How Can I Get Free Backlinks?

As someone who is just starting to build your own website, or if you have been at it for a while but seem to be having trouble generating traffic, there are some steps you can take. One of these steps is backlink building.

Backlinks are one of the most important things you can get when it comes to visitor traffic and SEO rankings. If you are unsure of how many backlinks your site has or how high quality they are, you might want to engage in some backlink analysis.

Your analysis might tell you that you just don’t have enough backlinks on your site. Now, you can, of course, pay for backlinks, as this is a common practice.

However, you might not have money to spend right now, in which case, there are ways to get free backlinks. Use the following tips, and you should be able to score some totally free backlinks to help improve your SEO ranking.  

Ask Your Friends

One of the easiest ways to get free backlinks to your site is to ask your friends. This means that you need to have a decent network of friends or contacts, but if you do, it can be an easy way to get backlinks.

If you have friends, family, or contacts with a reasonably high-quality website that is considered an authority, they are the perfect candidates for backlinks to your site.

Remember that backlinks not only need to come from authority sites but also ones that have content and topics related to those of your own site. As long as they meet these criteria, you should be good to go.

Reach Out to Related Publications

If you don’t have many friends and family who can help you out here, the next logical step is to reach out to other blogs, sites, and publications that are considered authorities in their field and have content that is quite closely related to yours.

Some publications and blogs will tell you no, but there are also just as many that will happily add backlinks to your site. Often, publications may even ask you to add a backlink to their site – a tit for tat kind of thing.

Specifically, there are two ways to go about this: first, merely asking them to add backlinks. However, a much more common practice is to write a guest post for that blog, and then add a backlink to your site within that post. It’s a good way for that site to get new content while also benefiting you in the process.

Write High-Quality Blog Comments

One of the easiest ways to get free backlinks to your site is by writing some quality comments on other blogs related to your own. Remember that these comments need to add value to the original post, they need to make sense, and they need to appear legit. If you can manage this, then inserting a backlink into those comments should not be an issue.

Although you do have to be careful with this because too many backlinks set in blog comments, especially comments that appear to be spam, with the sole purpose of featuring a backlink, won’t be great for your SEO rankings. However, if you do it right, it’s a great way to get free backlinks, all without really having to do any work.

Take Advantage of Your Social Media

Another way to create free backlinks to your site is to take advantage of your social media. Most sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will allow you to add a website URL to your own site in your social media profiles.

It’s easy, it’s free, and it’s something that you can do on your own. On a related note, you can also create new posts on your social media pages, in which you link to your site.

Do an Interview

An interesting thing that you can try doing is to interview an expert in content related to your site.

For example, if you run an auto repair blog, you could interview a highly rated mechanic and then publish it on YouTube.

Then, within that video, you can add backlinks to your site either in the video or in the video description. YouTube is free to use, and they won’t have a problem with you doing this.

Getting Free Backlinks – Final Thoughts

Something that you might want to do is perform backlink analysis both before and after getting free backlinks. Knowing if they’re high quality and how they affect your SEO ranking is crucial when deciding how to move forward.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.