Building Inbound Links In Today’s White Hat SEO World

It was not long ago that you could spam your way to success in the SEO world. Even in 2011, 2012, and maybe a little after there was still a tremendous amount of SEO link building spam going on. There were platforms that would spam comments to add links to your site and many other black hat tactics SEO’s would use. Many of them would work, but not for long.
The massive changes to Google’s Algorithm over the past five years, have completely changed the SEO game and many have gotten out and moved to content marketing tactics. Backlinks still have tremendous SEO value, perhaps not quite as much as before, but are still an important part of building up an SEO presence. The truth is though that building backlinks, otherwise known as inbound links, in today’s white hat only world is much harder than before, and simply takes a long time.
However, having an overall strategy to build links over time will help you build up your SEO presence and lead to a stronger link profile of inbound links to your website. Here are some tactics that not only can benefit your overall business in many ways, but help you build quality backlinks.

Events:

Creating events and building up your reputation at events can lead to more backlinks over time. If you speak at an event, sponsor an event, or host a Meetup, you can build backlinks. There is a good chance an event website will link back to your site if you do one of these things and Meetup.com or Eventbrite can link back to your site if you are involved in the Meetup.

Partnerships:

Partnerships are a great way to build backlinks because you can get industry relevant websites to link back to you on their partners page. Partnerships may also open up doors for other co marketing efforts that lead to quality backlinks. Building a strong network of partners will lead to a much stronger SEO presence.

Blogs:

Blogs are one of the most obvious ways to build backlinks. A quality, consistent blog, will lead to overall more traffic and people linking back to your individual posts. The better the posts, the more likely other websites will reference such posts as a source, thus generating more inbound links.

White Papers & eBooks:

White papers and eBooks are a great way to create content that can help you secure emails to build an email marketing campaign. Additionally, other websites may link to your resources if they offer significant value, helping build your inbound link profile over time.

Webinars / Podcasts:

Scheduling time for a webinar or podcast is a great way to get people interested in your products and services as well as learn more about your expertise. Having useful webinar pages with links to the videos after the webinar is completed can lead to other sites linking to the video as useful content.

Unique Downloadable Content:

Sometimes it helps to become creative regarding content you offer for download. Creating a checklist, an excel calculator, or other types of unique content to download can help spur interest to your website. A valuable resource like this could cause other websites to link back to your site as well.

Products, Software, and Demos:

If you can setup some sort of product, software, or demo online that attracts visitors you can gain traction to your website. You will also likely gain some links from other sites that want to link to your products, software, or demos. Releasing an open source version of a product is a great way to build a community of people who may link to your software or demos.

Social Bookmarking:

Social media has taken over the web, but most social media links are no follow links and are not considered inbound links. However, that is not necessarily the case for social bookmarking sites. Sites like BizSugar and other social bookmarking sites only publish posts that get a certain amount of traction, and those links can become inbound links. Here is a list of many social bookmarking sites that could lead to more backlinks for your website.

Public Relations:

Sites like PRweb.com and other PR websites can help you promote news worthy stories about your business. This is a great way to get your name out there and promote something exciting like a new product launch, partnership, or something else that might catch the attention of other websites linking back to you.

Google Web Masters:

You can see all of the links going to your site via Google Web Masters. You might find some interesting sites linking back to you. This could lead you to find other sites and ways to get other links on other similar sites that you might not have thought about.

Social Media:

Social media is a pretty obvious one here, but getting your content and news out on social media could help spur traction and allow new people to find your site. This could lead to new people linking back to your posts as a resource they find valuable. Make sure your blog posts and content you want being shared is easily shareable via share buttons on your site.

Local Listings / Citations

Local listings are a critical part of building an SEO presence. Getting your site claimed on the major local listings like Google Places, Yelp, YP, and much more can help you generate more local backlinks. There are services like Yext and Moz Local that can help you do this faster. Here is a list of some local listing sites you should claim.
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How To See Your Inbound Links

There are three solid sources for this as well as many other ways to find this out. One is Google Web Masters which will show you all the links Google has indexed that are linking to your website. The other are Ahrefs and Moz Open Site Explorer tools. Between these three tools you should be able to gauge how many backlinks you have and whether you are gaining new ones as well as how your competitors stack up against you.