, the chances of getting fast and natural links are almost zero. Natural links take time, so build backlinks with patience.

When you have created awesome content, using a combination of the techniques above can earn you more high quality backlinks.

Before closing up the post, I want to share you a list of link building tactics which is explicit about what cannot be done from Google:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. (This also includes sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.)
• Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking between multiple sites.
• Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links.
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.
• Text advertisements that pass PageRank.
• Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank.
• Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.
• Low-quality directory or bookmark site links.
• Keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites.
• Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites.
• Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature.

Be sure to avoid these tactics.