You can’t do without backlinks for your website if you want to rank on Google.

When you grant an interview, do guest blogging, send an outreach, social bookmarking, and so on, what you are looking for is a broader exposure and backlinks.

But without looking for backlinks in the right direction, you will do your website more harm than having no backlinks at all. 

NOTE: Searching for backlinks is good but could be HAZARDOUS to your website if the quality is bad. Thas why tools such as the Ahrefs backlink checker becomes useful.

It is important you know how to get free quality backlinks to your website and avoid being reprimanded by Google. Whether your backlinks are much or not, they can’t increase your ranking positions on Google if they are not of high quality.

This means that link building is a crucial SEO effort needed to boost your domain authority (DA) and gain organic traffic from Google.

There are laid down rules, that you must know if you want to build free quality links for your website.

And that is what this guide is all about.

If it is your wish to get free quality contextual backlinks from authoritative websites, that can be accomplished with these backlink tactics that I am about to show you.

What is a backlink in SEO?

A backlink is simply a link that points to your website from another website. 

Take, for example, you have a post titled “How to Make Money As a Student” with the URL https://xyz.com/ How-to-Make-Money-As-a-Student /.

If I copy the post URL and put it in any related post on this blog, it means I have successfully created an:

• Outbound link for my website.
• Inbound link for your website.

To me, your link which I place on my website is called an outbound link because it is pointing out to your website (an external website).

And to you who owns the link I placed on my site, the link is called a backlink or an inbound link.

A backlink doesn’t essentially mean a domain-to-domain or domain-to-page link, but also a page-to-page or post-to-post link between two externally related websites.

From a professional viewpoint, a backlink is an inbound link – a link that comes to your website from an external source.

You can see that such a collaboration is a vote of trust from a website to another. For me to embed your link in my post, that means I trust you and agree with whatever information you putting out.

So, you see that link building is a very serious aspect of SEO. It’s like air is to life.

Air is free and everywhere, but you have to choose between breathing in clean air or contaminated hazardous air. That’s the same thing with backlinks, you have a choice to make while searching for backlinks.

There are free quality backlinks and there are bad ones. The bad ones are capable of destroying your website’s reputation. Subsequently, your domain authority (DA) will be negatively affected.

And if your DA is low, no authoritative websites will give you free quality backlinks that you don’t deserve.

For this reason, the links you get naturally to your website are valuable.

No one wants to give you a pat on the back. if you didn’t earn it. Get backlinks takes a lot of hard work, such as knowing how to write quality content and some simple Off-page SEO efforts to get authoritative backlinks.

So, if you want to know how to get free quality backlinks to your website or blog, the answer is you will have to wait for them to come naturally.

Types of backlinks

There are four major types of backlinks and each one has its use, but one carries more weight than the others. There are:

1. Dofollow backlinks
2. Nofollow backlinks
3. Sponsored backlinks
4. UGC backlinks

1. Dofollow backlinks

Dofollow backlinks are the kinds of links that send link juice from a website to an external website which the links point to.

It’s mostly used if you want to share in the authority of another website, you let the owner place your link on his website.

Example of dofollow backlink:

<a href=”https://forexample.com”>anchor text</a>

By default, dofollow links take no tag or attribute, so when the spiders (search bots) come across an external link on a site, they will know what to do with the link depending on its attribute. And via the anchor text, the bots receive a signal which tells them to let the authority of the referring websites flow to the linked websites.

Because search engines automatically index dofollow backlinks list, they make a great impression on your rankings and target traffic.

The main mission of any SEO activity going on both within and outside your website is to become an authority in your field of business. If you know how to get free quality backlinks from authoritative websites, your mission is surely going to be met.

But no website will give you free quality dofollow backlinks if you don’t have quality content or your website’s speed is slow.

That makes it very essential to first fix your technical and on-page SEO if you want to get dofollow links from authoritative websites.

2. Nofollow backlinks

When people or websites don’t want to share their authority (link juice) with the other websites they are linking to, they offer nofollow backlinks.

Nofollow backlinks are external links placed on a website, which gives no authority to the websites that the links point to.

Nofollow, is when someone places your link on their website and adds the tag rel=”nofollow” to it, instructing the search bots not to share their web authority with you.

Example of a nofollow backlink:

<a href=”https://forexmple.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a>

According to SemRush, struggling for a nofollow backlinks is useless. The use of nofollow emerged in 2005 when spamming was escalated.

To reduce spammers who used comments to embed spam links in other people’s websites, Google invented the nofollow link attribute. Therefore, the search engine recommended that nofollow should be added to any link you want to place on your website, especially, if you don’t trust its source.

Since then, most people avoid linking to low authority websites or rather give nofollow backlinks.

Normally, when you get a backlink, the benefit is mutual between you and the website linking to you. But if the backlink is a nofollow, it stops you from sharing in the link juice.

So, don’t get too happy when someone favors you with a backlink, because the link might be nofollow or have low quality. But this shouldn’t be a problem if your website is optimized and you have good page authority. Because others will be comfortable in giving you a beneficial dofollow link.

3.UGC links

User-generated content (UGC) are the types of links usually embedded on a website by its users or subscribers through a comment thread or forum post to link to an external website.

Examples of UGC links

<a href=”https://forexample.com” rel=”ugc”>anchor text</a>

So, when you join a forum or comment on a website and place your link on the thread, what you get is a UGC backlink.

This doesn’t mean nofollow backlinks and the likes are useless. The truth is your goal governs the types of links you get from other websites.

If you just need traffic, getting a nofollow backlinks might be okay.

Nofollow, UGC, and sponsored backlinks can be used to send referral traffic to your site if coming from authoritative websites.

On the other hand, dofollow backlinks can do more than sending referral traffic to your website, especially, if it is your mission to outrank your competitors on search engines, then you need as much dofollow backlinks as possible.

4.Sponsored links

These types of links are the links that point to an advertisement on a website.

Examples of sponsored links

<a href=”https://example.com” rel=”sponsored”>anchor text</a>

When you are placing a sponsored, advertised, or affiliate link on your website, it is a good SEO practice to add rel=” sponsored” in front of the link.

This will tell Google to treat the links as the attribute states.

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are important in SEO as much as citations and references are to authors. They are important because:

1. They Act As A Vote of trust

Your backlinks can be seen as a vote of trust.

They can be explicitly used to measure the worth of your website or authority as an entity on search engines or the web as a whole.

It is a misdirected sense of priority to look for backlinks without having quality content.

Free quality backlinks will come naturally from relevant authoritative websites if your content is outstanding. Because of this phenomenon, backlinks can be seen as byproducts of quality content.

Before a backlink can boost your rankings, you have to first get their trust by creating linkable content on your website. All you need is quality, not quantity.

2. Backlinks Are How Google Finds New Pages

The simplest answer to the “why are backlinks important?” question is because they are how Google spiders discover new pages.

Just like we use a map to find our way in new environments, Google spiders use backlinks to find, crawl, and index pages on a website.

Think about it: You are more likely to find where you are going if it’s connected to other locations right? A tiny street that sits in the middle of nowhere could take a while to find, that’s if you manage to find it, at all.

A lot of backlinks improve your website chances of being found quickly, which leads to faster indexing, and higher rankings, 

3. Backlinks Are Google’s Reputation Management Tool

Google isn’t human. Although the algorithm was created and is operated by actual people, but the software doesn’t have a human brain.

Granted, that can have advantages—but they are slow in determining which sites are worthy of high rankings.

Enter backlinks.

You see, backlinks are important because they are used as Google’s reputation tool. Since Google’s main aim is to point users in the direction of the best possible result for their questions, they won’t point users in the direction of a site that’s writing non-relevant content.

Instead, they want to point them to a popular website—because a popular website means it has a good repute and can be trusted.

4. Backlinks Drive Traffic to Your Site

Google won’t trust a website that doesn’t get any traffic. Obviously, it’d sit lower down in the SERPs.

But, websites with lots of traffic must be trustworthy and offer some value, because for the website to keep getting traffic means people are enjoying o benefiting from whatever content is on that website.

It doesn’t matter if the backlink is through a social media share, directory listing, or guest post submission, anyone who clicks a backlink and lands on your site helps to boost your referral traffic.

So, when you are executing your own link-building strategy, aim for free quality backlinks from relevant, high-quality sites with a Domain Authority of 40+. These websites have a larger, established audience—and a better chance of improving the overall traffic to your own website.

How to get free quality backlinks to boost your website SEO

Having a reasonable amount of quality backlinks can boost your rankings. There is no doubt about it.

But the problem is to get free quality backlinks is not easy. So, waiting for inbound links to come to your website naturally will take a lot of time.

For that reason, you can’t fold your arms and stare at the ceiling?

After publishing your content, you have to make an effort and do the best you can to pitch your content to authoritative websites for quality dofollow links.

Considering these following tasks can assist you in building quality backlinks fast to your website.

1. Create linkable content

The most natural way of getting backlinks is through the content of your website. If you have quality content, other content creators won’t mind placing your links on their websites.

When their audience follows the link to your website, their hope is to provide reference to the topic in the discussion so they can have adequate information on the topic.

It would be irrational to refer my audience to your website via your link and on getting there, they find nothing useful. This will hurt not just your website but mine also, as I have now lost my audience’s trust. 

So, if your content is worth linking to, authoritative websites will link to it.

Website content doesn’t necessarily mean just the text but all linkable resources on a website which are web pages, posts, infographics, images, videos, eBooks, case studies, and so on.

Hence linkable website content is basically any resource or information that can be used to provide additional information on other websites.

Linkable content must be:

• Highly researched
• Authoritative
• Evergreen
• Educative
• Focused on a niche audience

Whether your content is text or graphic, you need to know how to produce content that people want to link to. This will give you the opportunity to build your links naturally from websites that are related to your niche.

2. Build links from interviews

Another way to get free quality backlinks to your website is by finding interview opportunities on authoritative websites.

Getting interviewed on a relevant website is one of the easiest ways to build backlinks to your website naturally. But unfortunately, many people are not looking in that direction.

Aside from the link-building opportunities you get from being interviewed, your business will also get broader exposure, credibility, and authority on the web.

But that opportunity doesn’t just happen overnight, before you can get such an opportunity, you have to be valuable to people and exhibit your thought leadership.

You should be good with pitching ideas to relevant groups that you’re in. Pitching ideas on relevant groups can make you easily gain the attention of the other members.

Having established a good relationship in the group, you can suggest interviewing members based on a mutual understanding to place their links on the interview and link back to it or another relevant posts on your website

One of the best places to pitch for interview opportunities is Facebook or Twitter.

3. Build links from roundups

If you usually do nothing after publishing your post, one of the chances you’re missing out on is a link roundup.

A link roundup is a strategy to collect content from different websites on a particular issue.

Let’s assume you want to do a roundup on a topic related to “healthy foods”, you will have to reach out to relevant authors for their posts on “healthy foods”.

While you are doing the compilation, each person will have a chance to place some of their links in the content being submitted for the exercise.

The major benefit of link roundups is to link out to other websites so all contributors can gain backlinks from the host.

If you can find websites that accept link roundups, that would be a major additional source of getting free quality backlinks to your website. Most veteran bloggers use a roundup link-building strategy because this is how to get free quality backlinks fast.

But it doesn’t matter if you are a novice, you can also make good use of roundups happening around your niche or business.

4. Link exchange strategy

The link exchange tactic is a fast backlink-building approach through which you can exchange a relevant link with another person.

The steps are simple, all you have to do is assess the other website and find out what it is all about.

If you are both covering the same topic, look for a post that you can link to on it and contact the owner for an exchange. But because most people will give you a big fat NO, you must be ready to give out some incentives or money depending on the negotiations.

5. Skyscraper method

The Skyscraper link-building strategy was introduced by Backlinko.

It gives you insights into the ranking scores of high authority websites, so you could leverage on their weaknesses.

To spy on your competitors and get comprehensive information about their link profiles, you need some SEO tools such as:

• MOZ
• Ubersuggest
• Majestic
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• SimilarWeb
• Google keyword planner
• Pro rank tracker
• Social Mention
• Hootsuite

These tools can be used to discover the top-ranking posts on your competitors’ websites and find those who are linking to them.

With the information you get from this exploit, you can then produce better content and ask those who are linking to your competitors to link to you instead.

Conclusion

If you want your website to strive and rank well on search engines, there are hundreds of SEO tactics that you can use. Among them, backlinks remain the key.

Building free quality backlinks for your website can bring you the most SEO benefits. This is why Google is strict about how, where, and when you acquire your backlinks.

To get free quality backlinks from authoritative websites, your content has to be linkable.

With quality content, you can pitch to authoritative websites and get quality dofollow links for your website.

Having a hundred backlinks with poor quality won’t do you good, it will even do you more harm and Google will penalize you. Google sees your backlinks as votes of trust. So, your strategies must be natural. Links generated naturally are considered to be of high quality. They help increase your rankings.

I have shared some exclusive link-building tactics with you in this guide.

If you can make use of these tactics, they would help you build free quality backlinks for your website and establish your authority.