Backlinks still remain an integral part of SEO and content marketing. Without links pointing to your website, the amount of traffic you can reasonably expect to attract is limited. Likewise, search engines prefer to rank websites highly that have more backlinks pointing to them. When beginning your blog or website, it can be difficult to convince search engines that the content you’re producing is valuable. Likewise, the number of impressions you’ll be making will be limited as well. However, every website has had to start somewhere: how can you build backlinks when you’re starting from scratch? We’ll talk below about a few basic strategies for accomplishing this.

Build a Guest Blogging Plan

The first and perhaps easiest thing you can do to earn a large number of links is to blog for other websites that are already established. Guest blogging provides opportunities for smaller websites and blogs to earn links from bigger entities in exchange for quality content. Not all websites will be willing to offer you a guest blogging spot, but with so many potential entities to write for, you shouldn’t have much difficulty finding places who’ll accept you. The key to this is a) already having an established series of quality blog posts and b) knowing who to reach out to and how to reach them. For some, engaging via Twitter is ideal. For others, a simple email will suffice. Do a bit of research on your prospective guest blogging opportunities and figure out how best to appeal to them. This will help maximize the chances of pinging URLs from their blogs back to yours.

Build Great Multimedia

Whether it’s via social media, blogs, email or some other medium, people love to share great content. While blog posts can be informative, entertaining and well-written, the type of content best suited for earning backlinks is rich multimedia. This can be anything from podcasts and videos to infographics and interactive pages. These elements are in high demand in a world where entertainment, information and the ability to absorb content in a number of ways are all now present. Even mobile devices can be easily used to view videos and read high-resolution images these days, and that is driving the trend toward richer multimedia. If you can successfully produce content like this, then you’ll be able to quickly earn backlinks with a little bit of content marketing.

Answer People’s Questions

Last but not least, you should know that there is real opportunity in answering people’s questions in exchange for earning links. With many different websites out there built specifically for finding answers to questions, you’ll be able to quickly find topics where you have expertise. By answering people’s questions and citing your experience – in part – as your relevant blog, you’ll help increase the number of people who find their way to your site. While some of these websites will have nofollow links and therefore won’t influence Google’s algorithms, you’ll still increase traffic through them. Another option is to consider the benefit that sites such as HARO offer: here, you can answer questions for reporters. In exchange, they’ll cite you in their pieces and include links to your site.

Even with no reputation, you can quickly start pinging URLs to search engines by answering questions, building multimedia and guest blogging. Which one of these is more preferable to you?