Content Marketing: Types of Content that Attract the Most Backlinks

Attracting backlinks should be one of your most instrumental goals when you create your website content. A backlink is a link from an external site that points to your website; this is created when your content is engaging, relevant and appeals enough to make people want to pass it on to their readers.

Quality backlinks provide much greater weight with the Google Gods than inbound links, which are a traditional method of SEO as they are much harder to manipulate. Inbound links can be added to any web page but backlinks need to be placed in relevant context making them a much more authentic method of increasing traffic to your website and therefore increasing your ranking.

With quality backlinks being at the forefront of your mind, here are a few content creation tips that will attract other users to your posts and encourage them to backlink.

Long Live the List
A study conducted by Fratzl and posted by Buzzstream concluded that list posts are the most shareable. This makes good sense as they require less attention to detail from the reader but still get the message across. In a list post, the reader can get the idea of the content without having to take too much attention away from what they're doing.

List posts also generate a challenge mentality in the reader. They want to try and name the top five holiday destinations (for example) without prompting and have to read through to confirm their guesses. This encourages their interaction and allows them to share fascinating new facts with their audience.

The Essential Guide
A guide implies that you have thought of the basics of a subject, an 'essential' or an 'ultimate' guide means that you've thought of everything! There will be nothing left for the reader to write on the subject so they may as well just link to in their post.

Use Infographics
Infographics are an extremely popular way to encourage the sharing of your content. They are attractive, visually appealing and require no reading yet they still convey an often powerful message. While they are not as unique as they were two years ago, they are still an incredibly popular way to gain attention and encourage backlinks so their use is still highly recommended.

It's crucial that if you're creating an infographic you engage with a skilled designer, a poorly designed infographic is worse than no infographic at all.

Stay Local
Creating content that is relevant to your community will inspire a sense of belonging that will encourage people to backlink to your post. This doesn't necessarily mean the street you live in; it can be a much wider community issue but writing about something that is close to the hearts of many people around you will increase your popularity and have your content shared time and time again.

There are many methods of creating content that encourages backlinks and it is up to you to try them and stick to the methods that are the most successful for your product. The benefits of keeping the search engine gods happy are well worth the extra effort!