In the previous article we took a look at the four most important factors that affect an article’s ranking position on the front page of Google:
1. Direct website visits – The number of readers that reach your site by simply typing your domain name in their browers.
2. Time on site – How long the average reader remains on your site.
3. Pages per session – How many pages an individual reads on your site during their visit.
4. Bounce rate – The percentage of users that leave your site after reading just one article.
As a writer, these are four factors that are completely within your control. If you write a helpful article that is user-friendly and has plenty of internal links, these factors will take care of themselves.
But there’s another factor that Google’s algorithm takes into account when deciding how to rank your article: backlinks.
A backlink is simply a link from an article on a different website that points back to your article.
Google views backlinks like endorsements from other sites. The more backlinks you have to a particular article, the more sites that are “endorsing” that article as helpful and useful.
How to Get Backlinks
There are a few basic ways to get backlinks to your articles:
1. Receive them organically.
One way to receive a backlink is to receive it organically from another site. This is when the owner of another site finds your article useful and links to it from an article on their site.
Typically this happens when your article ranks naturally on the front page of Google simply because you focused on the four ranking factors mentioned above when writing the article.
Thus, when it’s on the front page of Google, it makes it easy for other sites to find your article and increases the chances that they’ll link to it.
2. Use a “white-hat” approach to receive them.
A “white-hat” approach to receiving backlinks typically involves one of the following techniques:
- Writing a guest post on another site and placing a link to one of your articles within the blog post.
- Directly reaching out to a website owner and asking them if they’d like to place a link on their site to one of your articles because it’s a useful resource.
3. Use a “black-hat” approach to receive them.
On the flip-side, a “black-hat” approach that is sometimes used involves paying other website owners to place a link on their site that points to one of your articles. This is considered to be a violation of ethical SEO tactics in Google’s eyes and, if caught, you could receive a severe penalty on your site.
I generally recommend avoiding this approach.
My Personal Backlink Strategy
I personally use the first approach mentioned above because it allows me to focus all of my time and energy on writing the best articles possible and then receiving backlinks organically.
As I write more articles that naturally reach the front page of Google, I increase the chances that other sites will find my articles and link to them. This means I’m able to gain backlinks without actively reaching out to other sites because they simply find me instead.
Occasionally I will write a guest post on another blog just to receive a backlink, but this is rare. I prefer to spend my time writing articles on my own site.
Can You Rank Well Without Backlinks?
Statology is direct evidence that a site can rank well and bring in serious organic traffic without actively building backlinks.
There are plenty of other sites out there that are doing well without any serious backlinks as well. As evidence, check out this thread from Charles Floate on Twitter.
He shares examples of five sites that have very low domain authority and very few backlinks, yet are crushing it in google organic search simply because their content is so good.
Charles shares a few things in particular that the sites do really well:
- They all have a clean, minimal site design
- They use tons of internal links
- Their articles tend to be quite long
- They use custom images
These tactics line up perfectly with the results of the SEMrush study in the previous article: Sites that focus on creating excellent content can rank well without backlinks.
Keep in mind that Google’s job is to serve up the most useful articles possible to someone searching for a particular keyword. They use backlinks as signals that an article is potentially useful, but the true test of the usefulness of an article is how long a reader stays on the page and whether or not they stay on your site to read more content.
Backlinks are simply a means to an end. If you focus nearly 100% of your efforts on writing excellent content, your rankings will take care of themselves.
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