As I continue to build this blog, I’m implementing more SEO tactics to increase traffic.

I wanted to share with you 5 ways to gain quality backlinks. Quality content and outreach have supplanted traditional SEO tactics. Prioritizing the development of relevant quality content goes hand-in-hand with SEO if you want to increase your site’s visibility. Essentially, if you don’t have a proactive approach to building content marketing, your link-building and SEO will fail.

Here’s 5 ways to gain quality backlinks through content marketing

 

1. Optimize Existing Links

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Try contacting site owners who have linked to you and ask them to change your URL to a specific page on your site.

For instance, some sites will share my content and attribute it with the www.juntaedelane.com URL. Once I notice this, I will send them the full URL of the content they are posting.

Let’s consider this blog post for example. If another site referenced this blog post and cited the author as Juntae DeLane from www.juntaedelane.com, I would ask them to replace that link with the full URL to access that blog post (i.e. http://juntaedelane.com/5-ways-to-gain-quality-backlinks-through-content-marketing/).

Finding the contact information for the site owners may be difficult.

Here are a few tricks to help you get started:

• Use the site’s Contact form submission.
• Try to get their domain administrative contact through: http://www.register.com/.
• Search for their social media accounts and contact them through that platform.

Best Practice Tip:

Prioritize sites with the highest authority. For instance, the Huffington Post will have more authority than a personal blogger. Use PageRank or mozRank to identify these sites.

2. Blogging, Guest Blogging, Content Marketing and Outreach

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Guest blogging is when a writer develops a relationship with another site that posts their content. The content may include links back to the guest blogger’s site within the body text or in an author biography.

Best Practice Tip:

If you invest sufficient time in your blogger/partner outreach, you have the ability to control your linkbacks. This tactic is often neglected which allows you the opportunity to leverage it successfully. I strongly suggest you put as much time into it as possible to build the authority of your site.

3. Online Press Releases

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This once was a widely-used tactic, but now it seems to be forgotten. Online press releases still are an effective way to repurpose content you are already creating for traditional PR and use it to your advantage. I am guilty of this myself – it’s certainly a tactic I could use more often.

By submitting online press releases, your content is able to reach large news portals such as CNN, Yahoo News, Forbes, Huffington Post, and more. The idea is to generate backlinks to your website and increase the likelihood that your content will rank in search engines–which ultimately increases traffic to your site.

This part of the process is key to generating the links back to your website and the better the quality of content/idea, the more effective it will be. Obviously, each blog you publish creates another opportunity for your content to rank in search engines. As a result, you’ll have an increase in web traffic.

Here are some popular Press Release distribution websites:

• http://www.prweb.com
• http://www.prleap.com
• http://www.sourcewire.com
• http://www.clickpress.com
• http://www.przoom.com
• http://www.pr.com
• http://www.marketwire.com
• http://www.prnewswire.com
• http://www.businesswire.com

4. Encouraging Social Sharing

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Sharing is caring and this is certainly the case if you care about your SEO. A practical technique to increase social sharing is to use a visually appealing image that readers would like to share.

Best Practice Tip:

Find out what’s working for your competitors. Start by evaluating the headlines and content that’s working best for your competitors in terms of social media sharing. Use this to inspire your approach when developing your headlines. Try using Topsy.com to acquire a listing of the most shared content for audiences on different social networks.

5. Directory Submission

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This is no longer a core SEO technique and is actually considered an “old-school” link-building method. It was effective in the late 1990s when directories such as Business.com, and Yahoo could boost your site’s ranking.

Although, this technique is considered out-dated, it can still pay a role where these specialized or niche directories can indirectly contribute to relevant backlinks. Essentially, Google may no longer view these directories as authoritative, but users will still view them as such.

So, placing your content on these types of directories will still bring traffic to your site and increase the chances someone will link back to your content.

Final Thought

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Try some of the tactics outlined in this post. Closely track whether your efforts are increasing traffic to your site. Like me, you probably get in a nice rhythm of content creation. Occasionally, you must break out of that flow and begin building your site’s authority by focusing on producing quality back-links.

Essentially, if you don’t have a proactive approach to building content marketing, your link-building and SEO will fail.

So let’s get to it!