20 Simple Methods to Get Inbound Links for Your Website

inbound links
Do you want to increase your search ranking? Sure you do. Pretty much everyone does. Well, this is where inbound links come in handy.

Now, when I explain how Google sees these links as votes of confidence, I always see folks nodding their heads. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Then I ask them how they think we should handle the link-building process.

All I get are blank stares.

I thought I’d try to help all of you out there who need some help. Here’s a list of 20 ways you can get inbound links for your website:

1. Ask for a Link Trade

I hesitate to include this one, but the truth is that it still works. However, sending an email to a blogger asking to exchange links is not very reliable. It’s just cheap and fake and fluffs. As a rule, Shout Out Studio tries real hard to avoid this type of marketing.

But if I’m trying to help someone, I’ve got to share. Now let’s move on.

2. Create Foundational Content

Create content that uses foundational information and vocabulary for the industry you want to target.

This post is an example: We wanted to create a list of all the recommended ways to handle business link-building.

That will be foundational content that will engage a broad audience. Content like this is both relevant and worth sharing.

Other examples of similar foundational content would be “Link-Building 101″ or “The Definition of Link-Building”.

3. Run a Contest Centered on Content Creation

Executing a digital contest might not sound like a ton of fun, but it can absolutely transform the online business if done right.

Your contest should involve a big payoff for participants and ask participants to create content across the web. This way, you’re going to end up with an increase in inbound links.

4. White-Hat Link Building

There are several agencies out there who specialize in building massive amounts of links for their clients. Most of these folks are submitting links to Squidoo lens and other sites they keep up with.

Beware of anyone who does this for far too little money.

Manually building these links takes time and if you’re paying $5, you’re probably getting bad service.

5. Directory Submissions

There is a load of directories across the web. Use these as places to list your website and give a business description. Here you can find a list of  Free Directory Submission Sites where you can submit your website.

Directory submissions can cost money, but it can be VERY VERY worth it.

I’ve worked with businesses who hesitated to pay to be included in a directory. Well, it was – in fact – links from those paid directories that drove new business to their site.

6. Ego Bait – Create a List of Industry Experts

“Ego Bait” is a phrase used to describe the method of enticing engagement with rewards that play to the target’s ego.

This is how it works:

  • Create a list of the top 20 bloggers within your industry
  • Create a page on your website with a list and description of the blogs. Be sure to include links to their site
  • Create a sidebar badge that those bloggers can place within their sidebar
  • Lastly, contact each blog alerting them to their inclusion on the list and share the badge with them. Most bloggers love showing these on their sidebar or “about” page.

7. Think like a Publicist

Getting yourself some larger press coverage can produce a load of potential inbound links. Getting yourself mentioned on an industry website or even within the newspaper can build links back to your site.

8. Guest Post on another Site

Many bloggers love to have others help them create content. Find relevant blogs and see if they’ll allow you to guest post. Have two or three articles ready to go when you approach the blog.

Ensure that your proposed content fits will be relevant to their audience.

Almost 100% of guest blog posts include links pointed to the author’s website.

Make sure you optimize them first by using the best keywords

9. Syndicate Articles

There are many places for you to syndicate your blog content across other channels. Folks in the SEO community often disagree on the effectiveness of syndicating articles. Google penalizes for duplicate content across the web but rewards inbound links.

Shout Out Studio doesn’t recommend this method to our clients, but I know folks that have used it very successfully.

If you’re looking for places to syndicate your RSS feed, the Social Media Today Community is a great place to start.

10. Publish Press Releases

To release online Press Releases, you can use services such as:

It can put information about your business in the hands of journalists who can distribute the content all over the web.

These articles can include links back to your site. Thus, you could earn thousands of inbound links if these online press releases get distributed well.

11. Submit an Article to an Industry News Site

It’s similar to guest posting. However, it focuses on reaching out to some of the top industry blogs and submitting an interesting/timely article. That will enable you to receive an inbound link.

Links that get in front of your targeted audience are great for search, but the referral traffic is even better.

How to optimize your articles for both Search Engines bots and Humans

12. Think like a Local Business

Grab links from your local Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, and the local library. They are considered trustworthy by the local community and your site can benefit from getting exposure on them.

13. Use Your Partners

Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field.

You can use these relationships online and offline. For instance, you can share links and distribute each other’s business cards.

Manufacturers, vendors or retailers associated with your business may be willing to link to you from their website. That’s especially true if you write a review or conduct an interview with them.

14. Answer Questions to Get Inbound Links

Sites like Yahoo! Answers, Quora & Google Groups allow you to respond to questions. That gives you an opportunity to provide relevant links back to your site within your answer.

Answering questions effectively will give you credibility in front of a potential audience. Also, you’ll gain inspiration for future blog posts by

15. Use the Pro Link-Builder’s Secret Weapon: Squidoo

Link building agencies often just add links to your website from pages they curate on Squidoo. Well, did you know it only takes 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page?

Be sure to include expert information and popular, useful tools for your field. Also, don’t forget to link back to your website.

16. Build a Collection of Tools

Folks are often searching for useful online tools. Whether it’s SEO tools, mortgage calculators or Body Fat Calculators, these are valuable for them. Plus, they often love to share with their audience.

So, start building an information-rich list of tools relevant for your audience. That can earn you some really powerful inbound links. 

17. Review Products, Apps, and Services

Write a thorough review of an iPhone app, relevant service or a product. Companies are always looking for case studies and testimonials.

After writing your review on your site, be sure to contact the provider to let them know about the review. Also, give them permission to share the content however they want to.

18. Give Away Free Samples

I’ve worked with several companies that have created thousands of links to their site by giving away free samples.

These companies had their giveaways picked-up on “freebie” and “couponing” websites. For hundreds of dollars, these sites received thousands of dollars worth of inbound links.

19. Make Sure You’ve Got Those Social Profiles Filled out

Search engines are relying heavily on social networks to verify and give authority to their rankings.

If you have profiles filled out on relevant websites, you’re letting search engines know you’re legitimate. Also, most profiles allow you to link back to your site.

20. Let People Share Your Content

Creating great content is critical. Making sure it’s share-worthy should be at the forefront of your mind when scheming new ideas for images, blog posts & videos.

The next thing you should do is communicate clearly that you’re OK with folks sharing/using your content & images. However, specify that they need to attribute the content with a link back to you.

If you’re using original content, this will help you spread your content as well as increase inbound links for your site. (Special thanks goes to InboundMarketingAgents.com for this idea!)

Conclusion

If you start with this list and work through even a few of these steps, I’m sure you’ll be amazed at the difference in the referral traffic and search engine traffic you receive.

Read more:

7 Surprising Numbers That Will Empower Your WordPress SEO

 How your SEO techniques and Social Media Strategy Intertwine

Introducing Education Cloud

We launched the first version of Squirrly back in 2012.

Since then, we released five courses, each containing an average of 7 lessons. 139,000 people became better marketers after learning how to do SEO using one of our training programs and approximately 50,000 people have completed them.

We only provide top, relevant training for Squirrly SEO users. That’s because we believe that the more you learn, the more you earn.

There’s also a paid course that we have on Udemy, which has over 2,500 students enrolled.

We’re Happy to Introduce You to Squirrly’s Education Cloud

Practical Things You Can Learn by Joining the Education Cloud:

  • Advanced Social Media Tactics to Boost Traffic
  • Expert Lead Generation Tips
  • Fresh Content Marketing Strategies

Our mission with Squirrly SEO is to turn non-SEO experts into SEO superstars. And a big part of that happens through constant learning.

To help you keep moving forward on your path to SEO greatness, we’ve analyzed all our courses and the lessons we’ve taught so far. One of the conclusions we’ve reached is that if you are to get amazing results, you need to develop an SEO content tree.

Do you remember the SEO content tree from Lesson 4?

Here’s a reminder:

While the Squirrly SEO tool helps you on so many levels, in order to develop a great content marketing strategy, you need to keep learning.

That’s where the Education Cloud comes into play.

We’ll keep adding new training programs to it so that you can keep renewing your strategy and manage to up your site’s audit score.

In Lesson 9, we wanted to show you a great way to get new lessons, because what you’ve learned until now sets you on a path to business growth.

However, there is more to learn. Remember that in order to improve your rankings you need to get social signals coming to your site, and you also need quality backlinks.

Education Cloud will help you understand what you need to do with your blog posts and pages after you’ve published something new on your website.

Imagine What It Would Be Like If Nobody Linked Back to Your WordPress Site

Without backlinks, your SEO content tree would be just one tree on a lonely field.

It could even be a magnificent tree in a great looking field, with beautiful mountains in the back.

However, it would not matter.

If squirrels (yes, well, we’re Squirrly like that) were your customers, they’d try to jump from tree to tree and find as many attractive opportunities as possible. This is what your success would rely on.

Every lesson until now has been about helping you build an amazing SEO content tree.

What you must do now is make sure that many other content trees will surround the content you create. This will enable squirrels to reach your tree while they’re “browsing” all the trees. They could finally get to jump from tree to tree and reach yours. They would end up seeing what you have to offer.

Otherwise, it would be impossible for them to find you.

This is the reason why Google needs to see backlinks (either from other sites or social media). If it sees backlinks, it knows that your content tree is in a place like this:

Each of these content trees is surrounded by other content trees and squirrels could easily go from one to the other.

This is the type of environment in which Google would like to see your content tree to consider your WordPress site more valuable and rank it higher.

Education Cloud will help you with both setting up your content tree and surrounding it with others.

Without any coding knowledge, you can achieve this. Without being an SEO expert, you can become an SEO superstar.

When your potential customers have easy ways of landing on your site, that’s the moment when you will win.

Keep the tree growing and your Education Cloud close.

People are searching for companies in your industry. Be the one who shows up (in search engine results).

You’ve Made it to the Finish Line

It’s good seeing you here.

This coaching session has come to an end, and I hope you now feel more confident when it comes to your SEO knowledge and your ability to apply what you’ve learned using Squirrly SEO.

It was great having you onboard. And to reward you for taking the time to stick with the lessons, I’ll send you an exclusive offer by email over the next few days. Keep an eye out for that in your Inbox; it’s the kind of offer you don’t want to miss out on.   

Your Goals Moving Forward

  • Post Optimized Content on your Site Weekly
  • Test New Tactics to Grow your Social Media Reach
  • Constantly Freshen Up Your SEO Strategy to Keep Ranking Higher

7 Surprising Numbers That Will Empower Your WordPress SEO

It’s a beautiful day, and we’ll get to talk about seven surprising numbers that will help you take control of your WordPress SEO and your content marketing strategy.

You started this coaching session about nine days ago and I’m so happy that you’re still keeping up with these lessons.

In lesson 5, you’ve learned about creating a content marketing plan. Today, I want to teach you how you can check the successful implementation of that plan.

Practical Things You’ll Learn in This Lesson:

  • How to check your site’s progress and performance using numbers and scores
  • What are the most important Google ranking factors 
  • How to leverage data and metrics to rank your site higher

The Link between Numbers and WordPress SEO Success

You need to have a strong vision of what you want to achieve, sure. However, you will never reach your goals unless you study what’s going on with your site, measure the progress and continuously work on improving performance.

And this is where numbers come into play. They are meant to guide your efforts and help you always be in the know.  

That being said, the best way to check your progress and see how your WordPress SEO improves from week to week is via Squirrly’s site Audit score.

The weekly Audit that you get from Squirrly will help you access essential information with ease. That’s because it gives you relevant metrics and a performance score to let you know how your site is performing.

What’s more, the Audit is broken down into sections so that you know which areas need improving. It also tells you what every section means and gives you either insights or PRO tips to help you improve the score.

Learn more about the site audit from the SlideShare below.

Now, let’s take a look at which numbers from the site Audit contribute to the success of your WordPress site.

7 Numbers That Have a Lasting Impact on WordPress SEO

By now, you’ve probably already received this week’s site audit from Squirrly. Go ahead and open it from this page. If you don’t have access to it, shoot us an email to support@squirrly.co and let us know about it.

Right. Numbers. 

1) Site Audit Score

Based on everything we analyze about your WordPress site, we give you an overall score. If you remember, in Lesson 1, we did that group learning experiment, and we’ve shared with you what we’ve discovered.

The most important takeaway of our study was this: the sites which had a solid chance of making it big online all had a Site Audit Score of over 80.

Back then, we also had a traffic analytics solution implemented for the people who were part of the experiment. We measured their organic traffic – the traffic they got as a result of having great WordPress SEO.

Even if your site’s score is at 30 when you’re just starting out, don’t panic!

Follow the suggestions given to you by the Squirrly Settings Assistant and increase the level of your SEO Star.

These will help you solve most of your WordPress site structure problems, which will increase the score you get. Start making improvements. Check your Audit weekly. That score needs to grow.

You can always get professional help from Squirrly Experts, to get your WordPress SEO Site Structure fixed.

2) Posting Frequency

The next important number for great WordPress SEO is the posting frequency.

I guess you already know that the way to do SEO these days is by having a lot of great content on your site. It’s much easier to rank for pages and blog posts than it is to rank for your homepage.

Furthermore, your website needs to look fresh and updated. Google takes this very seriously. It has solid reasons for doing so.

If someone enters a website and sees that there is no new content published by that company on their blog, it’s a clear indicator that either:

            a) That company went out of business.

            b) Business is going dreadfully.

If you think people will assume the business is doing so well that they don’t have time to write articles anymore, know that this scenario is highly unlikely. Most people just don’t think that way.  

Especially nowadays when you can outsource this task to content writing experts.

#noexcuses

Remember: your WordPress SEO needs to take into account both search bots AND human readers.

Another good case for publishing new blog posts is this: social media only works for you if you keep posting new content. The human readers who spend their time on social media will get bored if you publish the same old, same old.

Brian Dean (who also loves the Squirrly SEO Audit and our keyword research tool) is one of the most important SEO experts. He is the owner of Backlinko, where he posts some fantastic ideas on how to get backlinks to your website.

Brian’s ideas revolve around the fact that you should publish super long-form content, instead of publishing shorter articles more often. He is right. You can also try that.

We know that not every business will be able to publish content every three days. What we also know is that websites with a higher posting frequency have a much better chance of being ranked than the other ones. It can work both ways.

Our purpose is to show you what works in most of the cases, to give you a better chance of having amazing WordPress SEO.

3) Average Content Optimization

To provide this score, we analyze all the pages you optimized so far with Squirrly (whether they are WordPress blog posts or eCommerce product pages) and check the optimization percentage.

Using this data, we determine the average content optimization score.

Now that you have Squirrly SEO, you should focus on getting as many pages optimized as possible.

By raising this number, you will help Google figure out that your pages are valuable for other people. This will increase your rankings.

Talking about making them valuable for people: remember to get that human-friendly optimization check right in the Live assistant. It’s a sure way to improve your overall WordPress SEO.

4) Average Shares per Latest Posts

Many people publish great content on their WordPress sites and then forget to do anything about them. That’s the best way to fail.

The best way to win, however, comes from actually doing stuff with your articles post-publishing. One of the simplest things you can do after publishing is to start sharing your new content on social media platforms.

You will get social signals back to your site, which represents an important Google ranking factor. This shows Google that human readers love the topics you write about, so it starts considering your WordPress site as being more valuable.

In other words, promoting your content is key, as it will help gain some social signals which will also impact rankings.

So, you need to make sure that all your latest posts get shared.

5) Backlinks per Latest Posts

This is a number that you will need to improve your site’s authority and thus increase its rankings.

The good news is that you can increase this number by finding relevant content that you’ve already published on your WordPress site and sending links from those blog posts to your new blog posts.

Inner linking is paramount. One of the best things about Wikipedia is that it has so many internal links that help you discover more and more content. Google loves this kind of stuff.

To be informative, you need to provide ways for people to access more great content. Don’t limit their experience. Enhance it.

6) MozRank

MozRank is a great resource developed by the company called MOZ.

They’ve indexed million upon millions of pages. One of their great ideas was to determine the popularity of a site to tell the world if that website has any authority on the web.

While it’s not an exact number that Google uses, it’s an important indicator, and you can rest assured that Google does a similar thing and takes this sort of data into account.

If a site has a high MozRank, you can be sure that it has authority on the web.

7) Majestic Unique Domains

It’s a number that will show you the total number of domains that have linked back to your WordPress site. Past tense.

So, the number doesn’t take into account the number of domains that currently link to your site.

A big difference.

Some SEO experts dislike Majestic because of this. Instead of showing just the currently existing backlinks, this tool will show you numbers that always keep growing, even though in reality you might be losing some of your backlinks.

The Majestic Unique Domains number, however, is actually necessary, regardless of the rest of the data. Maybe even BECAUSE of it.

If the number is high, it means that your website has always been important. If that number keeps getting bigger and bigger, it means that your site is gaining a much wider reach worldwide.

This number shows how many sites in the world have linked to your website. If more and more websites link to yours, it means that your visibility and importance on the web just keep getting better.

Empower Your WordPress SEO with These 7 Numbers and Rank Higher on Google

Now you know more about the most important numbers you can use to check your site’s SEO performance, what they represent, and what you can do to increase them.

Your Goals for This Lesson:

  • Check your site Audit and find 2 issues that you can start working on right away
  • Set an SEO goal for next couple of weeks, such as to improve your posting frequency
  • Start using the tips presented in this lesson to improve your site score and authority over the next month

Just one last lesson to go through, so stay tuned for the grand finale.

Google’s new mobile algorithm

Mobile websites and the mobile algorithm

Nowadays, it’s crucial for your website to be mobile responsive. Most of the new WordPress themes have already included this as a feature.

Why you need a responsive website

Because every search engine started to implement an algorithm that is based on responsive websites for mobile searches. Google introduces an addition to the ranking algorithm that influences the position of your web pages in Google’s mobile search results.

Google’s mobile ranking algorithm has started rolling out on 21st April 2015. The global rollout will take a few days.

Is the new algorithm affecting your regular search results?

The answer is NO. The regular search results are not affected by the new mobile algorithm.

Now the question is:

How do you know if your website is mobile friendly or not?

Good news! Google is offering a tool to check if your website is mobile friendly or not.

They call it: Mobile Friendly Tool

 

Watch the video below and learn how to use the Mobile Friendly Tool. This video will teach you how to test your site speed as well.

If you want help from our team, we can look over your entire website and make it work correctly. We will look at SEO, Caching, Bad Plugins, Loading Time and CSS. Read more

What to do to speed up the mobile version of your website?

The best way (even though it may not be the easiest way for you to do it), is to have a m-dot website for the mobile version, and www one for the desktop version.

Watch the hangout video below, and find out what to do if you want to have both mobile and desktop websites. Learn how to connect them correctly in order to avoid broken redirects.

Statistics

mobile vs desktop online search
mobile vs desktop online search

 

Don’t forget that your competition is also on mobile. In 2015, aside from the 91% of users that are using the desktop version of a website to search online, 80% are using their mobile devices for search purposes. This is a percent that is growing and growing every month.

Source: http://www.smartinsights.com

That being said, it’s no longer a matter of asking ourselves whether mobile marketing important, because we know it is!

I hope that this information will help you improve your website, and I’m open to answer your questions, if you have any.

Top 5 free tools for testing your website’s performance

performance tool

1. Squirrly SEO Plugin

The audit from Squirrly gives users precious insight into how their website’s performance help them improve their online presence and boost their sites rankings.

http://igamify.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/15540556-0-a-1024x666.png

You receive a score for your site based on several things the tool analyzes, such as blogging, SEO, social, traffic, links, authority.

Feature Overview

  • An Audit Score for your Content Strategy and its execution
  • Insights about the 6 main areas of your Content Strategy (Blogging, Traffic, SEO, Social Media, Links and Authority)
  • Tips on how to fix every issue which appears
  • Easy-to-follow guidelines and explanations, but also heavy documentation for those who require it
  • See how your score evolved over time
  • You can send the audit either by PDF or by email to a team member who can help you fix certain issues.
  • PRO Tips, Videos and Articles from us

Download Squirrly SEO now and boost your site ranking for Free!

2. ContentLook

ContentLook helps you take a look at your whole Content Marketing Strategy and offers an easy way to streamline your workflow and take key actions to grow your business.

Feature Overview

  • Audits your site, so that you are aware of how your website is actually doing from an SEO, Social Media and Online Traffic perspective.
  • Offers you key insights which will help you better understand the data behind your content, so that you can make informed, strategic decisions that spark growth.
  • Allows you to monitor your website’s performance. You and your team can easily keep track of how each published article is performing to make it rank better.
  • You can also easily measure the progress and results of your online marketing campaigns.
  • Integration with Google Analytics, Trello and Slack.

website's performanceYou can see a live demo here!

3. Pingdom Tools

With Pingdom’s website monitoring you’ll be the first to know when your website is down and you’ll stay on top of your website’s performance. 

Monitoring your website’s performance and servers is always a smart decision. Pingdom will display the load time of your webpage and also provide you with a performance grade based on several important factors.

pingdom_testing_tools

Feature Overview

  • Examine all parts of a web page – View file sizes, load times and other details about every single element of a web page (HTML, JavaScript and CSS files, images, etc.). You can sort and filter this list in different ways to identify performance bottlenecks.
  • Website’s Performance Overview – Performance-related statistics based on the test result.
  • Performance grade and tips – See how your website conforms to performance best practices from Google Page Speed (similar to Yahoo’s YSlow). You can get some tips on how to speed up your website this way.
  • Trace your performance history – The tests can be reviewed later. Users can see how things change over time (with pretty charts!).
  • Test from multiple locations – See how fast a website loads in Europe, the United States and so on.
  • Share your results – Share them with your friends, work colleagues or web host.

4. Google PageSpeed

PageSpeed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. It fetches the URL twice, once with a mobile user-agent and once with a desktop-user agent.

The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A higher score is better and a score of 85 or above indicates the page is performing well. Please note that PageSpeed Insights is being continually improved and so the score will change.

google_testing_tools

PageSpeed Insights measures how the page can improve its performance on:

  • time to above-the-fold load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page and to the moment the above-the-fold content is rendered by the browser.
  • time to full page load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.

5. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is also one of the free tools, which grades your website’s speed and has a suite of features and options to optimize your website speed clear and easy.

GTmetrix can help you develop a faster, more efficient and all-around improved website experience for your users.

gtmetrix_testing_tools

Feature Overview

  • Keep track of the performance for your page and visualize your history with 3 interactive graphs. Zoom, pan and set a date range and more!
  • Analyze on an actual Android device. GTmetrix passes your URL through an actual Android device to get real world performance data on your page load.
  • Test from Multiple Regions. Analyze the page load of your site from 7 different regions around the world.
  • Playback Page Loads with Videos. You can also view your page load in a filmstrip view. This allows you to get a frame-by-frame look at your page loading in real time.
  • Set up Monitored Alerts. GTmetrix can alert you if your page falls below a certain condition you set!
  • Schedule GTmetrix to run a test daily, weekly or monthly on your pages.

What Other Free Tools Do You Use to Monitor Your Website’s Performance?

What other free tools you think should have made it into the list? Make sure to share your suggestions in the comment section below!