SEO & Link Building: How to get high quality backlinks

2013 marked a significant change in the online marketing world, particularly for those involved in organic search engine marketing (SEO).

The algorithmic updates that saw hundreds of websites fall out of the Google search index due to unethical link building techniques or ‘Black hat’ SEO drove a higher demand for how to obtain high quality backlinks.

The three piece factor to great high quality backlinks revolves around relevancy, authority and context. To further explain these metrics, I mean the relevancy of the website or page your link is on, the authority of the website or domain in the industry and where your link is contextually.

But how do you get these high quality backlinks?

Well it is not actually that hard.

Having been in the SEO industry for over 10 years – providing SEO services through my company E-Koncept, I have learnt a thing or two about SEO, what works and what doesn’t.

The first thing to note here is that the sites which are going to get the most SEO value are the high quality authority websites of the web. Now, other than possibly paying for these links, which is against Google’s webmaster guidelines – the only other way to build high quality backlinks from these websites is to create something great and bring it to their attention.

#1 Create GREAT Content

You have heard it before. Content is king. It should be: “Great content is king”.

This is the time consuming part of this process and it takes significant effort to produce, but it works.

The easiest way to create something that you know is going to get a lot of attention is to find something you know has worked in the past and make it 10 times better.

i.e If you found a post about 50 things…. make it 100 things…

Here are 4 steps to finding and then creating great content:

1. Find people in your niche who blog or create content.
2. Filter through to find which get a lot of viral interaction
3. What is the content about?
4. Make it better by:

• Putting a spin on it
• Adding some debate to the discussion
• Adding images
• Extending out content and making it more in-depth
• Creating an infographic to support
• Video! People love videos.

Make it the best resource around your subject matter the web has to offer.

Market that content

The next step is to get that content out in front of the authorities in your industry – including authority forum posters, bloggers, website owners, those on twitter.

Authority links are the most relevant and best links you can get and best of all they are completely ‘white hat’! If your authorities link to your content then that is a good sign your content is worth linking to and that it will help people in your industry.

The simplest way to get your content out in front of your industry authorities is through email outreach. You can use a service like Buzzstream to do this, but good old Gmail or Outlook will be fine too. Adding some value to their website in some way or form along the way will help you engage with them before presenting them with your content.

Here are a couple of templates you could use for this:

Template #1
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