How to get Backlinks for Free

I've been asked so many times: How do I get Free Backlinks? So here is the answer.

Below is a list of various ways to get backlinks for free. It isn't a list of sites to get backlinks from. If this was available it would be valueless as everyone would be getting one of these free backllinks.

The harder a backlink is to acquire, the more valuable it is in terms of SEO.

Backlinks remain one of the most critical parts of Googles algorithm. So, if your competitors have more high-quality links than you, theyre in better position to beat you to the top of the search results.

Backlinks are important and you want lots of them, but only from high authority sites. Spammy backlinks will not help you - they will only hurt your site.

So, without further ado, here are some ideas for aquiring backlinks for free.

Write great content

The first idea is the best.

If you can create great content then people will naturally link to it.

Good content directly translates to more people seeking out, engaging with, and sharing your stuff. On the plus side, the more content that you create, the greater chance there is that you will naturally receive incoming links. Conversely, there is no guarantee that this will generate the results that you are chasing.

Your primary purpose when creating and publishing content is for readers, not Google. Don't be lured into writing content for search engines. For this technique to work, you need to be writing content so that humans link back to you.

Write guest posts

Writing guest posts is also an excellent way to build your own backlinks, in effect. It may sound like you'll just be helping another site build their resources and generate more views for themselves, but this is very much a case of helping each other out as every guest post is entirely credited to the writer, not the hosting site.

This is a great way of getting your name out there, making your content available to new readers and winning increased online visibility.

Ask friends and family

Ask everyone you know to give you a link. Many people now have their own websites or blogs, Facebook pages, and LinkedIn accounts. Ask everyone you can think of to mention your site. Send all of them a short e-mail detailing what you’d like them to say. You may want to create a little bit of HTML that they can paste straight into their pages. If you do this, you get to control the link text to ensure that it has keywords in it.

You can do this by sending a brief outreach message to your friends, acquaintances, and alums online, requesting for backlinks. To make this more effective, make sure your request has a benefit to them.

Register with search directories

Links are important not only because people can find you when searching at those directories but also because search engines often spider these directories. Directory links are highly relevant because they’re categorized within the directories. Search engines like relevant links, and categorized links are relevant. Therefore, if you haven’t registered with the directories, consider that an early step in your link campaign. Research niche directories that provide information that is relevant to the industry you are targeting. The weight of the link isnt quite as strong as a mention on a blog or from an authoritative news publication, but its still a link that Google recognizes and gives credit for.

Ask your employees for a backlink

Employees often provide, by accident, a significant number of links back to their employer’s website. In particular, employees often mention their employer in discussion groups that get picked up by the search engines. So why not send an e-mail to all your employees, asking them to link to the company’s site from their sites, blogs, and various social networking sites, and to mention you in discussion groups? Again, you might give them a piece of HTML that includes an embedded logo and text.

Contact association sites for inclusion on their site

Association sites are a much-overlooked source of free and useful links. Contact any professional or business association of which you’re a member and ask for a link. Are you in the local Better Business Bureau, the Lions Club, or Rotary Club? Many such sites have member directories and may even have special links pages for their members’ websites.

Contact manufacturers’ websites

Another overlooked source of links is manufacturers’ websites. If you sell products, ask manufacturers to place link from their sites to yours. They will gladly do so as it will bring in more business for them in the long run.

Contact companies you do business with

Many companies maintain client and dealer lists, helping customers find where they can buy. Check with all the firms you do business with and make sure that you have a backlink from them on their site.

Ask to be a featured client

If you’re using someone’s services — for web hosting, e-mail services, syndication services, or whatever — you may want to contact the site and ask whether you can be the featured client. Hey, someone’s going to be, so it may as well be you. This will give you a backlink for free from their site. It also brings a new audience to your brand and indicates that you're a player in your field.

Submit to announcement sites and newsletters

There used to be scores of “announcement” services, websites and newsletters that published information about new websites. The number of these has diminished over the years however there are still some out there. Think about who might want to let their readers know about you, and then ask them if they will announce you.

Use the broken link building technique

You can use the Broken Link Building technique to create high quality backlinks. Simply find a high quality website that has a broken link, write to them and ask them to feature a link to your site instead.

Find sites linking to your competition

If a site links to your competition, it may be willing to link to you, too. Find out who links to competing sites and then ask them if they can link to yours. In some cases, the links are link-exchange links but in many cases, they’re just sites that provide useful information to their readers. If your site is useful in some way, you’ve got a good chance of being listed. Ideally, you don’t want to link back to sites linking to you, as this may devalue the links.

When you find sites linking to your competitors, you may discover that some of them could be appropriate for a link to yours.

So how do you ask for the link?

Nicely.

Send an informal, chatty message.

Don't make it sound like some kind of form letter that half a billion other people have received.

This should be a personal contact between a real person (you) and another real person (the other site’s owner or manager). Give this person a reason to link to your site.

Explain what your site does and why it would be of use to the other site's visitors.

Yes, this can be time consuming.

Nobody I’ve ever met said that link building is easy.

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Most people want a list of sites for free easy backlinks and want to be able to punch this out on their own.

But the reality is that you will need to form relationships if you really want to learn how to get quality backlinks for free.

Generating quality backlinks can be hard work, but it doesnt have to be.

You can use the services of an SEO agency to take care of the backlink building for you.

Because even though the methods above are free in terms of cash, they're not free in terms of time.

You have to weigh up whether your time is valuable or not. If it is, why not leave it to the experts?