Here’s How Top Sites Get Other Blogs to Share Their Content and Send Them Massive Amounts of Traffic

Content plays a central role in many online businesses.

Whether it's a niche affiliate site, an online store, or a digital publication where the content itself is the product, you'll find tons of value-packed blogs, videos, infographics, and more.

Inbound marketing strategies use content aimed at people throughout the buyer's journey process, from initial research to the final sale. And when well executed, it works.

But content plays another important role as well: it's central to SEO.

Now, it is true that this role has evolved and changed over the years.

Keyword density, once a central part of on-page SEO, has lost importance as Google has gotten better at understanding topics and context.

While SEOs used to create large quantities of relatively short blog posts focused on very specific keywords, this approach has long since given way to a focus on longer content with a lot more depth to it.

But content is still a central part of backlink acquisition. After all, to get links, you need something that's worth linking to.

There's strategy involved in creating content that's designed to attract links, and it's a bit different than crafting content with social shares as the goal.

So what makes someone want to link to a particular piece of content?

In a recent blog post, SEMRush explains how you can create content that's tailor-made for maximum linkability.

How to Create Linkable Content

What makes content linkable? The first step is to understand why people might link to your material and find ways to gain their support. Your content might help someone else; here are some examples of how this could be done:

• Support an article with a reference.
• Share authoritative content (e. g. research).
• Share valuable content (e. g. guides or ebooks).

Another way to make sure that content brings value to your readers is to think about the types of articles that could be useful to them. The more helpful you can be to them the better. But keep in mind, there are some content types that are more likely to help rake in the backlinks. Let's review some of these…

1. Original Research with Insights

Original research provides unique statistics and data. So when somebody wants to mention the information presented in your study in an article, for example, they have only one way to do it – to backlink to you.

The quality research should answer vital industry questions and provide value to your audience. Before attempting an article like this, you should understand what your research hypothesis is and how this data will help your target audience. This type of content can take a lot of time and effort to create, but it often results in high-quality backlinks.

2. Visual Assets

Supporting your content with great images and video offers value that makes your content more link-worthy. Visual assets attract visual learners, makes text less boring, and is easy to link to.

Link-worthy visual assets might be:

• Infographics: Which plenty of businesses may use in their own blog posts, especially if they contain helpful information, research or statistics. Place a link to your site in the embed code of the infographic to make sure that you get a backlink when it gets posted on other sites’ blogs.
• Charts and diagrams: These simplify the understanding of complex data and ensures that the reader will fully grasp the information they need.
• Videos: The importance of video increases daily as video continues to dominate content marketing and social platforms. Videos are much more difficult to plagiarize than a blog post, and a lot more time consuming and sometimes expensive to make; if you are able to create a great video, other influencers will share it.

3. Ultimate Guides and eBooks

Guides, eBooks, and white papers often contain valuable information about a specific topic, which gives you more room for in-depth content. A well-researched and planned out piece of content can make your guide a go-to resource for readers. As an added bonus, it can be a powerful lead generation tool.

After you have created an amazing piece of content, you will need to think about a distribution plan to ensure that it gets noticed by the right people and doesn’t fall flat.

You can read more about how content intersects with SEO over at SEMRush.