BACKLINKS QUICK-START
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO GET STARTED BUILDING BACKLINKS AND GET YOUR SITES RANKED
BY SHANE MELAUGH IMIMPACT.COM
Backlinks Quick-Start COPYRIGHT 2012 by Shane Melaugh, whitesquare GmbH
This is a FREE report offered by Shane Melaugh and imimpact.com.
This product may NOT be sold. This product may NOT be re-written, modified or changed in any way. This product may NOT be redistributed by anyone but its author and partners who have the explicit permission to redistribute it.
IN CASE YOU HAD TO PAY FOR THIS EBOOK PLEASE GET IN TOUCH WITH ME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE: SHANE@IMIMPACT.COM
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Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................ 4 Let’s Get Real: “Click Here” Case Study ...................................... 6 Backlinks: What Matters............................................................ 8 Amount of Backlinks ........................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Anchor Text of Backlinks ................................................................. 8 Backlinks Value.............................................................................. 9 PageRank ....................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. The PageRank Lie ...................................................................... 11 Location on Page ....................................................................... 13 No-Follow Attribute ...................................................................... 13 Source Diversity .......................................................................... 14 Link Velocity and Trends ............................................................... 14 One-Way-Links vs. Reciprocal Links ............................................... 15 The Perfect Backlink ..................................................................... 15 The Innocent Internet ............................................................. 17 Google Standard Answer ............................................................... 18 We’re All Gaming the System ........................................................ 18 How to Build Backlinks ............................................................ 20 Link Exchanges ......................................................................... 20 Blog Comments ......................................................................... 21 Article Directories ...................................................................... 25 Squidoo/Hubpages/Gather ................ Error! Bookmark not defined. Social Bookmarks ...................................................................... 25 Forum Signatures ...................................................................... 23 RSS Directories ............................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Free Blogs ...................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. The Big Web 2.0 .............................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Backlink Building Strategies ........... Error! Bookmark not defined. 2
Link Wheels ....................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Link Reinforcement ............................ Error! Bookmark not defined. Link Pyramids .................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Link Hubs .......................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Combinations .................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Closing Words ........................................................................ 29 More Training Material .................................................................. 29
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I NTRODUCTION WHAT ARE BACKLINKS AND WHY SHOULD I CARE? What a backlink is depends on your point of view. Let me explain: I’m sure you’re familiar with links (a.k.a. “hyperlinks”), the little bits of text or images that connect different web-pages together, online. Links usually look like this, i.e. a few words, highlighted in blue and underscored. A link is a connection from one webpage to another. If you’re looking at a link that goes from page A to page B, then that’s an “outbound link” from page A. From the perspective of page B, that same link is an “inbound link”, i.e. a link from somewhere else pointing to page B. Inbound links are more commonly known as backlinks. To boil it down to a single sentence: A BACKLINK IS A LINK PLACED ON ANOTHER WEB-PAGE, POINTING TO YOUR WEB-PAGE.
Backlinks are one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine the rankings of web-pages in their results. In general, a page with more backlinks pointing to it will achieve a higher ranking in Google, than one with fewer backlinks, all other factors being equal. And of course, better Google rankings lead to more traffic. We’ll go into some more detail on why backlinks are so important a bit later on in the guide. For now, I don’t want to bore you with more theory. Instead, let’s dive right into the practical part of the guide, so that you can get maximum benefit right away. The examples and subjects covered in the next few chapters will give your “Backlink-IQ” a kickstart and just a few pages from now, you’ll know how to get more backlinks to your site, you’ll know how to build backlinks for maximum effect and you’ll be able to determine exactly what kind of backlinks are worth getting kind of backlinks are not worth wasting your time on.
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The things you’ll learn in this guide have to potential to save you hours of your time and get your sites ranked much more quickly and efficiently. Lacking the basic knowledge covered here can mean that you waste hours pursuing “useless” backlinks and end up frustrated with the lack of results. So, take a bit of time to go through this guide and I’m sure you’ll reap great benefits from it.
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L ET
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G ET R EAL :
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H ERE C ASE S TUDY
A SIMPLE DEMONSTRATION OF THE IMPORTANCE OF BACKLINKS I believe in learning by doing and learning by examples, so let’s check out what is probably the most popular illustration of the importance of backlinks. To see it, go to Google and type “click here” in the search field (without the quotes):
The top two results listed are both from Adobe, right? Those two results are the download pages for Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Flash Player. If you go and look at those pages, you’ll see that the words “click here” are not featured on either of them. Even if you search through the source-code of those pages, you won’t be able to find the words “click here”. Think about that for a second: You tell Google that you want to find websites related to the term “click here” and it returns two pages that don’t contain those words. What’s going on here? Backlinks, that’s what’s going on. Here’s an analysis of the top listed web-pages for the term “click here”, (backlink data from Majestic SEO):
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The numbers in the “BL” column show how many backlinks are pointing to each of the listed results. As you can see, Adobe is dominating here because their pages simply have millions of backlinks. In addition, most of those backlinks have “click here” as their anchor text (more on in this later on), as in:
“If you aren’t seeing this video, make sure you have flash player installed. Click here to get the newest version of Adobe Flash player.”
The Adobe pages simply outrank everything else related to that search term because they are getting so many backlinks that it outweighs any other ranking-factor. Of course, this doesn’t mean that only backlinks matter and nothing else does. In this very same example you can also see how important on-page SEO is by the fact that clickhere.com makes it to position number three, despite having the fewest backlinks among all the top pages. Clickhere.com is getting a rankings boost because it has on-page content relevant to the search term “click here” and because their brand name is the same as the keyword. Backlinks are not the be-all-end-all of SEO, but you can see from the example above that they are a very significant factor. If you have a web page that has some good, optimized content and it’s not listed in the top spot for your targeted keyword, then backlinks are what it needs to get there. (And if you’re wondering what a targeted keyword is and how to find one, click here to grab my free keyword research training).
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B ACKLINKS : W HAT M ATTERS Ok, we’ve established that backlinks are important for getting to the top of Google search results. However, not all backlinks are created equal. There are high-quality backlinks, there are lowquality backlinks and there’s everything in between.
Q UALITY O VER Q UANTI TY In this chapter, you’ll learn everything about what determines the quality of a backlink. It’s hugely important to know about this, since quality always trumps quantity, when it comes to links. Google has become very good at evaluating the quality of links and “quality over quantity” is true to the degree where you can potentially get hundreds of thousands of backlinks that won’t help in your rankings at all, while getting just a handful of truly high-quality links can make a huge difference to your rankings and traffic. So, here’s what matters, when it comes to backlinks:
A NCHOR T EXT
OF
B ACKLINKS
The first and most important signal that tells Google what a webpage is about (and therefore indicates which keywords are relevant to it) is the content on that page. The second, similarly important signal is the anchor text of the links pointing to a page. The anchor text is simply the word or phrase used to link from one page to another. As stated above, the reason the Adobe pages rank for the term “click here” is because of this standard reminder that can be found on almost any web-page with flash content:
“If you aren’t seeing this video, make sure you have flash player installed. Click here to get the newest version of Adobe Flash player”
And there’s an equivalent message often found on pages containing download links for PDF documents. The point is that almost
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everyone links to the Acrobat Reader and Flash player sites using the anchor text “click here”. This use of the anchor texts to determine site content usually makes a lot of sense. After all, if I have a website and I write something like:
I just read this great article on Bob’s fitness blog…
Then it’s reasonable to assume that the site I linked to is a blog about fitness and it makes sense to list it among the search results for the keyword “fitness blog”. For your own link-building efforts this simply means that, whenever possible, you want to make sure that the anchor texts of the links you build to your sites and pages are descriptive and match the target keyword(s) that you want to rank for. To make your backlinks look as natural as possible, I recommend using your targeted keyword in about 60% to 70% of your backlinks and mixing in variations of your keyword for the rest of the backlinks. The goal is to have most of the anchor texts closely related to your targeted keyword, but you don’t want a “clone army” of identical anchor texts, because that might raise a red flag with search engines (spam!).
B ACKLINKS V ALUE There are a few factors that determine the value or “weight” of any given backlink and these factors are:
P A G E R A NK PageRank is an arbitrary score assigned to web-pages by Google. PageRank (more commonly just called PR) ranges from 0 to 10, with 10 being the best (and rarest) score. In theory, here’s how it works: PageRank is passed on through links, but diminishes with each link. This means that if we have the following example: 9
Web-page A with a PageRank of 2 linking to web-page B does not make web-page B a PR2 as well. It does, however, pass on a portion of the PR. In fact, we can theoretically calculate how much PageRank is passed on between pages: How Many Links Required from pages with PR ->
To Attain Desired
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92414 16803
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PageRank (PR) ->
8 9 10
0.5 Million 2.8
92414 16803 0.5
Million Million 15
2.8
92414 16803 0.5
Million Million Million 84
84
2.8
92414 16803 0.5
Million Million Million Million
92414 16803 3055 555 101
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(Note: tables like this can be found all over the web, with slightly varying numbers. They should all be treated as estimates.) What we can gather from the table is that PageRank does not scale in a linear fashion. The difference between PR9 and PR10 is vastly greater than the difference between PR1 and PR2.
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Similarly, there are billions of web pages online, that have a PageRank between 1 and 3, but there are only a select few that have a PageRank of 10.
THE PAGERANK LIE At this point, I need to address something very essential: Note that it’s PageRank, not Site Rank. Each and every web-page has its own PR score. Why am I mentioning this? Because you often see people talking about links and PR value. For example, if someone is offering a linkbuilding service, it will usually be described along the lines of: “High-quality backlinks, PR3 to PR5.” Theoretically, this would mean that the backlinks built through this service are all placed on pages with PR5 or higher. In reality, however, it usually means that the links are placed on pages that belong to websites that have a PR5 or higher on their homepage. A link from a page with PR5 is something very different than a link from a page, belonging to a PR5 domain, but this is often conveniently overlooked when people talk about the quality of backlinks they have to offer. Admittedly, there is a connection between the PR on a homepage and the PR of every other page on that same site. After all, the homepage likely links to all the other pages and therefore passes on a portion of its PR to the other pages. A link from a page on a website with a PR5 homepage really is more valuable than a link from a page with no homepage PageRank, but still: calling the former a “PR5 link” is simply incorrect.
T O O L BA R P A G E R A NK V S . A C T U A L P A G E R A NK Another important factor you need to keep in mind about PageRank, is that there’s a difference between the PR value Google lets you know about and the real PR value of a page. Google is continually calculating and adjusting PageRank values, according to the changing landscape of interlinking between web pages. However, they only update the public PageRank values once 11
every couple of months. It is, therefore, possible to look at a page with a certain reported PageRank (using either a PageRank checking service or an SEO toolbar), when the real PR of that page is already higher (because more backlinks were built since the last update) or lower (because some backlinks were lost since the last update).
N U M BE R O F B A C K L I NK S , R E FE R R I N G D O M A I N S , R E FE R R I N G IP S Because toolbar PageRank is such a vague and rarely updated value, it can’t be given too much weight on its own. Since we know that links pass value (or “link-juice”), it’s helpful to know how many backlinks are pointing to the page containing our backlink. Since Google doesn’t publish useful information about linking pages, we need to rely on third-party services to get this metric. And since crawling the entire internet to count backlinks is an expensive undertaking, these services cost money. The favoured candidates for this kind of backlink analysis are Majestic SEO and ahrefs. Both of these services allow for limited free access, so you can give them a spin right away. But to get the full service, you’ll need to sign up for one of their subscriptions. Here's an example analysis of a page in ahrefs:
From these numbers, we can tell that the analysed page has 290 backlinks from 290 different pages (i.e. each page contains only one backlink). These 290 pages are found on 124 unique websites (see number of referring domains). This is important to know, because multiple backlinks from one website don’t count the same as multiple backlinks from multiple websites do.
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There’s some debate about how exactly this is measured, but it’s clear that 20 backlinks from the same website don’t carry the same ranking benefits as 20 backlinks from 20 different websites do. Finally, the ahrefs analysis also shows that the backlinks are coming from 112 unique IP addresses. This means that some of those 124 websites linking to the page are probably on the same hosting account. Tests conducted by the SEOmoz team have shown that this is a factor Google pays attention to: two backlinks from two different servers are more valuable than two backlinks from two different domains, hosted on the same server.
L OC A T I O N ON P A G E Finally, even the location and context of a link on a page makes a difference. For example, a link that is surrounded by other links has lower value. In other words, if a backlink is coming from a page that consists of a large list of links, your link just being one among many, then this is a very low-value backlink (this valuation rule was introduced to discourage so-called link-farms – sites that contained nothing but tons of links to other sites). It also makes a difference whether a link is part of the main content area of a web-page or whether it’s tucked away in a sidebar or footer, somewhere. In terms of location and context, the ideal backlink is part of the main body content of a page, it’s the only or one of only a few links on that page and it is surrounded text relevant to your targeted keyword.
N O -F OLLOW A TTRIBUTE No-follow is an attribute that can be added to links. Simply put, it tells Google to discount the link in question. No-follow was introduced to reduce link-spamming, particularly in blog-comments. The idea is that by removing the SEO value from a link by adding the no-follow tag, it’s no longer worth sending out masses of comment-spam. If you run a blog or two, you probably 13
know that, as a preventative measure, this really didn’t work out so well. In practice, Google will still “follow” no-follow links, as it has been shown that pages can appear in the Google index, even if they are only linked to via a no-follow link. There’s also some debate about whether no-follow links help increase a site’s rankings or not. While it’s not clear whether no-follow links can increase a page’s ranking on their own, there have been some reports about the mix of no-follow and do-follow links being important. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t really worry about it. Just focus on building links. Some of them will be no-followed, but that only makes for a more natural looking backlink profile.
S OURCE D IVERSITY The next factor to take into consideration isn’t concerned with individual links, but rather looks at all of the backlinks going to a particular page. It’s important that these links come from different sources. This was mostly covered already, in the sections above, but it bears repeating. A natural backlink profile will be very diverse, so it’s always a good idea to get links from different types of sites, from different IP addresses, with varying anchor text, differences in PageRank etc.
L INK V ELOCITY
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Another important concept is that of link velocity or linkacceleration. If a site receives tons of backlinks in a very short period of time and then suddenly no further backlinks, it will usually rank very well for a short period of time and then drop in search engine position again. The reason for this is very simple: If a site gets a lot of attention (in the form of backlinks) for only a short period of time, it’s probably got something to do with a passing trend, a fad or a seasonal phenomenon. Since it is Google’s goal to deliver the most relevant results possible, it makes sense to show pages while a trend of fad 14
lasts and then demote them when the trend fades and the formerly hot topic goes out of style. Of course, for your marketing efforts, you’ll want to get your sites to the top positions and you’ll want them to stay there. To ensure that this happens, make sure that you keep a more or less consistent rate in your link-building. It’s better to build 10 links a day for 100 days than it is to build 1000 links in a single day.
O NE -W AY -L INK S
VS .
R ECIPROCAL L INKS
If two sites are exchanging links back and forth, that is considered as less valuable than if it’s a one-way-link from one site to another. This factor is one you don’t need to worry too much about. Reciprocal links still count and the majority of the link-building techniques discussed later in this guide produce one-way-links by nature.
T HE P ERFECT B ACKLINK To summarize all of the factors we just discussed, here’s what the perfect backlink would look like. The perfect backlink:
…has our targeted keyword (or a closely related keyword) as it’s anchor-text. …is located in the main body content of a page with high PR/and or many backlinks pointing to it. …is located on a page, which is part of a domain with many backlinks pointing to it. …is one among only a few links on the same page. …is surrounded by text relevant to our site and on a page that covers roughly the same topics as our site. …does not have a no-follow tag attached. …is not coming from the same site or IP address as lots of other backlinks to our site. …and is a one-way-link.
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Most of the backlinks you will acquire or build will not meet all of the above criteria and that’s perfectly fine. I’m not suggesting that you should strive to get that perfect backlink. The above list can be looked at as a checklist, of sorts: the more of the criteria a backlink meets, the better.
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T HE I NNOCENT I NTERNET THE CONCEPT BEHIND BACKLINK VALUE Now that we’ve gone through all of the relevant factors that determine the quality of a backlink, I want to briefly describe the logic behind all of this. Unfortunately, this logic is based on the concept of an “innocent Internet”… The idea is that every link represents a “vote” or a recommendation. This, theoretically, makes sense in many cases. Picture a blogger who uses a technical term that might be unfamiliar to some readers and links it to a Wikipedia-page, explaining the meaning of the term. Obviously, this will only happen if that Wikipedia-page is worth reading and contains a good explanation of the term in question; otherwise, the blogger would look for a different source to link to. In the above scenario, the link can be seen as meaning:
“If you aren’t familiar with this term, check out this page, where you’ll find a useful explanation.”
In this sense, the link represents a recommendation. And the same goes for most situations where someone links to a video, picture album, facebook-page, blog, funny cartoon or whatever else they happen to have come across and liked. People link to stuff they like, because they want to share it with (read: recommend it to) their friends. The problem is that this system of evaluating websites breaks down as soon as people learn about how it works. As soon as the factors for getting a website ranked are known and there’s money involved, people are going to start doing all they can to manipulate the system in their favour. And on the Internet, there is a lot of money involved…
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G OOGLE S TANDARD A NSWER Whenever a Google representative is asked any kind of question related to link-building, article marketing, guest posting, or off-page SEO in general, they always give the same answer. It’s what I call the “Google Standard Answer” and it goes something like this:
You shouldn’t worry about building backlinks and instead of submitting content to other sites, you should focus on creating more unique and great content for your own website. Great content on your own site is what will get other webmasters to link to you and it’s the best way to eventually get your site ranked well.
Google representatives are defending the idea of the innocent Internet. While they can’t really prohibit anyone from building backlinks, they’d rather you wouldn’t. They support the idea of “if you build it, they will come”, i.e. just create some great content and the rest will take care of itself. Unfortunately, that’s complete hogwash. Yes, if you create geniuslevel awesome and original content, then you don’t need to worry about building backlinks much (example: see The Oatmeal, which was getting almost 5 million unique monthly visitors only eight months after its inception). If you don’t create genius-level awesome content and happen not to be a viral-marketing badass, then just putting up fresh content and twiddling your thumbs isn’t going to get your sites anywhere. Keep this in mind for the next time you see someone claiming “linkbuilding/guest posting/content syndication/SEO is DEAD!” Maybe they just saw an video with a Google representative giving the Google Standard Answer and got spooked by it.
WE
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A LL G AMING
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The entire concept of the innocent internet simply doesn’t work. As soon as there’s money involved, people will start gaming the system. And technically, almost everything you can do to promote 18
your website is in a grey zone. Even just encouraging people to share your web-pages is a bit like cheating. Why do I mention all this? I simply wanted to illustrate how the website ranking system theoretically works and where it goes awfully wrong. Because of the situation being what it is, linkbuilding is a major part of any kind of website promotion. And don’t get discouraged when you hear Google’s official statements on the matter. Link-building may be “gaming the system”, but it’s the only thing that consistently works to get your websites to page one of Google.
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H OW
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THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF LINK BUILDING Alright, now that we have the theory and the fundamentals out of the way, let’s get to the nuts and bolts of link-building. To give a bit of context and enable you to find your own linkbuilding sources, keep the following in mind: Any site that lets you submit/upload your own content is a potential candidate for linkbuilding. Whenever you can submit your content, you can usually also include at least one link. The best places to build links are sites that have do-follow links, high PR and existing traffic streams (i.e. sites that already get a lot of visitors). Below, you find descriptions of the most popular and effective methods for getting backlinks along with a list of resources for each method.
L INK -B UILDING M ETHODS
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L I NK E XC H A N G ES Link exchanges are perhaps the most traditional (and for some weird reason often the most respected) method for link-building. A link exchange basically works like this: You find a website that is a good match for yours – based on the same general topic as yours but not a direct competitor and with similar PageRank, age and authority as your website. You then contact the owner of this website to ask for a link exchange. You want to strike a deal along the lines of: “I will link to you if you will link to me.” Ideally, this is done by getting a third site involved, to avoid reciprocal linking. In other words: “You link to my site A and in exchange I will link to your site from my site B.” Since it takes research, negotiation and a lot of time to acquire backlinks like this, it’s only worth doing for very valuable links. For anything that isn’t a relevant, do-follow, high-PR link with your desired anchor text, negotiating link-exchanges is simply a waste of time. 20
R E S O U RCE S
Google Search to find potential link partners SEOQuake and Majestic SEO or ahrefs to analyze the potential link partner’s website.
B L OG C O M M ENT S This method is very simple: Find some blogs on a related topic to that of your website and leave a few comments on the posts there. Your name in each of the listed comments contains a backlink. Two important pointers, when it comes to blog commenting: 1) Remember that most blogs are no-follow in the commentssections. 2) Leave relevant, interesting comments. Stuff like “Great post!” will simply end up in the spam-filter. Despite many no-follows, blog commenting can be a good way to generate traffic, since readers can click through to your site if your comments are interesting. To get the most out of blog commenting, you need to make sure that you follow an exact system and schedule. Otherwise, you’ll just spend hours aimlessly surfing the blogosphere, getting nothing important done (I speak from experience, here…). R E S O U RCE S
Google Search Use the following custom searches to find blogs in your niche: o [niche] blog o [niche] “leave a reply” o [niche] “powered by wordpress” Example for finding blogs in the fitness-niche:
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The first example will return the most results. The two other examples can help uncover a few more blogs.
SEOQuake to detect no-follow/do-follow links. Do-follow blog search engine Do-follow blog directory
P R ES S R E L EA S ES Issuing press releases is another one of the very few link-building methods that is deemed legitimate by almost everyone. A press release is basically a statement to the media, which includes some newsworthy story or event, some information about your company, at least one link to your site as well as your contact information. There are thousands of press release directories on the web that are much like long-abandoned article directories: full of junk and never visited by an actual person. These are not the kind of places we want to submit to. There are two ways in which you can benefit from press releases: 1) Your press release gets published on (reputable) press release directories, along with a link to your site. 2) Your press release gets picked up by news sites or niche sites, who run a story about it. This can lead to an influx of traffic, if the story becomes popular. The downside is that you need to have something more or less newsworthy to write about, you need to write in a proper press release format (or pay someone to do it for you) and you need to pay for the press release distribution. R E S O U RCE S
Press Release Monkey (writing and distribution) PRWeb (professional distribution) 22
G U ES T P OS T I NG Guest posting is a great way to generate some high-quality backlinks as well as traffic and brand exposure. The downside is that it only works if it’s done right and to do it right requires quite a bit of time and effort. Many blogs and article sites welcome content written by guest authors, as long as the content fits into their site and is good, valuable content. This means you can’t get away with sending someone a generic piece of content, outsourced for $5 and hope to get it published as a guest post. The correct approach is to find the most popular blogs in your niche, study their existing content and their audience and then create a post specifically tailored for them. It also helps to get in touch with the blog owner through social media and blog comments, before you ask about having a guest post published. The guest post will contain a short blurb about you, with a link back to your site. R E S O U RCE S
Google for some general keywords in your niche and see what blogs come up. Google [niche] “guest posting guidelines” Google [niche] “write for us”
F OR U M S I G NA T U R ES Almost every forum lets you place a few lines of text, including links, in your signature. The signature shows up with each post you make. Much like with blog comments, signature links aren’t only good for boosting your rankings, they are also likely to send you traffic from people clicking through on your links (provided that you write something compelling). I recommend you sign up for one or two forums on the topic of the site you’re promoting and post there from time to time. Forums can be great places to get in touch with your customers and potential customers.
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However, you should also have a fixed schedule for visiting and posting in forums, otherwise you run the risk of wasting hours upon hours just browsing, reading and posting. Also, when you’re new to a forum, tread softly. People hate spammers and blatant marketers, so if you join a forum, add a hypey signature and start pushing people to visit your site in every post you make, you’ll get banned in no time. So, start out without a signature and just make some relevant posts, maybe ask and answer a few questions. R E S O U RCE S
Google Search A search for some related keywords plus “forum” will return more forums than you can shake a stick at, in most niches. You can also try searching for: [niche] “powered by vbulletin” (vBulletin being the most popular forum platform)
B L OG N ET W O R K S There are two types of blog networks, usually available for a monthly subscription. The first are sometimes called content syndication networks and the second are single-post blog networks. On a content syndication network, you can submit a spun article, usually with up to three links, and this article will be distributed to dozens of blogs in the network. On a single-post blog network, you create one article with one link and it gets published to only one site in the network, but there’s a guarantee that this is a site on a domain with PageRank on the homepage. Both approaches are as close as you can come to creating “natural” backlinks, but with a systematic, repeatable approach. These are probably the most natural looking backlinks you can generate yourself and they've proven to be quite effective. R E S O U RCE S
Find the best blog networks in this review. Recommended single-post network: BuildMyRank 24
W E B 2.0 S I T ES Sites like Blogger.com, Squidoo, Hubpages and Gather are among the many different sites that allow you to create and post content with few restrictions. In some cases, you can create your own site/blogs and in other cases (e.g. Squidoo), the sites act more like article directories, but with the options of adding videos, images and other media to your pages. Web 2.0 sites can still provide a few valuable links, but many of them were also hit with “Google slaps”.
L INK -B UILDING M ETHODS R ECOMMENDED
THAT
A RE N O L ONGER
A R T I C L E D I R EC T OR I ES Article directories typically let you submit articles of 300 words and above and include a “resource box” where you can add one or several links. Article directories used to be a favourite source of backlinks, until a sweeping change introduced by Google in 2011 devalued most article directories drastically. Now, article submissions to traditional directories are no longer a very effective use of one’s time.
S OC I A L B O OK M A R K S Social bookmarking is a method of link building that is still often mentioned, but becoming more and more “retro”. Like a few items listed above, social bookmarking sites (of which thousands can be found online) used to be a valuable source of easily created backlinks. At some point, social bookmarking sites became flooded with linkspam and were largely de-valued. Getting a link from a social bookmarking type site, where there is actual human participation and traffic (e.g. reddit) can still be very useful. Getting thousands of bookmark links from abandoned bookmarking sites all over the web won’t help your rankings, however. 25
F OR U M P R O FI L E L I NK S Forum profile links are the perfect example of a method that got spammed to death. Whenever you sign up to become a member of a forum, you can usually add a link to your website in your profile. Since the user profiles are public pages, this is a potential source of a good backlink. Forum profile links were shown to be very effective at one point and soon, everyone was building them. Not too long after that, you could buy software and services that would generate forum profile links by the tens of thousands, spamming every possible forum in sight. This became a big problem for forum owners, who might have 200 real members and half a million members generated by spam-bots and it also became a problem that Google quickly picked up on, as it made search results too easy to manipulate. Presently, forum profiles are almost completely worthless, as backlink sources. In my most recent experiment, creating over 100,000 profile links to an optimized and well-established page made absolutely no difference in ranking position.
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L INK R EINFORCEMENT With everything we’ve already looked at in this guide, the principle of link reinforcement does not require that much more elaboration. The idea is simple: you build links to pages that are linking to you, in order to increase the power of your backlinks. Here's an illustration:
In this example, the page containing the backlink to your site is being reinforced with two additional links, which leads to more linkjuice being passed on to your site. Here’s a simple rule for link reinforcement: use weaker links to reinforce stronger ones. For example, if you have a guest blog published on a great site, it’s a good idea to do a blog network submission, linking to that guest post. Going the other way around (linking a guest post to an article published in a blog network) would be a lot less advisable.
B A C K L I N K B O OS T I NG Backlink boosting is a form of link reinforcement, which is based on building lots of links to your linking pages. The main purpose to 27
backlink boosting is to make sure that as many of your linking pages as possible get indexed by Google. Originally, this is a technique that was developed in order to increase the effectiveness of spammy links such as forum profile links. Backlink boosting usually works with a high amount of low-quality backlinks, but it can be effective for getting more links indexed as well as pushing some additional link-juice towards your site. If you concentrate solely on creating high-quality backlinks such as those gained from guest posting, then backlink boosting isn’t necessary. If you use some automation-tools to build links or otherwise go after lower-quality links, then backlink boosting is recommended. Recommended service: Backlinks Indexer
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C LOSING W ORDS Now, all that’s left to do is for you to get started with your linkbuilding. This guide has provided you with everything you need to know to get your sites and pages listed for some high-traffic keywords and as you may have noticed, many of the methods listed are completely free. I highly recommend that you create a system for yourself. Create a habit of doing certain link-building activities each and every day. It doesn’t have to be a huge chore and you don’t have to spend hours on it. The key to making this work (as with almost anything in life) is consistency.
M ORE T RAINING M ATERIAL If you liked this free guide, also check out my other training material:
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Keyword Research Easily the best keyword research training ever. Yours for free.
WordPress Websites Made Easy How to quickly and easily build your own website from scratch, even if you’ve never done anything like this before. Yours for free.
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