The easiest way to build backlinks is to encourage others to do it for you. Natural links are the single most valuable method of boosting page rank. They’re also the most elusive. In order to get natural links, you will need to create valuable content that people will naturally want to share with their friends and family. Strive to create content that people will want to save, reference or pass along.
Social media is one of the most important aspects of the Internet today, and you should always have social media in mind when designing your website. Think of ways to make it easier for people to share your content. Here are some particularly share-worthy types of content that you can use to generate natural backlinks:
- Images, such as infographics and memes, are highly shareable due to the visual nature of social media.
- Quizzes that prompt the user to share their results are popular in social media as well and can provide information and generate activity on your page.
- Tools and resources, like currency converters, recipe calculators and more, get shared frequently because they are so useful.
- Recipes, instructions and other types of genuinely useful content are more likely to be shared than something more abstract that can’t be put into action.
When generating content for your website, think about what you personally enjoy on the Internet. Pay attention to what is shared on social media among friends and family, especially people in the target audience for your site’s niche. Find ways to create and deliver that type of content on a regular basis.
Additionally, make back-linking easy. The more effort someone has to put into sharing your content, the less likely he’ll be to do it. When you post an infographic on your site, include a code that can be easily copied and pasted by another website owner or blogger. This allows a visitor to share that content and its embedded link with minimal effort. Also be sure that every page of your site or post on your blog has unobtrusive but visible buttons to share the content to Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and other social media sites.
When you create content that’s easy to share, many of your backlinks will develop organically. This saves you the trouble of building up backlinks yourself, and it builds traffic and visitor involvement. Having readers share your content is the holy grail of SEO, and it should be encouraged as much as possible.
