part0010

I t’s not enough to put keywords on a website and hope it ranks. If you want a slice of that sweet organic traffic, you need to promote your website. That means getting valuable engagement signals that shows Google our websites are “popular” and therefore worthy of receiving traffic.

This phase focuses on how to generate those signals through outreach and manual promotion tactics.

A “link” or “backlink” refers to when another website “links” to yours. Generally speaking, a link is used as attribution - similar to a footnote in a research paper.

For example, let’s say you have a website that sells organic dog food and the Huffington Post writes an article about the “best organic products for dogs” and includes your website in the article. Generally speaking, they will place a “link” in that article that refers visitors to your website.

Google essentially counts “links” as a vote of popularity for your website - they are widely agreed upon to be a top ranking factor with search engines.

However, “links” come in different shapes and forms - not all of them are created equal.

As soon as SEO professionals realized links were a major ranking factor, we began to spam the crap out of them.

To fight back, Google released guidance for websites to add a piece of HTML to outbound links that would tell search engines not to “follow” that links, i.e. not to count it towards SEO rankings (Search Console Help, 2019).

This HTML is known as NOFOLLOW - if a website sets a link to “NOFOLLOW”, it does not pass SEO equity to the linked website .

A lot of major publishers now use NOFOLLOW links as a standard practice to beat back people who want to abuse their websites as link sources (INC, Forbes, etc).

All links from social networks are set to NOFOLLOW - so before you get any ideas, links from social networks have no [direct] impact on SEO rankings (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc).

While there are some benefits to NOFOLLOWED links, generally speaking, seeking them out is a waste of resources when it comes to SEO.

For example, the Huffington Post example is what we call a “contextual” or “editorial” link. These types of links to pass the most “ranking equity”, as the linking website wants to refer traffic to your website. An editorial link will pass much more SEO equity than a link from the comments section of a website.

The Huffington Post example is what we would call a “contextual” or “editorial” link. These types of links sit within the body text of a page are also known to pass a high amount of “ranking equity”, as the linking website wants to refer traffic to your website.

If you’re getting links from low quality websites, you’re running the risk of getting penalized by Google. When engaging in link building, it’s critical that you only aim to land on websites that are relevant, real (aka not link farms) and authoritative .

Google launched the “Penguin” algorithm update in 2012 to fight back against “link spam”. The algorithm detected when websites were engaging in low quality link building and penalized them by removing them from Google’s index altogether.

When this algorithm launched, it devastated millions of businesses who relied on organic traffic to stay alive. Many of these website owners were innocent – they just hired the wrong SEO company to manage their sites.

Google caught a lot of flack for this, especially because it took them so long to roll out the Penguin update that re-indexed sites who cleaned up their link profile.

They’ve made significant adjustments to the algorithm, [I believe] most notably on ignoring links, as opposed to penalizing for them.

In a recent Google Webmasters Hangout, John Mueller said this (Search Engine Roundtable, 2017):

“So that's kind of a two-pronged approach that we take there. On the one hand manually we try to take action where we think it's necessary on the other hand algorithmically we try to ignore things that we can kind of isolate. ”

In other words, if a website is giving away signs of brokering links, the algorithm will not give any weight to the value of outbound links.

This was a brilliant move for Google, as no longer have to devastate business owners, those websites will just not get increased rankings from shitty SEO.

Without a penalty, you’re thinking/hoping/expecting those links to work. When they don’t, you’re not only wasting resources trying to look for other causes of “why” those pages aren’t ranking, but you wasted resources on acquiring those links.

We build a lot of links for clients, over 20,000 in the last 36 months. Each of these links is meticulously tracked in a spreadsheet that includes:

We took our spreadsheet and cross walked it with additional data to understand the impact of those links:

At first, our findings were unclear - we couldn’t draw any specific conclusions that the links we were building had an impact on traffic. Sometimes they did , sometimes they didn’t .

Much like the other case studies on this subject, we were focusing on purely topical elements:

While there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s analyzing the impact using principles from an algorithm that penalizes, not ignores .

John Mueller said it himself, “algorithmically we try to ignore things that we can kind of isolate”.

A change in focus was needed, so we looked at the data from the scope of if Google “ignoring” certain links as opposed to others. This required us to open up every backlink and visit its source. It took a while, to put it lightly, but we had to try and understand potential patterns the algorithm was picking up on.

It didn’t take long for us to see that Google has gotten incredibly adept and picking up patterns and ignoring our links.

Our internal data overwhelmingly supports the notion that Google is “ignoring links” as opposed to penalizing them. That means there’s a new set of quality metrics you need to live by when it comes to finding link opportunities. Here are some red flags to look out for:

It sounds pretty logical when you lay out all the information like that, but you’d be surprised at how many links get ignored because of that criteria.

My biggest pet peeve about the SEO community is the inability to understand anything outside of search engines. The worst culprits when it comes to that phenomenon are bloggers.

It's true that blogging is one of the best tactics when it comes to SEO. However, it's important to understand there's a whole world beyond search engines.

While Google does drive the majority of traffic for a lot of industries, it doesn't make sense to ignore all the other sources of users available for you and your clients. I'm talking about social media, guest posting, press releases, and more.

All those approaches fall under the category of link building. That is to say, direct links from other pages and social media, that completely bypass search engines and their results pages. The best part is, as you know by now, link building synergizes with SEO. Google sees links from other sources as bits of 'vouches' from third parties. The logic is, the more people link to your website, the better its content must be .

Link building not only complements SEO, it's a critical aspect of a holistic campaign. That means it's essential you understand what approaches work and which ones don't when it comes to link building.

The idea behind a resource page is simple. You put together a list of tools and services that are important for a specific audience. Think about it as a link roundup, but on steroids. The key differences between both types of pages are:

Take hosting, for example. If you look up hosting comparisons, you'll notice most of the top content focuses on helping you find the best providers. For results to remain relevant, they need constant updates. WordPress, for example, curates a shortlist of hosting providers they recommend:

That's a very rudimentary example of a resources page, but it works. If you look up "wordpress hosting recommendations", that boring resources page is the first result. Needless to say, that's a very popular web search.

From a link building standpoint, resource pages are a goldmine. The most popular results tend to be highly credible. If you can get a link from a resources page, it often becomes easier to find your way to others. From then on, it's a cascading effect.

It's important to understand, though. Not every type of link building opportunity works for every industry. If you're working in an industry that offers highly-targeted products and services, resource pages can be a great fit. Otherwise, you're better off focusing on other link building strategies that map more closely with your audience.

Your goal then, is to find "resource page opportunities. Our method for this process is downright simple – we use Google. Even a simple search using an operator such as inurl:resources "seo" is likely to bring up several link building opportunities:

Ideally, you want to find pages that get regular updates, which you can easily check using Google. Check out the website and see if they have any contact information or any other way you can reach them. We handle all of this via email, so we can pitch several pages at once.

At this stage, the smart move is to put together a spreadsheet containing link building opportunities and contact information. After we've talked about other strategies, I'll walk you through our outreach process.

It's impossible to talk about link building without diving into guest posting. As far as I'm concerned, guest posting is still the easiest way to build links to your client's websites. It's not an exaggeration to say I built my (very successful) agency on the back of guest posting.

You probably know how guest posting works, in a nutshell. You identify the blog you want to target, you pitch them an idea, and if they decide to go with it, you get to include a link to your website, and they get a full post. It's a win-win scenario, in more ways than one, including:

It can net you significant traffic depending on the popularity of the website you target.

Beyond traffic, it also gives you brand exposure and a lot of people take it as a tacit signal they can trust you. It enables you to build relationships with other key players in your industry.

That last benefit can be particularly powerful. Convincing websites to approve your guest posts can be tricky at first. If you're trying to build links for a client no one knows, you're going to get a lot of negative responses and worse yet, no response at all.

Here's the thing, though: once someone says yes to you, they're much more likely to keep saying yes down the line. That means the more outreach you do and the more websites associate your work with high quality, the easier it becomes to find guest posting placements. That only goes as long as the content is relevant to their audience, of course.

If you're ready to get to work, the first thing you'll need to do is identify guest posting opportunities. Thanks to Google, that's fairly simple. Your best bet is to focus on websites that openly call for guests posts, which you can find using operators such as "write for us" or "guest posting opportunities":

Usually, websites that explicitly accept guest posts will outline how the process works. It's your job to read those requirements, as you're much more likely to get your pitch ignored if you don't.

The downside to guest posting is that usually, you have to tailor your pitch for each blog. That means it takes time to do link building at scale since you can't submit the same pitch you do to everyone else. One way to identify websites that are worth your time is to submit an exploratory email and see if you get any responses:

I always like to include links to some of my best content, so right off the bat, they know I'm serious about guest posting. If I get a response, then we can sit down and talk about post ideas. That way, I save time over having to brainstorm for dozens of websites only not to hear back from them.

Sponsored posts fall into a gray area when it comes to link building. As the name implies, you're paying a website in exchange for publishing a post. Sometimes, that'll involve a positive review of your products or services, whereas in other cases, you're essentially paying for a link.

In the past few years, it's become more and more common for some websites to ask for payment in exchange for "guest posting". As far as I'm concerned, if you're paying for it, it's not longer a guest post, it's sponsored content.

The benefits of sponsored content are evident. In many cases, money opens doors to websites that might not look at you twice otherwise. To put it another way, if you're going to pay for links, you might as well get your money's worth.

The challenge, in this case, is to find sponsored post opportunities that are "native" or fit in with the rest of the site. You do not want posts that get tagged as sponsored or paid placement since users are much more likely to ignore those. In a nutshell, here's what you want to avoid when you pay for links:

The way we like to approach sponsored posts is as advertisement opportunities. We look for real websites and blogs, with native audiences that can actually benefit from the products or services we want to promote. We're looking for posting opportunities and not traditional ads, such as banners. However, the way we find them is by looking for websites that are open to advertising of all kinds: email blasts, banner ads, influencer placements, etc.

As usual, once you've identified multiple opportunities, you want to reach out. In this case, I like to approach the conversation by asking about advertising in general and check if they're open to native opportunities.

If the answer is yes, you're off to the races. Then comes the really tricky part, which is figuring out how much that post is worth to your client.

Imagine if every time you mentioned a product or a service online, you had to publish an accompanying link to it. If that were the case, I'd personally have to pay a lot of fines. It's not because I don't appreciate the products I recommend either, it's just that sometimes, we all forget to include those links .

In practice, that means there's probably a ton of unlinked mentions for your clients, on blogs, post comments, and all sorts of pages. Doing a little outreach to convince the original authors to add a link is simple and often, you're met with very little resistance. After all, the hardest part of link building is often convincing people to vouch for you in the first place. If they're already doing so, adding the link becomes simple.

Here's the problem, though – finding unlinked mentions worth your time can be a hassle. For every mention where it may be worth reaching out for a link, there may be a dozen that aren't worth your time.

The best way to tackle this problem is using automation. For example, you can set up a Google Alert that tells you every time someone mentions you or your clients:

To avoid spamming my own inbox, I set the alert to notify me about new findings once a week. Then I can set a little time aside to check out which ones are worth pursuing and if I can find contact information for those.

If my team or I can find an opportunity that ticks both boxes, then we'll send an outreach email:

As far as link building goes, unlinked mentions are one of the most scalable methods you can employ. If you find your client is getting mentions constantly, that can translate to an influx of new links very quickly – all you have to do is reach out.

If you run a popular website, you will have people knocking on your door 24/7 trying to get you to link to them. That gets old fast and while direct outreach does work for me and my agency, sometimes, you need to think outside the box to get those links.

One 'hack' I use to get links from publications such as Thought Catalog, Huffington Post, and Forbes is I pay for them. The real trick lies in knowing who to contact, which makes this link building technique fall into a gray area .

Popular publications can get away with not paying freelancers because they know there's always people willing to work for free in exchange for a piece they can add to their portfolio. It sucks if you're a freelancer, which is where link building opportunities arise.

What we do is, we find those contributors, and then we work out a deal where we pay them in exchange for coverage.

Is it 100% ethical? Definitely not. However, as long as the posts you pay for are relevant for the website where they will get published, it's a win-win scenario for everyone involved. You get links from reputable websites, freelancers get paid for their work, and the publications get their free content.

To identify "press" opportunities, you want to look for any major publications that have "contributors" working for them. The way we like to approach this is, we put together lists of the keywords we want to target (we cover this in phase 3) and see if there are any publications we're interested in that are using them.

If we find an overlap and that content was written by a contributor, then we know there's an opening. We look for that contributor's contact information and we send them an outreach email. With a big enough budget (we usually offer around $150 per post) the results can be astounding .

This whole approach might seem too unethical, but it's far more efficient than spending thousands of dollars on a "PR" firm that often does precisely the same. I'm a results-focused guy, so if I see a way to get those results for WEBRIS' clients where everyone involved wins, I'm going to take it.

We've already talked about guest posting and how it's one of the most powerful link building techniques you can use. Sometimes, though, you'll want to reach out to blogs that don't have guest posting opportunities asking for links. That's what we call "cold blogger outreach".

There's millions of blogs online, each representing an opportunity to get new links to your clients' websites. You will, of course, want to focus on blogs within your same niche, but even so, there's still a mind numbing number of opportunities available to you.

Here's the problem, though – direct link outreach, which is where you blatantly ask someone to link back to you, has a minuscule success rate. Why, after all, should I take the time to read your email and give you something valuable in exchange for nothing?

Your success rate when it comes to cold blogger outreach depends on the value you can offer. For example, one of my favorite tactics involves reaching out to writers that consistently blog about the same theme and let them know when I publish a post they might be interested in.

I call this process "seeding" because I never outright ask for a link. What I do is plant the seed so they might reference that content or some of my other posts in the future. In many cases, just reaching out without asking for anything in return can be the start of a fruitful collaboration. Blogging is, after all, a lonely job.

Another tactic I like to use is to offer promotional exchanges. If you have a healthy following on your blog or social media accounts, you can go ahead and tell other bloggers "I'll Tweet this if you Tweet this". That way, everyone benefits from the exchange.

Every single approach we've covered so far shares one thing in common – they require outreach. You have to establish contact with the right person and pitch them convincingly. The more links you want, the more work that outreach takes .

Some people will tell you that you can just sit back and wait for links to come organically. If you publish amazing, in-depth content, that will happen. However, just waiting for links to fall from the sky is no way to run an SEO campaign. If you want results, you have to hit the streets.

For us, "hitting the streets" means putting together a link building process we can scale. As usual, it all begins with a spreadsheet:

When it comes to social media, for example, our offshore team constantly looks for accounts in our client's niches, which we can contact. They put together all that information in a list we can reference later.

The same approach works for pretty much every type of outreach. Before you get in touch with anyone you need their name, website, and email. You will also want to ascertain how valuable each opportunity is. For example, is their website one of your top competitors? Are they ranking for keywords you want to target ?

The more valuable the link building opportunity, the higher on your list of priorities they should be. Once you have all that contact information, you want to use a tool that enables you to send outreach emails en masse.

We use Pitchbox ( https://pitchbox.com/ ) for outreach. It's expensive, but by far the best email outreach solution on the planet (tell them I sent you).

Below is a screenshot from the outreach template we use to bring influencers on board. It's important that you use different templates depending on what type of opportunity you're pursuing, so keep that mind.

For high-value opportunities, you might want to set the time aside to send fully personalized emails. When it comes to cold blog outreach, for example, I may take the time to mention which of their posts are my favorite and how long I've been following them. Small details such as those that can have a huge difference in your success rate.

Finally, it's critical you understand that link building outreach is a numbers game. You don't want to get inside your head trying to get links from a specific site or two. Ideally, you'll identify dozens or hundreds of opportunities, construct outreach emails accordingly, track your success rate, and then repeat the process all over again.

Without a scalable process, you're no different from a guy sending cold emails from his basement.