A Beginner’s Guide: How to Get Backlinks for New Jersey SEO
If you know anything about SEO, you know that acquiring backlinks is notoriously the most difficult aspect of great optimization. Afterall, getting backlinks is mostly out of your control. It depends on external parties finding your posts worth linking to. That’s why most New Jersey SEO strategies focus first on foremost on effective keyword research, followed with superb content. But there are of course some strategies you can implement to increase the number of backlinks you’re acquiring.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are any links out there that link back to your website. Not to be confused with internal links, which are links on your website that link to other pages of your website. (for example, this link will take you to Reclaim Digital’s Home Page). Outbound links are links on your website which take readers off of your website and to another. When an external blog creates an outbound link that links to your website, that’s a backlink.
Why are backlinks important?
Along with building the overall reputation and authority of your website, along with increased visibility, backlinks are also one of the primary bits of information that Google uses when ranking websites (along with keywords and content quality). Essentially, the more backlinks you have, the higher you’ll rank. If you really want to be competitive and show up at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), then backlinks are essential.
There are two types of backlinks:
- Natural backlinks: as mentioned above, your primary goal with creating fantastic New Jersey SEO should be first and foremost to write top notch content with well researched and effective keywords. If you’re doing this part right, people will naturally link to you, without any extra work on your part. Creating great content is the most important thing you can do, and if you aren’t putting the energy into this step, implementing the steps suggested in the rest of this article will be a waste of time.
- Manual backlinks: This is when you make an effort—any effort at all—to get someone to link to your article. That’s what the rest of this article will attempt to help you with.
Strategies to Get Backlinks for New Jersey SEO
Linkbait
The first thing you want to do when fishing for backlinks is to create bait—linkbait, to be exact.
Ahrefs.com explains it thus:
“Linkbait” is content that’s specifically formulated to attract links. It’s something so cool, valuable and unique that (given the opportunity) any industry blogger/influencer would be hard-pressed not to link to it. These links then help to improve the site’s rankings in search engines.
That last part’s important: Backlinks don’t just improve the ratings and visibility of the specific article that is receiving links—they improve the ratings of your entire domain. That’s why creating a few linkbait articles can move your entire website (and other articles) up in overall Google rankings and vastly improve your New Jersey SEO.
What qualities do good linkbait articles contain?
- Emotion-evoking. People respond to emotion, so make sure your article is funny, or makes people angry or righteous. Alternately, you could make them excited, surprised or awe-struck.
- Value. Offer real value or utility to a person’s life—can they implement the knowledge you’re offering?
- Lots of visuals. People love visuals—they simply make a piece of content easier to take in.
What are some tried and true formats or styles of linkbait articles? Try the following:
- Infographics: According to Venngage.com, “An infographic is a collection of imagery, charts, and minimal text that gives an easy-to-understand overview of a topic.” They are appealing to the masses because they involve lots of pleasing-to-the-eyes imagery, can be gleaned rather quickly and are educational.
- Guides, Tutorials, How-to’s—this really appeals to the value aspect.
- Lists—a common formatting for articles that easy to digest and pass along
- Stories—People love to relate, and what better way than with stories? A good story will evoke emotion. This can also include case studies and examples.
Promote Your Content and Get Backlinks
Now that you’ve got a great piece of content that can be classified as linkbait, you’ve got to get out there and promote it. After all, how will people read your content and link to it if they never find it? Promotion is a crucial step in building backlinks for New Jersey SEO.
A few ways to promote your content:
- Reach out to existing audience: the first and most obvious step is to email your existing newsletter subscribers or past clients. Send an email notifying them of the article. If you’re on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, post the article there. Make the article visible to your entire existing network.
- Reach out to relevant communities: now comes the hard part: reaching new people who aren’t in your network. One way to do this is to submit your article to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit and other forums. Only submit to communities if you are actively involved in these communities, however, or your post may be interpreted as simply self-promotional spam and deleted (plus you’ll be blocked).
- Leave Comments: Leave thoughtful comments on other blogs and Youtube videos with your link included. Remember the keyword here: thoughtful. Otherwise, as above, you’ll wind up coming across as a spammer and won’t get clicks or response.
- Answer Questions: Answer questions on Quora or other question websites. Give a great answer and suggest if they want to read more, to read your post (insert link here).
- Ego-bait: If you mention anyone in the article, be sure to reach out to them and let them know, along with a big thank you. They just might to link to you, either to support you or for their own promotion! Everyone feels good when they know their work has been appreciated.
- Paid Promotion: Of course, paid promotion is a fantastic way to reach lots of people. If you have the funds, invest them in Google, Instagram and Facebook ads.
Outreach
Outreach is another form of promotion, but deserves its own section. Ahrefs.com explains outreach:
If you’re not familiar with “outreach”, it basically involves reaching out to people that you feel may enjoy your content to letting them know that it exists. The idea is that, should they like it, they may link to it (or at least share it).
Shoot them a friendly email or social media message with a compelling response to their work and introduce yourself. Offer a link a well-written, relevant article.
How do you find people to reach out to? Look for those who have linked to similar articles or published articles on the same topic. It’s a good bet they’ll be interested in your article—if it can offer value. Don’t send them an article that’s the same content as the one they’ve already linked to. Send them an article that’s more thorough, written from a different perspective, or on a complementary topic.
Guest Blogging
Another way to strategize your article writing is to pitch your ideas to other related blogs. Come up with a list of great article ideas and a list of great blogs that would be likely to accept your offer. Shoot out an email to the various blogs with your ideas and see who responds.
If you land a guest post, your domain will be a part of your featured bio, and you can include a link or two to your own website—and boom: you’re exposed to a new audience.
Advanced Tips for New Jersey SEO
Repurpose Content: Since you’ve already put all the work into compiling an article full of information, you could repurpose it into videos, slideshows, infographics or other form of media in order to reach a wider audience and increase the chances of backlinks. This is a great way to get more bang for your buck with your New Jersey SEO strategy.
Broken links to articles similar to yours: if you notice an article that has a broken link to another post, you can potentially use this to your advantage. Ahrefs.com explains: Creating a similar resource on your own site, then reaching out to sites with broken links and offering your content as an alternative can yield a reasonably high success rate. Most webmasters will be keen to fix errors on their site.
Oftentimes, there are opportunities to acquire links from people already referencing your material:
Broken Links—If other sites have already tried to link to you, but the links go nowhere, there are a few ways to fix this. You could reach out to them and ask that they fix their links. You could also use a redirection plugin.
Brand Mentions without links—similar to the above, if someone has mentioned your business or brand but failed to link, send them a heads up and request that they link to you.
Getting Backlinks for New Jersey SEO
There’s no question that manually attracting backlinks take a real effort on your part. If you aren’t quite ready for that level of commitment, just focus on creating great content and reach out to Reclaim Digital for assistance along the way. Good Luck!
