How to build backlinks when you have nothing at all

We all start out with nothing. Even if you're a well established brand with loyal customers, when you first create your website it is completely without a any back links.

If you have a solid social media following already, you've got a leg up on everybody else, as you can use your platform to promote your new website in all its glory. But what if you don't?

We've got a few tips on how to get started when you have absolutely nothing but a great idea and a brand new fancy website.

How to get those first few backlinks

First on your list should be an afternoon with a large mug of tea or coffee (or water, whatever you prefer), and some legwork signing up for all the relevant local and international business directories and self promotion services you can find.

We've got 10 websites to get you started:

About.me - a page to promote who you are

https://about.me/

You can create a page designed to professionally represent you and promote your business, brand, services and more.

The free tier allows you to write a little description and, more importantly, add a few links to your site.

You can then share the link on social media, or just leave it as is after sign-up and enjoy the free back link.

It is pretty easy, to get started click the "Get your Free Page" button, enter your e-mail address and follow the instructions.

"What do you want people to do on your page?", you can choose what fits you the best, it only affects what the button says.

When asked if you want a professional domain, say no thank you and continue with the free plan.

Once setup is complete, you can add links additional links to the description, just make sure to only include relevant links, such as "How to contact me" could be to your contact page. Spamming links will only hurt your ranking.

Screenshot of the About.me Sign-up form.
Example of an About.me profile.

Behance - the world's largest creative network

https://www.behance.net/

Behanced is Adobe's social platform, where creators of all kinds can create accounts, showcase their work and discover new inspiration and opportunities.

You can create an account, sign in with an existing Adobe, Google, Facebook or Apple account.

Once you've created or signed in, click the "Create a Project" button and add something. It can be a screenshot of your website or a little text about what you do. Don't forget to add a link in the body of the text.

Click Continue, then follow instructions and finally Publish and you're done.

Screenshot of Behance, showing how to create a Project.

Brownbook - a global business listing database

https://www.brownbook.net/

This one is pretty straight forward: Click the Plus in the top right corner, fill in the required information and confirm your e-mail. Done.

Dribbble - for digital designers and creatives

https://dribbble.com/

Dribbble (yes that's three b's) is a self-promotion and social networking platform for digital designers and creatives. It is a portfolio, jobs and recruiting site rolled into one.

To get started, Sign up with an existing Google account or create an account from scratch. Once you're all set up, add your link to the "Online Presence" part of your profile. You can also add a portfolio URL, but those don't give a back link as they're only shown if you choose to make use of their job platform.

Screenshot of Dribble's link profile.

Ello - The Creators Network

https://ello.co/

This is another easy one, simply click the Sign Up button, enter your e-mail, fill out the relevant forms, then finally add a link to your website.

Europages

https://europages.com/

Europages will provide you an awful lot of back links, as your profile will be translated into 23 languages (at time of writing, likely more to come). These are obviously duplicate links and won't count heavily towards your ranking, just be mindful of it when you suddenly see a bunch of new back links pop up one day.

Click the "List your business for free" button to get started.

Enter your business details, and follow the instructions.

Once you're done, it can take a few hours for them to generate all the pages, don't worry it's all automatic.

Screenshow of Europages signup page.

GrowthHackers

https://growthhackers.com

Create an account, or sign in with your existing Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or Apple account.

Once you're in, click the green Plus button (Create), and then Article.

Here you can write a little excerpt from your website, blog or whatever else you think might attract some eyes.

To add a link, simply select the text, click the link button and write your URL.

Click Post when done.

Screenshot showing you how to create a link on Growthhackers.

https://www.txtlinks.com/

Looks a bit old school, but does the job.

Find a category matching your business, then click the add URL button and fill in the information. If you're linking back to them, you can add the URL where you do so. It is however not required at time of writing.

How to add a link on Txtlinks.

Linkcentre.com

https://www.linkcentre.com/

Screenshot of the Linkcentre account creation call to action.

Click the Create Account button, and you'll be taken to a page where you can choose between several tiers of service, they have a free one available.

Fill in your company information on the next page. Please note that the free tier requires that your e-mail match your domain. This means what is after the @ must match. Example: [email protected] would be acceptable when adding northrook.com.

Once you've signed up, check your inbox for the validation e-mail. Open the link in the e-mail, and on the confirmation page, you can find the "submit a website" button. Click it, and follow the instructions.

Done!

Tinyurl

https://tinyurl.com/app

Screenshot of the TinyURL link creator.

This one is a little bit different.

TinyURL is designed to help shorten long links to something less overwhelming. Let us imagine you have a cornerstone product in your webshop. The URL might be massively long. To make it easier to share you can simply paste it into the Long URL field, and write something like "yourshop-product" in the alias field.

The back link part is a little obfuscated, but works nonetheless. Each TinyURL link simply takes you to the long link, but also has a page generated that can be viewed by adding "preview" as the subdomain.

Check it out: preview.tinyurl.com/northrook.

As you can see, this has uses far beyond back linking, and their service starts from just zero money!

Conclusion

That's it for our list. There are thousands of services like the ones above out there, from industry specials to local directories. Have a quick search and I'm sure you can find more!

Back links take time

Now that you've got a good foundation, it's time to start the real work: creating relevant, high-quality content that your visitors love, and share it wherever you can.

The links you've created today will by no means stand on their own, you'll have to keep adding new and relevant links to your site for quite some time. Write good enough content and establish a decent following, you'll eventually get shares and back links all without having to do the legwork, just keep the flow of quality content going.

On-Page SEO: It's about more than just content

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about so much more than just content. This article explores some of the other elements of SEO that are important to get right, and why they’re important.

There are two types of on-page SEO: content and technical.

Content on page SEO includes reflecting the keywords you want to target in your content, as well as structuring it for optimal readability with good paragraph lengths, headlines etc.

Technical On Page SEO covers optimising things like the HTML code so that Google can find your website easily.

Keywords and content

While you want to optimise for the keywords you just can’t cram a bunch of them onto the page, this is where good SEO texts come in. So it’s a good idea to make the content relevant and in a way that captures your target audience.

The keywords still need to be there, and this is where we look at the placement of the keywords in context of the text on the page. Usually it’s a good idea to have the targeted keywords in the first 100 words on a website.

You want to have a good balance of keywords but also make sure the content is engaging.

How frequently do you use keywords?

It’s about doing it enough but not too much. This process is making sure that the keyword is mentioned frequently, but without making the page seem like it is being keyword stuffed, which is a bad thing. Google heavily penalises keyword stuffing.

While it is tough, the best rule to follow is to find keywords that are genuinely relevant to what you are writing.

Write out your content, then search for the keywords you want, if they haven't naturally formed, find other words you have used that sound similar, and replace accordingly.

Headers are important

The header tags on your website’s pages help Google understand the structure and hierarchy of the content on a page.

There are some hard rules to follow:

The H1 tag is the main headline of any given page, and should be limited to only one per page (with some exceptions, but as a general rule, one per page unless you really know what you're doing).

The rest of the tags, H2, H3, etc. are used to separate denote "depth" in subjects. Always use header tags in ascending order. A simple way to view header tags would be a list:

You can always fit a deeper header tag within another, but not the other way around.

Making sure that what you link to is done in the right way, it can help your ranking if you link to authority sites on subjects. This process helps Google understand what your site is about.

URL optimisation

Simply put the URL is what you see in the address bar in your browser when your are on a website. This also needs to incorporate your keywords. So if you are targeting pistachio ice cream, my favourite, then that needs to be in the page about pistachio ice cream’s URL. This is another detail that helps google understand what a specific page is about. WordPress will typically do this for you, as it uses your page title to form the permaslug (the URL).

Meta Title and Meta Description

Making sure your keyword is in the title tag and in the meta description is a very important ranking factor, that again, tells Google what a page is about.

Titles shouldn't be too long (nor too short), somewhere around 50-65 characters, white-space included.

Descriptions can be a bit longer, with the general consensus of "up to 300 characters" being the norm.

Be aware that search engines truncate (limits) the text, so if your title or description run too long, it will be cut off in search results.

Use Schema Mark-up

This one has shown not to have any effect directly on your rank but helps make your content better looking on Google and it re-enforces Googles understanding of the content on a page. Most decent WordPress SEO PlugIns like Smartcrawl, Rank Math and Yoast, can help you set up Schema painlessly.

Conclusion

In short:

Northrook