How to get Backlinks | Full Guide to Backlinking

Backlinking is a process of building a solid portfolio of external links to your website. Understanding how to get backlinks is crucial to your SEO success. 

How to Get Backlinks and Boost SEO Results

how to get backlinks and backlinking tactics

“White hat” backlinking strategies are one of the foundational elements for a successful content performance program. Because backlinking is such a critical component of content performance programs, the accuracy and volume of backlink data is of the utmost importance.

BrightEdge provides the most accurate and complete set of backlinking reporting, encompassing backlink tracking, discovery of high-quality backlinks, and competitive backlink insights with actionable, keyword-level backlink recommendations supported by built-in task and workflow management.

The idea of negative SEO is a controversial one. Although the major search engines generally say that it is difficult if not impossible to hurt another site through negative SEO, there are also reports of brands saying that their websites were impacted by backlinking from spammy sites. It is always a good idea to check your backlinks and make sure that they are from reputable sites and can help your search engine rankings. If you find links that are not up to your quality standards, you can disavow them so that Google knows that you do not want this site counted among your backlinks.

Backlinks are the fundamental structure of the Internet and are a quality signal to search engines that your content is valuable and that people appreciate what you offer. The key to leveraging this signal to increase your page’s ranking is producing high-quality content and getting it in front of the people who are likely to link to it. Follow the best practices, and use the tools available to you to get the most out of your backlink building and optimization efforts.

BrightEdge has published thought leadership articles, like 10 Simple Link Building Ideas You Can Do In a Day, to help BrightEdge community members at any level of SEO expertise make backlink and SEO progress.

Competitive SEO Backlinking and BrightEdge Backlinks Management

After you understand how to get backlinks and do your backlinking job, it is important to understand what else can be done to enhance your backlink portfolio. Leverage the most complete suite of backlink analysis and management tools on the market to fine tune your content performance strategy at the keyword, page, or domain level. BrightEdge S3 backlinking analysis, competitive analysis, and actionable recommendations provide end-to-end backlink management to contribute to your overall SEO management efforts.

backlinking and how to get backlinks iconWin with Comprehensive Backlinks Management

  • Immediate Backlink Visibility – Gain a complete picture of your existing backlink portfolio. Within BrightEdge customizable dashboards you can effectively track backlink counts trended over time. BrightEdge provides tracking and analysis on your backlinks including: page URL, date added, page score, anchor text, category, and type (blog, directory, partner, news article).
  • Seamless Backlink Database Integrations – Integration with industry leading backlink databases Majestic and Moz.
  • Tasks & Workflow – Track domains you are targeting for backlinks, assign them to team members track the progress, and get notified automatically when backlinks become active.

Gain the Competitive Edge with In-Depth Competitive Backlinks Data

Ever wonder how your backlink strategy compares to the competition? With BrightEdge you can get an instant snapshot comparing the quality distribution of your backlinks against the competition. This helps you to understand where and how to get backlinks, quickly identify the highest value opportunities for your site based on what is already working for the competition, and to gain insight into the current gaps in their strategies.

  • Competitive Tracking and Recommendations – Uncover your competitors backlink portfolio, and gain insights into which backlinks are the most valuable to their content performance. BrightEdge provides recommendations of the best links you should pursue for your targeted keywords.
  • Backlink Quality & Anchor Text Distribution Analysis – Compare quality distribution of competitors' backlinks to identify the correlation of quality and rankings, including top level domain (TLD), anchor text distribution, domain type (press releases, blogs, social, directories, etc.) Quickly uncover the basic backlink profiles of companies winning your targeted keywords.
  • Identify Link Hubs – Quickly find “link hubs,” domains that are linking to more than one of your competitors’ sites and therefore may be more likely to link to your pages as well.
  • Extend Beyond Known Competitors – Discover the top 10 ranking pages for each of your keywords. Take into account your entire competitive landscape with Keyword Level Backlink Insights.
  • Identify Social Backlinks - Compare social media signals for your domains and your competitors’ domains. Uncover which keywords and pages are the most impactful to target with Likes, Tweets, and Shares to improve rankings on search engines.

competitive insight backlinking pie charts

 

Keyword-Level Backlinks Insights

There is no disputing that organic search is competitive. With that said, it’s essential to have a complete picture of the entire competitive landscape. For businesses that operate in multiple locations, rank on a large number of keywords, have multiple products, or operate under different brand names, it’s tough even scratching the surface to identify all of your competitors in the SERPs. And simply looking at your top three known competitors doesn’t cut it.

BrightEdge S3 goes way beyond cursory, domain-level analysis of known competitors by providing actionable insights into competitive backlink profiles at the keyword level. Now you can get insight into the optimal backlink sources to target for hundreds or thousands of keywords right away.

  • Go beyond known competitors – Discover the Top 10 ranking pages for each of your keywords and uncover their backlink portfolio. Take into account the entire competitive landscape, instead of only considering your top named competitors, who may only compete on a fraction of your keywords.
  • Assess and prioritize opportunities – For each keyword, BrightEdge will crawl the Top 10 ranking pages to identify all the links these competitors have in common and then organize this analysis by type (blog, directory, partner, news article, and TLD).  BrightEdge then prioritizes your backlink opportunities by page and domain authority.
  • Take action and track progress – Once you’ve identified the backlinks you want to go after, assign each opportunity to a member of your team. Within the BrightEdge Backlink Module, we’ll automatically monitor the status of the links, and track when links get added. Easily manage tasks and workflow and measure progress week over week.

brightedge page backlinks report

Majestic Integrations for Tracking Backlinks

A crucial component of a successful content performance program includes “white hat” backlink management, specifically backlink tracking, acquisition of high quality backlinks, and competitive backlink discovery. Because backlinking is such a critical component of content performance programs, the accuracy, and volume of backlink data is of the utmost importance.

BrightEdge has a firm commitment to data integrity, which includes integration of Majestic’s industry leading “Fresh Index” backlink database. The BrightEdge S3 platform provides backlinking analysis, competitive insights, and actionable recommendations with workflow. Partnering with Majestic provides BrightEdge customers with the most comprehensive backlink insights for enterprise.

Integration with Majestic

  • World’s Largest Backlink Database — Majestic currently tracks 150 billion URLs in their “Fresh Index,” and 3.8 trillion URLs in their Historical Index.
  • Highest Quality and Most Current Data — Majestic performs daily updates of its enormous Fresh Index, enabling BrightEdge to incorporate the freshest large-scale database commercially available today.
  • Seamless Integration — Majestic metrics are available in BrightEdge S3 platform with minimal latency.

 

Explore Advanced Backlinks Tactics

backlinking strategies or how to get backlinks