How to Build High-Quality Backlinks for Your WordPress Blog in 2019

It’s no secret that a blog is a very effective form of content marketing. If you can get your blog in front of the right eyeballs, you can build your brand whilst building a stronger relationship with your audience. Then, conversions and sales rise.

Awesome, huh?

If producing all-star content comes easy to you but driving traffic and establishing your brand doesn’t, you’ve probably been told to go and chase some high-quality backlinks. The more top-notch backlinks you have, the higher your blog starts to rank in the SERPs.

But what does this mean exactly and how do you capture those A++ backlinks? This article is going to first take a look at what a high-quality backlink is, before demonstrating the steps you need to take to bag yourself more of them.

What Is a High-quality Backlink?

First of all, a backlink is an inbound link from one site to another. Let’s imagine I have a blog for my pet store, and that a dog food company links out to me via an article. That’s a backlink. When folk read that article and see that link, they might be inclined to click on it and come see me. Thus, I’m getting more traffic.

However, not all backlinks are good.

Low-quality Backlinks

If a site has been penalized by Google for spam or other bad activities, their backlinks will be of a poor quality. You can go ahead and grab as many as their links as you want, but they’re going to send you tumbling down the SERPs.

Moreover, they’re just a total waste of time. For example, a low-quality backlink doesn’t always come from a site that’s been penalized. The website might be perfectly legit but if its content is wholly unrelated to yours, it’s going to be of no use to you because their audience isn’t your audience. In other words, you might be driving traffic, but it will be the wrong traffic and your bounce rate will soar. And because bounce rate is a ranking factor, your position in the SERPs might change for the worse.

A poor quality backlink is also an inbound link from a low-traffic site. For example, let’s say that I secure a link from a dog food website to my pet store’s blog. I’m pretty happy at first - until I hire an SEO agency who find out that the dog food website has non-existent organic traffic.

High-quality Backlinks

A high-quality backlink, on the other hand, is an incoming link from any of these sources:

A reputable website that’s related to your niche
A website that enjoys high Domain Authority (DA)
A website that drives a very healthy amount of organic traffic on the regular

Recommended: 5 Link-Building Tactics You Should Stick with in 2019

So, you want to avoid all poor quality backlinks and land more superstar ones. Here’s how to do it:

Guest Blog

The most common method most used by those in search of backlinks is guest blogging. What does this mean?

Essentially, you come up with an idea for a topic related to your niche, reach out to a blog that’s got a good amount of traffic, and pitch your idea to the owner. If they like your idea, you’ll then write the blog article and publish it on their site.

The magic is in the little link you include in the blog post that links out to your website.

For example, if I have a social media app, I might go on the offensive and reach out to several related tech blogs with a few topic ideas. I’ll write the articles, they’ll publish them, and I’ll get lots of fresh traffic that’s being driven to my website from theirs. And all because I included a little link in my blog post.

Here are some tips:

1) Identify high traffic blogs in your niche. There are tools that help you do this, such as Nightwatch. Nightwatch gives you information regarding how much traffic a website has, as well as what their backlink situation is like. This is key because a bad backlink profile should act as a warning sign that a website is spam.

Also, it’s very important that you only target high traffic blogs. These blogs are already seen as experts in your niche, and if you can drive that traffic to your site, you’re onto a winner.

2) Only target related blogs. If a blog doesn’t fall within your niche, always avoid it.

3) Create a list of these blogs and keep them in a document for future use.

4) Carefully read the editorial guidelines before submitting your idea. Some blogs want you to pitch a few lines, while others just want a headline, while still others want the whole article there and then. Moreover, some don’t let you link to any products or services that you’re selling, while others do.

5) Reach out to the blog via a submission form. Introduce yourself and briefly explain why you’d like to post on their blog. What’s your field of expertise, and what kind of value are you going to provide? Remember to demonstrate what you’re going to do for them.

Recommended: 4 Ways to Find Best Sites for Guest Blogging

Create Viral Content

Yeah - creating viral content sounds hard.

But the thing is that viral content doesn’t become viral by luck - there are certain determining factors that cause internet users to share the heck out of an article. Before I show you how to create viral content, let me explain how viral content can help you gain more top notch backlinks:

Essentially, the more your content is shared, the more your name grows, and the more you become known. Before long, there’s a buzz around your brand and blog. People know you, trust you and see you as the expert … and others are now linking out to you!

It’s pretty sweet. But how does content go viral? Here are some tips:

1) Nail the headline. Check this stat out: Many of us will share an article without even reading it! This means we share an article on the strength of its headline.

2) Create valuable content. Now, you could create silly content that gets shared like wildfire purely because it’s so silly and internet people like silly stuff. But silly won’t get you high quality backlinks and won’t position you as the expert.

Instead, you need to produce in-depth, long-form content that offers the reader an insane amount of value. Just take a look at the content we shared the most in 2016. It was informative, valuable content. People shared it because it actually had a positive impact on them.

And if you think long -form content gets shared less than short-form content, reconsider. Kissmetrics checked their own data and found that most of their traffic is heading to their long-form, in-depth content.

3) Tell people you want them to share your content. Look, you’re not Mother Theresa. Sure, you’ve just created a long-form, in-depth, fabulous piece of content that took you a while to write, but you do expect something in return - for example, a share.

At the end of each piece of content, and on the accompanying message on social media, tell folk you want them to share it. Don’t be boring, though.

Recommended: A Roadmap to Great Content – From Idea to Viral Post

Get Involved with Influencer Marketing

What is influencer marketing? In a nutshell, it’s when you write a top-notch, high-value post that’s stuffed with facts, data, and numbers, and ask an influencer in your niche if they could kindly take a look at it - and perhaps even share it with their audience.

Influencers are big deals on the internet, and especially on social media. They have a lot of power, and they have something you want - a massive audience.

There are differences between influencer marketing and guest blogging. Influencers are:

Bigger on social media
Harder to reach
Harder to impress

The last two points are worth expanding on. Influencers are harder to reach because they don’t generally have a submission form. They’re not always actively pursuing contact from outside sources.

The thing is, though, they, need fresh content. So why wouldn’t they listen to your pitch? Well, you’ve gotta make yourself seen, heard and known. A good way to do this is to build a relationship with them before hitting them with your idea. Engage on their social media profiles. Be active. Ask questions, answer questions. Get in and among the community, add lots of value and make it known that you know your stuff.

Once the influencer has noticed you, it’s easier to DM or email them and be noticed. And the truth is - investing in influencer marketing can be a game changer for your website.

To impress them? Well, your piece of content that you want them to share can be nothing short of amazing. These people are the experts in their niche. Their audience turns to them for the raw data, the facts, and the figures. So you need to provide all of that, plus anything they haven’t covered yet.

Once you’ve pitched your amazing piece of content and outlined what’s in it for them - your content will reinforce their audience’s perception of them delivering lots of value - kindly ask them to promote and distribute it.

Recommended: 10 Influencer Marketing Strategies You Should Follow

Host an Interview with an Expert

People trust experts. When you interview an expert in your field, your credibility grows - and you gain more backlinks.

How?

Let’s say I arrange an interview with an expert in my field. I publish the transcript to my blog and the video version, and I then publish it to all my social media profiles. The expert — who has lots of followers — does the same. All of a sudden, I’ve got an influx of top quality backlinks.

Simple but magical stuff, huh?

Here are some tips:

1) Introduce yourself. The best way to reach an expert you want to interview is via email. If you don’t know someone’s email address, you can use an outreach tool like hunter.io.

Then, shoot them an introductory email. Be polite, mention how you know them and what you do.

2) Offer an incentive. What’s in this for them? Often, the answer is “more exposure” and a chance to cement their position as an authority figure.

3) Outline what will happen and how you’ll use the interview. If you don’t plan to publish the interview for another 6 months, by gosh let them know. Be upfront, honest, and transparent. This is crucial for relationship building.

4) Don’t ask too many questions. The last thing you want is for an interviewee to grow tired and frustrated because you’re pumping them with an endless amount of questions.

Collaborate on an eBook

I really like this final one. The premise is simple:

1) Come up with an idea for an eBook.

2) Identify experts in your niche who have a good following on social media. Make a list of them along with their contact details.

3) Contact these experts, pitch your eBook idea and ask if they’d be interested enough to contribute a short chapter for it.

4) Compile the chapters.

5) Publish the eBook, along with a blog article based on it.

6) Send a copy of the eBook to all the contributors, as well as a link to the blog post and a link to where others can purchase it (pro tip — offer it for free. The aim here is not book sales but backlinks).

7) Each contributor will then — surely of their own volition — link the blog and the eBook to their own followers, via their website and social media.

Et voila — you now have lots of top quality backlinks.

As you can see, link building doesn’t have to be so hard, but it can be really time-consuming. However, the ROI can be huge. Find those backlinks and then monitor your backlink efforts. The last thing you want is for low-quality backlinks to sneak in without you realizing it.

Do you have any tips of your own? Let us know in the comments!