We love resources that link to our site, especially when they do it for free :) However, such occurrences are quite rare nowadays, and relying on passive link building isn’t advisable if your blog is just average without anything particularly original.
So, let’s consider a few key points in obtaining free external links. What should you do?
- Comment on Relevant Blogs: Find blogs similar or closely related to your niche and leave quality comments. Ensure these blogs do not use tags that prevent indexing; otherwise, it’s futile (though someone might click out of curiosity and stay on your site, but that’s another matter).
- Interview Influencers: Prepare quality questions and conduct interviews. For example, if you have a guitar website, interview a prominent guitarist and publish it on your site. A backlink from the guitarist’s site won’t keep you waiting.
- Register in Directories: Register only in reputable directories that do not require reciprocal links. This method is somewhat controversial, but it exists, so let’s not exclude it. The fruits it will bear, however, are known only to the almighty search engines :)
- Use Classified Ad Boards: Classified ad boards are somewhat similar to directories but can carry more weight.
- Offer Guest Posts: Propose a guest post to an authoritative site in exchange for a backlink. They get free content, and you get a link. Everyone wins. This process can be quite interesting to automate in the future, but more on that another time.
- Create Quality Content: Write content that is interesting to your website visitors. This content serves as bait for backlinks. However, it should be so good and interesting that it naturally invites links.
- Join Forums: Register on forums and include a link in your signature. Links from forums are also a debatable point, but if the forum is high quality and doesn’t hide links in signatures, you might get lucky.
- Use Social Bookmarks: Don’t forget about social bookmarks. They may not carry much weight, but they do count for something.
- Register on Job Sites: Add your website information there. For example, include your website address in your company profile. Job sites can pleasantly surprise you.
- Exchange Articles: By using this method, you can promote your site through low-frequency queries.
Lately, my posts seem to lean towards point-by-point lists… but maybe that’s even better for readability and easier to write :)