Hi I’m Praneeth Kumar.
In this blog post you will learn everything related to how to get high quality dofollow backlinks for free.
This is the ultimate 8000 words highly actionable, tried, tested and practical guide to link building you can find online, so I have divided the blog post into 2 different pages.
So without further ado let’s get started.
Here is a 30000 foot view of the blog post.
21 strategies to build high quality do follow backlinks in 2021!
1. Guest post.
By far one of the best ways you can use to build high quality free dofollow backlinks to your website is by guest posting on other websites.
It is a simple process of publishing content as a guest on other sites for a contextual high quality do follow link back to your website.
But along with that, in most cases you will be given the authorship of the blog that you published on other websites which can help you establish expertise on the topic and grow your website audience to new audience and get more exposure.
This is why guest posting is so amazing compared to most other link building strategies.
Here is one of the guest post I published on authority blog called aselfguru and I have got the authorship of the blog like this,
This helps me establish Expertise Authority and Trustworthiness with my blog/also as the author and get me more audience to my blog as quality referral traffic through the backlink.
Now the question comes, how do you find & build these links?
Here is a step by step process for finding high quality guest post opportunities;
I will show you my own method of finding these guest post websites which is both free and highly effective.
Step1: find websites related to your niche and which are also authoritative using Google search operators.
You can type the following searches in Google to find list of websites which can accept the guest posts related to your industry like
In my case I write about Digital marketing, Blogging, wordpress, on my blog I would search something like,
Blogging+write for us
Blogging+submit a guest post
Blogging+contribute us
Likewise you can search something similar related to your industry like keyword+writeforus,… in Google search and hit enter.
You will get a bunch of results that accept guest posts.
Step2:
In order to shortlist the websites which you want to guest post on you can use tools like Ahrefs website authority checker to
check the website authority and you only want to consider guest posting on website which have higher authority than your website because those website have strong link profile and you can get benefit from them by guest posting on their website.
Step3:
Now you can check their site guidelines and see if they allow you to get a contextual backlink which is getting a backlink from the middle of the content and whether they allow you to follow link or not.
This depends upon each website.
After reading all the guidelines, if you are satisfied and happy with the guidelines then you can consider pitching your Idea or submit a guest post of high quality directly following their guidelines & word count.
Guest posting on other websites will also help you build relationships with other influencers of your industry & grow your network & connections.
Hold on! Read through before you start guest posting.
Matt Cutts who was Google’s web spam leader said in 2014 that people used guest post as their only link building strategy to build lots of spammy links to the website from very very low quality and thin content publishing on other websites.
Later he explained why guest posts are getting bad as they are getting more spam and less of quality.
But guest posting isn’t dead, it has simply evolved and got better like anything on the internet and in life.
Times have changed so are things and practices for guest posting.
I have published dozens of guest posts on other websites over the past couple of months and here are a few suggestions I would like to give to make your guest posts less spammy.
BTW, I love guest posting on other websites, if you have a similar website like I do who writes about blogging and digital marketing, let me know in the comments, I would publish on your site’s as well.
The number one rule of guest posting is always try to guest post on other websites which are some way or the other relevant to your website.
Since I have a blog about blogging and digital marketing I would like to guest post on other websites which also write about topics related to blogging, digital marketing and wordpress not about camping, fashion or outdoors or something totally irrelevant from what I publish on my blog.
Relevance is a new quality factor in SEO.
Don’t take my word for it.
John Muller who is the senior web advocate of Google said on SEJ that,
The total number of backlinks a website has doesn’t matter at all to the search algorithm. One good link from a relevant website can be more impactful than millions of low quality links.
Apart from relevance the website authority and link profile also matters so you can check it using Ahrefs website authority checker.
And
Make sure that you don’t send spam and low quality content to sites for those links in return, make sure to add unique value to other websites with your guest post and
use natural anchor text for those links not keyword rich ones to prevent your site from being penalized.
The next strategy is,
2. Replicate links from competitors with skyscraper technique.
When you are new to SEO and blogging space.
It can be hard for you to start link building, finding the right websites to get quality links from.
In such a case, why not consider replicating the links from your competitors,
But!
With the best version of that piece of content.
What do I mean by this?
Well,
When you are completely brand-new to blogging and SEO industry and if you want to get better and succeed in this industry then instead of being confused on which websites you should contact to get this sweet links pointing to your website,
Consider replicating the link from your BEST competitors because your competitors are the people who are already there in the industry and if they are doing well with getting traffic with Google, links are definitely playing a huge role in that.
Here is how you can use this strategy;
Step1:
All you need to do is find and select a few competitor websites of your industry and look at their authority, backlink profile using both free and paid SEO tools like Ahrefs or semrush and ubersuggest.
In order to find your competitors’ websites, all you need to do is to do a quick search in Google and type any of your keywords that are very much important in your blog niche and see what type of websites ranking, those websites are your competitors in that industry.
Paste the URLs of the competitors in the SEO tools mentioned above like in my website, my one of the competitors is, bloggingqna.com
So I enter their URL in ubersuggest to look at their link profile.
Step2:
Observe who is linking out to your competitors websites and which pages they are linking to the most.
Like in my case,
This page gets a lot of links,
Step3:
Find and visit that page of your competitors.
Read and understand the page content and depthness better.
Look for some areas of improvements Like,
- addition of multimedia like images, videos and infographics.
- Update the blog information with latest stats, information, case studies, etc.
- Which questions have not been answered or answered improperly.
- Increase word count with more examples and information to explain a concept and a point better.
- Improve UX of the blog with better readability.
Step4:
And create a 5-10x better piece of content than your competitors which you can publish on your blog.
This strategy is called skyscraper technique and it was developed by SEO expert Brian Dean of backlinko.
Step5:
When you create and publish such content, contact the website which are linking to that competitor page and use emails to connect with those site owners to let them know that you have published more high quality in-depth
piece of content on your site which is much better than your competitors webpage whom they are linking to and ask them to link to your webpage instead of your competitors because your webpage is both great/better
than what they are linking out to and it can also help their audience with better source of information.
More often than not, if you properly promote that content with other influencers, you can expect people to link out your website with high quality do follow links.
Why because, in general people only want to link out to content that is awesome not a spammy piece of content.
When your blog content is really awesome and helpful.
People would definitely link it out over others.
But again, you need to be consistent with your email outreach sending out those emails to get a few responses back.
3. HARO.
HARO is an acronym for help a reporter out.
This is a free service which connects bloggers and publishers with journalists and when you register in the service as a source,
you will get an email 3 times a day from Monday to Friday like this,
The journalists who are connected with this service will be looking for information and experiences of people before they write and publish reports on specific topics on many popular media sites like Huffington Post, Business Insider and entrepreneur magazine.
Related to any specific category like Business, Medical and fitness if you have real life experiences and
knowledge then you can answer the questions of the journalists and send emails before the deadline and if you do it consistently you can get yourself featured as a source for these journalists reports on media sites.
Getting backlinks from media sites like huffpost, business insider, BuzzFeed, etc can increase your website authority drastically but it is very difficult to get links from such sites but thankfully with HARO you can do that.
You just have to be consistent & patient over answering the questions in Haro related to your category and you will get those sweet backlinks to your site over a period of time.
4. Publish posts that attract links.
Let me ask you an interesting question!
Why do people give backlink to other websites in the first place?
There are multiple reasons for that and some of the most popular ones are,
- Amazing expert piece of content, engaging and visually appealing.
- Content that is evergreen and future proof.
- Content that evokes curiosity and eagerness.
- Useful data, insights and Statistics.
- Best resource of information on that topic overall.
You should do the same but there is an interesting study done by buzzSumo on content formats and links.
And they found that if you write content based on these formats, you can get more links than others.
- List Posts-because they evoke curiosity and sometimes get links as well.
- Quizzes-because they are engaging rather than just exchange of information.
- “Why” Posts-They solve problems and give new insights, data, etc.
- “How to” Posts-They can really help a lot and become the best source of information.
- Infographics-they are attractive and engaging.
- Videos-they are also more engaging than text content.
Hence you should make sure that you publish such types of posts more often, especially list based and how to as they get more shares and views and eventually more links as well.
5. Use broken link building.
I am sure you have heard of this strategy a thousand times while talking about link building but,it can work, if done rightly.
Broken link building is a popular link building strategy which you can use for getting both high quality and follow links to your website.
A broken link is a link that shows a 404 error when the user clicks on that link instead of leading to a page.
There are 2 types of links, internal and external and you have to check broken links of a website which are external links that pass from one website to another.
It is a way of finding broken links on other websites which are related to your website and you can do this by using many popular free tools like check my links Chrome extension or Ahrefs broken link checker and
all you need to do is to find relevant pages on other websites where you would like to get a link from and search for broken links on that website and when you find a broken link,
you can contact the website owner to let them know that they have a broken link on the web page and you can ask them to replace that broken link with your webpage as a replacement.
What if you don’t have any relevant page published on your blog which could be a good fit for that broken link?
Well, it is simple. Just create and publish the post and then ask for a link as a relevant replacement for the broken link.
What if you don’t know what type of content that broken link had?
You can use way back machine to find the content of that page,
Just paste the broken link URL in the search bar and look at the content, read and create a better source of information than that broken link article on your blog with skyscraper technique which we talked about earlier.
The beautiful thing about this strategy is that instead of just asking the website owner to link to your website or webpage directly, you first add value to the website owner by letting them notice and know they have a broken link which causes bad UX.
Add then you ask your relevant webpage as a similar replacement for that webpage.
Although it is considered one of the best techniques to get links to your website, because of the competition, this technique has become extremely common.
If you want to find success using this technique you will have to send lots of emails to lots of website owners to get anyone to respond back and give you a link replacement.
When I mean lots of, you should be doing this for 100’s of websites to get a few links.
But that is what link building is mostly about as it takes a lot of time building links.
6. Publish data, case studies and Statistics.
This is by far one of the best and future proof techniques to build backlinks to your website naturally.
In this world full of fake information on the internet, if you want your blog to stand out as a trusted and credible source of information for the audience instead of just the mere opinion of the Author.
You have to back up your claims, opinions and arguments on your blog with statistics, case studies and data in your blog posts.
This is the proof you have got to convince your audience into believing them in something you are trying to explain in your blog.
Even Google wants to rank websites which are authoritative and have a trusted source of information as we have learnt in the EAT and quality rater guidelines.
Hence, blogs that publish and have unique statistics, unique case studies, and data will surely attract links naturally over a period of time as a source of that information.
Brian Dean who is the founder of backlinko is a great example of this, he writes about SEO on his blog and he constantly publishes statistics and unique data regularly on his blog, like this one,
Because of which, we other bloggers when looking for data and Statistics, use it from backlinko blog and link to his blog as a source of information.
This will help bloggers like us to avoid plagiarism, and copyright infringement and since we are backing up our claims in our blogs, we look like a trusted source of information to both users and google.
It doesn’t matter which industry you blog about, if you can you should definitely choose publishing case studies statistics and unique data which you can accumulate by doing surveys, analysing stuff, reading through white papers and studies.
You WILL get those high-quality DO-follow links naturally.
The only drawback is that it is quite hard to get those data, statistics and conduct those studies as it will take more time, energy, expenses than you would do in writing usual blogs because of which it is also hard for others like your competitors to replicate it.
7. Create visual assets.
If you think you can only build backlinks from just plain old text based blog posts then you are mistaken my friend.
You can also build backlinks like really amazing and high quality do follow backlinks for absolutely free of cost to your website by just creating and publishing lots of visual content on your blog.
In visual content there are a few things that I am talking about like,
- Infographics.
- Custom images like screenshots, memes, GIFs.
- Charts and graphs.
As a matter of fact, studies show that, human brain processes images 60000 times faster than normal text based content.
Just think about it if I were to give you 2 blog posts that target the same topic but one blog post has a 3000 word article and the other blog post has a beautiful infographic explaining the topic.
Which one would you choose?
In my case I would rather choose the infographic one because it is easy and attractive to learn than reading a 3000 word post which requires more time, energy and attention.
Hence, if you can, you should consider creating the visual assets that I have mentioned above.
Now you might be wondering how do I get those backlinks to my website by just publishing this visual content?
Before letting you know that, have you heard about copyright laws and copyright infringement?
According to Investopedia, Copyright refers to the legal right of the owner of intellectual property. In simpler terms, copyright is the right to copy.
This means that the original creators of products and anyone they give authorization to are the only ones with the exclusive right to reproduce the work.
When you create these visual assets, I will explain to you how you can create them later in this blog but because you have created something unique from your own interest and creativity so
you hold the copyright of that work and if somebody wants to use that image on their website then they must link to your website as a original source if not it would be called as copyright infringement which would be against copyright laws.
When you do copyright infringement you can get yourself in trouble and it can cause a lawsuit or huge financial charges and fines because you have not respected and followed the copyright laws.
Copyright infringement is an illegal thing and a criminal offence.
Hence people always link to the place where they have taken the infographic or any custom made screenshots, graphs, charts and any other visual assets if they haven’t created on their own.
Like this,
But now comes the question: how do you make these visual Assets and what type of content can you make?
Let’s first start with how you can make these visual assets?
There are lots of Amazing graphic design tools you can use but I would highly recommend you to consider using
Canva which is a free graphic design tool you can use to create amazing infographics and custom images with drag and drop builder and lots of templates, read Canva review.
Another popular graphic design tool which specialises in making beautiful infographics is venngage.
You can use these tools to make amazing visual assets for your blog yourself or you can hire a freelance graphic designer to make one for you.
Now comes what type of content you can make using these visual assets?
It is simple,
You can create any content which is easy to understand in an image format compared to text and words.
For example, here is a custom image from backlinko’s guide on word count and rankings in Google.
If you would have to write this same information in words, it can take up to 500 words which could easily be explained in a chart way as shown above.
You can also create and publish stats and facts with infographics.
Just keep in mind, when you are doing some unique research, finding and acquiring data and
Statistics in your own, if it is possible consider making a chart and a graph of it so that people can easily use yours images on their website and to avoid copyright infringement they would definitely link out to your blog as a source.
This is also one of the best ways to build high quality dofollow backlinks to your website free of cost but
when you are creating these amazing custom images and visual assets you might have to invest some money hiring a professional graphic designer to make these amazing visuals for your blog.
8. Interviews.
Interviews are also one of the best methods to build high quality dofollow backlinks to your website.
There are two ways to go with this,
- Interview someone.
- Get interviewed by someone.
In both the cases, you can definitely expect the high-quality contextual backlink to point to your website.
Let’s talk about interviewing someone, when you conduct interviews of Somebody on your website then is a perfect ego bait for the other person and after publishing the interview on your blog the other person will
definitely share and link to your interview present on your blog to let their audience and other people know about how good he is and satisfy his ego.
This is how you get that sweet backlink.
Now comes an interview by someone.
And when you get interviewed by someone in most cases you would be already established in your industry and the interviewer will interview to grow his audience and since you are getting interviewed, you feel proud and want to share and link to the interview to let the audience know about yourself in detail.
In both cases, when conducting an interview you will definitely get a high quality follow link pointing to your website whether getting interviewed or interviewing someone to let the audience know more about the person in detail by linking out to his website and social handles.
Here is how you can get interviews.
If you want to get interviewed, the process would be,
Step1:
Select the website where you want to get interviewed. In most cases the website you select must be related and relevant to your business and also authoritative.
Step2:
Verify whether the website publishes interviews of people or not on their site using Google search.
You can type something like this in Google,
Site:your competitors website name: interviews.
Now Google will show up all the results of that website that has the word interview in it.
Using this You can verify whether the website you selected publishes any interviews or not.
Another way to find websites for interviews is by finding who has interviewed your competitors.
You can do this by searching like this in Google.
Your competitor’s website name+interview.
Now Google will come up with all the results that contain those things where your competitor has been interviewed on other websites.
If you find your targeted website to publish any interview of any of your competitors or others to interview your competitors in general then there are more chances that you will also get interviewed as well.
Now you need to send the outreach emails to the website owner and by the way you can find emails using free email checker tools like hunter.io
You need to explain exactly why the other person should interview you. You should state the benefit that the other person would get by interviewing you on their website.
If you have already established a website then you can ask the other person that you can send the interview blog post to your audience and link out to the interview and also share it on their social media handles along with an email list which can help the other person’s website grow and get more exposure.
When you include such a hook in your email, people are more likely to respond to your emails and interview you and publish it on their website and you can obviously get high quality backlink in return along with more brand exposure and awareness to your website.
What if you want to interview someone?
If you want to interview someone then since you have an authority blog where you consistently work on your blog then even if you approach such inferencers of your industry for interviews then
they are more likely to accept you to take their interviews because obviously they can get more brand exposure from you as well and let me tell you something important in digital marketing.
Look, everybody wants to build a brand on the Internet in order to succeed with digital marketing and on online platforms but building a brand is a constant process.
You need to constantly publish content and add value to other people in order to stay relevant and attract audience attention online.
Neil Patel and Gary vaynerchuk are best examples, they publish TON of content both on blogs and on social media to continue having that influence online and stay relevant.
Because of which interview is a great method to grow and build strong brand awareness for influencers.
By far one of the best ways to get more interview options for your website and business is by starting a podcast.
Look podcasting is one of the fastest growing low competition content formats on the internet and when you get podcasts popular over a period of time you will get interview requests naturally to your website and even possibly acquire high quality links from influencers of your industry as well.
In today’s world, most people prefer listening to a podcast over reading a blog or watching a video , especially while interviewing a person.
Read pros and cons of podcasts and blog Vs podcasts which is great?
As we have learnt, building a strong brand is a constant process.
There is no end point, You need to constantly do that so interviews with podcasts is a great idea.
9. Participate in expert roundups.
Participating in industry activities is also one of the best ways to build high quality dofollow backlinks to your website.
One of such industry activities is getting involved and involved in an expert roundup of any blog post.
Expert roundup is generally a blog post which is a collection of advice, ideas and perspectives from different experts on a particular topic published on a blog.
In such type of posts, if you enrol participate and give your ideas as a expert on the topic then you can get a link back to your website which is both high quality and
do follow from that post since you have shared your opinions and point of view you and give information for the blog post and help the audience of the Other blog which is publishing the expert roundup post.
In most cases, experts and influencers who are involved and participated in those posts are also linked out to that post to get more brand awareness and also due to the law of reciprocity along with sharing them on social media platforms.
Here is one of the expert roundups posts from databox on link building strategies.
Here is the process of participating in expert roundups;
Step1:
You can easily find such types of expert roundups posts on any industry by just searching simple keywords like this in Google search.
Your keyword+expert roundups.
Like SEO+expert roundups.
Step2:
You will get a bunch of results related to your industry and you can select any one of them depending upon the website authorities and whether the backlink is do follow or not.
You can short list the websites and then,
Step3:
You can then contact the website owner to include your piece of expert advice in their blog post and link to your website and make sure that you give a good and strong reason why they should be including you as the expert in their blog post.
The stronger your reason is, the more chances you have to get accepted for the roundup post.
You can give benefits like,
- You will share it with your audience on social media platforms.
- You will share it with your massive email list
- You will also potentially link out to the expert post from your blog.
Participating in such posts can really help you get high quality backlinks and also help you build trust and brand awareness in your industry and picture yourself as an expert among others even if you aren’t one.
10. Feature in link roundups.
Similar to expert roundups, link roundups are also a kind of curation of blogs which Link out to blogs that are simply awesome in a particular industry.
There are two types of link roundups in general.
- Monthly link roundups.
- Yearly link roundups.
In monthly link roundups, some popular websites create, link out and publish awesome content which gets published in that particular month in that industry or niche.
In yearly link roundups are posts like,
10 best SEO blogs of the year.
Or, best lifestyle blogs of the 2021.
Something broad which is best in that year.
You can find these link roundups posts related to any industry by doing a quick search in Google.
Like this,
Best+your keyword+ blogs in 2021.
Top+ your keyword + websites in 2021.
Look at the results and analyse the website which are ranking for those results, their domain authority and other important metrics and see whether they have included your website in their top list or not and see whether they are offering a do follow backlinks or not for other sites they are linking out to.
Then you can decide and send emails outreach to those Website and ask them to include your blog as a
top industry blog related to that topic on the list and you should also state the benefit of them doing that for you by letting them know that you can share that blog post with your audience or possibly even link out to that blog in exchange.
Yes, this is something like against Google’s guidelines but you gotta put in the work.
If you really have high quality information, blogs and an authority website, in most cases people will definitely include your blog in their list.
That’s all there is to it.
11. Give testimonials.
Publishing testimonials is one of the best marketing strategies that many companies and bloggers use to sell their products and services online.
Here are a few examples,
It is kind of social proof strategy that shows that works like, if other people are using the product and service, sharing their positive reviews and experiences using the product then it create a social proof for the
other audience’s mind that other people are already using the product, liking it which means it is kind of a good one so why not try purchasing the product since most people purchase it.
In such a case, writing testimonials is one of the best ways to build high quality backlinks to your website because if the company does not link to the websites of customers, the testimonials wouldn’t appear genuine.
Here is how you can do it:
In order to write and publish these testimonials, first of all you need to select any product and purchase the product and start using that.
After you gain some experience and hands-on knowledge about the product you can then approach the brand and company to give them a testimonial and if they accept your testimonial, they will publish it on their website linking back to your website as a source.
It may sound very simple but there is definitely some work involved which you can only experience while performing it.
It is a perfect Win-Win situation for both of you bloggers and businesses as you bloggers will get a link back to your website and the businesses will get more testimonials which can help the product/service get sold more.
With that said the first page of link building strategies has come to an end,
You can refer to the next page here to learn more about the next ten link building strategies in detail.