Brian Dean On Effective Strategies To Build Backlinks

#BiteSize is a video series where leading experts answer some of the most pressing questions entrepreneurs have while building or marketing their startups.

In this latest episode of #BiteSize, Brian Dean gives out some of the most effective strategies for building backlinks in SEO.

Brian Dean

Brian Dean is one of the world’s most sought-after SEO experts and the founder of Backlinko.com, a popular blog that focuses on actionable SEO and digital marketing techniques and strategies.

Transcript of the Video

Without links, you basically won’t rank. So, Google’s algorithm keeps changing and they’re always adding new ranking factors into the algorithm. But the core of the algorithm is the same as it was when Google first came out and that’s the site with the most quality links will rank above the rest.

But the tricky part is, how do you get those links without doing shady stuff that can get you penalized, and that can prevent you from ranking in the first place. For a busy entrepreneur, what should you do for link building?

Well, one is that you need to have a resource on your site that is worth linking to. So lot of entrepreneurs make a mistake where they create a product or an ecommerce site or an app, which is pretty cool but is it something that people will link to? In general, people don’t tend to link to sites that sell stuff. You may get the occasional link if you have a PR campaign for your startup and has something cool going on. But the average blogger just isn’t going to link to stuff unless it’s super unique and useful.

So your job is to create a resource on your site that is absolutely amazing to the point that people actively want to share it. So that’s why you’d want to spend a lot of time on content – specifically on one piece of content. You don’t need a lot, just focus on making that one piece and that’s when you can leverage the links over and over again.

The next thing I would do to build links is to use email outreach. Find people that already link out to similar content than yours. So if you just put out a new guide to help people get more fit, you want to find other people linking to fitness guides. And you can do this with tools such as AHREFs.com, MajesticSEO and OpenSiteExplorer.

Just see who’s linking to content that’s already out there which is inferior to yours and give them a heads up about your content. Don’t push anything but be like, “Hey, I know you mentioned this guide, I just came out with something similar, just thought you’d like to check it out.” And because you have something that’s actually worth linking to, you’d be surprised how much people are receptive to your outreach.

The third thing I would do is a hybrid between the first two. And that’s infographics. They’ve kind of passed their prime already, but in today’s context they need to be super unique and useful and the topic itself has to be inherently visual. I’ve seen infographics work lately, I’ve put them out that have done well lately. And people do enjoy sharing them. In fact, BuzzSumo did a study a year ago that analysed 100 million articles online. And they found that infographics got two and a half times more social shares than a regular blog post.

And when you do that and start using email outreach. You’ll find that people are super receptive because we are all visual creatures and we all love visual content and if you have something that’s worth linking to that’s also visual, it’s very powerful for link building.