10 Tips to Build Free Backlinks to a Brand New Website that Work

Building backlinks to a new website is not as easy as it was about a decade back. You could once get backlinks from forums, blog comments, and directories, and search engines would consider them as relevant backlinks.

But now, the game has changed. Search engines are choosy, they consider backlinks that your website gets until it’s relevant to your niche. Plus, if the backlinks are from a low quality website, you can even get penalized by search engines resulting in de-indexing your website.

Given these challenges, link building now requires expert knowledge – You need to find relevant websites and identify bad backlinks. Also, most top websites do not give a free backlink, you may need to spend anywhere between $100-$1000, or even more for a single backlink.

A new website owner with no budget, you will find link building to be an uphill task. You have zero domain authority, probably no brand name, so website owners will be hesitant to link to your website unless you pay them a good amount of money. And in the end, the juice may not be worth the squeeze, as some backlinks are useless.

But tons of new websites succeed with backlinking and even beat established competitors in Search Engine rankings. In this blog post, we will show you how to replicate their success.

Here are 10 tips on how you can build backlinks to your new website for free.

1. Write Top Quality Content

Top quality content is the key to success for any blog. This is because it’s what your readers will come to expect from you and if they don’t see it, they’re going to stop reading and go somewhere else.

But when you write content that is relevant to your readers and helpful for their audience, you get natural backlinks to your website.

Here are some general guidelines for what makes good content.

• Knowledge: Write about things you are knowledgeable about. This doesn’t mean that every article has to be about your profession or hobby, but you should have enough background knowledge to write about it with authority.
• Finesse: Your content needs to be worth reading. Make sure it’s interesting, informative, and entertaining.
• Structure: Keep your readers engaged by organizing your points logically and using appropriate transitions between them.

2. Score Featured Snippets

The more people see your listing on Google Search Results Pages (SERPs), the better the chance of them visiting your website and linking to it.

And Google’s Featured Snippets feature provides an excellent opportunity for businesses to rank higher on SERPs. Google displays snippets of your content in response to some search queries.

The snippets are displayed at the top of the organic search results page; they stand out in terms of design, thus attracting more eyeballs than a generic SERP listing.

As a new website, your backlink profile will grow if you score featured snippets. Here’s everything you need to know about Featured Snippets and How to get them.

3. Find and Fill Content Gaps

Google is essentially a library of content. It stores tons of pages and serves them for relevant search queries. However, at times, Google can’t find content relevant to the search query. In fact, 15% of daily search queries are new!

If you write content that addresses that 15%, you stand a great chance of getting the top rank on Google, or maybe even score a snippet. This way, you are visible to a very niche audience who have no better source to link to; this way you score more backlinks.

Here’s a complete guide on how to find and fill content gaps.

4. Conduct Original Research and Publish Your Findings

Google has a lot of content. In fact, 7.5 million blog posts are published daily! Did you know how we got that number? Simple, we Googled it. And we also provided a backlink to the source.

Similarly, you can get backlinks if you publish data that no one else has. As stated earlier, Google is a library, but it does not have all the books. If you provide data that it lacks, it will publish at the top of the SERP listing, even if you are a new website. This makes it easy for people, looking for that information, to find you and link to you for free.

From a link provider’s perspective, you offer data and no one else does. Plus, Google endorses your content by ranking it at the top, so they can link back to it confidently.

However, to get original data, you need to invest time, effort, and money into research. You can conduct polls on Reddit or other forums and analyze the findings and serve them in an easy to consume format.

5. The Secret Tip

The more time you keep people on your domain, the more backlinks you get. And hosting quizzes on your website is a great way to do that. Quizzes are high engagement assets, they are fun, snackable, and easy to share.

People who try your quiz will want their friends and followers to give it a go, this generates quality backlinks to your website. For a new website, hosting quizzes is a great way to build an audience and get free backlinks.

6. Interact With Your Industry

As a new website, the best way to get free backlinks is to build relations within your industry. When you get on social media and interact with content from influencers, you put yourself on their radar for a future request for backlinks.

Besides, once you build clout, you can invite them over for an interview and summarize your interaction in a blog post. The interviewees might link to your content as it features them.

7. Attend Webinars

One great way to generate natural backlinks is to attend webinars relevant to your industry. You can then create content around what you learned in the webinar with the consent of the host, and share the link with them once it’s published.

The host may link to your content as they have a stake in it.

8. Write Long-Form How-to Guides

Long-form how-to guides are a great way to build free backlinks to a new website. They can target more competitive keywords which can be difficult to rank, but once it climbs rankings over time, they can drive tons of backlinks.

9. Promote With YouTube

YouTube can be a great source of organic traffic. In fact, it’s probably the best platform, other than Google, to generate traffic to your website. Also, your content ranks faster on that platform and offers better engagement.

You can link to your content in the video description to drive YouTube traffic to your website. You can create a video for practically any blog post you publish.

10. Respond to HARO Submissions

HARO – Help A Reporter Out – is a great way to generate backlinks for new websites from high authority sources.

On this platform, journalists publish an entry to seek quotes from industry experts. For example, if a writer from Forbes wants quotes on skincare during winter, she may invite responses from sources, like you, through HARO.

If you provide content that meets their requirement, you get a backlink from Forbes. This high-authority backlink can do wonders for your domain score and rankings.

Conclusion

Building free backlinks to a new website can be challenging. It will take time and effort but the above 10 methods will speed up your process and increase your success rate.