How to Get Powerful Links In SEO Link Building 2024

Introduction: Get Powerful Links In SEO Link Building 2024

In this blog post, I’m going to show you exactly what link-building techniques work today. But here’s what I’m gonna do differently. Most of the time, in blog posts like these, you’ll get a list of basic, link-building strategies: guest posting, broken link building, and skyscraper outreach.

But I’ll straight up tell you right now, How to Get Powerful Links In SEO Link Building 2024 and the vanilla, basic-ass versions of these link-building techniques do not work anymore. Techniques, like guest postings, still work but they need to be upgraded to be effective in today’s SEO environment. I build links for a living, literally.

The techniques I’m about to show you have helped me land links, like these, from The New York Times, a DR 94 website, Forbes, also a DR 94, and Inc., a measly DR 92

Most SEO content creators will tell you how things work at a high level. What is a guest post? It’s when you reach out to a website you want to link on and offer to write free content for them in exchange for a link in that content. Here’s an example of a guest post pitch I received in my inbox, not too long ago,

But I have a feeling that people who teach basic-ass stuff like this don’t actually do link-building. Vanilla link-building approaches don’t work. You get thousands of emails a day with boring link requests, like these, don’t you? In order to be effective, you need to stand out. You need to be different. You need to be better.

“Simply asking someone to link to you because their audience might find your content valuable, works great”, said no one ever. In this post, I’m gonna show you which link-building techniques work the best today. How to execute them step by step, including the email scripts that you can copy to get great results.

These are techniques I typically save for my students at the other Website academy or ones that we use for getting links for our clients at the Freelancing website. But today I’m opening things up for you. Now make sure to stick around to the end because the last technique is one of my favorites.

What is link building?

As I mentioned in my previous blog post Link building is a process for your website to earn new inbound links or in other words, backlinks from other websites to your website, or internal linking opportunities. When I say link building what I’m talking about is spending time effort and in some cases even money with the intent to get a backlink to your website. It’s a really common SEO practice and it’s a complete waste now.

Backlinks are good.

Let me pause here for just a second and say these backlinks are good. We are not now nor have we ever been anti-backlink. Google and other search engines use links from other websites to yours sort of as votes in favor of your content. It’s basically one of the ways that Google is able to measure the e-a-t of your content and Google EAT is an important factor in determining where your content should show up in the rankings.

Read more: Check why your pages aren’t ranking high on Google

Guest Posting For Getting Backlink To Website.

The first SEO technique I want to fix for you is guest posting. You know what it is already. It’s when you offer to write content for someone for a link in exchange. And you already know that this sad piece of an email doesn’t convert at all

The reasons why this doesn’t work are totally clear. First, it’s not unique. 99% of all guest post pitches look like this. Second, why would I let this person, whom I don’t even know, write for my site? I’m more likely just to link to them than to have to worry about their crap content on my site and have to edit it.

So here’s what you do instead. You’re gonna find sites with outdated content that need to be updated. And you’re gonna offer to fix it for them. Let’s say you wanted to get a link from Shopify, a tasty, DR 92, treat of a website. Google “site:shopify.com intitle 2020” to bring up a list of articles on Shopify that have 2020 in the title, meaning that they’re probably not up to date. Here we find this Best Markdown Editors of 2020 article

Let’s open it up. This article is out of date A-F

Some of these editors don’t even exist anymore. So here’s what you do next. Figure out the right contact email address at Shopify with a tool like hunter.io, which gives you 25 free requests per month. Then send them a template like this.

“Hey Bob, I was just reading your ‘Best Markdown Editors of 2020’ article and saw that it’s become out of date. A couple of the tools you’re recommending are end-of-life, and some of the features of others have expired. I’m well-versed in markdown editors. How about I write this article for you for free and get you all sorted out for this year? I’ve done this before for with. Let me know when you’re ready to proceed.”

A template like this works because you’ve just saved someone’s ass from referencing content that isn’t true anymore. Plus they probably need to get this rewritten anyway. Now, just sneak in your link and you’re good to go. I actually covered two more, outside-the-box, guest post angles in another blog post. I’ve left a link here, so make sure to check it out after you finish this blog article.

HARO: Link building technique that still works today

The next SEO link building technique that still works today, HARO but definitely needs a revamp, is responsive editorial link building with HARO. What is HARO? HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out. It’s a platform that allows journalists to request quotes from experts to use in their articles.

Let’s say that a journalist is publishing an article on AmericanExpress.com on millennial entrepreneurship and wants a quote from an actual millennial on how they got started in the business. Well, here’s where you step in and tell them about this awesome guy, SAM Readmorr Cofounder, who got you turned onto this super cool thing called SEO. Kidding. But, let’s say, they use your quote.

When they quote you, they’ll link back to your website. The main issue with HARO is that any link building technique, that gets this good of links and is free, is gonna get flooded with bazillions of SEOs trying to tap into that sweet, free, link juice. When that opportunity to get an MX link comes up, literally thousands of quotes roll in. Because of this HARO is a grind. Sure, it’s free, but you’ll trade your time, and a lot of it, because you’ll just get drowned out most of the time. You’re lucky if you even see a 5% success rate.

Here’s what you’re gonna do instead, that literally flips the script. To do this, you’ll need two websites in the same niche. We’re gonna set up a three-way link exchange. You’re, instead, gonna take the role of a journalist looking for expert quotes on your site. You do this at HARO’s Submit Query page

Let’s say you have an affiliate site promoting golf equipment. You’re gonna write an article on the best places to golf in the United States for beginners. And you’re gonna have HARO help you get expert quotes from golfers on their favorite beginner courses. You’re gonna get a bunch of quotes, tons of them, from people who are looking for links to their golf sites. But, here’s what you’re gonna reply, instead.

“Hey Bobby, thanks for your submitted quote. We’re, unfortunately, full-on quotes for this article, but if you could link to it from your site, I can sneak you into this article. Let me know.”

This is diabolically sneaky because it converts crazy as hell. If Bob doesn’t give you this link, then he knows he just wasted his time crafting a quote. To him, there’s nothing to lose and a link to gain. I first heard about this technique when I was judging WPX Hosting’s Best Affiliate Tip contest.

I made a blog Article summarizing the amazing entries from that contest, so make sure to check it out after this post.

Ahrefs For Get Powerful Links In SEO Link Building

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that many search engine optimization professionals, including myself, use to get their job done. It really does do more things than I can count.

But for me particularly, I use it for site audits, which help me evaluate the technical SEO health of my websites, so Google will love them, competitor research, in particular, reverse engineering the keyword research and backlink strategies of my competition, and Content Explorer, which helps me figure out high search volume, low competition, topics to write about.

This kind of data is absolutely critical for doing SEO these days. And it’s nearly impossible to get by yourself. And best of all, Ahrefs is offering a free version, called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, or AWT. Just go to Ahrefs.com/AWT to check it out today. Now back to the main topic.

Link Insertion for Backlink

The next technique I’m gonna show you how to beast mode is link insertions. A link insertion is when you ask someone to update an existing article with a link to your article

Here’s an example of a link insertion request, fresh from my inbox. “You linked to one of our competitors.” Cool story. Why does it matter to me? “We’re trying to build a bunch of backlinks.” Again, cool, so am I, what’s new? “It would really help us if you placed a link to us.”

The reason this doesn’t work, it’s because it’s all about them. They’re so focused on their own link, that they forget that it’s me they’re asking a favor from. So how can we make this work? When we pitch, how can we make it about them, and not us? Money talks.

Note that this technique requires you to spend a bit of money, but let me tell you it converts like crazy. Here’s what you’re gonna do. Write a typical pitch for a guest post. The reason you’re mentioning guest posts is because everyone knows what that is.

Not many people know what link insertions are. In the first line, ask how much the price is. This is what’s gonna get people’s attention. As soon as you mention money, your response rate skyrockets. As soon as they reply, no matter what their price is, say that it’s too expensive. Ask them if they can do a quick link insertion, instead, for half the price. They’ll do it because they’ve already spent time responding.

And they realize, that updating content with a link takes 1% of the time compared to reviewing and editing guest post content.

Broken Link Building

The following link building technique that still works, extremely well, but literally everyone is doing wrong, is broken link building. And yes, I’ll repeat, that it still works very well. Broken link building is when you identify when a site links out to another URL, but the URL they’re linking to is dead. Maybe the other website deleted that post, or the website completely shut down itself

Either way, the link is broken and that’s bad for SEO. So typically you see a pitch like this. “Hey, Roberto. In your article, you’re linking out to, which no longer exists. I recently wrote an updated, current-year version of that article here. If you’d like to update your broken link, we’d really appreciate it, if you considered our article instead.” Do you know what’s wrong with this pitch? Absolutely nothing at all. It’s perfectly fine

The problem is that people don’t care about the old articles they wrote in 2018. They wrote it ages ago and they could give two it’s on whether its links are perfect or not. But if they recently wrote an article and it’s incorrect, they’ll actually care. Here’s how you find broken link opportunities on recent articles with Ahrefs.

Find a big site, in your niche, that has a lot of links going to it. So, for me, let’s use Backlinko. Plug them into Site Explorer and search “Best by links”. Then set up the HTTP filter to “404 not found.”

This will bring up a list of articles that don’t exist anymore, ordered by how many domains are linked to them. This “prevent Google penalties” article at the top has 32 domains linking to it

Clicking on that number, you get a list of all those referring domains, but if you order by “first seen”, you get the most recent articles first. These are your target sites

Unlinked Brand Mention

Next, we have unlinked brand mentions. This still works very well, in this day and age, if you do it the right way. An unlinked brand mention is when someone references your name on your brand, but they just don’t link to you. Like this guy, here, who only ranked me 18 on this list of best SEO blogs. (image)Terrible, I know.

So at this point, you expect me to write an email to him saying, “Bro, you used my name. Please link to my site.” But the reason this doesn’t work is because if they would’ve linked to you, they would’ve done it in the first place. So again, we’re gonna flip the script. I’m gonna have my VA create a complete list of someone else’s unlinked brand mentions. Someone I want a link from. Then, I’m gonna deliver this to them as a favor, and ask if they could do me a favor back. After all, I did all this work for someone, it would only be polite.

Here’s how to get a quick list of unlinked brand mentions. Go to Ahrefs Content Explorer. Type in the brand name, here, at the top. Then, minus the URL. Then highlight unlinked domains

Now down below, you’ll have a list of sites that mention HubSpot

but don’t link to them. Now send HubSpot this script. “Hey, Bobba the Hutt. Being a fan of HubSpot and the SEO you do over there, I wanted to do you solid. I created this list of unlinked brand mentions where people used your quotes, expertise, and research, but didn’t give you credit via the link. I hope this helps. If you could do me a quick solid back, I could use a link to my site.” This script converts super nicely.

Getting backlinks doesn’t require link-building

But you don’t need to do link building to get backlinks. Let me show you this site is cookforfolks.com look up where I am. It’s a site that we have had live for almost exactly one year. When I go to ahrefs check this out this site has over 400 backlinks links from other websites that link to the content on our site.

Guess how much time effort or money we spent to get those backlinks, literally zero. Those backlinks were created naturally and organically. Now you may say all those are probably just low-quality backlinks but when I actually look at the backlink profile for this over half of them are do-follow links which means I’m getting the link juice from the websites they come from.

What I find when I look at those backlinks is the best links point to articles where we had unique thoughts and original research. One in particular where Anna did an actual experiment and put together data and took photos. It’s a piece of content that’s hard to replicate so what do people do instead they cite it and they link to it.

These are natural organic backlinks which is the intent of what Google is looking for. On our main site A domain.com we have over 34 000 backlinks and we have never done any link building

Backlinks are necessary for ranking well.

I saw a post the other day in our Project 24 community from a brand-new member this is what they said:

“Hello I’m a newcomer why is there no mention of backlinks here how can there be a good ranking without backlinks”

This sample site and posted a screenshot of that exact ahrefs report of one of the sites we’ve used as an example. The site we built and sold to another project 24 member who’s building it up like crazy and doing really well. I’ll show you that image here…

“This sample site has more than 5 000 backlinks and I want to learn how to create links”

Actually, the site has over 16 000 backlinks from over 5 000 different domains but guess what there was no active link building done on that site by us or by the project’s 24 members who bought it.

When others in the community said that this was the response:

“Hi are these more than 5000 backlinks naturally attracted totally impossible”

And then later:

“Hi backlinks are an important factor in seo. The sample site posted must have at least 5 000 referring domains. How did they get them? it is not obtained by nature at all. I can’t figure this out. I know that content is very important. But backlinks are also very important. Are these backlinks naturally given by others?”

And then they went on to say I am a SEO worker. It is impossible to have a good ranking without backlinks. This is the problem this is the paradigm that we face people in the SEO industry are stuck in the 1990s. Backlinks are a valuable part of SEO but they’re not as critical as seos would like you to believe.

Link-building strategies and issues

However, the practice of link building has a lot of huge issues. So let’s dive into those now. When you think of How to Get Powerful Links In SEO Link Building what comes to your mind? There are really only three methods that all strategies and tactics fall into.

1. Creating your own backlinks:

The first method is creating those backlinks yourself which is going to other places on the web. Where you can actually add links to your site which is done through social media sites, forum posts, and commenting on other people’s blog posts. Basically anywhere that literally anyone on the internet could post something.

Well, google figured out a long time ago that literally anyone can post anything in those places and so links of that type are given basically zero weight in the Google search algorithm.

In fact, when Google sees a lot of links from those types of sources they will even penalize websites that they believe are trying to manipulate their algorithm.

2. Buying Backlinks

The second way to get these links on your site is to buy them. You can literally pay people who have networks of websites or who reach out to others who have websites. Who will then for payment put links on their site over to your content.

This goes completely against Google’s guidelines and to get a link from the type of site that would actually add credibility to yours is so expensive. Links from valuable sites often cost $300 or more per link! The other pay-for-link option is to literally pay sites to allow you to write a guest post on their site that links back to your article.

So not only are you now paying to write this guest post that can literally cost you hundreds of dollars but now you’re also having to take the time to write a post that doesn’t even get to go on your own website.

3. Doing Industry Outreach:

The third method is to get those links by doing industry outreach. I am actually a big fan of doing industry outreach as long as it’s done in the right way and at the right time. In fact, we have an entire course on Eeat inside of Readmorr.com

But I need to be clear about this we do not do link building. You might say well Bro this is just semantics right. You call it industry outreach others call it link building no it’s not the same the words matter. When you do any activity with the sole intent of getting a link to your website your objective and therefore your behavior is different than when you do things with the purpose of building relationships with other content creators, with establishing authority within an industry.

When you view it that way and it’s not just about the link you actually do, better types of industry outreach more effective and it’s so much easier. Let’s dive into that. Now one of my favorite ways of doing industry outreach as a blogger is to go get interviewed on a podcast. Podcasters are often looking for people to interview. You don’t need to go on the biggest ones in your industry at this point start with small podcasts.

Get yourself interviewed by simply reaching out to the podcast host linking them to your website telling them hey this is the content that I create I would love to talk to you about it on your podcast.

One great way to find podcasters is through a service known as podmatch. You can sign up for free I’m not not even giving you an affiliate link for it. It’s created by a great guy who’s had me on his podcast before and basically, it matches podcasters with people who want to be interviewed by podcasters. Kind of like a dating site but for Eeat.

Getting interviewed on a podcast basically always comes with a link. I have never once been interviewed for a podcast even an interview for a blog post or a YouTube video or anything like that where the person interviewing me didn’t ask me. At some point proactively where would you like me to send people where would you like me to link to that sort of a link, makes a lot of sense because the people who are consuming that content may want to follow up and learn more about the person interviewed.

But the link is only a piece it’s not the end game. The real benefit is coming because the person interviewing you is clearly viewing you as some level of authority within your industry causing not only the algorithm to treat you a little bit more that way but people to treat you a little bit more that way.

Users people who listen to that podcast, watch that YouTube video, read that article that has that interview with you in it are going to be more likely to come search out your content. When they see your content within a search that they perform on the web. They’re going to be a little bit more likely to click on it because it’s a familiar name getting your name out there doing regular ordinary marketing organically.

Ends up building authority not just algorithmically but among people because of brand recognition. Now among the audience of people who listen to that podcast episode, let’s say there are going to be some who are also bloggers, they’re going to be some who are also podcasters and YouTubers within their industry.

Well now they have somebody that they know, they can reach out to who’s another authority within the space someone. They can interview, and they’re going to be substantially more likely to just mention you in a podcast on a video or within their blog and link over to your site. This is organic backlink creation. We’re not building them, we’re letting them be created and spread on their own because we create high-value quality content.

What does Google say about link building and Backlinks?

We’ll come back to that one in just a minute first. Let’s see what Google says about backlinks. In their documentation about how search works, google talks a little bit about the quality of content that’s where backlinking comes up what Google’s really trying to do here is understand the meaning of your search query that’s key.

Second, they’re trying to find web pages across the internet that have content relevant to your search. That’s actually the most important factor by far in search rankings, not backlinks. The next one is the quality of the content.

Here they tell you where those links come into play:

“We look for sites that many users seem to value for similar queries.For example if other prominent websites linked to a page what is known as page rank that is proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted”

“A good sign not a definitive sign. Aggregated feedback from our search quality evaluation process is used to further refine how our systems discern the quality of information”

Google over the last several years has been improving its algorithm through the use of manual quality raters that are looking at specific pieces of content to see how authoritative they really are based on numerous different signals. They’re using that information to update the algorithm to be able to algorithmically automatically determine the authoritativeness or the eat of pieces of content on your website.

Backlinks are only one of the many signals involved in determining the quality of your content. Google also talks about spam algorithms. Let’s look at what Google has to say about link schemes:

“Any links intended to manipulate page rank. So listen to this very carefully any link that you have created that’s intended to manipulate your page rank that is link building or a site’s ranking in google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of google’s webmaster guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your sites or outgoing links from your site.”

Further Google talks about spam algorithms. This might include things like buying or selling links. Okay so that just completely eliminated method number two. Excessive link exchanges: So this whole like hey you link to me I’ll link to you. You do that more than a couple of times with another website. You find yourself getting into trouble and then numerous other different methods that people use to basically spam the internet with links.

Those types of practices because they’re viewed as linked schemes and as manipulative can actually cause your content to rank lower than it naturally would on its own.

Now let’s look at what Google has to say down here:

“The best way to get other sites to create high quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the internet community”

Creating good content pays off I want to highlight this word naturally.

The danger of the “Backlinks are Necessary” Fallacy

Now let’s quickly go back to that idea that it’s totally impossible to rank without backlinks. This mentality is false and it’s actually really dangerous for bloggers.

Let me illustrate why if that were actually true then your site wouldn’t just need backlinks but every piece of content on your website would also need backlinks as they’re all ranked individually. It’s true that people linking to your homepage or to your About page do lift the overall authoritativeness of the site but the site’s authoritativeness only plays a small piece in the authoritativeness of individual pieces of content on the website.

They’re also looking at the authoritativeness of the author who wrote it and the individual pieces of content. So you write an article and now you’d like to get three to five quality backlinks, well what does that mean?

Statistically, it means you’re reaching out to at least a hundred different people to try to get links to that article. For each one of those people, you need to provide an opportunity for them to create that link. So you need to find approximately 100 broken links that are relevant to that piece of content you need to reach out to 100 different site owners offering to write a guest post to hopefully get two three four or maybe five of them to say yes.

How much time is that going to take you for each article? What if in that same amount of time, you wrote three more articles? Now you would have four different articles covering four different search queries with the opportunity to rank for those four different search queries.

To get backlinks on four different topics the natural and organic way that I’m proving to you happens on its own. Our process of search analysis which is what we do instead of keyword research is how we identify low-competition search queries that people are searching for every single day.

Google is more interested in providing people with the most relevant search result than they are in providing people with the search result with the most backlinks.

So What we do instead

We write articles with original value and unique content that are highly relevant to those search queries that most bloggers completely ignore. There are still tons of those by the way. So without any backlinks at all on a brand new website.

We are very frequently able to rank on the first page of Google and often number one. We also use our snippet optimization strategy to write content that is more likely to be chosen by Google as the rich snippet which allows content on brand-new websites to quickly skip the line and get to the very top of the Google search results.

With so much high-performing content on those lower competition search queries, We’re able to naturally gain that authority that Google is able to measure just as easily as they do backlinks and with that trust gained and that authority established, We’re able to rank for much more competitive search terms.

Making industry outreach easy

Now with substantially more content on your website than others because of the time they’re wasted chasing down links. When others in your industry come to your website they’re going to see larger amounts of content and better content that they’re going to be substantially more likely to link to naturally.

You have enough content that a podcaster in your industry is going to be far more likely to want to interview you. Industry outreach is extremely hard when nobody has any reason to view you or your content as authoritative. But when you put high-quality content first It actually doesn’t take that long before others in your industry start to view you as an authority on the topic. It’s actually way easier and far less time-consuming.

Want to learn more about how to naturally attract a lot of traffic to your website? In just a couple weeks I’m going to be putting another blog on link-building tips article on this website totally free of charge where I’m going to lay out our entire SEO strategy for 2024 and beyond. You’ll learn everything you need to know about how to get your content seen and how to get more users to your site.

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