When you launched your website, you thought you would reach the symbolic 10,000 views milestone in a few months. But today, despite all your efforts, the curve of your statistics remains desperately flat…
In your mind, one question keeps coming up over and over again: why?
Your content is highly qualitative. Once a week, or even every day, you publish blog posts worthy of being included in encyclopedias. And yet… Nothing.
Nothing is more difficult than investing time and money on a website that nobody visits…
What if, much like the truth in the X-Files, the problem was out there?
For a moment, look at things from another angle: if people don’t read what you write, it’s mainly because they don’t know you. In the ocean of possibilities the internet represents, even the best websites can easily go unnoticed.
Fortunately, to push your website in front of your audience, there is a strategy that is well-known to successful bloggers and SEO experts: netlinking.
What is netlinking?
Also known as external linking or link building, it is a very popular strategy in digital marketing. Its principle: asking sites that deal with the same topic as your own website to insert links redirecting to it in some of their articles.
It is similar to one of your peers recommending you. And when it comes to SEO, it’s a real godsend. If reputable sites have faith in you, why shouldn’t search engines do the same?
Why is this method so effective?
Let’s take a concrete example… Imagine that you are at the head of a small artisanal baby food factory. In your workshop, morning and night, you give everything you have so that our little ones have access to organic meals, made with good local products at low prices.
In order to promote your activities, you have set up an e-shop with a blog.
A few miles away from you lives Chloe, a family blogger whose posts are read by 65,000 people every month. Seduced by an article you wrote about homemade baby food, she mentions it in one of her posts and includes links to your platform in it.
Her audience tends to trust her beyond doubt as her expertise and reliability are already well-established.
Soon after she mentions you, the numbers of visitors and views on your website start climbing – more and more people subscribe to your newsletter and you generate more sales than usual.
How to get quality backlinks?
It can be tempting to buy backlinks to improve your rankings in search engine results… But don’t do any of that.
For Google and other search engines, it is not the number of links that counts, but their quality. And very often, the links that can be purchased on their own are anything but qualitative.
If you want to improve your SEO by using backlinks, the following three methods are to be preferred.
1) Collaborating with influencers
If you think a blogger might be interested in one of your products, have the courage to approach him.
Depending on the terms of your collaboration, he may recommend your website for free, in exchange for a product or a financial reward.
For a truly optimal natural referencing, stay in your business sector. A tech blogger with 1 million monthly views won’t be very useful if you sell vintage clothing…
Therefore it is important to set up in advance a real marketing influence strategy.
2) Practicing link baiting
In spite of the difficulties, do not choose the easy way out… Each content you publish must solve a problem in the most documented way possible.
By doing so, you will encourage other content creators to cite you and rely on your writings to inform their own audience. Of all SEO techniques, this is by far Google’s favorite.
Do you remember the example of Chloe and homemade baby food? This is a typical case of link baiting.
3) Exchanging links
You’re not the only person looking to get more traffic through netlinking. Why not contact sites and offer them a link exchange?
It’s a simple way to improve your SEO without paying a cent.