How to Create Content that Attracts Backlinks

If you keep up with our blog here at AllNaturalLinks.com, you are probably well aware of the importance of building backlinks. Google, Bing and Yahoo all use backlinks to determine where and how a website should rank.

This leaves many webmasters to believe that it’s OK to purchase backlinks in an effort to raise their search ranking. But doing so may have the opposite effect by lowering your site’s rankings — or worse, getting your site deindexed altogether.

Avoid Paid Links

Google has cracked down on the use of paid links in recent years, adjusting its algorithm to penalize offending sites. If you aren’t allowed to purchase backlinks, though, how are you supposed to obtain them?

The safest and most effective way to generate backlinks is to create content that people actually want to read and share. It should go without saying that users will be more likely to share a piece of content if it’s interesting and engaging.

So instead of manually building backlinks, focus your efforts on creating high-quality content. As you continue to build content for your site, you’ll notice backlinks being created without any additional effort on your part.

“Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site,” wrote Google in its document titled Steps to creating a Google-friendly site.

Quality Over Quantity

So, what’s the best way to create content that attracts backlinks? The secret is to focus on quality over quantity. Just a single high-quality article or blog post will yield more traffic, and backlinks, than half a dozen articles or posts of mediocre quality.

There are several different ways to increase the quality of your web content, one of which is to avoid publishing a larger wall of text. If your web content consists of nothing more than plain, unbroken text, chances are the vast majority of visitors will leave without taking the time to read it.

The human brain is hard-wired to read by scanning sections of text rather than word for word, left to right. Therefore, you should break up your site’s content into smaller, easy-to-digest sections by using paragraphs, sub-headings, links, bold, and similar formatting options.

You should also encourage users to share your like and share your site’s content on their social media profiles. Something as simple as a “click here to share” button can make a world of difference in attracting backlinks.

Each time a user shares your article on his or her social media profile, it creates a new backlink pointing to your site. These links will build up over time, helping to bolster your site’s search ranking while driving new traffic in the process.

Have any other content creation tips that you would like to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments section below!