We just need more links

Google’s PageRank algorithm is the basis for how they decide whether to rank a page for a specific search query. One thing that has always been a huge ranking signal is the number and quality of backlinks. It’s somewhat of a popularity contest: if a website that itself has a lot of backlinks, links through to your website, it’s a strong signal to Google that you can be trusted to appear in the search results. Now of course this isn’t the only ranking signal, but it’s the one that most people aren’t doing enough of. The reason is that backlink building can be boring, manual work, and just isn’t as fun as writing the post in the first place. Therefore it’s important that it’s featured prominently in your strategy, so that you know it’ll get done. One good rule of thumb is to build one backlink for every new article you publish. That way you can only do the thing you like (writing articles) if you do the thing you don’t like but that adds value (building backlinks).

The obvious strategy for backlink building is guest posting, though that’s relatively saturated because everybody is doing it. It’s also quite time intensive as you have to find backlink opportunities and then write a full post for them and hope it gets accepted. Even then most of the links you build will turn out to be worthless: you end up on a rarely visited page, so you won’t get much traffic from them directly, and won’t get much authority passed across. One easier and quicker root to getting a handful of early backlinks is directory or resource pages. These can be found with search operators like skincare men “recommended links”. This will find websites that talk about skincare for men, who contain the phrase “recommended links”, indicating they’re a directory. There are hundreds of potential search operators you can use, so it’s just a case of trying a few, seeing what you get back, then trying something more creative to find non-obvious sources of links.