Basically, when you get other websites to link to your website. This shows Google that you're an authority in your area. It's basically a popularity contest. How do you know who's popular?

It's because you look at how many people are talking about each other. You figure out who's talking about this person the most.

The most popular sites have the most authority in Google's eyes and tend to get the best ranking. So you need to play this game as well.

Ways To Get Links

ways to get links

Now there are a few different ways of getting links. They verge from extremely high effort on your part to extremely low effort on your part. 

The higher foot ones, the great thing about them is they're predictable. The lower foot ones the great thing about them is that you don't have to do anything.

So basically, you can do this in two ways. Creating linkable content and also doing outreach to publications and journalists.

1. Creating linkable content

The best thing that you can do to pick up links without putting in any effort at all is to make sure that your content, the information on your site is link-worthy. If we think about the number of links that Wikipedia gets, for example, people are linking to Wikipedia because it has useful information.

People aren't linking to Wikipedia because an SEO company is reaching out to them saying, "Hey, can you link to Wikipedia please?" Right, they're doing it because it has the best information. 

So the first approach you can take is to have the best information.

2. Conduct surveys

One of the things you can do is conduct studies and surveys and collect data about a particular topic. 

This is a great way of picking up links because if you're the first person to put data around a certain topic which is trending, which is popular in the media when publications talk about that topic, they often need a data source to kind of back up their opinions.

If you've got a really good source of data about that topic, you can find that they start linking to you. 

3. Writing ultimate guides

Another thing that you can do to pick up links kind of accidentally, is writing the ultimate guide to whatever it is that you do. If you write a really in-depth piece basically write a book and just put it on your website.

You're gonna find that people start linking to you because people always wanna link to a really good source of further information if they can't be bothered to write the rest of the information about that topic, or they just want a quick quotable thing that they can take from somewhere. 

They will find your piece and they will link to it. So you can get links passively by writing really good or really useful content for people.  Now, if you can put some effort in, then obviously you're gonna get more links.

4. Outreach to publications and journalists.

Let's say for example, that you've conducted a survey or a study, well, you can now reach out to publications and journalists in your space and say, "Hey, look, we've put this together." Do you think it's the sort of thing that will be interesting to your audience? And some of them will write about it.

Now I have to caution you when you start doing outreach to pick up links, you are not going to get a 100% success rate. Sorry, your success rate is gonna depend on who you are, but it's gonna be closer to 1% than 100%. So be prepared to put in some serious time to this, there's no other way around it.

And we would typically steer away from automated outreach tools because there's nothing more obvious than getting an automated outreach email. You've had them before, you know the ones. 

5. Journalist inquiry services

Another super cool thing to do if you're an absolute geek is to use journalist inquiry services. So things like ResponseSource and Gorkana.

When a journalist needs to provide some opinions or provide some data or expert advice to back up a story that they're writing, they can either tap into their personal network time-consuming who knows everyone, or they can go to a journalist inquiry service like ResponseSource, Gorkana.

Help her report her out, and they can just type in their inquiry hit submit, and it will get blasted out to millions and billions of people, all of whom are gonna contribute opinions and facts.

And journalists and very high authority, successful publications that you would have heard of, and you might even read, use these services as a shortcut to get an opinion. 

So if you subscribe to these types of services, then you can be that opinion. An alternative version using Twitter. Yes, Twitter is profitable for business. If you follow hashtags like hashtag journorequests, hashtag prrequests.

If journalists can't even face going to ResponseSource or Gorkana. They can just use Twitter and use the hashtag journorequests. They'll say looking for someone to give an expert opinion on how to turn your eyes inside out, oh no!

They might say hashtag journorequests, I'm looking for a health expert to talk about the benefits of onion squash for brain energy. And if you're the onion squash brain energy expert then you can reach out and say, "Hey, here's my tips." And real-life journalists use Twitter in this way. 

So you can be their source, this is a great way of getting links because when they write about you, they'll often include a link to your website. Now, if you're a local business, you can also list your business in local directories.

Yes, even this still works for SEO crazy, isn't it? But you can list your business in good quality local directories and it will help your ranking locally if you do it properly. 

Maybe in five years we won't be talking about links and we won't be talking about local directory citations anymore but for now, here we are. 

Conclusion: Ways Of Getting Links To Your Website

That's it for this one, we discussed 5 different ways of picking uplinks. Including creating linkable content, conducting surveys, writing ultimate guides, doing outreach to publications and journalists, and also using journalist inquiry services.

So I hope you found that useful. Leave comments below and share the ways you use to get links to your website. 

Read more articles about websites here at BuildSite.