The Key to Obtaining Free and Credible Inbound Links

There’s a sea change taking place in the SEO world these days, leaving many marketers feeling uneasy and unsure on their current SEO practices and a little reluctant on how to change course. With Google’s Panda and Penguin updates that have rolled out during the last year, black hat techniques of the past have been exposed, and overall link building practices have been scrutinized, with greater value being given for link quality.

If you’re looking for the safest, most organic way to obtain free and credible inbound links to your website or blog, to build link authority and improve your company’s search engine optimization rankings in search, this post is for you!

As we’ve highlighted in the past, there’s no deep dark secret about how to obtain more inbound links (aka backlinks), that are both free and credible.

The key is creating original, remarkable and shareable content. And creating lots of it!

Based on our own experience here at Weidert Group, we’ve attracted a large amount of credible links in the last year, which we know is a direct result of us being dedicated to blogging every work day. It’s on us to continually produce valuable content for our readers and to ensure we properly optimize our content so it’s found in organic search, but the hard work of creating over 261 blog posts in that years time has paid off. As shown in the graph below, our number of linking domains has increased 200% in the last year. In that same time period our SEO mozRank (link credibility score) has increased from 4.1 to 5.4.

This is enough evidence to us that our dedicated content development efforts, through our blogging and overall Inbound Marketing efforts, are truly paying off. Other than our time, we didn’t pay for one of those links and we’re not concerned that our site rank is going to suddenly tank with the next Google Penguin roll out.

Tips on Using Your Content to Attract More Inbound Links

1. When writing original blog content always keep in mind how your content is benefiting the reader and how it can be written to help address one or more of their pain points. If you continuously do this you’ll be more successful at getting others to share it and link to it within their own online content.

2. Take the time to properly format and present your content so it’s appealing to the reader and easy to digest.

3. If you’re blog content isn’t easily sharable via social media take action now! You’re only limiting the ability for your content to reach a larger audience, which means more opportunities to be found for new inbound links. These two blog posts will help you get started:

How to Leverage Social Sharing Signals for Improved SEO

5 Easy Ways to Make Your Content More Social

4. In addition to creating truly remarkable content for your own website/blog, and then promoting that content via social media to attract relevant traffic, it’s important to also pursue guest blogging opportunities with other credible websites and blogs. The team over at Inbound Now has an excellent blog article on how to search out credible sites to contribute guest content, in exchange for a link back to your own website or blog.

As dedicated content developers, our team knows it can be challenging to continuously develop content and manage the process with a team of writers. That’s why we developed our own Inbound Marketing Content Creation Templates. Download these 5 FREE Content Creation Templates for yourself!