The importance of backlinks for top Google rankings never be told to a blogging audience as this. Success in blogging means doing two things right – getting unique, high-quality content on your blog/site and getting good and quality backlinks to your website. Getting quality content is easy. Getting high-quality links from other websites to your website is not.
While there have been several ‘tips and tricks’ on how to get websites to link to you, including article marketing, distributing freebies and announcing contests, one of the simplest ways is often forgotten – ‘Plainly emailing the website author to provide a link to you’.
First and foremost, let me admit that this is one of the most difficult things to get done, but is the most rewarding of all. While you can easily get a lot of PR 0 and PR 1 websites to link to you through article marketing, how many PR 7 or PR 8 websites – the authorities in your niche, will link to you? If you would want Google and your niche audience to trust you well enough, it is links from these websites that matter.
So, how do you get this done? It is a long, yet satisfying process that will go a long way in helping you establish your authority.
First step – Do NOT click on the contact link and shoot an email. Thousands are doing this already and you will quite likely never hear back. What you need to do is establish a rapport with the author.
Here is where social networks come handy. Connect to the author on websites like Facebook and Twitter. Frequently, when the author tweets, do not just blindly retweet. Engage in a quality discussion with them. The first step is to get the author know that someone like you exist. Do this on a consistent basis before proceeding to step two.
Second step is to volunteer. Does the website author also handle a forum? Does he have a Facebook fan page? If not, create one, and ask him to endorse it on his website. If the author does indeed have forums, volunteer to be the moderator for the group. You have built trust.
The third step is the easiest. You simply have to mail the author asking if your website can be included in the Resources section of his website. You are most likely to get a link.
The procedure explained here can seem very arduous, but remember that any niche has got only a handful of genuine experts, and you are going to employ this only to get to these few people. Additionally, it is not just a backlink you are earning, but a very valuable contact in your niche which will go a long way in establishing your authority.
But wait, before anything like this can happen, you need to have great content. So, if you have not built genuine content yet, go build that one first!