[nishankkhanna]

First off, I think it's great that you're trying to address this key topic for non-marketers on HN and YC in general.

That being said, there's not much here that will move the needle for most people. I would highly recommend that people checkout either Moz's blog or Brian Dean's Backlinko to see what you need to win at SEO in terms of actionable steps.

"Create good content to get good backlinks" is pretty much the same as "build it and they will come".

A critical part of a link building campaign once you've created a piece of content is the outreach.

I was also surprised that none of the amazing tools used by marketers were mentioned. Just Google Search Console and Keyword Planner. There's BuzzSumo to find existing top content that you can improve on and reach out to people who linked to the original as a low hanging fruit. Ahrefs, SEMrush, the list goes on.

[Allvitende]

Digital marketer here. This is spot on. Brian Dean's "Sky Scraper Technique" is quite effective as well. Neil Patel's blogs[1][2] are also extremely helpful.

[1]https://www.quicksprout.com/blog/ [2]https://neilpatel.com/blog/

[simplybrain]

Neil Patel is not a good resource anymore. His blogs are all about quantity, not quality.

Brian, on the other hand, is a great resource. Not sure why you didn't link to his post on the Sky Scraper Technique, yet posted both of Neil's blogs?

https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique

[linuxasheviller]

What's missing is how not to do terrible outreach.

I help operate a blog with a fairly high domain authority that accepts guest posts.

Every morning I have to spend time mass-deleting guest posting requests that are just so bad there's not even a point in reading them. Poorly written but "customized" spam about how much the writer loves our site and why he or she thinks a listicle about online gambling would be a great fit for our audience. But the "legitimate" requests often don't look much better or different than the purely spam ones.