How to Get Backlinks to Your Website: A Writer’s Guide to Link Building

Do you want Google and other search engines to index your site high up in the search engine rankings? Do you want to know how to get relevant backlinks to your website? The two questions go hand-in-hand.

If your site is not on the first page, or at worst the second, you will not get much traffic. The difference between the bottom of the first page and the top can be thousands of visitors per day.

Before we begin, take note that this is a straightforward explanation of link building and how to get backlinks. There are many methods that are much more complex, but the concepts and ideas presented here will give you a base on which to build.

Start by Defining Your Brand, Message, and Target Audience

Begin the process by defining your brand, the message or messages you want to deliver, and your target audience. If you are a non-fiction author, you want to build a blog that demonstrates your credibility and shows that you know your subject. Your message is related to the content of your books. For more, see how blogging on your author website sells books. Your target audience are the people you are writing for. Define your audience well before you begin writing your books.

Brand is the image you want to portray. In the case of a person, this would be their appearance, mannerisms, reputation, abilities, skills, and expertise. For a product, it can be as simple as “our soda is cold and wet” or “our cables hold up bridges.” A brand is the idea you want to put into the minds of your target audience.

Message is the concept or concepts you want to deliver to your target audience.

Target Audience is your customers or whoever else you are trying to reach. It is impossible to reach everyone, and the more precise your target audience, the more accurately your message will be delivered and the more likely you will get results. The wider your audience, the more difficult it is to deliver a message and the less likely you will make sales.

Once you have those defined, the next step is to create good content that targets keywords and phrases related to your topic.

Here is a still-relevant overview of how small sites can build authority through quality content.

Create Good Content for Your Audience

Content is the published material on your website, including:

• Pages that contain text and other media
• Images
• Videos
• Slideshows and infographics

Create quality content that other people want to read and that is enticing to other blogs and websites. Your content should be a mixture of text, images, videos, infographics, and anything else that helps readers understand your message. Include outbound links to authority sites when possible to add credibility. This builds trust among your target audience.

I discuss these aspects of SEO in my article SEO for Blogs for Authors: Optimize for Google and People.

Additionally, it is vital to create a site that is well organized and free from gross errors.

Why Backlinks Matter

A backlink is a link from another website that points to your website or a specific page on your site. Someone decided your content had information relevant to their audience. For example, if your blog contains southern recipes, other recipe sites could link to yours to add value for their readers. Restaurants and newspapers in the local area might link to your site to give their readers cooking ideas.

Backlinks can point to your main site or a specific page. It is important to get a mixture of both.

Anchor text, the clickable text of the backlink, is also important. Search engines use it to understand the topic of your page or site. For my site, The Writing King, backlinks with anchor text of “The Writing King” establish that as my brand. Additional anchor text of “ghostwriter” or “book coaching” gives search engines more information about what my site covers.

The key point about anchor text is that it tells search engines what others believe your site or page is about. By building backlinks with a variety of anchor texts, you widen the net you are casting and get more results from searches.

Backlinks are vital for SEO because they establish the credibility of your site. Other people have stated, by adding links to your content, that your information is a good fit for their readers.

The Chicken and the Egg Problem

The best practice is to get links from sites that have more authority than yours.

• Domain Authority (DA) was developed by MOZ to predict how well a website should rank in search engine results. Websites are rated on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being best. New sites always begin at one, and as sites mature in a white hat manner they will get higher scores.
• Page Authority (PA), also developed by MOZ, measures the ranking strength of an individual page.
• Page Rank (PR) was Google’s original metric indicating the quality and quantity of links to a page on a scale of 0 to 10. Google no longer publishes this number, but the concept behind it still influences their algorithm.

If your site is relatively new with low DA and PA values, how do you get inbound links? This is the classic chicken and egg problem. You need links to raise in the rankings, but you cannot get links until you raise in the rankings.

The answer is you create great content which other webmasters want to reference, and you use techniques such as guest posting and media outreach. Additionally, establish relationships by networking with other bloggers, businesspeople, and webmasters.

Do Not Build Links Too Quickly

If you are like most bloggers and businesspeople, you want search engines to take notice of your site as quickly as possible so you can start building an audience.

Slow down. Get a few good quality backlinks a week, at most. If you go too fast, Google may decide you are attempting to spam them. This can result in a downgrade for your page or site.

If you write good quality content, people will naturally want to share it. Get more people to look at your content through social media and other methods. If your quality is high, you will find it shared across the web. Be patient.

Networking Is a Great Way to Get Backlinks

One of the best ways to create backlinks, especially if your site is relatively new, is to network with other professionals. These could be:

• Peers in the same or a similar niche or genre
• Co-workers
• Suppliers and vendors
• Consultants

The idea is to get others to know, like, and trust you, and to create great content on a well-optimized site. These relationships will naturally result in cross-linking.

Things to be careful about:

• Do not use link exchanges. Search engines frown on obvious exchanges where you put a link on your site in return for a link on theirs. Add links that make sense and ask for links that make sense, and make sure your networking partners understand it is not necessarily an even exchange.
• Do not link to or ask for links from low-quality sites. If the sites or blogs are not of high quality, do not consider them in your link strategy.
• Avoid thin sites. These are sites with little or no real content.
• Stay far away from any black hat SEO. Google and other search engines will catch you.

Link Building Methods That Work for Authors

The following methods are techniques I have found useful. Many of them require writing content, which fits right into what I do every day. Design a workflow of tasks to accomplish on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

This is a brief list. There are many other methods. Use the ones that fit best with your style. Over time, you will discover what works for you. The key is steady work on a regular basis over time. You cannot build backlinks quickly. The search engines frown on that because it is not natural.

Blog Commenting

Commenting on blogs generally will not improve your search ranking directly because most commenting systems mark links as NOFOLLOW, meaning search engines will mostly ignore them.

However, by making intelligent, thoughtful comments you can gain the attention of the blog owner, and they become a networking partner. You can ask them to link to your site, write guest posts for them, and build a relationship. You may also get traffic from people who click on your comment links to check out your site.

Here is a useful overview of how blog commenting fits into an overall link building strategy.

Get Interviews

Find podcasts, radio shows, and bloggers who want interviews, contact them, and offer to do an interview. These outlets are always looking for content, so you have a good chance of succeeding. You will most likely get a backlink from their site for the interview. Sometimes these interviews will be a written questionnaire, sometimes audio podcasts, and occasionally video.

To get more value from the effort, ask for copies of the interview in audio or video format along with rights to republish. This gives you content for your own blog.

Guest Posting

A strong method for getting backlinks is to write guest posts on other blogs. For more on SEO and backlinks that bring clients, hear Richard on Business Growth Digital Marketing. Find a blogger and start communicating with them. Comment on their blogs, join their email lists, reply to their newsletters. Once you have established a relationship, ask to do a guest post.

Ensure these posts are of the same or better quality than what you publish on your own blog and include a link or two back to your site.

If possible, write more than one article for each site. Otherwise, it might appear that you are posting articles simply to get backlinks.

Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

An excellent technique for getting backlinks is to join a media query service as a source. You will get regular emails with questions from reporters. By properly answering their query with a well-crafted pitch, you will get responses, and most of these will result in backlinks to your site. On occasion, you will encounter a reporter for a print publication or a site that does not allow backlinks, but that is part of the process.

If you focus on answering their query and explaining why you are a credible source rather than selling your products and services, you will get responses. After a while, the same reporters may come back to you for more material.

Write Testimonials

You have bought products and services from companies that have a web presence. Send them a short, genuine testimonial and give them permission to republish it on their website. Include your link. This often results in a link from their home page or testimonials page.

How to Destroy Your Rankings

Any of the following actions can cause your site to be banned, temporarily or permanently, from search engines. This is not a full list of black hat SEO techniques, but it will give you a clear idea of what to avoid.

• Article directories – Google will most likely ignore these as they are generally only intended for linking purposes.
• Link farms – Sets of web pages that include hundreds or thousands of links in an attempt to influence search engine rankings.
• Keyword stuffing – Repeating keywords and phrases over and over in an attempt to fool search engines.
• Unrelated keywords – Adding extra, unrelated keywords in an attempt to get search engines to send more traffic.
• Hidden text – Making text very tiny, using colors to make text invisible to readers, and hiding links so they can be picked up by search engines but not seen by viewers.
• ALT stuffing – Loading your image descriptions and ALT text with keywords.
• Cloaking – Making your pages appear different between search engines and human viewers.
• Doorway pages – Creating pages on different domains with duplicate or similar content, often redirecting users to a primary site.
• Page swapping – Once a page has been indexed, swapping it out with a different page.
• Duplicate content – Copying content from other sites and using it on your own.
• Spam or automated blog posting – Creating blog posts that are garbage just to get people to click on links.
• Comment spam – Posting links in comments on other blogs which add no value, especially in an automated way.
• Traceback spam – Using the traceback mechanism of WordPress to generate artificial links.
• Pingback spam – Abusing ping services by notifying them of your content over and over to make them think it is new when it is not.
• Cybersquatting – Registering domains similar to popular domains.
• Social network spam – Using social networking in a spammy way to drive clicks. For example, posting a cat video which links to a get rich scheme.
• Article spinning – Creating multiple variations of the same article.
• Content automation – Using automated programs to create content.

The way to get your site ranking well in search engines is simple:

• Create excellent quality content.
• Get links from high quality authority sites in an organic, natural manner.

Here is an overview of negative SEO and why these techniques backfire.

What If You Have Several Sites

Be careful about linking together different sites that you own, especially if they are on the same IP address. This is common when using shared hosting services, because they often allow multiple blogs or websites with their own domain names to be defined for a single account.

For example, if you own mywebsite.com and want to create myproduct.com, anotherproduct.com, and myservices.com, it might seem advantageous to link all these together and include all those links in the menu on each page.

While it will not hurt to include a link here and there to other sites that you own, avoid including those links on every page of all your sites. Instead, create a hierarchy in your main site which includes each of your other sites as subfolders. For example, mywebsite.com/myproduct, mywebsite.com/anotherproduct, and mywebsite.com/myservices works much better for SEO purposes.

Conclusion

If you want to get your site ranked in search engines, start with excellent quality content that others will want to share. Use your writing skills and include graphics, videos, and other media.

Once you have quality content, create a plan to contact other webmasters and bloggers and ask to do guest posting. This is the most effective way to get traffic to your website.

The other methods, such as blog commenting and testimonials, can help. Just do not overdo it.

Stay away from anything related to search engine spam. Avoid any kind of free backlink builder or free backlinks submitter. Most of these do not work, are spammy, and may get your site penalized.

If you follow these recommendations and build links at a regular pace over time, you will find the search engines take notice and you will get more traffic.

For more on building your online presence as an author, see the Author Platform Handbook and the Substack Handbook.

Schedule a free consultation to discuss your book project.

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