We all want more powerful backlinks, right?

After all, backlinks are the third most important search engine ranking factor. However, a lot of bloggers and online entrepreneurs are not exactly sure how to achieve that.

Let's start with the basics here. 

There are usually two ways you can generate powerful backlinks for your website:

  • Contact shady search engine agencies who promise to buy you "natural" backlinks. More often than not, those backlinks don't work. In the rare scenario when they actually work, the cost of those backlinks are just too much to yield you any benefits. Moreover, Google is strictly against buying links. So there is always a chance of you getting penalized in the search engine rankings.

  • The second method is to generate high quality and completely natural backlinks via content marketing. This method requires a proper content marketing strategy and some hard work, but it's the only long-term solution.

In this post, I am going to discuss some actionable tips on how to create contents that actually attract more powerful backlinks.

So let's see what those tips and methods are.

1. Write Longer, Information-Rich Posts


If you want to consistently generate high-quality backlinks for your blog, you will have to understand the underlying framework and psychology of why people create outbound links.

When a blogger directs his traffic to another website, he wants his readers to find the most comprehensive and useful information that is available on a given topic.

For instance, whenever we talk about Google ranking factors, we tend to link to Brian Dean's complete list of 200 Google ranking factors.

Why?

Simply because it's complete and full of information. He left nothing out of it. If there is one article that you need to read on Google ranking factors, it will be that one. And you won't have to read another one. This is why it has generated so many backlinks from various domains.

This is the exact recipe of content creation that you need to follow if you want to generate backlinks.

Create super informative and in-depth articles that really explore a topic, provide actionable tips for your readers, and solve their problems.

2. Breach the traditional word count

Social media shares have a big role to play in any content marketing strategy. It generates traffic views, credibility, traction, and engagement. All of it eventually translates into better exposure and more backlinks.

According to a recent study, blog posts with more word-count get garner more social media shares.

You should at least aim for 2000+ word in-depth articles. Moreover, if the final word count can fall into the category of 2000 - 3000 words, then you are going to have even more social media shares — based on the quality of your content.

These social media shares are verification stamps by actual people that they liked your posts. In fact, they liked it so much that they decided to share it in their social media networks.

Other bloggers and influencers in your niche can see that. They know if other people are liking and sharing your content, their own readers will love that, too.

This is why increasing your social media shares is a great strategy to increase the potential of generating more backlinks.

And while we are at it, here is another tip to help you increase social media shares and, eventually, the total number of high-quality backlinks.

3. Create more list-based blog posts 

List-based blog posts work extremely well in the online marketing world. However, surprisingly, not many bloggers create such posts as often as they should.

Recently, BuzzSumo and OkDork conducted a research to determine why blog posts go viral. According to the results of their study, list-based blog posts and infographics get the most amount of social media shares.

People actually prefer list-based blog posts. And such posts garner 11,000 social media shares on average.

There is also a very common misconception that there are too many list based blog posts and that you shouldn't create any more of them. However, it is simply not true. The same research also indicated that despite the popularity of list-based posts, only 5% of the web content are based on lists. 

There are many popular websites that have cracked this code and creating more and more blog posts that have numbers and lists in them.

BuzzFeed and UpWorthy are some of the big names that instantly pop out in our minds. They have specialized in creating list-based posts, and most of their content goes viral on social media. It has been their major traffic source for a long time, and it continues to grow.

4. Create more Infographics

Infographics, without any doubt, generate the most amount of backlinks. 

If you are serious in acquiring more backlinks in a relatively short period, creating high-quality Infographics should be in your content marketing plan.

As you can also see in the earlier research done by BuzzSumo and OkDork that Infographics generate the most amount of social media shares - an average of 14,000 social media shares. Such a huge amount of social sharing definitely helps in getting you a lot of necessary exposure, credibility, and authority. 

More importantly, Infographics are relatively harder to create than simple blog posts. This is one the main reasons why so many people just prefer to create a link back to an Infographic instead of putting all that information on their own.

If you’re not a graphic designer, you can hire a good designer to create infographics for your website or you can start on your own. This may seem a little hard at first, but there are plenty of excellent tools that let you make great infographics quickly.

Here are a few tools for you to get started:

Also, here is a guide that will help you learn how to create infographics and promote them to acquire exposure, traffic, and backlinks.

The Beginner’s Guide to Infographics by Crazy Egg

Final Words

Building backlinks takes a lot of time, patience and a right approach. There are going to be quite a few things that will not be entirely in your control. However, the content that you put out and publish on your website definitely is.

Understand the basic principles and the psychology of why people create links to someone else’s work, and it will make the entire process a lot simpler and easier. At the same time, also understand link spams that can easily destroy your search engine rankings. Do that, and you will be fine.

Even in this post, I’ve created a few outbound links to other articles. Why did I do that? Simply because they are informative and useful to you. So, if your content has the high quality that the community requires, it will get the necessary backlinks. Apart from that, use the tips I mentioned above to increase the social media shares and exposure your blog posts get. It will all eventually translate into more authority and backlinks.