How to Build Backlinks – 14 Strategies for 2023 🏆

Updated: December 28, 2020 – Now even more backlink building suggestions!

This post is all about how to build backlinks.

Specifically, I’m going to share with you strategies that actually work in the year 2023.

Why did I need to add that distinction?

Well:

Over the years, the effectiveness of certain link building strategies can diminish.

Search engine algorithms change.

Strategies that were unique and powerful at one time can get too popular and then ineffective after overexposure.

So, I wrote this incredibly detailed article on 10 different strategies to help you build links and ramp up your website traffic.

(You are going to want to bookmark this post so you can refer back to it when you need to.)

Before getting into the details, I’ll save you some time, and get into the TLDR version of everything you need to know:

TL;DR

General Tips for How to Build Backlinks

There are a couple of themes that you will see to many of these effective backlink building strategies.

The big one is this:

Provide Value

If you want anyone to link to your website, you need to make it worth their while. 

In fact, all of the strategies in this article provide value to the websites we’re trying to get links from.

In most of these strategies, the value you are going to provide is quality content worthy of a backlink.

I was recently talking with a website owner who gets requests all the time from link builders:

So, keep in mind that in order to get a link from another website, it has to be worth the effort from their perspective.

If you are writing a blog post for link building and SEO and trying to promote that post, make sure it’s a heckin’ good blog post.

Aside from providing value, there are some other things to keep in mind as you work toward building links.

Get Your Contacts’ Names Right

And not just their first and last names. 

It’s also:

• Company names
• Websites
• Individuals’ email addresses

When you are doing cold outreach to someone to build a relationship (and ultimately, links), the recipient has no idea who you are.

And many websites get hit up constantly from people they don’t know.

The more-popular websites get dozens of cold outreach emails daily.

If you do not have your recipient’s name spelled correctly, or even at all, it lowers the likelihood they respond to you.

Without personal details, your outreach comes off as an automated, impersonal template.

Your recipient will assume (rightly so) that you know nothing about them and are just playing a numbers game, reaching out to as many websites as you can find.

But, more than that, your recipient will assume that what you have to offer them is garbage, and they will just ignore you.

Don’t Forget to Follow Up

Many of these link building strategies are going to involve emailing people.

You are going to find out that most people will not respond to your initial email. 

This is even if you spend a lot of time personalizing it.

It’s just the nature of the beast. Doing email outreach to build links is a numbers game.

A way to increase the likelihood of getting a reply to your email is to follow-up.

Whether it’s once every 3 days, 5 days, once a week, having a follow-up email is important.

For these strategies we discuss in this blog post, follow up at least once, maybe twice.

A/B Test Everything

After you are doing outreach for awhile, you begin to notice some things…

Certain email subject lines tend to get you higher response rates than others.

And you’ll notice that some cold email pitches seem more likely to get a response.

But, having a hunch is not the same as having data.

Having a slightly-better response rate can be a significant difference when you are sending thousands of emails.

So, feel free to experiment. 

And then measure everything.

What email subject lines and body text get you better open and response rates?

Work on it and you will see better results in your campaigns.

Strategies to Build Backlinks

Now, let’s talk about specific link building strategies for 2023.

Link Roundups

If you want an “easy win” for building links, you should start with link roundups.

By far, I have found that link building with link roundups has yielded the highest win rate.

Before I get into why, let’s talk real quick about what link roundups are…

Put simply – link roundups are regularly-published blog articles or newsletters that share and highlight other people’s content on a given topic or industry.

As an example, Big Apple Media regularly publishes a link roundup focusing on web design and marketing:

Now, why have I had such success with getting backlinks from link roundups?

Because websites publishing link roundups are actively seeking your type of content.

By sharing your relevant article with them, you are doing them a favor.

To put together a link roundup article, the author has to scour the Internet for new articles. 

It takes a lot of work to do.

So, when you reach out and say “Hey, I am familiar with your roundup and I have an article that would be a great fit for your next post,” you are doing them a favor.

So, how do you find link roundups?

By using advanced search parameters in your favorite search engine.

In case you are not familiar, you can use certain terms in your search queries to refine your searches and get more relevant results.

For example “intitle:[keyword]” will return you search results where the keyword must be in the title of the results that return.

Another example: “inurl:[keyword]” will return you search results where the keyword must be in the URL of every search result that shows up.

Here is an “intitle:” search:

Both intitle and inurl are important for link roundups.

For link roundups, you should search for things like “intitle:roundup + [keyword]” or “inurl:roundup + [keyword]” which will ensure that search results will have roundup in the title or URL respectively.

intitle:roundup [keyword]

inurl:roundup [keyword]

But, we’re not done searching yet.

If you stopped reading here and went straight to Google, you done messed up, as you’re probably finding out.

With just those search parameters, you are likely to get outdated roundups that are not still publishing, and other irrelevant content.

Lots of discontinued roundup posts.

So, here’s what we do:

In the top-right part of the screen of your search results page, there’s a Tools button. Click it.

Then, limit your results by Past Month.

Now, you will ensure that you only see link roundup articles published in the past month. 

So, now when you reach out to these websites, you will be reaching out to websites that are currently publishing roundup articles.

Next, open up a spreadsheet – Google Sheets or Excel, or an alternative, your choice – and add these websites to your list.

Related: Grab a free outreach tracking spreadsheet and other tools.

Next, we have to find a way to reach out to each of these websites…

For this, we will need an email address finding tool.

The one I use and recommend is Hunter.io. You can also use others like Norbert. Both tools are free for up to 50 searches.

Another great tool is ContactOut, which, in addition to retrieving email addresses can also retrieve contacts’ phone numbers (which may be useful depending on your outreach goals).

Enter the domains from your spreadsheet, and then get contact information for these websites.

After that, we will need to reach out to each website.

Let’s put together an email.

I could go on all day with tips on how to write emails for link building outreach, but I’m not going to do that here.

Instead, I will save you time and just share some templates that have worked well for me.

Here is a link building template that I use and has worked great for me.

And then, don’t forget to follow up.

With each outreach strategy, I like to keep my follow-up emails simple. 

Something like:

Keep it simple.

You don’t need to rehash the first email’s pitch in your follow-up email.

The follow-up email is a reminder and a show of your continued interest and persistence.

Mention Outreach

Every blog post you write should have outbound links.

This is a given. 

Outbound links support your claims; they’re like bibliography citations.

But, beyond that, having outbound links can help you build real relationships, get your content shared, and get you backlinks.

How?

For every outbound link you have in your blog post, you should reach out to that website to make a connection with them.

We call this Mention Outreach.

Reaching out to another website completely cold, saying, “Hey, I like your site, how about we be friends? How about you also share my article?” is going to be met with a lot of skepticism.

Why?

What’s in it for them?

Put yourself in their shoes:

But, if you can show them value in your initial outreach, you are much more likely to get a response, and a positive one at that.

Compare that above message with something more like,  “Hey, I really liked your article so I linked to it in my article [link here]. I’d love to chat about maybe collaborating on something in the future [or whatever else you want to ask for].”

At this step, you have given them something – a backlink from your website.

The feeling of reciprocity is not to be underestimated.

If someone thinks they owe you a favor, it will make them more likely to do something for you.

From a sales psychology perspective, reciprocity is powerful.  

When people do things for us, we feel compelled to do things for them. It’s why you often see free giveaways in sales. They make up for the giveaways by the sales generated because of the giveaways.

There are a few different ask items that you can have, including:

To do Mention Outreach and build links, you need to do a few things:

1. Find all the outbound links in your blog article
2. Find contact information for the websites using an email finder like Hunter
3. Email those websites

Finding the outbound links part is easy. Just go through your blog post, and note each of your outbound links in a spreadsheet.

Then, we gotta find contact information. For that we’ll use Hunter.io.

In our description of Link Roundups, we mentioned how to find email addresses that way, so we don’t need to go into it again.

Next, we need a personalized email.

Here is a template that I use and recommend for Mention Outreach:

Resource Page

One easy way to find websites that could link to you is to find websites that have published Resources pages.

Resource pages are webpages dedicated to sharing good-quality content, relevant for the website’s audience.

What you can do is reach out to websites with resource pages and ask them to include your content.

To find a site with resource pages is fairly similar to the process for finding Link Roundups.

With Resources Outreach, you need to first find websites that publish resource pages.

So, we head to our favorite search engine…

And we use some advanced parameters.

For resource pages, we should do something like:

intitle:resources + [keyword] 

Or

inurl:resources + [keyword] 

And, unlike with link roundups, you do not need to limit your searches by date.

Whether the resource page was published 1 month ago or 10 years ago doesn’t matter so much to us here like it would for a roundup post.

Once we find some good websites, we’ll add them to our spreadsheet.

Next, we find email addresses using our email-finder tool.

And then we need an outreach email.

Here’s a template of mine that you can borrow:

Uber Skyscraper

If you have read any articles ever about how to build backlinks, one strategy that comes up frequently is Skyscraper Technique.

Real quick, Skyscraper Technique involves:

When we’re doing our research, we want to find keywords where the top-ranking websites have a lot of backlinks. The more the better.

If you find a keyword that you like, but the top-ranked sites only have 10-20 backlinks, it’s time to find a new keyword.

And, you also want to keep in mind the difficulty rating for ranking.

Next, we get to an overview screen that gives us a lay of the land.

In the sidebar on the left side of the page, we can click on the “keyword ideas” to get for more suggestions and details.

Now, we have a table of suggested keywords along with their search volume and search difficulty (also some pay-per-click related details, but those are not as relevant for us).

If we click on a keyword, we also see a sidebar to the right side of the page that shows us a table of the top-ranked websites for those keywords.

And in that table is a column for links!

In the links column, you can click on the number of links for a particular website and get a list of all the websites linking to that post.

In this example, I’m gonna click on the “58” in row #3.

Now, I can see all the backlinks to this website that’s ranking for “best sandwiches near me.” (scroll down on this page).

And now the link heist begins!

We can click “Export to CSV” to download all the URLs in a CSV file.

We’re going to use this later.

Next, we have to write and publish a great blog post for link building.

Then, we will go to Postaga for Step 2 of this sequence.

Grab a free account.

Then, we are going to build a Custom URLs campaign to find contact information for these websites and send out the campaign.

After going to create a new campaign and selecting Custom > Custom URLs, we enter in the Ubersuggest URLs we exported into a CSV.

Then, Postaga will analyze the URLs and find contact information for these websites.

Next, we choose an email sequence to send (we can create our own sequence from scratch or use one of Postaga’s).

And in this section we can see the emails that will go out to everyone, and we can further customize and personalize them if we want before we schedule and send.

And then we schedule our campaign.

That’s all there is to it.

And just like that, we can do Uber Skyscraper Technique, quickly and easily reaching out to websites to build backlinks.

Oh – real quick, I forgot to mention the email template.

Here is the email template that I use with Postaga for Uber Skyscraper Technique:

Write a Guest Post

If you can’t get other articles to link to your website…

Write articles for other websites that can link to your website.

Guest posting, or, writing articles on other websites, is a tried and true way to get quality backlinks.

Some agencies that do link building exclusively focus on guest posting because of how consistent and reliable it can be for building links.

When looking for guest posting opportunities, the best ones to pursue are websites whose content is relevant to your market, and also have high domain authority. Backlinks from those websites will be much more valuable to you.

Before I get into domain authority, let’s first talk about finding websites that accept guest posts.

So, what is the best way to go about finding guest post opportunities?

Here are some helpful search terms:

intitle:”write for us” + [keyword]

inurl:”write for us” + [keyword]

intitle:contribute + [keyword]

inurl:contribute + [keyword]

Websites that accept contributors often have a guest post submission page.

Keep in mind though, every website’s guest submission requirements are different.

So, you cannot expect good results if you send a mass email to every website that accepts guest submissions.

For example:

Some websites require you to fill out a website form with information about your guest submission…

Other websites have minimum requirements of submission content (e.g. word count, min/max # of outbound links).

And others might require that you send things like a topic outline, a headshot, sample articles you’ve published.

The common pitch requirements will be:

Since many websites accepting guest posts require these things, you should make a single document where you keep all these components. 

This way, you can easily reference them for different pitches, rather than have to write everything from scratch on every website you pitch.

Beyond that, most guest submission pages also have parameters for acceptable submissions. 

The common post submission requirements are:

Every website that accepts guest posts generally has their own guidelines, so make sure to pay attention to those.

There are a lot of websites out there that accept guest posts.

Which ones should you go after?

Ideally, all of them.

But, more realistically:

When you are trying to decide which websites to submit to, you might want to prioritize by domain authority.

Higher domain authority means their backlink is more valuable to your website.

You can look up a website’s domain authority with free tools like this one or this one.

Also, don’t be afraid to submit the same pitch to multiple websites.

If your post is not accepted by a website, more often than not, they do not let you know.

So, don’t save your best post idea for a single website.

If two or more websites accept your same pitch, you can either try and have a different spin on that article idea for different websites, or let them know that the topic was accepted by another website.

Unlinked Mentions

Other websites might reference your company by name without linking to your website.

If they do, here’s a good opportunity to ask for a backlink.

These are called unlinked mentions.

How do you find them?

Here is a good search parameter to use:

intext:[your brand] -[your website URL] -twitter.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -youtube.com

What this does is search for your brand name, but it excludes looking at your website (where you would expect to mention your brand name), as well as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube.

You can also feel free to add any other website you know has mentions of your brand.

Aside from this search, you should also set up a Google Alerts for your company and your team.

With a Google Alert, any time someone mentions your brand, Google will let you know. 

If there’s no link, you can reach out right away.

Also, you probably don’t want to reach out to every website mentioning your brand.

For example: negative brand mentions.

You don’t want to get into a conversation with a blogger who already doesn’t like you.

Here is a sample email template you can use in your outreach:

HARO

Many news websites have very high domain authority, so links from them can be incredibly valuable.

But, news websites don’t link to anyone just for fun.

Though, they typically link to their article sources.

So, let’s become a source for journalists and get them to link to our website!

There is a way where you can help journalists and get backlink in return.

It’s called Help A Reporter Out, aka HARO.

HARO is a platform that connects journalists and sources.

How it works:

As an example, one day I came across this question from a HARO list.

I replied to the email address with a thoughtful response.

Then, a week later, the author let me know that my response was featured in their post.

And just like that, I got a backlink with about 10 minutes of work.

You won’t necessarily get featured for every response you give, and you may not find a question you can answer every day, but it’s another tool in your link building arsenal.

Update: The day I published this article, I got a notification that a response was featured in Forbes.

Best / Top Ranked Lists Exclusions

If you sell a product or service, chances are there are other websites out there that rank you and your competitors.

Articles like, “Best [your industry] businesses in [city].

Go to your preferred search engine. Type this in:

Best [business type] -[your business name]

This gets you results where someone wrote an article about the best businesses in a certain category, excluding your business (We don’t want your business to show up here because we only want to reach out to websites that have not mentioned us).

Below is an example, where I’m looking for articles about the best ramen joints in New York City that do not mention my favorite ramen bar, Totto Ramen.

If I’m on the marketing team for Totto Ramen, I might reach out to these blogs demanding that they revise their articles to include my ramen joint, which is far superior to the others.

And now I have a list of websites that write about my industry, but haven’t mentioned me.

Then, we can reach out ot them, with an email like:

Get Reviewed Thanks to Your Competition

If you are trying to get your app or product or service reviewed by websites, you can start by seeking out websites that have reviewed your competitors.

Here’s the search parameter:

intitle:”[competitor name] review”

Next, we add the websites to our list.

We find contact people at those websites with our email address finder of choice.

Then, we reach out to them.

Here’s a template you can use:

Offer Expertise

Blogs often seek expert opinions on topics.

HARO exists as a platform to connect expert opinions with journalists.

But, aside from HARO, there are ways you can seek to share your expert opinion, by doing the work yourself.

You can find websites that can feature expert opinions and reach out to them to share yours.

Go to a search engine.

Type in either of these searches: 

1..200 (experts|pros|professionals) [keyword]

(Inurl:experts | intitle:experts) + [keyword]

The search results will include articles that feature expert opinions on your keyword.

You can reach out to these blogs and offer them additional content for their article.

Submit to Business Directories

There is an easy win to get some backlinks, and it’s by submitting your website to online directories.

Online directories often offer a completely-free opportunity for you to create a profile for your website and list your business information, including a URL for your site.

Years ago, directory listings were rocket fuel for SEO, but over time with Google algorithm updates, they became less potent. So now, many SEO professionals ignore them entirely. However, that does not mean they are ineffective. It just means you need to find good, quality, relevant directories to submit your website to.

And because most directories ask for the same information, if you create a spreadsheet with most of the common info you’ll need, and submit your profile to different relevant directories, you can get a lot done and get some good backlinks.

Be a Podcast Guest

This strategy has the benefit of getting you a backlink, while also getting you exposure to a new audience and potential customers.

Generally speaking, every podcast has a website.

On those websites, they have pages dedicated to each episode.

And for each episode, they have show notes where they link to the guest’s business and social media profiles.

If you’re just trying to get as many backlinks as possible and don’t care about anything else, this strategy might not be for you. It takes time to do – you have to spend the time being on a podcast and cannot outsource that.

But, if you are thinking of leveraging podcast guest outreach and apperances as a marketing channel for your business, the backlink is worth it.

When you have found podcasts that you want to be a guest on, you will need a compelling pitch.

Here is what I recommend for your pitch email:

• Show your interest in their podcast
• Pitch an episode topic or topics
• Demonstrate your relevant expertise
• Reciprocity – show that you are willing to promote the podcast

Here is a sample of an email template you can use for inspiration:

Conclusion

It’s a lot of info.

I know.

But, this should give you a good start.

Bookmark this post and refer back to it when you need some ideas for how to build backlinks.

And after doing these for awhile, these strategies will become natural to you.

Whenever I write a blog post, as a matter of routine, I will do link building with Uber Skyscraper, Resources Posts, Mention Outreach, and Link Roundups. Every time.

The day I hit publish on this very blog post, you best believe I am going to build links for this post.

Many of the strategies can be run easily and for free with tools like Postaga and Hunter. So, I’d recommend grabbing accounts with them .

If there are any important strategies you think we missed, or you have some experiences to share, or just any comment at all, please leave a reply below.