It wasn’t that long ago that getting a heap of backlinks for your site was a surefire path to search engine success. The amount of weight Google gave to this factor within their search algorithm was quite astonishing. It meant that anyone willing to “game” the system could end up ranking reasonably easily for highly competitive and lucrative keywords.
As Google updated and refined their algorithm, the importance of backlinking as a ranking factor was brought more into balance with many other ranking factors, and the backdoor of simply building a ton of worthless and “spammy” backlinks to rank, was closed.
However, getting links to your pages may seem old school, but it still can be a primary factor in where and how your pages rank in Google and the other search engines. Receiving relevant and authoritative backlinks is a building block of any SEO campaign, and while many are scared to death of the task, it isn’t quite as scary as you might think.
So if we have to get it done in order to best our competition, how do we wisely go about this? To get the process started, we’ve detailed 7 ways to get quality backlinks in 2015, to help get you the rankings you seek.
7 Strategies to get quality backlinks to your pages
Utilize press releases – Back in the day people wanting links would slap up a PR for fast links utilizing their anchor text keyword. You still see some attempting this, but Google is getting good at detecting link spam here. Use press releases as they were intended to be used, to report newsworthy items. You’ll find that quality is still very effective.
Get links from business directories – Not just a local ranking tactic, though if you have a local site it’s essential. Do not enter every directory out there, as this is also about quality traffic, not just link spam.
Image sites – Sites like Pinterest and Instagram are easy pickings, and have the chance to spread your links wide. You’ll want to cross promote on your other social media channels.
Write guest posts – You might think this is so 2010, but the truth is that if you are producing great content, highly trafficked sites are going to want to talk to you.
Social media – The highest and best use of social media for your business is to help you promote your other content. Extending your reach through the fans and followers of others is a great way to get the word out.
Infographics – Quality infographics are hot at the moment, and more and more places are springing up to place them, not to mention plain old social media!
YouTube Videos – YouTube is owned by Google, (you knew that) and tends to receive favor from them in many ways, not the least of which is rankings in Google’s search results.
While the process and methods of building backlinks in the old days worked for that time, they will often do more harm then good these days. Back then it was all about building enormous amounts of backlinks to artificially increase your relevance. Today it’s all about relevant, high value, and high authority links.
As you can see there are still effective and safe ways to go about your backlink campaigns.