There are many many factors that will affect the SEO of a website and the articles on it. The content 
itself, the user experience and much more all contribute to how well a web page ranks. Another factor that determines the SEO of a web page comes with the backlinks coming from other websites to it. Linking is a crucial part of SEO, so here are some ways you can try and get backlinks from other high ranking websites, to boost your SEO efforts.
Perform a Competitor Analysis
If you want to improve the SEO of a web page, you need to first understand what competitors are being linked from, and the type of websites that would benefit your web page to have a back link come from.
If you were to manually do this, it would be through your own understanding of competitors, and ideas of websites that you think would be useful to be linked from.
The problem is that this can be really time consuming – from personal experience, it is far better to pay for a subscription SEO service, such as SEMRush, Moz or Ahrefs to automatically determine what websites you should be getting links from to improve a web page’s or website’s SEO.
Reach Out
Once you understand what websites you should be targeting to gain backlinks from and to what articles, the next step is to try to contact the website owners/editors. From here, it is a grey area as to how to get other websites to link to you. For me, I found the following methods are best to gaining backlinks from websites you know of:
- Illustrate the benefit of linking to your website to them – how you provide content they don’t (and will never) have.
- Let the other website benefit from a link back too.
- It’s a numbers game – for this reason, don’t lose faith if you don’t get backlinks after contacting as many as even 10 websites. But, be sure that the more you contact websites, the more you will hear back from them, with the potential of a back link too.
- Target 404 pages – This is a really good technique I found to be super useful. Instead of targeting potential good backlinks, look at your competitors and related websites using SEO tools to see what external links go to 404 pages. Clearly, this is something the website owner will not want, so informing them of this issue is good news to them.
When this happens, offer content from your website that would be a good replacement for the link – typically, when website owners have 404 errors for external links, they do not want to remove the link completely. It makes more sense to replace it with another source that adds value to the article: make that article yours!
