How to convince other websites to link to your site

Links are the most important signal in Google’s ranking algorithm. The better the links that point to your website, the higher your rankings. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to get links from other sites. This article shows you how to convince other sites to link to your website.

how to convince other websites

Step 1: Identify the right websites

If you want to get as many good links as possible, you have to target the right websites. In general, websites that link to your competitors are good targets. These websites have shown that they are willing to link to other websites, and they are related to the topic of your website.

To find websites that link to your competitors, enter a competitor domain in the Link Profiler tool in SEOprofiler. The Link Profiler tool offers comprehensive filters so that you can find linking pages that contain particular words in the title, links with particular anchor texts, etc.

The Link Influencer tool enables you to find websites that link to more than one of your competitors. Usually, these websites are important hubs that should also list your own website.

Step 2: Give the other websites a reason to link to your site

After identifying the websites that link to your competitors, you have to convince these websites that it is better to link to your site. There are two main ways to do that:

Option A: Create better content

If your website offers better content than the website that is currently linked by the other site then you might be able to convince the owner of the other website that it’s better to link to your site.

Unfortunately, many websites won’t link to your site if they think that they are already linking to a very similar site. For that reason, option B usually leads to better results.

Option B: Create complementary content

Instead of trying to build content that is better than the content of your competitors, it is often easier to create complementary content. Create something that can serve as an important supplement to the pages that link to your competitors.

Pages with complementary content usually get more links than pages that contain the same content as an existing page, even if the content is better. For example, a well-known high-authority website might have an average article about a particular topic.

That article will get many links just because the website is well-known. If you have a better article about the same topic, changes are that the other websites still won’t link to your site just because your site isn’t as well-known and authoritative.

If you offer these websites something additional that complements the average article on the well-known site, then it is much more likely that these websites will link to your site.

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Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.