The most commonly used form of backlinks is free backlinks. Free backlinks are a form of white hat SEO, meaning that it follows search engine guidelines. Backlinks are a great way for you to broaden your audience as well as gain more traffic for your site. Having the ability to know where to find these links and how to gain free backlinks is extremely important to the growth of your site. These links are also key to having long-term, sustainable growth with your site. Backlinks allow your site to gain traffic in a way that is natural and will allow you to connect with sites that have similar content. This article will teach you about what free backlinks are, their benefits, and where to find them.
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What is a free backlink?
A free backlink is receiving a backlink without needing to pay any money. This is crucial because there are policies in place in search engines like Google that can flag sites that have paid backlinks. Being flagged for a paid backlink is considered black hat SEO, and can lead to your site suffering the consequences. black hat SEO is based on quick wins, rather than focusing on long-term success. Free backlinks are not only white hat SEO, but they are also a way for your site to have long-term success. Free backlinks are a risk-free way to gain backlinks for your site that are high quality. They will also ensure that you will be increasing your search engine rankings without risking the consequences set by different search engines.
Why have free backlinks?
When it comes to marketing, it’s important for you to decide whether you want to invest time or invest money. Investing your time is the way to earn free backlinks. You also receive long-term benefits for the effort you put into getting backlinks. There are a few different benefits when it comes to getting free backlinks: improved understanding of your market, improved professional network, improved SEO expertise, and a high likelihood of lasting backlinks.
Improved understanding of your market
Through the process of market research and earning backlinks, you will understand the needs and desires of your target market better. Having the best understanding of your market as possible will allow you to grow your site with the knowledge of your audience. This knowledge will come in handy if you decide to run pay traffic or focus purely on SEO.
Improved professional network
In some cases, earning free backlinks can help them grow in your network. In business, the best opportunities come through networking. When you build relationships with respect, you can keep those connections and develop them for other opportunities.
Improved SEO expertise
For online marketing professionals, you can never stand still in sharpening your skills. Doing the work to earn backlinks will keep you up to date on all the latest trends and skills needed in order to improve SEO.
High likelihood of lasting backlinks
Put $1,000 into Facebook ads today and that traffic will come and go. This is an effective way to get a fast rush of traffic and a good way to test a new offer. However, it is not a sustainable way for your site to grow. While this may seem like an appealing way to gain traffic, the issue is that the traffic will not last long term. Having quick fixes of gaining traffic to your site will not allow you to grow naturally and will not last. The goal of backlinking is to grow your site in a way that allows you to increase your rankings on search engines in the long term. If you want to grow quickly, it is possible at times. However, more often than not, this growth is not sustainable. However, earning backlinks will stay in place for months and years after.
Tools to get free backlinks
There are many different ways to gain free backlinks for your website. A general rule of thumb is that the more content you create, the greater chance there is that you will naturally receive incoming links. While this is not a guarantee, it is something to think about when strategizing backlinks and your site. Incoming links remain a top search engine ranking factor, meaning that the more backlinks you have, the more likely you are to rank higher on a search engine. Some tools that can be used to gain free backlinks are Ubersuggest, Check My Links, ContentBird, Whitespark, and Linkstant.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a tool that can be used for you to gain access to backlink data for your competitors. This will allow you to better understand their link profile, while at the same time targeting the same links. The first thing you need to do is go to Ubersuggest and enter your competitor’s domain. Then you will click the Backlinks tab, and you will see three numbers: domain score, backlinks, and referring domains. These numbers are an important part of a site’s ability to rank high in search engines. The domain score is the overall strength of the website running from 1-100. The backlinks are the number of incoming backlinks from other sites. The referring domains score is the number of unique domains linking to the site.
The next step is to scroll down to the backlinks to better understand the health of the website, which will be the step you use to actually gain more backlinks. The results will show the source page title and URL, the domain score, the page score, the link type, the anchor text, first seen, and last seen. You can use this information to secure the same links as your competitors. This will allow you to not only stay up to date as to what your competitors are doing, but you will also be putting yourself on the same level as them. It’s important to know what kind of links your competitors are putting up on their sites in order for you to create a strategy that can counteract your competitors.
Check My Links
Check My Links is a Google Chrome extension and is one of the easiest tools for backlinks for SEO strategy. One of the best ways to generate high-quality incoming links is to pinpoint broken links on other websites, reach out to the appropriate party, and suggest that they be replaced with one to your site. Check My Links allows you to speed up this process by working as a backlink checker. If you have the extension enabled, you can quickly do a backlink check on a webpage. While most will be highlighted in green, some will be in red. The links in red are the broken external links and provide you with an opportunity to improve your own link popularity.
ContentBird
ContentBird, in many ways, is a do-it-all SEO tool. Many of its features are slanted towards link building strategy, it can also be used for backlinks. ContentBird can analyze your backlink popularity and profile, track your rankings, and conduct keyword research for search engine optimization. With this software, you can easily integrate link building with your content marketing strategy and search engine optimization. ContentBird has the ability to locate websites for high-quality incoming links and uncover your competitor’s backlinks. This backlink tool also has a team member collaboration feature. This is a feature that is great if your company has more than one person responsible for marketing and link-building strategies.
Whitespark
If you are interested in ranking for local search terms, use the SEO tool Whitespark. Whitespark is built as a local SEO tool and can use the link prospector to quickly and easily find link opportunities for guest blogging, niche directories, link pages, sponsorships, and more. This SEO tool saves you time, helps you narrow your focus, and gives you the information you need to reverse engineer your competition’s citations. Whitespark’s checker tool helps you find different opportunities like guest posting, directories, donations, reviews, and professional organizations. All of these opportunities have the capability to put you in a position to build high-quality free backlinks to your site. This is done with the intention of improving your link popularity and rankings for local terms.
Linkstant
Link building comes down to one thing: generating as many high-quality natural links as possible. Even though the quality is more important than quantity, you don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to secure a new incoming link. Linkstant was built on the premise that you want to know about every new backlink to your site. Linkstant allows you to see who is most interested in your website and content, which you can leverage for future benefits. You can also see why others are linking to your website. This is helpful to see because if your link is associated with a negative review, you can take immediate action. While Linkstant can’t be directly attributed to building new links, it can indirectly help your building strategy in a number of ways.
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SEO Design Chicago can help you increase traffic to your website and improve your rankings on the SERP. Contact SEO Design Chicago today to take advantage of our link-building services.
FAQ
- What are backlinks?
- Why are free backlinks better than paid backlinks?
- What is white hat SEO?
- Why are free backlinks important?
- How can you get free backlinks?
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