The best 11 backlink strategies for link acquisition

94 % of all online content does not receive a single backlink. So what can you do to ensure that this statistic does not apply to your own content?

You need some backlink strategies that are easy to implement and really work in practice. In my experience, the best strategies and tactics for link acquisition can be found in this article.

Create or take over entries in company directories

Company directories are a source of backlinks that is not only easy to use, but also thematically relevant. Since backlinks are not only about the quantity and quality of the links, but also about the thematic relevance, links from company directories (also called Directory ) is a must for every company website.

In many cases, accounts must be created in these directories, in which then a URL can be stored. However, there are also directories that list companies themselves - in this case you should accept the entry in the directory, check the data and, if possible, add a link to the website.

An easy way to find relevant directories is to search for industry-relevant directories on Google. You can find such directories (often with dofollow links!) with the following search:

Allintext: [Industry] Directory

For example, a search for directories for doctors produces the following result:

In addition to such industry-relevant directories, there are old acquaintances such as Gelbeseiten.de, Dasoertliche.de or Dastelefonbuch.de, as well as Google My Business, Bing Places For Business, on which a Dofollow link or not, an account should definitely be opened, as these are not only SEO-relevant signals, but also for direct traffic can provide.

Company directories are often the first links that come into question for link building. They can be free of charge, but in many cases incur an ongoing fee.

Sponsoring of events

There is a way to get strong backlinks, advertise offline and also reach the target group - Sponsoring of events!

Events are usually organized by well-known companies or organizations. In terms of SEO, this means that backlinks from the associated websites are difficult to obtain and are therefore particularly valuable, but often also thematically relevant and GEO-specific.

Such events are for example:

• Concerts
• Clubs
• Fairs
• Conferences
• Workshops
• Seminars
• Sports events
• Lectures
• Academic events

To find suitable events, directories such as https://www.messeninfo.de/ or https://online.marketing/conferences/ to.

As a rule, it is very easy to find ways to obtain a backlink through sponsorship, especially for online events. It is only important to check the quality of the domain (and the URL!) in order to assess the value of the link. However, this only ever accounts for part of the value.

Sponsoring can be worthwhile for many reasons, SEO is only one of them. Therefore, higher prices may also be appropriate.

Offer experience reports

Testimonials are one of the easiest ways to obtain backlinks. The prerequisite is that a customer has a website with testimonials - which is often the case for agencies, products or services, for example.

You don't even have to have worked with the company. Especially if you have already made a name for yourself in your industry, your Testimonial gladly seen.

The following procedure is recommended for link building through testimonials:

1. Create a list of tools and services that you use frequently.
2. Take a look at their website. Are there any testimonials with backlinks on their site? Could something like this be set up?
3. Get in touch and declare your willingness to write a field report.
4. Write your testimonial and include the link to your website.

Almost every business works with products or service providers and can receive one or two backlinks free of charge in this way.

Send press releases to news websites

Press releases can be surprisingly good for gaining backlinks from strong sources like local news websites to the online editions of well-known journals or magazines such as Spiegel, Wirtschaftswoche or Bild. However, the basic prerequisite for this is a presentable brand and a topic that captures the zeitgeist.

Quantity of backlinks should not be the goal of a press release. Rather, the focus should be on quality. Fortunately, press releases can get into the right hands relatively easily, for example with Newsaktuell.dea company of the dpa Group. Press releases are published for a fee via the press portal and distributed via the newsletter for journalists, bloggers and influencers (currently 175,000 subscriptions).

All press releases published via the press portal can contain text, audio, images or videos. Naturally, releases with videos receive significantly more attention. It is therefore also worthwhile for SEO purposes to generate content that is as visually appealing as possible.

On Presseportal.de, content with audio 3 %, content with image 34 % and content with video 50 % receive more attention.

Although press releases are often adopted by smaller portals without changes, they can often serve journalists and bloggers as inspiration for unique articles. In this way, they can also lead to closer cooperation with your brand.

Press releases are also useful and inexpensive for brands and personalities for link building.

Requesting links for existing mentions

These Backlink strategy is a must for anyone interested in optimal rankings on search engines. It's nothing more than searching for mentions of your website or brand without a link and trying to turn that mere mention into a dofollow backlink.

The crucial part of this strategy is therefore finding these mentions. There are several solutions here - with SEO tools and without.

Search for mentions on Google or Bing.

For example, you could search Google for relevant terms such as the brand, the website or well-known personalities associated with it and hide sources such as social media websites, as no dofollow links can be obtained here and editing is sometimes difficult or impossible.

Possible search on Google: intext: "Tobias Dziuba" -tobias-dziuba.de -twitter.com -facebook.com -youtube.com -linkedin.com

Annoyingly, all sources must now be be checked individually. The better known a brand is, the more time-consuming this becomes. That is why there is an alternative that can simplify this process.

Use tools like BrandMentions or Ahrefs

BrandMentions is an example of a tool that can display mentions without a link with a single click. This is useful to get a comprehensive overview of such brand mentions.

If you also want to know the SEO data for these pages, you can either test the pages output by BrandMentions for metrics such as DR or UR or search for these mentions without a link using the Content Explorer without BrandMentions.

Even if not everyone converts the mere mention into a link, the chance is great enough to justify the effort.

Google Authority Stacks

The Google Authority Stack is a collection of Google products such as Docs, Sheets, Forms and Slides, which contain content that is "stacked" on top of each other and made public. As Google products, all of these entities have very good SEO metrics, which theoretically makes them excellent sources of backlinks.

In practice, the individual entities are linked to each other in order to strengthen each other and then link to the target page (your website) in one way or another. Ideally, the stacks are created with the corresponding keyword on the target page in mind.

Example: You have an affiliate website and want to build links for your vacuum cleaner comparison. Accordingly, you create Google Docs on that topic, as well as presentations and videos on YouTube, which you then link to each other. Finally, you create your links for the comparison on your website with the anchor text you want.

The biggest advantage of this strategy is that while it is incredibly easy to implement and is blackhat in other circumstances, by using Google Entities it suddenly becomes absolutely whitehat.

Google Authority Stacks are an ingenious way of acquiring links that is free and easy to implement.

Guest Posting

One of the oldest methods of link building is publishing posts on other websites. This often involves publishing on blogs with a separate account for the guest blogger. Such posts published by the guest blogger contain a short summary of the blogger somewhere on the page, usually a portrait and a link to their website.

The process for the guest author looks something like this:

1. Find a suitable blog
2. Search for the e-mail address or contact form
3. Write a message
4. Discuss possible topics for guest posts
5. Write the post
6. Check the publication of the article

In practice, there are hardly any blogs or websites in German-speaking countries that publish guest posts. officially and free of charge. Such a post is often seen as a way to publish backlinks for payment. So here you have to think very carefully about whether the link is worth the effort, the money and the breach of Google's guidelines for webmasters.

It is important that your expertise comes to the fore. This way, you not only get a link, but you can also encourage the reader to visit your website or find out more about you or your brand.

Guest blogging is exhausting and takes time. However, results in the form of backlinks can almost always be achieved.

Targeted outreach campaigns

We are now in the middle of a series of well-known strategies that still work, but are used by just about everyone - albeit with varying degrees of success. Outreach campaigns usually follow the following principle:

1. Content is published
2. A list of contacts is created
3. Contacts are contacted either individually or in bulk by e-mail

The idea behind this strategy is to draw the attention of relevant bloggers, webmasters, influencers etc. to relevant and high-quality content and thus obtain links. The links received in turn provide a boost in the search engine rankings and thus attract even more links, as the pages with the best rankings are often used as a source when researching new content.

The success of this strategy depends primarily on 4 factors:

1. Reputation of your site
2. Quality of the content
3. Formulation of the outreach e-mail
4. Selection of contacts

This strategy is described under SEOs seen as usefulbut in many cases it can be less profitable. After all, only a fraction of the emails sent are read at all and even fewer of your contacts will ultimately link to them, even if they like the content.

The key to success lies above all in optimizing all four points mentioned above. Whether mass mailings or targeted campaigns are better depends largely on the niche in which your site is located. Both versions can be successful, but often are not in the first attempt.

Outreach campaigns are also not welcomed by Google. Normally, however, there is no realistic way to control this.

Overall, this is one of the most difficult backlink strategies, which also requires the creation of first-class content. 

Broken Link Building

Broken Link Building is a straightforward tactic that can be used to systematically obtain new links. With the right tools, it is also scalable, although not necessarily resource-friendly.

The procedure is as follows: First, a suitable tool is used to search for links that point to a URL that is no longer online. In most cases, this is a URL that contains the Status code 404 returns. With tools like Ahrefs or SemRush domains can be searched for such links.

The next step is to replicate the page that was linked to (unless there is already a very similar article on your website). In order to Maximize the chances of success of this tactic, need to understand what exactly led to this page being linked to. However, as the URL is no longer online, this turns out to be impossible. Not quite, because many pages can be found using tools such as the Wayback Machine on Archive.org.

The content must be so good that the owner of the referring website actually links to it. This tactic is therefore best suited to websites that make a trustworthy impression overall.

Finally, the right contact must be researched. This step can be made easier with tools such as Hunter Automated become. Alternatively, contact can be made via social media.

While this method may seem tedious, it can often kill several birds with one stone. This is because, if the page identified in the first step has in many cases received several links - it is therefore worth finding out all the pages that have linked to it and then contacting them all in the next step. Thanks to the links already received, the URL also has a good chance of being at the top of the organic search results on Google which attracts further backlinks over a longer period of time.

Broken link building is an effective white hat SEO strategy to get backlinks without having to pay for them.

Creation of surveys, own statistics

One of the best long-term strategies is to create content that is naturally linked to. In recent years, it has now become apparent that the best type of web content for link building purposes contains original statistics - with the data gathered from surveys or individually formed from large data sets.

Statistics pages can receive links from hundreds or even thousands of sources. Tools such as Ahrefs help to find out who has linked and what information prompted the authors to link. Source: Ahrefs.com

While this strategy can generally only be pursued if you have the corresponding centerl to compile such statistics, it can be realized even on a small budget. And this is how it works:

1. Search for statistics in your industry and check that they are up to date. Pages often receive numerous backlinks, while the statistics in them are outdated.
2. Check the URL with the outdated statistics with the SEO tool of your choice and find out how many backlinks it receives from different sources.
3. If the number of these sources is high enough, create a page with updated statistics.
4. Find the contact persons of the link sources (e-mail or LinkedIn, for example) and inform them.

In some cases, it is worth preparing the statistics visually. For such cases, freelancer platforms such as Fiverr.com where an infographic is already available for between 5 and 20 $.

The creation of statistics can provide numerous backlinks and in many cases is also possible with a small budget.

Take part in podcasts

In many cases, podcasts are still hosted on their own websites, for example via WordPress. Since links that are set with WordPress, Dofollow by default this is a great opportunity to receive a link as a guest of a podcast.

Appearing as a guest on a podcast just to provide a link doesn't sound very efficient. However, it does have some advantages:

1. You not only get a link, but also traffic from users who are already familiar with you, your site or your company.
2. If the podcast is well-known, the episode you appear on will receive additional links, which in turn strengthens the link to your site.
3. In contrast to many other links, this one is difficult to replicate.

Appearing as a guest on a podcast is a difficult backlink strategy to scale, but it can generate valuable and unique links, as well as qualified traffic.