How to Get Backlinks – 5 Tips

Back-links are important for two things – traffic from other sites and traffic from search engines. More often than not, it is the latter that most webmasters are interested in most. Naturally, ranking high in search engines for your niche keywords can bring a lot of targeted traffic to your website.

So here are a few tips that will help you get more back-links for traffic and SEO purposes:

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools and monitor the error reports for 404 (broken link) errors. Maybe you have taken down some pages and didn’t notice that some other website was linking to you, or maybe you’ve bough your website or domain and there are old links to pages that no longer exist. You should make sure to make use of all links that you already have before you go looking for more. Create the pages for these links, or redirect them to other related pages.
2. Search for old websites that are no longer up (type in this phrase in Google, “This domain name expired” +”your niche keyword”) and look up the back-links of these sites in Yahoo Site Explorer. Look from where those links come to the old site and look for links that seemingly should lead to a similar content that you have on your site. Contact the webmasters of these sites and ask them to replace the links with yours – it’s a win-win for both of you if your content is good.
3. Buy the old domains from step 2 if they are being sold and redirect them to your site.
4. Search for missing pages on authority sites and replace the back-links with yours as per step 2. In this case the phrase to search in Google is “page not found” +”your niche keyword”.
5. Consider guest writing (or blogging) on authority websites in your niche. That’s a great way not only to get links to your site but to also establish yourself as an expert in your niche.