How to get backlinks for your blog: A Beginners Guide

Backlinks are links from another website to yours. They can help people discover your content and remain one of the signals search engines use when understanding pages and their importance.

Getting backlinks can sound complicated when you first start looking into SEO, particularly when most SEO tools present you with enormous lists of domains and metrics. In practice, the basic process is much simpler: create something worth referencing, find relevant websites and give them a genuine reason to link to it.

This guide covers some of the most practical ways to start.

1. Create something people can actually link to

Before looking for backlinks, think about why another website would link to yours.

A standard article covering exactly the same information as the first ten Google results can be difficult to pitch. Give publishers something useful to reference instead. That could be original research, statistics, a detailed tutorial, a free template, first-hand experience or information that isn’t readily available elsewhere.

You don’t necessarily need to create something enormous. A small travel blog could publish current transport prices from a destination it has visited, while a local business could produce useful data about its industry or area.

A good test is simple: if you received your own outreach email, would the page be useful enough to link to?

2. Find relevant websites

A backlink is more useful when it makes sense in context. Rather than building a huge list of websites and emailing all of them, start with sites closely related to what you publish.

Google itself can be useful for this. Search for your main topics and see which independent websites regularly appear. You can also look at authors contributing to industry publications, resource pages and websites mentioned by other businesses or bloggers in your niche.

For example, if you’ve published a detailed guide to hiking in Peru, a relevant travel publication or hiking website is a much more logical prospect than a high-authority technology blog.

Keep your first list small. Twenty relevant prospects are more useful than hundreds of websites you’ve barely checked.

3. Look at your competitors’ backlinks

Your competitors have already done some of the research for you.

Backlink analysis tools can show which websites link to competing sites. Don’t simply export every referring domain and start emailing them. Open the actual linking pages and work out why the backlink exists.

You might discover that a competitor was quoted in an article, contributed a guest post, created a useful resource or was included in an industry directory. Once you understand how they earned the link, you can decide whether there’s a realistic opportunity for you.

Pay particular attention to websites linking to several competitors but not to you. If they regularly reference websites in your niche, they may be worth investigating.

4. Try guest posting

Guest posting involves writing an article for another website, usually with an author bio and sometimes relevant contextual links.

The easiest way to start is by finding publications in your niche that already accept contributions. Search for phrases such as:

“[your topic] write for us”
“[your topic] guest post”
“[your topic] contributor guidelines”

You can also check where people in your niche have previously contributed articles.

Read the publication before pitching. Find a subject that fits its audience but hasn’t already been covered extensively, then pitch that specific idea rather than sending a generic “Can I write for your website?” email.

A good guest post should still be worthwhile even without the backlink because you’re getting your work in front of a relevant audience.

5. Find broken links

Websites regularly delete or move pages, leaving other websites linking to URLs that no longer work.

If you find a broken external link and already have content that could genuinely replace the missing resource, contact the website owner and let them know.

Keep the message straightforward:

Hi Sarah,

I was reading your guide to [topic] and noticed the link to [resource] is returning a 404.

We’ve published a resource covering the same subject, which might work as a replacement if you’re updating the article: [URL]

Thought I’d flag it either way.

Cheers,
Peter

Don’t create a tenuous connection just because you’ve found a 404. If the original link was to a detailed research report and you’re suggesting a loosely related 500-word blog post, there’s little reason for the publisher to make the change.

6. Find unlinked mentions

Sometimes another website has already mentioned your business, blog, research or name without linking to you.

Search Google for your brand name in quotation marks and exclude your own domain. For LinkWise, for example, you might search:

"LinkWise" -site:getlinkwise.com

Check the results manually and look for genuine mentions without a link. If you find one, you can contact the publisher and politely ask whether they’d consider linking the mention to your website so readers can find the original source.

This tends to work best once your website has been around for a while and has started receiving mentions naturally.

7. Give journalists and publishers useful information

Not every backlink needs to come from traditional outreach.

Journalists, bloggers and industry publications regularly need expert comments, statistics, examples and first-hand experiences for articles they’re working on. If you can provide something genuinely useful, they may reference and link to your website when the article is published.

The important part is having something to contribute. Respond because you can answer the question properly, not because you spotted the word “backlink.”

You can also be proactive. If you’ve collected interesting original data, package the most useful findings into a short pitch and send them to relevant journalists or publications.

8. Write better outreach emails

You don’t need an elaborate outreach template.

Explain why you’re contacting that particular person, what you’ve created and why it could be useful to their readers. Keep it short enough that someone can understand the reason for your email without digging through several paragraphs.

Avoid pretending you’ve been an avid reader for years when you found their website five minutes ago. A specific, straightforward email is usually more credible.

Something as simple as this works as a starting point:

Hi James,

I came across your article on [topic] while researching websites covering [subject].

We’ve recently published [resource], which includes [specific useful information]. I thought it could be useful alongside the section where you discuss [specific section].

Here’s the article if you’d like to take a look: [URL]

Cheers,
Peter

Then adjust it for each prospect. The reason you’re contacting them should be specific; the entire email doesn’t need to be rewritten from scratch every time.

9. Keep track of your outreach

Once you’ve contacted more than a handful of websites, it becomes surprisingly easy to forget who you’ve emailed.

At minimum, record the website, page, contact, reason for approaching them, date contacted and outcome. A spreadsheet is perfectly adequate when you’re starting.

This also gives you useful information over time. If one type of content consistently earns links while another gets ignored, you can put more effort into what actually works.

What should you avoid?

Don’t judge opportunities purely by Domain Authority or Domain Rating. These are useful third-party metrics, but a high score doesn’t automatically make a website relevant or a backlink valuable.

Be particularly cautious about services promising hundreds or thousands of backlinks for very little money. Google’s spam policies prohibit links created primarily to manipulate search rankings, including practices such as buying ranking links and excessive link exchanges.

You also don’t need to build backlinks as quickly as possible. Five relevant editorial links can be far more worthwhile than 500 links from websites that have nothing to do with your subject.

Start small

If you’re building backlinks for the first time, don’t begin by trying to contact 500 websites.

Choose one page on your website that’s genuinely useful. Find 20 relevant websites, investigate why each might reasonably link to that page and contact the best prospects individually. Track what happens and adjust your approach based on the responses you receive.

Once you’ve worked through that process a few times, backlink building becomes much less mysterious. The tools can make the research faster, but the principle stays the same: give relevant websites a good reason to reference something you’ve created.