Link Building SEO 2023: Pro-Guide on How to Build Backlinks

An Introduction to Link Building SEO and How to Build Backlinks

 There is a very high chance that more than 90% of your web pages drive ZERO traffic. In one study of Semrush that was conducted in December 2020, it was revealed that more than 90% of the pages available on the web have linked with ZERO referring domains. There are billions of pages on Google, but 90.63% of the pages drive no traffic at all. They become massive worthless and zombie pages on your website with horrify link-building SEO strategy.  

People are busy producing tons of content without having the essence of keyword research and backlinks. Even after investing considerable money and resources in content for years, website owners are not able to run and grow their business organically. Their web pages do not rank on Google and other search engines because of a lack of SEO marketing knowledge or bad SEO planning. 

The above-mentioned facts and statistics can put you in shock. But this is the harsh reality. 

Now, you must be wondering that what is the reason for not getting organic results even after producing high-quality, unique content? 

There are two main reasons for this massive failure, even after having great content on your website.

Reason #1: Not picking up the appropriate keywords.

To accomplish the keyword research task, read my ultimate guides on 

a) how to do keyword research, and 

b) How and why to choose long-tail keywords for your website

Reason #2: Not investing time and resources in getting backlinks 

Or you must be wasting your time or money to earn backlinks. Before 2015, link building was based on quantity, but now it is 100% focused on quality. 

With thousands of Google algorithm updates, most of the past link-building strategy has become spammy and outdated. 

Hence, if you want to improve the website’s ranking, organic traffic, and domain authority, you have to develop an effective SEO link-building strategy. Now, the backlink is one of the most critical Google ranking factors and top SEO strategies in 2022. 

Note: You need to focus on two things while building links on another website. First, the domain authority (40+ DA) and the quality of the website should be excellent.  And second, it should have relevance and relate to your industry. 

Suppose you create a backlink on much high authority referring domains, Google and other search engines index your pages. With consistency in blogging and a great link-building strategy for SEO, you will get 434% more indexed pages, and your inbound links will grow by 97%.

The right SEO link-building strategy can help you to earn thousands of backlinks. Not only links, but your websites also start driving thousands of high-quality referral traffic, leads, and then conversions.  

Here, I have listed 19 proven link-building SEO hacks to skyrocket your website’s organic ranking and traffic. I have also mentioned the most effective ways of how to build backlinks.

Let’s dive in and learn the best link-building SEO hacks that work for your website in 2023.

1. Competitor Backlink Analysis

Backlink analysis of your competitors is an essential part of the link-building process. Any successful link-building campaign is incomplete unless you perform competitor backlink analysis. 

Performing a competitor backlink analysis helps you to discover which websites are in your niche. Through competitor backlink analysis, you get a clear picture of your competitor’s website performance, the number of backlinks, and their link metrics, including web page authority & domain authority.

Competitor backlink analysis makes the complete process of link building more comfortable and speedy where you come up with healthy SEO link-building strategies. 

To accomplish this goal in the best way, you can help the best backlink analysis SEO tools Semrush and Ahrefs. 

You can also read the complete review on Semrush Vs. Ahrefs.

2. Guest Posting 

Guest blogging or guest posting is an all-time effective link-building strategy for bloggers and other website owners. 

Through guest posting, they become a contributor to global websites like Forbes and Entrepreneur. In this way, they earn high-quality backlinks (on 90+ domain authority sites). Usually, if you want to buy one backlink on 90+ domain authority sites, you may invest any amount between $1000-$2000. But through guest posting, you build quality backlinks for free and get a place in the author section. Once they approve your profile and blog post, you can create hundreds of backlinks in a year from these sites. 

How to find hundreds of best guest blogging websites? 

#1 Guest Blogging Pro Tip: 

You should find lists of all quality websites that accept guest posts. You just need Google: “list of blogs that accept guest posts” or “list of – your keyword – blogs that accept guest posts.” Thus Google will result in numerous lists of blogs. But still, you need to research them if they are outdated.

Google your search terms to find guest blogging websites with time-saving techniques;
You need to start the search with your keyword + one of the following terms mentioned below:
Keyword + “guest blog”/”guest post.”
Keyword + “write for us.”
Keyword + “submit an article”/”submit a guest post.”
Keyword + “contribute guest post.”
Keyword + “contribute to our blog.”
Keyword + “become a guest blogger.”
Keyword + “guest blogging guidelines.”
Keyword + “contributor guidelines.”
Keyword + “send a tip.”
Keyword + “guest post by”
Keyword + “guest author.”

#2 Guest Blogging Pro Tip: 

Research your competitors and see where they are doing guest posts. Identify bloggers in the same niche as you who are already guest blogging and then search using these search queries:
Site:domain.com “guest post by blogger_name.”
Site:domain.com “a guest contribution by blogger_name.”

#3 Guest Blogging Pro Tip: 

Use SEO marketing tools to make your research more vast and compelling. Content research tools, social listening tools, or audience overlap tools such as Buzzsumo can help you. 

3. Earn High-Quality Backlinks from Infographics

These days, infographics are getting very popular. People are liking, sharing, and linking infographics three times more than any other form of content. Marketing agency, Kissmetrics acquired more than 42,000 backlinks by creating only 54 infographics. 

My marketing and advertising agency, The Blue Oceans Group, has created only 5 excellent and informative infographics. We acquired backlinks from giant websites like SocialMediaToday (91+DA), MarketingProfs (90+ DA), and many more.

Pro Tip: Analyse your competitor’s links they are outreaching their infographic with, create a list, and thus, start reaching the destination sites. There are also free infographic submission websites with more than 90+ DA like https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics (95+ DA) and https://visual.ly/ (90+ DA).

4. Create Comprehensive Industry Reports and Earn Thousands of Quality Backlinks 

Comprehensive industry reports and research papers are another amazing way of building and scaling your backlink strategy. 

Neil Patel made more than 90,000 backlinks with his two report posts. One statistic and industry research was based on a report; “17 Charts That Show Where Content Marketing Is Heading”. And second was on “New Study: What 100 Social Media Followers are really Worth”.

You should prepare a minimum of 2 detailed reports with in-depth industry analysis every year. One report at the end or beginning of the year can be in the next six months.

With a single post, you can also generate more than 10,000 backlinks and earn extreme popularity. It will also create thousands of new leads with a tremendous increase in your website’s organic search. 

5. Create Free Online Video Courses to Generate Tons of Backlinks

Make inspiring and informative video content for your audience. Offer them for free like Udemy, Coursera, and HubSpot academy. These platforms have built thousands of high-quality backlinks. Here, you need not to beg for backlinks. People start consuming your video, keep sharing, and linking. 

Creating a high-quality video course is a one-time investment. But it is worth it. Very soon, you will see a hike in your organic ranking, traffic, backlinks, and domain authority. It will help you build thousands of backlinks with a significant increase in the organic search for your web page. 

6. Build Helpful Tools to Get Thousands of Backlinks 

Another fantastic hack of link building and scaling backlink process is to create a tool or software. 

Websites like SEMrsuh, Ahrefs, UberSuggest, and Moz created an SEO marketing tool and drove thousands of high-quality backlinks from thousands of referring domains every year. 

You can also do the same. By creating a tool, you generate huge revenue and build a brand and scale your link-building process for many years. Building one useful tool in your niche can give you millions of backlinks in its whole business life cycle. 

7. Resource Page Link Building 

Resource page link building is a process of getting yourself featured on a blogger or influencer’s “resource” page on their site.

You may lose the enormous opportunity of getting backlinks from resource pages if your email is not inspiring. Cold email outreach has a horrible conversion rate. People not only ignore you but also put you in spam. 

But if email outreach for resource page link building is done in an outstanding manner, you can get a great conversion rate from 9% to 30%. You can also outreach bloggers/sites to add your resource page to the existing blog posts. 

Recommended personalized email outreach for better conversion in earning backlinks are

Subject: Addition of resource/references in [Page Title]

Hi [Name],

I was looking for some information about [topic], and I came across your fantastic resource page: [Page Title/URL].

Great Stuff! The section [Topic] also helped me reach the (Resource page) that I was searching for.

Also, I recently published an article/guide on [Topic]. [Brief Description].

In case you’d like to check it out: [URL] and consider mentioning it in your blog post. It might make a valuable addition to your page. 

As a friendship note, we will write a custom intro and mention your blog post on our article mentioned above.

I am looking forward to hearing from you for synergy.

Regards,

[Your First Name]

8. Broken Link Building

Broken link building is another most effective SEO link-building strategy. Here, you build links on the best relevant web pages on perfect hypertexts. You can grab link-building opportunities from 404 error pages links. 

You can find 404 pages or broken links on other sites using tools like Semrush, Serpstat, ScreamingFrog, check my links, or DeepCrawl. These tools will help you in identifying broken links of your competitors. 

Then, you can outreach them via emails by informing them that this particular link is broken on your site and providing them the resource to replace the existing link with your article. 

Here, I have written a sample format that may help you with the email outreach for broken link building. 

Subject: Problem with (Their site name)

Hi [Name],

I searched for some information on (topic), and came across your fantastic page: [Page Title/URL].

Great Stuff!

However, I noticed that a few of the links didn’t seem to be working; I have jotted down a list for you:

(Broken URLs)

I recently published a massive guide/an article on the same topic (article name-hyperlink with URL). It may make a suitable replacement for the [Broken link].

Please let me know once you replace your broken link with my link.

As a thank you, we will write a custom intro and mention your blog post on our article as mentioned above.

I am looking forward to hearing from you for synergy.

Regards,

[Your First Name] 

9. Social Media Backlinks (Build Links on 100 DA Sites) 

Most brands do not take social media channels as an effective marketing strategy. But the matter of fact is that social media channels are the best fit for marketing and you can use them as the best link-building strategy for SEO. The best part is most of the social media channels have 100 domain authorities. 

The most common and high domain authority of social media platforms are YouTube (100 DA), Facebook (100 DA), Twitter (100 DA), LinkedIn (100 DA), Pinterest (100 DA), Instagram (100 DA), Reddit (97 DA) and Quora (92 DA). Social Media Backlinks can hook your website’s domain authority for free. 

10. Get Backlinks on .gov and .edu sites through Blog Commenting 

After rolling out thousands of Google’s algorithm updates, blog commenting is no more effective link-building strategy. 

People started using blog commenting as a link-building strategy in an unethical way. For the sake of creating backlinks, website owners and marketers forget what is right and wrong, and they start putting their website links in the comment section of any website. Blog commenting has become one of the most spammy and unethical practices of link building. 

Google and other search engines took it very seriously, and they started giving no-follow to all the backlinks that came from blog commenting. 

But, if you do blog commenting rightly you will earn high-quality backlinks and an excellent brand reputation. 

How can I do blog commenting effectively?

i) Pick the most relevant industry and do blog commenting there only

ii) Do not comment for the sake of link building. Write 100-200 words of comment after reading their blog post. There will be a higher chance that the relevant statement not only gets approval but replies too. 

iii) It is always a matter of pride to get backlinks on .org, .gov, and .edu websites. And blog commenting is the easiest and most effective way to get backlinks on these sites.

11. Earn Backlinks and Brand Reputation through Podcast

A podcast is another most trending thing nowadays. Most of the brands are boosting their brands by being podcast guests. 

Earning backlinks through podcasts is the process of finding and participating in podcast interviews. Most of the hosts link your site on the episode post and write a custom intro about your business.

It is simple, straightforward, and within a few weeks, you can earn backlinks. Moreover, more people listen to you and then search for you organically. In this way, it increases your organic search and improves the site’s ranking. 

Being a podcast guest creates publicity for you and your site. And this way, you can earn excellent links.

12. Testimonial Link Building 

Testimonial link building is the process of getting featured on the product or service provider’s websites with your opinion, feedback, or comment. The best of testimonial link building is you get a backlink on homepages. It is a great way to earn backlinks from high-authority websites that take on your niche’s relevant products or services.

Suppose I blog and educate people and brands about digital marketing. So, I probably already use many SEO marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing tools. Therefore, I can acquire links on these websites’ home pages by sharing my experience, opinion, and comment. 

By following these four easy hacks, you can build backlinks through testimonials;

i) Do listing of main products/services in your industry

ii) Find the best contact person to whom you should approach

iii) Outreach them via email and pitch your testimonial offering

iv) Create a descriptive and great testimonial and send them. It would be great if you can back your testimonial with a video.  

13. Help A Reporter Out (HARO) 

Building backlinks through HARO is one of the least explored platforms by marketers. But, it is one of the most effective link-building techniques for your website. 

Using a free service, “HARO,”, you become a source for Journalists and Bloggers. You write for them, and they give you credit and link your website to authoritative news sites and blogs. 

Seems difficult? 

But it isn’t that hard!

HARO service is free to use, simple to understand, and extremely powerful in terms of SEO. You just need to sign up as a source and provide some necessary information about your company; you’ll receive three emails per day with media opportunities. 

Now, make a quality pitch by answering journalists’ queries. If you do a good job, your site could receive backlinks from authority news sites like Mashable, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, etc.

14. Build Backlinks and Earn Brand Reputation Through Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is another highly effective and underrated link-building technique in off-page SEO. 

But, you can generate links and earn a brand reputation through crowdfunding. There are many small ventures, start-ups, NGOs, social welfare sites that want to raise funds or donations.  Here, you can make small donations from $1 to $5000 and get mentioned on their websites. 

15. Build Tons of Powerful Links through Events and Webinars

If you want to build powerful backlinks, then events or webinars are the most influential and speedy ways. 

You can generate backlinks through events in 2 ways;

i) You can host your event or 3rd party event where participants, sponsors, media, and news channels cover your event. They write a summary of your event and give links. 

ii) You can sponsor events and webinars. Here event companies, media, and participating website owners generally link to your website. 

Both the above-mentioned link-building practices are 100% legal, effective, and part of the white hat SEO technique. 

16. Web Directory Submission Link Building

Web directory submission is a link-building process where you add/submit your website’s link to an online database (directory) of links.

Web directory submission is an old-school link-building technique. Nowadays, many website owners think, web directory submission is outdated and worthless link-building SEO techniques. 

Off-course most of the web dictionary submission sites become irrelevant after 2018 because it is a highly spammy link-building technique among marketers. Some donkeys of SEO are used to build more than 300 backlinks in one day. 

But we should not ignore that some of them are still very powerful backlinks and domain authority boosters. That is why all those websites ranking on Google have backlinks from web directory submission websites. 

Mainly, you focus on three major areas while making backlinks from web directory submission websites; 

1. Well Moderated and Contextual with the glimpse of your work
2. Relevant to your Niche
3. Powerful domain authority (40+ DA)
4. The activeness of Web Directory

Pro-Tip of making Web Directory Submission- Do not copy and paste. Each submission should be unique.

17. Bookmarking Link Building

Bookmarking link building is again an outdated and spammy link-building technique that doesn’t work anymore.

But again, bookmarking is another effective link-building off-page SEO strategy. You can bookmark your site on some of the effective platforms to drive immense traffic, hook ranking, and improve your website’s domain authority.  

Some of the best bookmarking link-building websites are https://www.tumblr.com/ (95DA); https://digg.com (92DA); https://slashdot.org (89 DA) and https://diigo.com (85 DA). 

18. Skyrocket Your Website’s DA with Expired Domains Backlink Strategy

If you want to achieve thousands of backlinks, multiply the site’s domain authority, traffic, and revenue in a single shot, it is only possible with the expired domains. 

Now the question is- how? 

Many people have had great success snapping up expired domains and using those sites for link-building purposes. Various sites offer a list of expired and expiring domains.

You can buy those sites that already have traffic, content, high DA, and thousands of high-quality backlinks. 

Once you purchase that expired domains, 301 redirects them to your site. 

That’s it! All the traffic, backlink juice, and DA of that expired domain will be redirected to your website. 

Amazing! Right?

Note: Take care of risks, warning signs, and other factors as not all the domains are worth buying. You need to check the background of the domain backlinks, domain authority, index number, spam score, domain age, reputation, and other factors that should not inverse your expectations. A small mistake can lead to converting your site spammy or even a permanent ban of a website.

19. Backlink Indexers

Before 2015, Backlink indexers were one of the fastest and most effective ways to build and scale your link-building process. But after thousands of Google’s algorithm updates, it has almost become worthless. Google does not index these links. So, if you are still indexing backlinks with no value for search engines, you are wasting your time, money, and efforts. 

Then what is now for me? How can I create backlinks from Backlink indexers? 

Well! 

After trying various methods and putting in a lot of money and time, my team and I found that only a few backlink indexers are effective SEO link-building strategies. Else are massive worthless and a waste of time and money. 

The best way to index your backlinks are; 

OneHourIndexing is the most effective backlink indexer service. You can scale your link-building process and improve the site’s domain authority.

Paid backlink indexers services like Lindexed, Indexifcation, and free backlink indexers services like PingFarm are a massive waste of money and time.

Closing Keynote on Link Building SEO 

Your website’s backlink profile is one of the most critical SEO ranking factors on SERPs. The higher backlinks on much high authority referring domains, the higher your website ranks and drive traffic on search engines. 

But, at the same time, you must remember the fact that one high-quality authority backlink is better than thousands of worthless links pointing out to your website. 

You should always focus your link-building strategy as a growth strategy to impress the users, not the search engine bots. 

Be consistent, smart, and strategic with your blogging, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, email marketing, or other marketing channels. Keep testing and checking the methods of getting powerful backlinks. Focus on getting quality, trusted, and natural links. Say a big NO to spammy, shady, or low-quality links. 

So, come on to a conclusion on link building SEO, how to build backlinks, and scale link building strategy for SEO; you can follow these 19 link building SEO strategies that are 100% proven and tested by world-class marketers and SEO experts, including me. And, you will get success in your blogging and online business carrier.  

Now I would like to know your thoughts on this blog post about link building SEO. If you have any questions or queries, then do not hesitate to ask. 

If you are doing link building for your online business or blog, which of these best practices have you used to get quality links to your web pages?

Also, If I missed out on any other link-building strategy that might have helped you, let me know by leaving a comment below.