One of the most important methods to increase your online popularity is building backlinks to your website. In other words, those are all the redirections to your page from other sources. Backlinks are the core aspect of SEO. Being mentioned in the articles of valuable blogs authored by high-profile bloggers is one of the best ways to promote your product.

Backlinks, SEO, dofollow, nofollow

I’m not a positioning specialist, so I don’t want to write volubly about the topic on which I don’t feel like an expert. In my work, I treat Backlinks as one of the ways to promote my website, and I’m quite aware of the fact that many of you do not have enough time to study them thoroughly, so I won’t bother discussing all these complicated mechanisms.

However! What you must know is that links to your site should come from valuable sources. If the search engine “decides” that links leading to your website are the result of spamming activities or that they are artificially generated, the position of your site will significantly drop in search results. This will be followed by a lower return from the organic traffic.

The user-oriented, valuable activities are evaluated positively, while the Google-algorithm-oriented spamming ones can lead to the catastrophe. So if we want our website’s position to go up in the ranking consistently, we should focus on the quality of the links, not their number. Of course, the more of them we have, the better, but remember that one link of value can do more good than hundreds generated by the spammer activities on forums.

Ways To Get Backlinks

• Guest Posts – publishing them on the web is a great way to gain traffic from other sites. There are plenty of blogs and sites that accept valuable posts so you won’t have trouble finding them. On Kaboompics’ blog, we also like to publish interesting articles, and help aspiring bloggers and writers promote, so if you feel like you can contribute, let us now! However, if you don’t feel like the content you create is matching our blogging style, you can always try somewhere else – let me recommend a few interesting places, where you can start searching:
  

  Here’s a list of 50 popular blogs that accept guest posts prepared by Shoutmeloud.
  While here you have a stunning number of 1500+ blogs prepared by izideo. Something for everyone’s niche 😉

• Round-Ups – that is, lists created by bloggers or news services, rankings or simply recommended products or websites (e. g. My Top 5 Photography Apps or 10 Best Free Stock Photos Websites)
• Events – Take part in events whenever possible. Even better if you organize them on your own. It may even be a small workshop or course, during which we encourage the participants to share their impression via their social networks. It is important that they tag us or use a special hashtag prepared beforehand, e. g. #Kaboomknowledge
• Following the competition – it is worth to check what our competitors are doing, and what’s the biggest source of their traffic. You can even have a glance at the links that refer to their website in order to get ideas. If we have a page that’s our ‘role model’, we should thoroughly observe its actions and act likewise.
• Engaging in charity – active participation in such undertakings is an excellent idea for many reasons. Of course, helping those in need is the most important, but there are positive side effects – it has a great impact on the brand’s image and boosts its online popularity.
• Surprise us – with unusual events or ideas. It is a great way to draw attention towards your brand. Example: Some dude turned his car into the vehicle from Ghostbusters and travelled through several cities, generating a lot of hype 😉
• Hunting – organize contests where you hide small souvenirs with your brand’s logo all around the city, take photos as you hide these things and publish on your social media. Fans will be looking for them and the event will be trading.  Many well-known brands did that. Also, the actress Emma Watson ;P

Tools

Here you will find a few websites where you can check how big is your competition’s traffic and where does it come from. With these tools, you will be able to analyze the backlinks of other sites and draw conclusions that will certainly help you to gain your own. Of course, you don’t have to follow the competition step by step, but looking at it can be a great inspiration.

• SimilarWeb – Its free version offers a limited amount of information, but you can still find out a lot about the site, e. g. Total Visits, Average Visit Duration, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Traffic by countries, Traffic Sources and, most importantly, Referrals, which are the backlinks – the origin of the traffic. As for Visits, take it with a grain of salt, because if the website has not been linked to Google Analytics by the owner, then these are only estimates. I used to connect Kaboompics with GA on SimilarWeb, and the displayed results were understated. Thus, I take these statistics as a rough calculation.
• Monitor Backlinks – we can check only one domain per week for free and it only displays a limited number of results
• Small Seo Tools – free, but only up to 100 results. Enter your domain and click the button to check how many backlinks your website has. But you are also able to check the value of each link.
• Google – we type the name of our competitor into the search engine and check it in the results who mentions them. We can filter results, e. g. by the date – just click on Whenever and choose the results for the last 24 hours, a week or your own range of dates. This is also an excellent way to monitor your own brand. In my opinion, it works very well if you have only one project to follow. However, for a larger amount you may need more sophisticated tools such as Brand24.
• Alexa – a paid, but very advanced tool