Natural link building doesn’t mean you just sit back and hope people link to your site. It means that you don’t try to fool anyone into visiting your site, and to do that you must make sure the links to your site deliver value.
Do This Before You Seek Links
Before you ask anyone to link to your site, ask yourself, “who do I link to?” If you hardly ever link to anyone else, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to link to you.
Just as importantly, linking to other people and driving traffic to their sites is a great way to get links to your site. Think about how much time you spend looking at the referrer section of your visitors report. If someone sends you a dozen or a hundred visitors today, you will almost certainly check out their site.
The same is true in reverse—people who get traffic from you will look at your site. And, if they like it, they’ll probably link back to you.
I suggest that every substantial page on your site link to at least one other site you don’t control.
An additional benefit of this technique is that many people believe some search engines, Google particularly, give sites credit for linking to other legitimate sites.
More Ways To Say Thanks
When sites drive substantial traffic to your site, you’ll see it in the referrers section of your visitors report. Unfortunately, you may miss small sites who link to you—but these small sites are valuable to you too.
Take a moment to do a reverse link search on Google by typing in “link:” and the name of your site. For example: “link:example.com”.
The reverse link search will tell you everyone Google knows about who links to your site. Take a moment and thank these people directly through email or indirectly by linking back to their site, or heading over to their site and share a post, comment, etc. Making them happy makes them more likely to link to you again in the future.
Help Other Sites
Natural link building means helping other people, and the best people to help are other sites who have the ability to link to you. Here are five ways you can help other sites:
1. Guest posting: every webmaster has the same problem: content. Everyone wants more high-quality content, but few people have the time, energy, or skill to write it.
You can help other webmasters solve this problem by offering to write articles for them. In exchange, get them to promise to link that particular article back to your site.
2. Permissive copyright: it’s a sometimes sad truth about the Internet that people will steal your content. You can get upset about this, you can sue people, you can try to lock down your content, or you can try other things, but nothing I know of can effectively stop people from stealing your content.
So why not let other people take your content by placing it under a permissive copyright license such as Creative Commons? If you offer your content for free redistribution in exchange for a link, some people may take you up on it—and link back to your site in the process.
3. Comment: there’s a scam technique which is not natural link building where you try to comment on as many people’s blogs as possible in the hopes that they’ll link back to you. I don’t recommend that. Instead, when you see an interesting post and you have something useful—very useful—to say, please say it. There’s a good chance the author of that blog will see your comment and link to your site directly.
4. YouTube: a great way to promote useful information on your site is by concentrating some of that information into a short YouTube video. The video will give you a chance to promote your site and attract links from anyone who likes your video and is willing to post it on their own site.
5. Contesting: I love free stuff—most people do, so a great way to get people linking to your site is by offering free stuff. This can be free stuff you’ve bought or free stuff vendors gave you to give away. Just remind people to spread the word about your site—or make spreading the word part of the way to enter your contest. For example, tell people to enter the contest they have to mention your site on Twitter or become a Facebook Fan. Just make sure you to avoid some common mistakes when running giveaways.
The Rewards Of Natural Link Building
Natural link building has several benefits, but few of them are more valuable than the piece of mind which comes from not having to worry about search engines discovering illicit link building to your site.
If you play the game fairly, you can still amass a huge number of incoming links in a relatively short amount of time. And you can use these links to attract more links quickly and cheaply—the more you have, the more you get.
Conclusion
Remember that natural link building isn’t about waiting for people to link to your site. If you wait for that to happen, particularly on a new site, you could be waiting a long time.
Go out and find other sites and offer to guest post for them, or comment on their most interesting posts, or make a YouTube video—but don’t just sit around without doing some good, high-quality natural link building.
Aasma
Hi Mitz,
You’re certainly right here, first you should link other sites only then you can expect them to link your website. However you should only link their valuable page or post so that your reader get value. And I certainly like your “Permissive copyright” content idea as it automatically generate number of natural links for your website.
mitz
Yes I like the “permissive copyright” too! Why not share if you get a link. I also like to include internal links in the content just in case they do not link back… Most are too lazy to remove my embedded links.
This is really impressive, you explained Natural Linkbuilding in great way. I read lots articles in this topic but none of them are lose and this natural.
Very realistic article and I can your efforts and honesty.
I tried the permissive copyrighting thing and people would just copy my article and then delete the links – I’d find rival wedding photography sites using MY articles in THEIR linkbuilding efforts and spaming article sites with them.
Trying to be zen like and calm gets tricky then!
mitz
WOW that is definitely a low one! There should be some kind of name and shame site! π
Juan
your post make me think about this toward my blog, thanks Mitz
very helpful article! Makes total sense. Linking will remain important but not sure about how the “new” wave of searching and indexing will change in the near future. After all, linking is the best way for a bot to find related pages.
mitz
Natural link building is the only guaranteed way of staying in Googles good books. π
sofiya
Thank you for the list of link building strategies. I completely agree with the thought that liks play a vital role for the site’s ranking, so one has to be very selective while getting links. anyway this is a good list .thank you.
Linda
Excellent tips. I think the link target/source pages content volume matters too. I mean you can not link and to from pages that have very little content. ours thought ?
mitz
I agree that the landing page counts.. You need to have great content and content that lives up to the link. Those old tricks of leading people to bad content does not work any longer. π
Valeriy
Hey Mitz,
i really like your approach of helping other sites. Everyone needs content! Ive read many studies that say when you link out, you earn juice, also the linkee earns juice.
Maybe google is somehow helping the internet as a whole?
mitz
Yes I think it all boils down to providing the reader with the best resources. π Other sites sometimes have more helpful information.
sumit kumar
wonderful tips! thanks for sharing a great tips to easily create natural link. natural link how useful for a blog, I understand that after read your article
Shannon Ryan
Great tips, I think seo is going the way of more natural link building as the search engines get smarter about it. As a local business, one thing we do to get natural links to to run contests and promotions locally. We offer gift certificates and prizes for local events, and they in turn link back to our site. Great way to build local links.
Steve Noriega
Withe the ever changing algorithm by Google, natural links within natural contenct are a sure way to always have a great basis of SEO.
Joe S.
This is really good. I just launched my new blog and I am looking to get good links to it. This post can really help me out.
GoodTrader
I think the guest posting is a great way to get natural links, but it takes effort and time.
Very nice and helpful tips. Guest posting is the best way of natural link building.it takes a lot of time but the most important thing is the person should have knowledge about the article.
Thankyou
will visit your site soon.
Hill Mart
Nathan Peters
Ironically, I am always looking through my referrer list to see where my traffic comes from. I never thought that linking to another site and having them see me as the referrer would get me noticed. That’s a great tip.
in my country, bloggers used to build link by “link exchange”. one blogger write a link of another blog to their page then the another blogger do the same. but they write a link in a one page so in one page contain links list only. is it still natural in google eye???
Deni Saputra
Great tips! Though I will not totally agree with your thought about “More Ways To Say Thanks”
Good idea to send a thank-you, but it’s a bad idea to use Google to find out who has given you the link. Mostly Google will only show you few links on the search result – even it is not accurate.
mitz
Yes Google is probably not the best way to find links.. I like to keep an eye on my WordPress dashboard… That shows the incoming links in detail.
Sudipto
Hey Mitz,
Nice post and I really enjoyed it while reading it. Linking is one of the most important part of the blogging and I think comment’s on other blog is a best way for linking with others and it also very simple process.
Thanks for sharing such nice tips for linking.
Nice one, in times like this, when the bewared google penguin i turning searchresults up and down all over the world, I for one feel the need to take a look at how I am buildning my backlinks. I found some good tip in this post that I will try to implement on my work online. Guest blogging seems like one of the best ways to make good backlinks these days. But I guess a mixed bag is always to prefer.
sara
Hi Mitz, Thanks for the tips. I’m currently focussing my attention on article submissions as i think its the easiest way to target keywords. There are some really good spinning tools out there that make this a lot easier.
Regards
Sara
Marc A. Donald
Thank you Mitz for this post !!
Yes Sara you’re right about the article submission, it’s the easiest way to aquire backlinks with anchor text and co-citation.
But when it comes to the spinning tools, all of it really destroy the article’s meaning and it’s turned to low quality. which is bad of both user and Google !!
Thank you,
Marc A. Donald
sara
Hi Donald, I am agree with you on spinning point. You need to spin article by yourself not by a software. It will be beneficial to both you and Google. Thanks a lot.
Regards
Sara
Linen Suits
mitz
H there
I am not into spinning as it ruins the content. You can manually spin though and make a fantastic article but that takes too much time…Might as well write an original or hire a writer. π
Taran
Its really a great article.These are awesome tips for link building, this post will help me lot.Thanks you so much for sharing this post.
Gautam
Hmm Good Tips Are here AM Following Some From Last Few Months and Some Are New To me… I will Try All … Thnks For Sharing….
Taran
These are awesome tips for building links.You have shared such useful tips, thanks for sharing such nice info.
Mahendra Chhimwal
Hi Mitz….
Ya am agree with you. No one can anything totally free of cost.Same thing applied to link building.One should must reward back to someone who link back to his/her site.Taking few second to drop a quality comment is the one of the best way to reward to your back linker.
himanshu
Natural linking is like google’s love which will help to increase DA of your blog.