5 top link building strategies part i
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This document provides 5 top link building strategies. It begins by discussing how link building has changed and that article marketing, guest blogging, and content marketing are better approaches than blog commenting or banner ads as they focus on the human reader. It then discusses targeting top article directories with high-quality articles. The second strategy is to manually find high page rank link partners using tools like SEO Spyglass. The third strategy is content marketing by creating valuable, informative content. The fourth strategy is internal linking within one's own site. The fifth strategy is writing popular, engaging content on topics with existing high page rank content.
5 top link building strategies part i
- 1. 5 Top Link Building Strategies Part I: Surviving the Attack of Google’s Arctic Assassins Why's everything always my fault? I just got here... The landscape of SEO is a lot different today than it was just a few years ago. Remember when beginning websites could simply do a couple of link-exchanges, and rank highly (sometimes even first) for their chosen keywords? Now, it takes quite a bit more to outrank your competitors. Link-exchanges still work with high-value websites and blogs; otherwise, you need to incorporate other methods into your backlink plan if you really want to succeed. Not Everything's Changed When it Comes to Link Building
- 2. You're not out of the woods yet... Of course, there are still some methods of building backlinks that work as well today (at least as well; often better) as they did in the past; in fact, you've probably guessed the two major properties of these methods: - stick to methods that enhance the content for the reader - write content that isn't written primarily for the search engines. Content marketing and guest blogging, for example, are better than blog commenting and banner advertising – precisely because the former compel you to keep the human viewer in mind and produce great, targeted content. Incorporating all four of these into a link-building plan, however, is just what you need to really rise to the top for your chosen keywords. Without further ado then, here are the top current link-building methods in the post-Panda and post- Penguin eras. 1: Target the Top Article Directories with Your Absolute Best Article marketing still works; believe it or not. Even though many article directories have bitten the dust due to having too many poorly-written articles in their categories, well-written articles submitted to a handful of the better directories will still give you good/great backlinks. You should manually submit articles to diehard directories like:
- 3. Ezinearticles.com - still a strong PR6 article directory, with an excellent Alexa traffic value of 386. Consider that anything under 10,000 Alexa is really good. Articlesnatch.com - another excellent directory with a PR5 and Alexa = 5,500 or so. Articlesbase.com - a very successful PR6 site, which gets a totally undeserved bad rap sometimes for being "nofollow". Obviously, having nofollow tags is more important today than ever, when Google looks for a natural link profile and almost certainly gives extra points for them. Articlesbase has an Alexa value of 1,862 - recently its Page Rank has dropped to PR5 though... Articlecity - has a PR5 rank, and an Alexa right around the 10,000 mark. ArticleTrader - a great - though very slow unless you place an order to speed it up - article directory with a PR of 5; which just very recently dropped to PR4. Still a very good one though. ArticleDashboard - a pretty static and very strong PR5; they cost money - $49 at last count - to join, which may be one of the reasons they keep their poor-article-count down. Might be worth it to join if you've got the extra cash lying around; being that there simply aren't too many PR5 directories around any more. Lastly, for the others out there, consider using a distribution service like isnare.com to target them – although targeting the smaller ones isn't as important as it used to be pre-Panda. Be sure to submit different anchor text in your hyperlinks, of course; for even better results, wait until some of your articles are approved by Ezinearticles or another powerful directory, and alternate links between your main site and the article. Man I wish I had this much fun while article marketing Always aim to link at least 5 articles to each post you write for your main website/blog; stick to the big, reputable directories ones for your best, unique articles, and target the smaller ones using your many unique, but run-of-the-mill reproductions. Remember; the goal is to make sure your visitors have something of maximal value so you need excellent content on your website.
- 4. The rest of the articles you either write or spin (very well) are to get the search engine spiders to recognize your existence and push you through the pages - allowing your really good stuff to be seen. Content - as always - is King; so you're just wasting your time if your blog post or targeted article is just spun content or riff-raff. Engage your audience and offer something of value; I promise the results will eventually come your way. 2: Manually Find High Page Rank Link Partners (Of Course) Building backlinks by finding good linking partners worked in the past, and will work in the future. It can be time-consuming and difficult; but there are definitely SEO tools that can help out tremendously with this. My absolute favorite is SEO Spyglass (which is the most robust tool in a toolbox called SEO Powersuite, collectively), which I've used just in the past few months to find active link partners and get three of my webpages up to PageRank 4 – and growing. When I compare the results I get with this tool to the days, weeks and months I used to spend for results that take just a few hours to a day to obtain now, I wonder how I managed. Seo Spyglass is both an extraordinary timesaver (which means you do not need it; you can do this stuff on your own without it, as long as you have the time to put in. It literally saves you time by a factor of tens to a hundred) and allows you to find the link partners of your successful competition, as well as sets out a template for success in the search results. For me, SEO Spyglass allowed me to find both the authority sites, as well as websites that were doing quite well – but aren't necessarily considered authority sites – and scan their backlinks to know who to approach for links. No more spending hours and hours scanning Google Search page-by-page only to discover that 98% of the sites didn't allow commenting or link-backs - even if you had useful contributions to make. When I started finding sites with SEO Spyglass, I would spend some time reading the blog before commenting usefully, in a way that truly contributes to the discussion, and then either drop my link in the website box, or approach the webmaster with a guest blog proposal. This legitimate method has - simply put - worked wonders! Especially considering that you can clear your schedule, and try SEO Spyglass for a time before canceling - if it doesn't work for you.
- 5. The other tools are also quite useful, but the package is more expensive – it's for really serious SEO guys and gals who may also work optimizing other peoples' websites. Once you've found these link partners, you can read and comment on their posts, approach them to request a chance to write for them, suggest relevant articles to them - the possibilities are endless. The point is to foster some kind of interaction that will eventually lead to getting a backlink; but you must have something to offer in return. 3: Content Marketing As mentioned above, this is one of the most important website promotion methods out there right now, and is probably here to stay. You’ve got to fill your website with relevant content that informs your readers; as opposed to blatantly trying to get them to purchase a product. Content marketing is a perfect example of inbound marketing, where you've embraced the principle of getting visitors through value-creation, rather than by mere advertising. Gone are the days when a single page could comprise a website, with pitches on why you should buy their service or product, and minimal info on exactly why it is needed. Today, there’s basically a three- step process to making an informative webpage or blog post: you’ve got to first identify the need then anticipate all the questions people might have regarding it and then show them why you have a solution above anyone else’s. If content marketing gets to be too much for you as a single webmaster, then you can join a growing number of website owners who hire bloggers to write posts for them that reflect the general tenor of their previous writing.
- 6. There are several companies that have sprung up in recent years, and all you have to do is give the company a guideline of what you want written, and they’ll send it to a large pool of writers with different areas of expertise. There are some very good results reported with this method. 4: Internal Linking This is an often overlooked method, despite the great power it has. It consists of linking together your own content, by placing a relevant hyperlink from one page to another. By analyzing my own sites, I’ve found that search engines love this, as it shows your content has a coherent and related theme. I suspect there’s another reason why internal linking works so well; it’s an inevitable offshoot of that other top link building method – content marketing. A secret hint (well…not secret anymore): internal linking is counted by Google Search (and probably other search engines) as valid backlinks! To see this, just go to the Google homepage, type in “link:http://yoursite” and see that in addition to all the offsite backlinks that are listed, links to other pages on your domain are also there. These help to drive up your PageRank. As a quick example to drive the point home that internal linking is absolutely essential, have you ever considered why your homepage usually ranks the highest? Well, one of the reasons is because it is automatically internally-linked to all of your other pages, since they are really just folders on your domain. 5: Writing Popular, Engaging Content This is mostly for my relatively high-powered writers, or good researchers (or both). Find top content for a given long tail keyword that’s already out there, read through them all, and then write a unique take on these articles, providing better and more up-to-date information wherever possible. You can also spruce it up a bit by displaying your new content as an infographic or even pdf on slideshare.com or some such site. This is another area where SEO Spyglass can expedite the process, by finding the high-PR websites that would have great content to which you can contribute.
- 7. My Fool-Proof Method for Getting Backlink Partners My method, which I stand by 100%, is to enter in a niche-related (doesn't have to be niche-related, of course; but doesn't it make sense to approach similar websites just in case you find partners for whom you can write a guest blog?) website and let Spyglass run for a while. This can happen very fast or moderately fast, depending on your internet connection speed and the number of backlinks possessed by the website. These successful sites WILL have thousands of backlinks; anywhere from 2-3 thousand to 5-10 thousand and much higher. Once the software is done scanning all the details for the site in question, there are two ways to go about getting your own site to a comparable level: After your own site has a reasonable amount of great content for human readers, start from number one and just start linking where you can. Stick to a steady pace of 200 links per day; maybe taking weekends off to write more stuff after taking a look at your Analytics and seeing how your site is doing and figuring out which content resonates the most with people. Before you know it, this steady pace will have netted you an average of 4000 links (excluding the ones you couldn't get or didn't want to pay for). On that note - you should not pay for links - ever. When (not if) Google catches the site selling backlinks, you lose all the link-juice you have acquired from them when the site gets banished from cyberspace. Many links will have zero Pagerank; the second option is to disregard all the backlinks that fall below a PR1 or PR2. Don't worry about not having a natural link profile; you'll get those links naturally from people who decide to link to your presumably well-written content. After all, if you haven't taken the mantra “Content is King" to heart, then none of these link-methods will work for you very long anyway, because your bounce rate will be really high, and Google will rate you behind just about every site in your niche. Then proceed to run SEO Spyglass on several high-profile sites and link to their high PR partners wherever you can. Before you know it, your results will be positively...positive. If you want to take a shot at SEO Spyglass, feel free to see how well it works for you for a week or so without worrying about payment. In fact; here's a hint they may not want me telling you: I first got it about a year ago, but needed the money back for a credit card bill and they gave me a refund (no hassle whatsoever) after I'd been using it for two months.
- 8. Sooo.....nothing's set in stone. I purchased it again a few months later and found out it takes about 3-4 months for stuff to really take off; which makes sense - given that Google crawls sites seemingly once every two weeks or so in some cases. So 6-7 crawls later all of your links should be discovered in full, and your SERPs position will reflect this. The important thing to remember is that SEO Spyglass and the rest of the Powersuite tools do not comprise a magic wand (c'mon you know those don't exist anyway); you've got to work to get things done. It just makes all your effort more efficient. Think of it as using a calculator for your math homework, instead of calculating all the numbers by hand - you know you can do it the latter way, but why waste the time, once you've already learned how to calculate!? Unless you're a mathematician, calculation has now become merely a tool, and you've got to be efficient when employing this tool to aid you in a separate endeavor. A calculator can't do your Calculus homework for you; but it can allow you to get it done faster. If you're the kind of person looking for a quick-fix, then SEO Spyglass isn't for you - you'd be wasting your money. It works best for people who are tired and frustrated with all the time spent looking for links, discarding garbage, and finding the wrong ones. This wonderful tool still means you have to do the driving; it just makes sure you're on the right road. Take a few minutes to check out this video on the powers of SEO Powersuite, and just how much it helps you when it comes to building viable backlinks. The vid is 10 minutes long (the second is slightly less than that), but you'll get the idea after less than half of that. They can serve as fantastic and comprehensive tutorials if you decide to buckle down and get SEO Spyglass/Powersuite software - which, by the way, is a single purchase; you'll never have to pay for the automatic updates:
- 9. Consider some of the huge success that people have had using this great tool to accomplish more during the day than before:
- 10. My site went from a PR0 to a PR4 in about a tenth the time it took me before I got SEO Spyglass! Hits increased from around 10 per day to 500 daily and growing! "As part-owner of a father-son website, much of the optimization aspect fell on my shoulders - my dad says 'that's why we sent you to college, after all'. Problem is, seo is hard. Really hard. But after a few months of fruitless link-building, I came across SEO Spyglass; and it changed our online lives. Now we rank on the 3rd page of Google for competitive keywords, and on the bottom of the first page for one of our secondary keywords!" Jonathan Downs Cuyahoga County, OH - HVAC/Air Conditioning Specialists In just a few short weeks, our blog jumped up almost ten pages in the SERPS for several of our most lucrative keywords! We really couldn't be happier! "We actually hire a handful of people to do our link building; SEO Spyglass lets us scan the sites we want, and then download and send the file to our outsource group to build the links. Our traffic shot up by a factor of 3 in a month! My boss even promoted me because the results were so good - and I'm happiest that they've only just begun." Megan Cho San Francisco Continuity and Disaster Recovery
- 11. It's great to see my site up at the top of Google search! "All us beginning webmasters dream of the day our keywords start showing up in the first pages of mighty Google...most of us never get there. After using the Powersuite toolbox, from July to October my site practically exploded - I am now making 8 times more than before with no slowdown in sight!" Jonathan Mines A Travel Website SEO Spyglass is the ONLY tool you'll need for Search Engine Optimization "After my Creative Solutions upstart came to fruition, and I won a local award for innovation, I was saddled with trying to figure out how to reach a wider audience. Everyone says 'website this; website that' when it comes to advertising, but they don't appreciate just how hard to get promotional efforts off the ground. I've never had a problem with staying up to work for days at a time, but nothing was happening even after six months - I was still not showing up on Google. Only a month into using SEO Spyglass and its support software, my website has jumped to PR3 and there's still more to come. I am very, very happy to see my hard work finally start to get somewhere. I truly recommend this product!!!"
- 12. Christy Creative Social Media Marketing Consultants This Software is Exquisite! As a professor of biology and transubstantiation, I had a very difficult time promoting my website on study tactics for beginning undergrads. Even with a technical specialist grad student on my staff, we couldn't get the website to get hits. After speaking with Christina, she recommended SEO Powersuite to me and we decided to go ahead with the trial. In just 3 weeks, my inbox was filled with students asking questions about the site, and administrators requesting an expansion! We continue to use SEO Spyglass today to great effect; it's our number one tool and the first line of offense when targeting keywords. Dr. Andy Jones Professor of Biology and Hogwarts Study Tactics Website Designer Get your No-Obligation Copy of the Number #1 Professional Link-building Tool TODAY - don't languish behind the competition for a single instant longer. If you aren't satisfied, send them an email in 30 full days for a no-hassle, instant refund; by that time you almost certainly would have seen great results (assuming you are a committed SEOengineer). Get your copy of the full Powersuite by clicking the image below!!! As for the rest of the link-building strategies; stay tuned for Part II coming soon!!!