SEO: 5 tips for getting quality backlinks

You have developed an SEO strategy by following the evolution of the SEO criteria put in place by Google. Despite all your efforts, you are having trouble positioning yourself at the top of the list and the number of visits to your blog is no longer growing.

Have you thought about backlinks , these links from external sources pointing directly to your articles? However, it is one of the most important factors to take into account to improve your positioning on Google.

In fact, you should not consider quality backlinks as an additional and unnecessary burden, but rather as a way to highlight all the work you have done upstream... Backlinks are hypertext links, emanating from other sites and pointing to your site. They play an important part in building your online reputation.

As soon as you have a blog, you enter this race where each site tries to obtain the best positioning and an increasing number of visitors.

To obtain quality backlinks , follow our few tips.

How to get quality backlinks?

1. Develop quality content

If your blog posts aren't interesting, or the quality of your writing leaves something to be desired, don't expect to get backlinks. You need to make other people want to share your content, so quality is key.

Writing articles per kilometer, without in-depth documentary monitoring and without grammatical proofreading is not a short-term gain: it is quite simply suicide in terms of e-reputation . Access to information is increased with the Internet, readers' requirements, both in substance and form, therefore increase proportionally.

Aim for the long term: it is better to have a few careful, well-written and well-read articles than a plethora of poor quality articles which will reflect a degraded image of your brand.

An article in list form can very quickly go viral. Its rhythmic and mnemonic aspect is generally very pleasing.

It is also a way to classify items (thus proposing a “top 5” that is always effective for example) or to propose technical solutions in a user-friendly form.

Free downloads

If you provide free (quality) resources to download, word will quickly spread. The advantage is that your content remains accessible offline, can join the files on your Internet user's computer, etc.: it's a good way to create an initial proximity with them.

This allows the content of your site to be distributed differently: via a USB key, or even in printed version (which also allows you to reach audiences less inclined to new technologies, etc.).

The interviews

The experts interviewed will be the first to share your content on their blogs and/or social networks, and you will gain credibility. Additionally, the dialogue form brings authenticity and a livelier rhythm to your text content.

Comparing products or services

If you end up announcing which one you think is the best, you can be sure that the relevant company will share your article.

Proposing a detailed comparison also allows you to kill two birds with one stone. First, the well-ranked company will give you the benefit of its own visibility. Then, from the readers' point of view: most Internet users have a weakness for rankings, which often help to make a purchasing decision after personal research which is sometimes difficult to put an end to on your own.

Infographics

This is one of the best ways to get backlinks from well-known media. For example, Mashable, The Huffington Post and The Verge regularly share infographics . For what ? Thanks to the synthetic efficiency specific to infographics, which skillfully combine figures and images.

The infographic format corresponds well to an increasingly rapid consumption of information, with the decline of the written press in favor of the electronic press which encourages greater zapping.

The infographic combines the seriousness of the figures and the appeal of the image, which will hold the attention of the Internet user more easily than a long article.

Our tip

It's not always easy to come up with topic ideas and write content regularly. To help you implement an effective content strategy, coqseo offers you a semantic audit to detect the SEO opportunities available to you depending on your site and your sector of activity.

In addition to the semantic audit which allows you to detect the best SEO opportunities to allow you to become visible on Google, this turnkey content strategy saves you time. An SEO expert designs the most relevant content topics both in volume but also in quality to generate leads or sales on your site. A team of professional editors writes all the content optimized for natural referencing for you.

All content written is guaranteed without duplicate content and is formatted in HTML format to allow you rapid integration into your CMS.

Implementing such a strategy most often guarantees obtaining backlinks because visitors who will be attracted by your content will not hesitate to share them.

2. Promote your content

Developing quality content is good, but you still need to make it known.

There are many solutions available to you. For example, you can comment on blogs dealing with the same theme in order to make yourself known.

There are also forums, such as Quora , where you can open a discussion and insert a link to your blog. However, be careful to remain discreet so that your discussion does not act too much as an open advertisement for your site. Because the days of outbound marketing (explicitly imposing general advertising on your site on the reader) are numbered: following overexposure, Internet users are now “immune” against proliferating and non-personalized advertising.

It is better to first improve your image as a listening expert, by carefully reading the messages of forum participants to identify their interests and expectations, before responding accordingly.

Finally, don't forget social networks. You can create a page on Linkedin and/or Facebook from which you share your articles and other content, or try to contact influential people on Twitter .

However, be sure to clearly define with these people the message to convey about your brand, because the limit on the number of characters specific to Twitter encourages a tendency towards simplification.

3. Offer Guest Blogging

In addition to obtaining a backlink, guest blogging will allow you to develop your notoriety. It can appear in two ways: either it is your site which invites an unusual author (in the form of an article or interview), or it is another site which publishes one of your articles. In both cases, the goal is an exchange of good practices, which allows each partner to benefit from the visibility and network of the other.

However, you should carefully choose the sites on which you can offer an article because remember, your goal is to obtain a quality link. So do a little research on sites covering the same topic as you and choose those that are already well referenced by Google.

If the author you invite to your site has a high reputation, his aura will reflect on your site. This will create an effect of surprise and enhance your site, like a preface written by an influential writer wishing to promote a beginning novelist.

In addition, guest blogging establishes a win-win relationship, since the author will benefit from your site's visibility and promotion channels, while your site will benefit from its own. Thus, both partners will gain visibility outside their traditional audience.

Then be sure to come up with several topic ideas to then provide a quality article.

4. Contact influencers

You can use tools to find influencers addressing your topic: BuzzSumo , LaunchMetrics or Brand24  can help you.

It is clear that influencers are on the rise today, and can bring real viral force to a product.

Prefer an influencer who is known and respected in your field of specialty (who will attract a smaller but more qualified audience), rather than a general influencer with no particular knowledge, who will ultimately serve you poorly.

Do not hesitate to contact as many influencers as possible to have the best possible chance of getting your content shared.

5. Find 404 errors

This technique is not very well known but it can bear fruit since 404 errors provide a poor user experience and therefore impact the quality of the content offered by a site. They are one of the “pet peeves” when auditing a site, because they constitute an impasse in navigation, which blocks the Internet user in his search for information and creates frustration which is very likely to turn him away for the long term. of the site concerned.

The objective is therefore to find broken links on other sites (still in your theme), thus generating 404 errors, and then offer to the brand to repair them by redirecting to quality content: yours. On a psychological level, it's a good calculation: you present yourself to the Internet user as the repairer of a situation that is frustrating for them.

Already started in his search process, it is very likely that he will click on the link to your site, with two impressions in mind: a bad impression of the competing site which sent him to this dead end, and a good impression of yours since you avoid this unpleasant situation of the 404 error. This way everyone wins.

How to judge the quality of a backlink?

The quality of the backlink is essential because it can positively influence your natural referencing.

But concretely, how do you know if a backlink is of quality? We will present to you the criteria to take into account for this small evaluation.

1. The quality of the partner site

Let's break down a common misconception about backlinks: even if it is good to have many inbound links on your site, their quality comes before their quantity.

Start by reviewing all the sites that link to you.

These so-called “partner” sites play a major role in the quality of the backlink. They must :

• Belong to the same sector of activity as you: this is about having a relevant backlink.
• Have a low spam score : you can check this with the Moz Spam Score Checker tool.
• Have good domain authority

If a partner site does not meet these three criteria, it is preferable to ask the administrator to remove the link since the latter penalizes your own SEO.

2. The relevance of the content of the partner site

In the previous point, we talked to you about relevance. The main objective of search engines, and even more so Google, is to guide Internet users towards relevant content according to their search.

The content from which the backlink comes must be consistent with that of the link in question.

For example, it makes perfect sense for a blog article presenting the new fashion trends for this summer to link to a ready-to-wear e-commerce site. For the latter, the backlink is considered relevant.

3. The position of the link in the content

Few people think to check this criterion when they want to evaluate the quality of a backlink.

The links that are located at the heart of the text are those that have the most value in the eyes of search engines. Indeed, it is normal to think that the author of the content inserted these links naturally.

This is not to say that it is bad to have inbound links from sidebars or footers, but keep in mind that these are of little importance.

4. Link anchor text

Whatever the nature of the link (inbound or outbound), its anchor text is always an important aspect not to be overlooked.

Again, the anchor of a backlink should be relevant to the content the link links to. The anchor must notably contain the main keyword of the targeted page .

Let's take a concrete example. You have a blog article that explains the strawberry recipe. A quality backlink that is beneficial for your SEO should be positioned on an anchor containing the key phrase “strawberry recipe”, or at least on “strawberry”.

5. The dofollow and nofollow attribute

This aspect is the most delicate to judge when determining the quality of your backlinks. Before starting the explanations, let's clarify the terms dofollow and nofollow .

In the HTML code, this is what a dofollow link looks like (the principle is the same with nofollow ):<a href="https://www.coqseo.com" rel="dofollow">Plateforme de rédaction</a>

When web crawlers review content on a site and come across a link with the dofollow attribute , they will take it into consideration. Conversely, if they notice the nofollow attribute , they will not follow the link and the latter will have no impact (neither positive nor negative) on SEO.

Now let’s come back to the quality of our backlinks. The idea here is to find the right balance between dofollow inbound links and nofollow inbound links .

It is possible to have dofollow backlinks from many different (and relevant!) sites. But the same partner site that makes numerous dofollow backlinks to your content can be detrimental to your SEO. In this scenario, the partner site must at some point create new inbound nofollow links .

Pay your attention to these 5 criteria to judge the quality of your backlinks and remember one thing: prefer quality before quantity. Don't forget the quality of your own content either: it must also be relevant to your audience.

Wondering how to find your backlinks? Use specific tools such as Majestic or Open Site Explorer from Moz.