– In this video, I'm gonna
show you nine different ways that you can build backlinks to increase your Google rankings for free. I mean, well obviously this video's free. But what I really mean
is that the techniques I'm gonna show you cost exactly
$0 to put into practice. However, just because
these tactics are free doesn't mean that they're not effective. These are the same techniques
I use to build links from sites like the New
York Times, HubSpot, Inc.com and Search Engine Journal.
In case we haven't met before, My name is Matt Diggity and I'm the founder of
Diggity Marketing, LeadSpring, the Search Initiative, and
the Chiang Mai SEO Conference. This video is all about link building. A link, also known as a backlink, is when one website
places a clickable link to another website in its content. When someone clicks that link, they jump to that new destination. For example, someone clicks
this link in this article on zapier.com, they get
taken to my website. Why do we care about backlinks? Links are one of the most
important ranking factors in Google's algorithm.
– I'm kind of a big deal. – [Matt] In this study by Backlinko, they found that websites in
the top positions on Google have more backlinks than
websites in lower positions. That said, link building
is easier said than done. It takes time and requires
you to learn a new skillset, Which is why many people just
end up paying for backlinks. But you really don't need to pay. There's always ways to
build backlinks for free or should I say there's
correct ways to build backlinks for free and there's incorrect ways. As I was researching for this video, I found tons of videos
recommending outdated techniques, like blog comments, as a
way to build free links.
Bro, blog comments haven't worked since Pokemon Go was a thing. So in this video, I set up to spill the beans
on free backlink techniques that'll actually give you massive results. and I'll even give you outreach scripts so you can start putting these techniques into practice today. And here's the kicker. The best links on the planet
are the ones you can't pay for. So whether you pay for links or not, pay attention to this video if you want the best links possible. And make sure to stick around to the end because the last technique
gets the best of the best. Now before we get started,
here's where I ask for a hand on smashing that like button. Smashing the like button
lets the YouTube gods know that this video deserves
an algorithmic high five while at the same time encourages me to make more videos just like this one. The first technique is what I
like to call the fixer upper.
We're gonna look at where
our competitors got links and persuade those websites
to link to us instead. This one works like crazy. It's the exact techniques
I used to get a link from Typeform, a DR 93 website. Here's how to do it. You're gonna look for
articles in your same niche that have a lot of backlinks. Preferably ones that are older and might reference outdated facts such as cows milk being a miracle food or blog commenting being actually useful. Sorry, I'm really just picking
on blog commenting today. If I were to Google
"blog commenting guide," I'd find this guide here with 188 referring domain backlinks, according to my toolbar. And if I open it up? Sure
enough, it's old as dirt. 2013, which might as
well be the Middle Ages when it comes to SEO. Next, you're gonna figure out who all is linking to this article using a tool like Ahrefs or
the free trial of Ubersuggest. Here's what a backlink report looks like for that blog comment article in Ahrefs. I wanted to highlight this
article from Bluehost.
Bluehost is a major internet brand. I'm sure they want their
article on what to do after you start a blog to be
relevant today, not for 2013. So that brings us to the last step. Send them an email pitch
asking them to link to our up-to-date article instead. Here's how that'll look. First, you go over to their contact page and snag the press email. This one typically works best. Then you send them an email like this, "Hey Bluehost Team, This article you wrote, insert URL, is referencing some outdated advice. You recommend blog
commenting as a viable way to promote your blog. But this article from
Search Engine Journal quotes a Google employee saying that it 'doesn't work anymore
and hasn't for a long time.' I notice you don't have
HARO as a promotion strategy in your article I wrote a comprehensive
guide on HARO here. Would you mind linking
to it in your article? I'll write you the paragraph
if it would save time." It's as easy as that.
And then you repeat it again
and again for all the sites that are linking to that outdated article Since we just mentioned HARO,
let's jump on over to that. What is HARO? HARO stands
for Help A Reporter Out. It's a platform that allows
journalists to request quotes from experts to use in their articles. It's gotten me tons of links
like this one here from Forbes. For example, let's say that a journalist is writing an article in the New York Post about people that work online and they wanna quote from
someone who works online. So they might propose a question like, "What's the best thing
about working online that most people don't realize?" Well, that's convenient
because you work online. So you hit them up and
drop some knowledge bombs about being a digital badass. When they use your quote, they'll give you a link
back to your website. Easy breezy. – Let's go! Too easy, dude.
Give me that crown. Boom. – Here's the tactics that you need to use to get the best results from HARO.
Each day, HARO will send
out a list of opportunities for expert quotes. You need to jump on this right away and give your quotes
before anyone else does. Speed is the key. These journalists have deadlines so they're trying to wrap
up their articles ASAP. Next, don't get lazy. After you do a few of these, you might start giving half-assed answers to their questions. You want to answer each question as if you know you're
gonna get that backlink.
Visualize, focus, see the end
goal, whatever you gotta do. Just try to hit a home run every time. Lastly, answer as many
questions as you can. If your website is about knitting, if you sit around waiting for only knitting quotes to come up, you're gonna die before
you get five links. Remember, you work from home. You might manage people
and you've had other jobs. You could essentially write
content on anything related to business like hiring,
self-motivation, or whatever. I left a link in the description
to another video I made with some advanced HARO tactics so make sure to check it out
after you finish this one. Next step on the list is
to get your content placed in article roundup posts. You know those posts where
people recap the best content in a particular industry, like
my monthly SEO news roundup where I highlight the most
interesting news in SEO or this expert roundup
that I participated in for Rank Ranger.
Let me give you the perspective of someone who actually puts content
like this together. Scouring the internet for
the month's best articles in the SEO space is a bit of a time sync. It takes time to sort through
basically the entire web for qualified content. It's a huge pain in the ass to be honest, and it's much easier when people send me their articles proactively. But the thing is, after
I've put up a post, I can't be (beep) to go edit the article and add your article to the list. It's written. It's done.
The goose is cooked. So to get your content
placed in these articles, you need to get ahead of them. Here's how you do that. Here's a bunch of search
terms you should use to make a huge list of the
roundups in your niche. Keyword, like SEO, plus link roundup, keyword plus roundup,
keyword plus best of, this week plus keyword, and
this month plus keyword.
Next, you wanna get the email addresses for these publications
using a tool like Hunter.io or just using their contact form. Now, as soon as you
write a piece of content and it goes live, you want to email these guys with an email template like this. "Hey Diggity, I just finished up a piece of
content on SEO optimization that would be a great fit
for your SEO news roundup. It highlights five tested
ways that AI can be used to build rankable content." This is where you highlight
the unique benefits that your article would
add to the readership.
"If you could include it in your roundup, I'd be more than happy to show
that roundup with my audience and encourage my readers to subscribe." This is where you highlight
what's in it for them. Put this process into a repeatable system and you'll have free links on autopilot. The next free link building technique is broken link building. Broken link building is when you identify when a site links out to another URL, but the URL they're linking to is dead. Maybe the other website deleted that post or the website is
completely shut down itself. Either way, the link is
broken and that's bad for SEO. So what people usually
do is email a website with a broken link and say, "Hey there, in your article
,you're linking out to, insert broken URL, which no longer exists.
I recently wrote an updated,
current year version of that article here, insert your URL. If you'd like to update your broken link, we'd really appreciate it if you considered our article instead." But before we start saying
"Broken link building is so 2018, it doesn't work anymore," you're right. It doesn't work anymore unless
you add a little twist to it. I got this tip from my man, Brian Dean. The reason it doesn't work is because just like I don't
wanna update old roundup posts, people don't care about
fixing their old content even if it had broken links. But if I posted something fairly new that I know people are
reading, then hell nah. I want it fixed. Find a big site in your niche that has a lot of links going to it. So for me, let's use Backlinko.
Plop them into Ahrefs' site explorer and search best by links. Then set the http filter to 404 not found. This will bring up a list of articles that don't exist anymore ordered by how many domains link to them. This "Prevent Google
Penalties" article at the top has 32 domains linking to it. Clicking on that number, you get a list of all
those referring domains. But if you order by first seen, you'll get the most recent articles first. These are your target sites. Now go back and send that same template and watch your conversion rate double. By the way, I'd like to
give a shout out to Odys the sponsor of this video. Odys is a premium domain marketplace and is my one-stop shop
for money site domains. I've been using Odys domains
for two main purposes. First is for building
websites with a headstart instead of having to start from scratch.
This site is only a few months old and it's already getting
100 visitors per day. Second, Odys domains are
great for 301 redirects to give an instantaneous
boost to an existing website. The domains on Odys are all handpicked and vetted for quality. They stock powerful domains
with great backlink profiles in a variety of niches. And they also cover your ass by making sure that all the
domains have a clean history and have never been used
for any funny business. Sign up for Odys.
Use the link in the description and get a $100 welcome
bonus in your dashboard. Now, back to the video. The next free link building technique is link exchanges where you
trade someone for a backlink. You link to them and they link to you. Are link exchanges Google safe? Here are the Google
guidelines on link exchanges. They say "Excessive link exchanges, 'Link to me and I'll link to you,'" are listed under what
they call link schemes. The keyword here is excessive. As long as you don't do this too much and make it your primary
link building technique for crying out loud, you'll be fine. Now, the problem with link exchanges is it's not the most
efficient way to outreach and build links. This is what I mean. If you're gonna take the
time to find websites you want links from and send them emails offering them more value
like through a guest post, which we'll get to later,
is much more effective.
Simply asking for a link
swap wastes the attention that this person graciously gave to you. So here's what you do instead. As you very well know already, your email inbox gets
spammed a billion times a day from people trying to get
a link on your website. But if you actually take the
time to see who is asking, you'll see that many of these websites are actually quite good. And since they reach out to
your site asking for a link, they're gonna be super relevant to you. Instead of just ignoring
these outreach requests, respond to the people with the websites that you'd wanna link from
and ask for a link exchange. Just look at all these amazing links. I'll let you guess how
many of them were landed simply because I decided to take a look at who wanted a backlink.
Next up, we have linkable assets. This is the art of making content that attracts links like a magnet. There's various types of content pieces that work best as linkable assets. Research studies and statistic
pieces do really well. Ahrefs ran a case study where they built an SEO statistics page. It's still pulling links like crazy. Why does this work? Because writers need
to reference statistics when they're creating content. And typically when they
reference data, they link. Another linkable asset
type is a free tool. HubSpot made an online calculator for advertising ROI based
on some super simple math and it's pulled a butt
load of referring domains. Then we have definitive guides. There's hardly any search volume for anchor text optimization, but I made a definitive guide anyways and it's pulled massive links. Now that you understand what
types of linkable assets can be made, here's a framework
on how to create them. Step one, know your audience. What are their likes and dislikes? SEOs like data and guides
so that's what I create.
But people into fitness like hot bodies so I'd make something that
helps them achieve that like a fitness calculator, or helps them look at more of them like a roundup of the fitness
people on the planet today. Step two, figure out
what's already working by reverse engineering your competition. If videos are working, make a video. If free tools are working, make one. Step three, start to collect data. Make sure you're getting data from multiple sources of information. It helps with credibility
and, of course, linkability. Step four, make it look beautiful. Trust me on this one. Looks matter when it
comes to linkable assets. Step five, share it. Post it on your blog. Then share it on social
media, your email list, and outreach about it. Step six, rinse and repeat. Every year or so, update your
asset and begin promo again. Next up, we have an oldie but goodie, and that's guest posting. What is a guest post? It's when you offer to write
free content for someone.
And in that content,
there's an expectation that you'll have a link to your website. Many people say that guest
posting can't be done for free these days because all online publishers
are expecting money for a guest post. But that's because these people are going about guest posting the wrong way. You see this article I wrote
for Inc.com, a DR 92 website. Inc doesn't accept money for backlinks. You have to think outside the
box to get on sites like this.
One of my favorite techniques
for getting free guest posts is the rankable content guest post pitch. What you're doing here is
offering the right content that a website should
be able to rank for you. Offer to do free SEO for someone. If you wanna get a link
from HubSpot, DR 93 website, the first thing you
need to do is figure out who are their weaker competitors. Next, you're gonna use
Ahrefs' content gap tool to figure out what are the keywords that these other weaker sites rank for but HubSpot doesn't. Right away, you can see this
DR 76 website, WiseStamp, ranks for a term "email
signature examples" and HubSpot doesn't.
And considering that HubSpot
has 138,000 articles on email, you'd think that they want to. Now, you just send them
an email pitch like this. "Hey John, I was doing some research and found some topic pieces
that you could easily produce and pull traffic for. In fact, WiseStamp ranks for this and they have a fraction
of your authority, DR 76 versus DR 93. Title: 43. Next-Level
Email Signature Examples. I'd like to write this
for you, free of cost, in the form of a guest post. I've actually done this before
on, insert example website, who is now ranked number
three for their topic. If this sounds good, let me know, and I'll start this evening." This script converts crazy as hell. I left a link to a video called
"Guest Posting on Steroids" which has even more powerful
guest posting techniques. Check it out after you finish here. The next technique is called the favor. It's when you do someone solid and they feel obligated
to help you out in return. – You serious? – What are some nice things you could do for someone else's website, but also don't take a
huge amount of work to do? How about a list of
unlinked brand mentions? Where people mention a website,
but they don't link to them.
You're giving someone
a list of opportunities for themselves to get links. The way you do that is go
to Ahrefs' content explorer and type in someone's
brand name at the top, then minus their domain name. This will give you a
list of all the content on the internet except that person's site
that mentions their brand. Now you select highlight unlinked and type their domain name to pull up who doesn't link to them. Now export and you have
something to send out in your pitch email. "Hey there, I created a list
of 94 different websites that are mentioning you and your research, but not correctly citing
you for it with a backlink. Please find it attached. If you find this useful, would you mind if I get a
link myself from this article to my article?" It's as easy as that.
Next, we have digital PR. Which is not only the way to get the best links on the planet, but the most in a single effort. What you're doing here is
creating newsworthy stories and getting them in front
of the eyes of journalists in the biggest online publications. I wrote this article
on which tech companies have had the biggest
impact in the 21st century. It leverages data and polls
to achieve its conclusions. And it's picked up 65 backlinks including the New York Times. To do good at digital PR, you need to start with a relevant story. What subject is particularly
important today? Then you wanna make your
content as linkable as possible.
This almost always means that you wanna include a lot of hard data. And lastly, you wanna be able to get this in front of journalists that
are interested in that subject. I'll create a full video
explainer on digital PR so make sure to subscribe
so you don't miss it..
