If you are looking for useful link-building strategies – you came to the right place. Here are 30 ways to get backlinks.
With the rise of organic tactics and holistic SEO, more and more marketers will focus on creating meaningful connections. More SEOs will steer away from shameless promotion and focus on helping people be smarter, happier, richer.
This post contains 30, no-BS evergreen link building tactics that still work in 2018, and guaranteed to get you white hat backlinks. Because why fix something that already works?
As simple as they are, you still have to make them actually work by applying some common sense:
Be relevant. Focus on opportunities that are more targeted, rather than using the spray and pray approach.
Create a connection with your prospects. Don’t drop the bomb before you’ve even said “hi”.
Don’t promote – serve. Respect is key.
Kill them with kindness when you get rejected. Because you will get rejected. Especially if you’re just starting out with link building.
This post should act as a quick reference for to the best ways to get white hat backlinks. Brainstorm with them, jot down the tactics you like and get to work.
Let’s cut to the chase.
The Low Hanging Fruits
These strategies will help you to get white hat backlinks faster than getting a dog out for a walk. No reason not to use them.
1. Internal Linking
Yes, that’s right. Internal linking is something most people overlook, but internal linking is big. Not only does it help you transfer link juice through your pages, but you have complete control of the links. It also creates a natural link profile and helps Google crawl your site quickly.
2. Friendly Blogrolls
Ask your friends, employees and colleagues to put a link in their “Friends” blogroll section.
3. Ask for Credit
Whether you run an SEO agency, or you’re a freelancer, you should ask for credit from your clients or partners.
For example, at WooGuru, we ask our clients if it’s OK to put “WooCommerce support by WooGuru” in the footer of their website.
The best time to ask for this link is when a client is at his peak of happiness. Also, make it easy for them. Put the link on their site yourself or provide an embeddable HTML snippet with the link.
4. Ask Your Suppliers and Distributors
If you’re buying products or services from someone, ask them to link to your site. Since you’re already paying them (although not for the link itself) your suppliers tend to be much more likely to link back to you, as they want to see you succeed.
5. Create Message Board Signatures
Include a link to the site in your forum signature.
Although mostly “no-follow”, these links can bring a decent traffic to a site, and also, help you keep up with your natural link profile.
Directories and Resources
6. Resource Pages
Another old-school easy way to get links. Just use Google search parameters like:
“keyword” + list,
Try this – “keyword” + resources,
“keyword” + tips,
“keyword” + links,
This is great as well – “keyword” + inurl: links.
Depending on the vertical of your business, you should find at least a dozen solid link opportunities.
7. Directories
Submit your site to niche-specific directories, blogger directories like AllTop or local business directories like GoldenPages.
Be very careful with general web directories, as some of them are rife with low-profile links and you don’t want to associate your site with them.
An easy way to track if a directory is fine is by using the Moz Spam Score.
8. Paid Directories
Some premium directories will ask you to pay to list your site on their site. The problem with them is it’s hard to distinguish which ones are worth the money.
9. Web Design Galleries
This type of directory deserves a special mention because you can get some pretty serious traffic from them. This tactic works best if you have a unique, innovative design.
Use a service like CSS Gallery list to get your site submitted to all web design galleries for 50 bucks.
10. Startup Directories
There’s a number of startup-related directories that let you create your company profile. To name a few: Angel List, Crunchbase, and BetaList (if your startup is still in pre-launch stage).
Content-based Opportunities
These link-building tactics involve creating content to get a link.
11. Participate in Round-ups
Thought leader, expert, and influencer roundups are an excellent way to build credibility in your field and get a link. Of course, you must know a thing or two about your niche to get featured in them.
The important thing to note is that once you participate in few roundups, blog authors will start approaching you instead of you having to go to them. Almost every blogger wants to write a round-up post at some stage in their blog’s life, and the easiest targets are usually the people who are already participating in round-ups.
12. Create Round-ups
This tactic works the same way as the previous one, except this time you’re putting together the expert roundup.
Reach out to influencers in your field and ask them to contribute. Everybody wants to look good among other well-respected people. Once you put the round-up live, you can simply ask them to share or link to your post.
13. Create video tutorials and share them on forums
Most bloggers share their tutorials on forums either wholly or link to them. Linking doesn’t work that often since moderators remove those. Sharing an entire tutorial gives them little incentive to come back to your site.
The thing that I have seen working time and again is sharing video tutorials. Branded with your blog’s name, with an outro slate providing a link back to your blog, these videos work magic in bringing visitors to your site.
Video tutorials are often posted to the relevant categories and send a nice trickle of traffic long after you’ve stopped promoting.
The additional advantage is that there is no problem sharing an internal forum thread elsewhere on the forum. You can always prop up the thread if it’s relevant to the discussion.
This technique works better and requires more effort than any other forum promotion technique that you might have heard.
For the Internet marketing niche the best forums for this would be Warrior Forum, Black Hat Forum etc.
14. Guest Blogging
Pitch bloggers with an idea for a blog post and ask them if they’re happy to publish it.
If you’re just starting out with guest blogging, you will find better luck using one of the guest blogging networks like BloggerLinkUp and MyBlogGuest.com
15. Offer Content Upgrades
These tactics involve offering content upgrades like eBooks, reports, infographics, etc. to other sites.
The reason content upgrades work so well is because:
you can provide something exclusive for the site you’re pitching
it’s much more scalable than guest posting
Let’s say you wrote a big article on cats health. You can re-package the whole post as an eBook and offer it as an exclusive resource to a relevant site.
16. Write Testimonials
Nothing makes a person happier than seeing his clients using their products. Endorse the products you use and ask them to share your testimonial on their websites.
17. Write Case Studies
This tactic is the same as the previous tip, except you go for more details and write a complete case study, describing how you use the product/service.
18. Comment on Blogs
With blog comments, you can get some no-follow links, which is perfectly fine but you can also find a decent number of blogs that allow do-follow comments.
19. Participate in Communities
Niche communities are a great place to bring more traffic to your site and get some links (usually no-follow). These could be everything from subreddits to smaller hubs like GrowthHackers.com for online marketing.
20. Answer Questions
Answering questions on Quora and Yahoo Answers not only brings traffic to your site but also helps you build a credibility as a thought leader in your business vertical.
21. Inbound Link-building
This works in a similar way to the round-up tactic except on a much bigger scale.
Great examples are StartupStash and the Glossary of Internet Terms.
22. Mention Influencers in Your Content
This is the classic ego-bait tactic. By appealing to the egos of people, they’ll help you increase the exposure of your content.
Egobait still works – just not like it used to, it’s not as effective to simply quote or link to an influencer praising their work; we’ve found that at this point if you want to see results (and leverage influencer marketing) you need to bring them into the conversation before you push publish.
23. Create a Free Tool
Build a free plugin or browser extension to your main product or service.
24. User Generated Content
People want to be the center of attention, and in control of what they’re doing. Create a platform for user-generated content. That could be a simple message board or Spotify’s interactive “year in music” personal music habits review.
25. Surveys
Asking people for help could be very beneficial. The way surveys work is:
Collect a decent amount of answers to your survey.
Thank them for participating
Ask them if they’d like to help your research by spreading the word with a link.
26. Funny Products and Games
Everybody loves laughing. And everybody loves making other people laugh. This is a great way to generate a white hat backlinks.
27. Seasonable or Timed Content
Leverage the power of ego-bait on a massive level: a national celebration or event.
A great example is this infographic about the National Liberation Day, which collected over 3.5K shares in just a few days.
Give Something
If you have something to give away, this is probably one of the easiest ways to build a white hat backlinks. Although, be careful going overboard with the charity.
28. Promotions and Giveaways
Offer influencers in your field promotions or giveaways in exchange for a product review or feedback.
This works best with products with bigger margins.
29. Contests
Encourage engagement and linking by running contests with prizes. Use a software like Gleam or KingSumo to launch your contest.
Help People Out
Whether you’re helping webmasters by pointing to broken links or you offer your services to someone, there’s a huge opportunity for using reciprocity to build white hat backlinks to your site.
30. Finding broken links
On Google, you can find relevant sites (or posts) to yours.
Then search for broken links on the site – this app will do it for free.
In the end, you offer the site owner to replace the broken links with your post.
There are several free tools that can help you identify the broken links on a site. One of the most hassle-free plugins is Check my Links for Chrome. In the example below the link in red is a broken link.
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