www.99signals.com

Link Building in201814 Proven Techniques to Get High Quality

Backlinks

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Matt Cutts on Link Building

Introduction

#1 “Best of” Blog Posts

#2 HARO (Help A Reporter Out)

#3 Leverage Infographics

#4 Submit Your Website to Feedback Sites

#5 Submit Your Site to Blog Aggregators

#6 Link Roundups

#7 The Moving Man Method

#8 Scoop.it Backlinks

Link Building Strategies-

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#9 Google + Backlinks

#10 Provide Testimonials

#11 Link Reclamation

#12 Pen.io

#13 Broken Link Building

#14 Submit Your Site to Startup Directories

Thanks For Reading!

"Don’t just try and appear for your links to benatural. When you have good content, naturallinks will come. The objective is not to makeyour links appear natural; the objective is thatyour links are natural.”

Matt Cutts, Head of Google's WebspamMatt Cutts, Head of Google's WebspamTeamTeam

Matt Cutts onLink Building

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Despite numerous algorithm updates, link building still remains

one of the strongest ranking signals used by search engines.

Yet our link building efforts mostly extend to commenting on

blogs in the same niche (“nofollow” backlinks with no link

juice) or contributing guest posts to simply brag about where

we’ve got our content published (under strict scrutiny by

Google).

But if you’d like to increase your site’s authority and rank

higher than your competitors in search engine result pages

(SERPs), you need to build high quality links on a consistent

basis. In other words, you need to have a link building strategy

that delivers results.

This eBook reveals 14 proven techniques to get high quality

backlinks that will help you stay ahead of the competition and

rank higher in SERPs.

In this eBook, you'll learn:

How to build high-quality backlinks for your site

How to leverage free tools to build backlinks

How to build backlinks FAST

How to build post-hummingbird era backlinks

How to build links that generate targeted traffic to your site

Introduction-

Hope you find this eBook useful.

This particular method of getting backlinks is borrowed from Brian Dean at

Backlinko and it’s insanely effective.

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1: Step 1: Use these following search strings on Google

“Best (TOPIC) Blog Year”

“(TOPIC) blogs to read”

“My Favorite (TOPIC) blogs”Any of these above searches will show you a list

of “best of” blogs in your selected topic.

Step 2:Step 2: Create a new Google Doc and add links to any quality blog that you’d

like to get a backlink from. Also note down the email addresses of the bloggers

you’d be reaching out to. In most cases, you can find them in the contact section.

If not, use Ninja Outreach Chrome Extension to find their contact details.

#1 “Best of” Blog Posts

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Step 3:Step 3: Reach out to these blogs via email and present them with a link to your

article and ask them if they can include it in one of their weekly/monthly roundup

posts.

You can use the below email template to reach out to the bloggers:

Hi [First Name],

I’m a digital marketer and regular reader of your Marketing blog posts.

I also run the blog at [Your Blog] and today, we published a pretty massive guide([Number or words] words) on [Subject of Your Blog Post]. I think it might be agood fit for your roundup posts and thought I’d reach out.

[Your Blog Post URL]

No worries if it’s not a good fit – I’ll be a regular reader regardless!

Thanks, [Your Name]

Many of these blogs will also allow you to post a comment along with a link to

your website.

One of the easiest and quickest ways to get a backlink is to post thoughtful

comments on any of the articles on these blogs that you deem worthy to get a

link from. Make sure your comment is THOUGHTFUL. Instead of posting “Great

article”, think of creative ways to appreciate the kind of information the author

has provided in the article. You may even ask a question.

But you may be thinking that there are blogs which simply don’t allow you to

provide a link to your website. They may be using Facebook comment system or

Disqus to manage and moderate their comments. And even if they do, you’ll

probably get “nofollow” backlinks which will do nothing to improve your search

rankings.

In such cases, the best way to get backlinks would to be use the email outreach

method. Though it involves some work, the backlink you’ll eventually generate

for your site would be worth the time and effort.

HARO is one of the best ways to generate high quality backlinks from authority

news sites.

Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for HARO as a source here.

2. You’ll receive three emails per day on weekdays from reporters looking for

sources. Look out for source requests relevant to you and your niche

3. Respond with some helpful content and your credentials

With HARO, you can get backlinks from authority news sites such as WSJ,

Mashable, Inc, FastCompany, Reuters, etc.

#2 HARO (Help A ReporterOut)

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Infographics are not just engaging but they are also great for SEO. Yet most

people ignore infographics because they wrongly assume that it's expensive and

time-consuming.

Using tools such as Canva, Infogr.am, and Piktochart, you can create fancy

infographics in a matter of minutes. Another way to create beautiful infographics

is to outsource it using sites such as Fiverr or Upwork.

Once your infographic is ready, it's time to promote it. Follow these steps:

1. Submit your infographic to these infographicsubmission sites

Here's a list of sites that allow you to submit your infographics for free. I've also

mentioned the domain authority of each of these sites to signify the value of

each backlink that you'll get, so that you can prioritize your efforts accordingly:

Visual.ly (DA - 83)

InfographicBee (DA - 27)

Cool Infographics (DA - 61)

NerdGraph (DA - 38)

Infographic Journal (DA - 44)

Submit Infographics (DA - 45)

Only Infographic (DA - 27)

Pure Infographics (DA - 28)

Bonus Resource: Bonus Resource: Top 40 Infographic Submission Sites to Promote YourTop 40 Infographic Submission Sites to Promote Your

Infographic and Get Contextual BacklinksInfographic and Get Contextual Backlinks

2. Reach out to bloggers in your niche and offer themthe infographic for free as a guest post

#3 Leverage Infographics

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This is one of the easiest ways to get high quality backlinks from sites with an

impressive domain authority. Everyone loves informative infographics and most

of the sites you reach out to will gladly accept to include your infographic in one

of their articles.

3. Use Siege Media's Embed Code Generator togenerate an embed code for your infographic

Siege Media has created its very own embed code generator which allows you to

generate embed codes for your infographic. Once the code is generated, all you

need to do is copy and paste the code below your infographic.

By generating an embed code for your infographic, you make it easier for others

to share and embed your infographic onto their own site. Here's the best part:

every time someone includes your infographic in their content, you get an

attribution. One of the easiest ways to get a high quality backlink.

There are many feedback websites out there where you can submit your site and

get critiqued on your site's design and content. The great thing about these

feedback sites is that almost all of them provide a link back to your site.

One of my absolute favorite feedback sites is Criticue.com which has a domain

authority (DA) of 40 (not bad for a website review site).

Once you sign up on Critique, you'll be asked to review other sites to earn free

credits. Each review gets you 1 credit. In my experience, posting 3 reviews of

other sites will fetch you a review of your own site and a quality backlink.

#4 Submit Your Website toFeedback Sites

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Blog Aggregators are sites which list blogs from different industries. Examples

include AllTop, Blogarama, and BlogEngage.

Though they don't have the same amount of link juice as they once did, you can

still get a decent amount of referral traffic from these blogs.

You can get high-quality 'dofollow' links from most blog aggregators for free in

three easy steps:

Submit your site (in most cases, the RSS feed of your blog)

Add a special HTML code to your site to confirm your ownership of the site

Wait for the blog aggregator to review your site

When it's approved, you will get your own page on the blog aggregator listing all

your articles.

Here's a complete list of blog directories/aggregators you can submit your site

to.

#5 Submit Your Site to BlogAggregators

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There are lots of high quality blogs that do link roundups. Link roundups are

weekly or monthly blog posts that link out to great content in their respective

niche.

On Startup Cafe blog, we usually do a weekly roundup of social media news and

call it ‘This Week in Social Media’ and provide links to social media sites with

interesting news stories that occurred that week. You will find blogs that do

similar roundups in your niche as well.

Here’s how it works:

1. Your first task is to find link roundups in your niche.Use the following search strings:

“your keyword” + “link roundup”

“your keyword” + roundup

“best of” + “your keyword”

“your keyword” + “this week”

2. Once you find a blog that you’d like to target forbacklinks, pitch your content to the person who runsthe blog. You can use the below script:

#6 Link Roundups

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Hey NAME,

I know you like to make compilation articles about everything [TOPIC] – so I justwanted to send a few of my recent ones your way. I hope this is OK!

[LINK TO ARTICLE]

[LINK TO ARTICLE]

Cheers,

[YOUR NAME]

[YOUR BLOG URL]

Just sit back and wait for the person to respond. If your content is the right fit for

the blog’s roundup, then you’ll get a quality backlink for your site.

This is yet another technique which I learned from Brian Dean’s blog and I’ve

found it extremely useful.

Here’s how the Moving Man Method works:

Step 1:Step 1: Find sites in your niche which have either shut down or changed their

names and URLs.

Step 2:Step 2: Find sites linking to the old URL.

Step 3:Step 3: Reach out to these sites and let them know about their outdated link.

To explain this technique in a better way, let’s take the example of Moz, a

popular SEO tool run by SEO Guru, Rand Fishkin. A while back though, Moz was

operating as an SEO agency named SEOMoz. As a result, they had to change the

URL from seomoz.org to Moz.com.

Sure, if you visit seomoz.org, it redirects to moz.com. So the links used by sites

linking to seomoz.org aren’t broken, but they’re outdated. This is because the

link points to the old URL and the anchor text has the old brand name.

As you may realize, this is a huge opportunity for people running SEO/Marketing

blogs to reach out to sites that are still using the seomoz.org link in their content.

And there are plenty of sites doing just that.

In order to make this technique work for you, you need to keep an eye out for

sites that are either rebranding or changing names. Use PRWeb to see whether

there are any brands in your niche that have recently rebranded. Use this search

string – “your keyword” + rebrands”. Do a similar check on Google News as

well.

Once you’ve found a site which has rebranded or changed its URL, it’s time to

reach out to sites which are still using the old URL in their content. Just copy the

#7 The Moving ManMethod

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URL and paste into your backlink checking tool of choice (I recommend Ahrefs).

You’ll find dozens of sites which are still linking to the old resource.

The last step in the Moving Man Method to reach out to these sites and give

them a heads up about the outdated link they are using in their content. And

then give a subtle suggestion to add your link to their site.

To learn more about the Moving Man Method, click here.

Scoop.it is a site where people aggregate their favorite content around the web

into a magazine format.

It’s also an excellent place to get high-quality “nofollow” backlinks and boost

your referral traffic. So how do you go about fetching backlinks on Scoop.it? It’s

quite simple really.

An active Scoop.it user usually has curated magazines which have hundreds of

followers. This means that your content can be get in front of hundreds of

people. Follow these two simple steps to get people to share your content on

their Scoop.it magazine:

Step 1Step 1: Give a search on the topic of your content. Ex: Social Media Marketing.

Find users who have magazines with lots of followers and views.

Step 2Step 2: Pitch your content to these people by using Scoop.it’s ‘suggest’ feature.

You can share the same content with 5 people in a day and chances are that

about 50% of them will share it with their network.

#8 Scoop.it Backlinks

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You may have mixed feelings about Google+ as a social network, but it still

shows up prominently on Google, mainly because it’s owned by the search

engine giant.

But did you know Google+ allows you to get ‘dofollow’ backlinks right from your

Google+ profile page? Here’s a glimpse of my Google+ profile. As you can see,

I’ve given links to my marketing as well as wellness blogs by updating the

“Story” section.

Furthermore, you can add links to any number of articles and your social profiles

in the “Links” and “Profiles” section as you can see below:

#9 Google + Backlinks

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In order to add more link juice to these backlinks, make sure that you are active

on Google+. Share content and interact with other people on Google+ regularly.

Consider giving a testimonial for a product that you really love

using. All companies love showing off customer testimonials on

their home page or have a dedicated page for them. Once you've

written the testimonial, make sure you let them know that they

can include your testimonials on their home page or testimonials

page.

Here's an example of a testimonial I wrote for AppSumo's

#10 ProvideTestimonials

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affiliate program on iDevAffiliate. It's been featured on the

iDevAffiliate website as well as AppSumo's website and used in

several of their promos

Link reclamation is simple and works like magic.

Here’s how it works:

First, you find mentions of your brand that don’t link back to your site

Then you send an email to the person with a friendly reminder to add the link

Here’s an email I received from Canva a few weeks ago which serves as a fine

example of link reclamation tactic:

It’s that simple and it works in most cases (like it did here in the example above)

Here’s how you can go about reclaiming your link:

1. Find unlinked mentions using Buzzsumo

A tool like Buzzsumo can help you find unlinked mentions of your brand. Setup a

content alert for your brand or domain on Buzzsumo, so that whenever someone

mentions your brand, you get an email alert.

2. Check whether the site has linked back to your site

If they have linked back to your site, awesome! If not, then move on to step 3.

3. Reach out and get your link

Send them an email with a friendly reminder. You can use the script below (same

#11 Link Reclamation

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that was used by Canva):

Hey NAME,

I just wanted to reach out and say “thanks” for mentioning (your brand) in yourarticle: [link to the article]

We really, really appreciate it.

I’m reaching out today to ask if you could add a link back to our site. That way,people can easily find us while reading your article.

Either way, thanks for the shout out and keep up the great work!

Thanks,

(Your Name)

Link reclamation is an easy, yet effective way to get quality backlinks for your site.

Link building with Pen.io is a web 2.0 strategy, but it’s one of the easiest and

fastest ways to get a quality backlink (pen.io has a DA of 67). Having said that, I’d

urge you to proceed with caution. Web 2.0 link building is not exactly black hat,

but it’s certainly a gray hat technique which may land you a Google penalty. Use

this link building technique only if the other techniques listed here are not

feasible.

With most web 2.0 properties like Blogger, Tumblr, etc. it’s often recommended

that you spend time writing 300-500 word quality articles from time to time to

make the backlinks seem genuine. Though a few bloggers just post a link and

picture on pen.io, I suggest you spend some time on your article so that the link

looks authentic.

#12 Pen.io

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A broken link is one that points to a page on a site that has since been moved or

deleted. In other words, these are pages that return a 404 error.

Broken link building involves some bit of work, but it’s a safe way to generate

fresh, high quality backlinks for your site.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Use tools such as Check My Links or Broken Link Checker to find broken links

from a site you want to fetch a backlink from.

2. Once you’ve found the broken links, reach out to the site owner and let him

know about them.

3. Share relevant links from your site that the site owner could use to replace the

broken links with.

Voila! You’ve earned yourself a high quality backlink.

#13 Broken Link Building

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If you’ve just launched your startup, there are tons of startup directories you

could submit your site to. Perhaps the most popular startup directory is BetaList,

a directory which is focused specifically on early-stage internet startups. The

submission is free, but if you’d like to expedite the process and ensure that your

startup is listed, then you’ll need to pay a small fee. You can check out their

submission criteria here to see how they review the startups.

Even if your startup is not eligible for submission at BetaList, there are lots of

other startup directories with high DA which will accept your submission. Here’s

a list of 100 startup directories compiled by Ninja Outreach.

#14 Submit Your Site toStartup Directories

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Now that you’ve learned these powerful link building techniques,

it’s time to get started and test these techniques out.

Thanks for taking the time to read this eBook. We hope you

found it useful.

For more tips and insights on SEO and content marketing, visit

www.99signals.com.

Thanks For Reading!

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