SEO Link Building in 2023 | The Complete Backlinks Guide

Backlinks improve SEO by signaling authority, trust, and relevance through links from trusted sources like the New York Times and relevant niche sites, boosting site ranking and traffic.

Identify the four types of external links—dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, and user generated content—and explain how they pass link juice, traffic, and rankings.

Discover how to use Google Search Console to view your backlinks, access the links report, and identify top linking sites and their backlink counts to inform your SEO strategy.

Discover how Ahrefs analyzes backlinks and referring domains, distinguishes dofollow and nofollow links, and offers a seven-day free trial to boost seo link building.

Domain authority, or domain rating, measures a website's credibility and relative strength for backlinks. Use a high rating like CNN.com's 93 to judge backlink viability on the 0–100 scale.

Explore the contrast between white hat and black hat link building, as ethical strategies earn links through quality content while black hat tricks risk penalties from search engines.

Learn how to disavow links to avoid penalties from bad backlinks, using Google's disavow tool and Search Console, including uploading a CSV of links.

Identify a rival content piece, improve it, and persuade the webmaster to replace the link to your improved content. Use Ahrefs to analyze referring domains and domain rating for backlinks.

Identify relevant blogs, contact webmasters, and write posts that include links back to your site. Use Ahrefs to find opportunities and verify dofollow links on example blogs like Stripe.

Add your startup’s link for free on forums and high-traffic sites like Crunchbase to boost traffic and funding opportunities.

Create a '/jobs' landing page and post a fake job on sites like angel lists, register your company profile to acquire backlinks, and note that these links are temporary.

Launch on Product Hunt to earn high-authority backlinks and leverage the 24-hour launch window. Engage with Indie Hackers and Quora to drive traffic and improve rankings.

Content marketing requires creativity, writing skills, and building a landing page, plus pitching journalists for emails; stay persistent, and even without links, a great content piece shines on your site.

Discover why building a pitch list boosts outreach for content pieces, and learn to track journalist contacts, domain authority, emails, and follow-ups in a simple Google Sheets document.

Identify target sites by listing Harvard outlets such as harvard.com, Harvard News, Harvard Magazine, and the Harvard Crimson. Verify authority with Similarweb and Ahrefs, then build a 100-site pitch list.

Identify the right journalist to pitch by locating emails via article pages and outgoing links, using Ahrefs to target reporters like Emmy and Alexandra at the Crimson.

Learn how to craft effective pitches to journalists using ChatGPT, illustrated with a draft pitch to Jennifer at The Crimson about Harvard follower data across social networks.

Prioritize one-by-one sending and personalized pitches over bulk mail, test with a small group first, wait a half-day between batches, and catch errors before scaling to the full list.

Monitor your content marketing piece's performance after distribution to see how it is received by journalists, and explore the different ways you can monitor.

Use a real-time monitoring tool like Mint.com to track Harvard University mentions across social media and websites, uncovering journalist mentions and linking opportunities from content marketing.

Follow up on journalists after sending content marketing pitches; use email follow-ups with a question to prompt replies, track opens with Streak, and limit to three emails to avoid spam.

Call journalists to catch attention after emails, using their phone number, present yourself and what you send, and ask for a reply. Test phone outreach to see if it works.

Learn how to secure backlinks when a journalist omits a link, including asking for links, creating a dedicated landing page with data, and leveraging mentions for brand building and traffic.

Turn the camera toward you to create content marketing pieces, finding a brand-fitting story, collecting data, writing the story, building a pitch list, then pitching and monitoring for backlinks.

You now possess a powerful seo link-building tool for your own and client sites. Join the Slack group on link building by emailing to get added.