Backlinks play a critical role in the success and popularity of any website. This is because those who develop Google’s search algorithm make tweaks in an effort to ensure users easily find valuable content on the first page of their search results. When many people are linking back to a given site or page, Google’s algorithm interprets this to mean that the page’s content is genuinely valuable, trustworthy, entertaining, or otherwise worthy of a reader’s attention. As a result, it may rank higher in relevant searches than it otherwise would.
You need a link building strategy to direct traffic to your site. However, you may be on a tight budget. Luckily, there are many ways to generate more backlinks to your site without spending a lot of money. The following are a few worth keeping in mind.
Submit Guest Posts
Often, in lieu of payment, the owners of various online publications and blogs will allow guest writers to submit posts that feature links to their own sites. Some of them even allow this while also offering monetary payment. Thus, submitting guest posts is a low-cost way to generate backlinks that actually might even help you earn some extra money.
Find Mentions
Search the Internet for existing mentions of your site (or business, or brand or products, etc.). When you find mentions that don’t link to your site, contact the owners of the sites where your brand is mentioned and ask them to go back and add a link to the content.
Don’t demand that they do so, though! You’re asking them to do you a favor that may not benefit them at all. As such, you want to ask politely, while also thanking them for having mentioned your site in the first place.
Write Long Content
People will naturally begin linking to the content on your site if said content is high-quality. To ensure it is, take the time to write some long, detailed content. You can still pepper in a few short blog posts, but having a decent amount of lengthy content on your site will give you more opportunities to write the kind of content that people tend to link to. Longform content also establishes you as an expert in your field, which can help you make a better impression on site visitors.
Pitch Others
Along with contributing guest posts to other blogs and online publications, you can reach out to the owners of blogs suggesting pages of your own that they may want to link to in the future. Just make sure you’re doing so because you can actually provide them with valuable content they’d naturally want to link to had they discovered it on their own.
For example, maybe you own a website promoting your law firm. One piece of content on that site may consist of a long article explaining the legal ramifications of a recent news story or political development. You could reach out to bloggers who cover similar topics, mentioning that they might want to link to your article, as it’s something their readers could find interesting. It would make sense to do this if you were confident your article would be genuinely useful to the bloggers you’re contacting.
All that said, while these are definitely effective low-cost ways of generating backlinks, if you have a higher budget, you’ll get even better results from partnering with experts who develop and implement link building strategies. Additionally, when others are generating backlinks for you, you can focus on other aspects of running your business.
