link-building-strategies-small-businesses

11 Link Building Strategies for Smaller Businesses

Link building will get a lot tougher these days especially for smaller brands that don’t have real capacities to compete with bigger companies in the industry because of the low amount of budget that they have.

In my experience communicating with potential clients, small companies are only willing to spend a monthly link building budget somewhere around $500 to $800 and search marketing agencies can outsource their link building work for a monthly cost ranging from $200 to $400 for each client/website.

With the price ranges above, we’ve seen a huge demand for a link building strategy that doesn’t really rely on huge budget in order to yield great results but on the value and quality of contents being produced consistently by the brand and on the approach used to promote those content assets.

And in this post, I’ll be sharing to you 11 link building strategies that can size up your links regardless of the size of your business and competition level of your industry.

Product or service development

This specific link building tactic is on top of my list since it is where the huge amount of time, money and effort should be placed in.

Constantly evolving your products/services can actually help your brand acquire natural links over time especially if you’re adding new useful features that your users care about, since the more they get tied to those product specifications, the potentials of them evangelizing your tool to their colleagues are higher.

So it is very important to keep track of newly added questions in industry forums and Q&A websites in order to gather information on the needs and wants of your potential customers. This will be the core basis of your product development strategy – user feedback.

In the recent interview with Slack’s founder, Stewart Butterfield shared a very interesting tip to win over industry competitors – make active listening a core competency.

“From the get-go, Slack made sure that users could respond to every email they received, and approached every help ticket as an opportunity to solidify loyalty and improve the service. As they listened to their ever-growing flock of users, the Slack team iterated accordingly.”, Butterfield said.

Consistent asking for user feedback will always bring new ideas to the table, which will not only solidify the brand’s core USP (unique selling proposition) but will also help the website acquire voluntary-given links from bloggers, influencers and corporate site owners.

I remember the early days of URL Profiler where its founders Garett Brown and Patrick Hathaway were asking for suggestions/feedbacks for their newly launched tech product. They got in touch with a handful of search marketers (especially those who’re actively working on content development and link building campaigns for several clients) in order to know the pros and cons of using the product for the said purposes (link building and content dev).

I used the tool, exchanged ideas with Garett and eventually evangelized the software on this link building blog.

Imagine if you have 20 different suggestions from like-minded bloggers in your industry. That’s a solid list of product development ideas that will not just improve your product features but will get your product or your site’s internal pages to earn links from bloggers/influencers who’ve been involved in the ideation of the product development.

You can add that unique angle (product feature suggestion) to your link building pitch in order to increase your chances of getting more responses and possibly editorial links. Given that the more you involve your target users to your business operations, the more they become overwhelm and attach to your brand, especially if their suggestion(s) has/have been considered and used in the product development.

Another way to build links with product development is to invest in creating free web-based tools.

Look at Traffic Travis. It is a free SEO software developed by Affilorama, which has been very popular in the internet marketing industry not only because of its highly functional attributes but on its free access.

For service-centered agencies, developing free web products is a good investment for branding and link acquisition.

One good example of this is Content Harmony’s free ShareMetric Chrome extension.

Given that the tool is freely available, industry bloggers and influencers can easily test it and share to their readers and followers by linking to the Chrome’s page and/or sharing it on social platforms, which will certainly promote the product to other untapped users.

Link acquisition is possible using this approach since the brand can simply reclaim the backlinks by asking existing linkers of the tool to link to the website’s tool page instead of linking to the Chrome extension content.

Word of mouth and referral marketing are best sources of link opportunities since bloggers and webmasters will naturally mention the page/tool from their blogs with no to little efforts on outreach.

Social prospecting

Social platforms has been a common medium used for link acquisition and content development these days since the competitive insights that content marketers can draw from it can really bring improvements to content marketing activities (content ideation, link prospecting, proper user targeting, etc..)

There are gazillion ways to generate content ideas using social media, and one of them is to create Twitter lists of bloggers/influencers from your niche and from other related industries.

The lists are useful for extracting questions, information and industry trends from engaged Twitter users (conversations, favorites, retweets), which can be the basis for improving the brand’s existing assets and brainstorming for new content pieces in the future.

Aside from generating content themes and topics, social media is also a handy tool in promoting one’s content to a set group of influencers and bloggers.

You can use the new Topsy extractor tool by URL profiler to find influencers who've shared similar content of your brand (either content from competitors or non-competitors).

There are two things you can do with Topsy extractor:

Find influencers who have shared the top pages in your industry and include them to your Twitter list. Spend at least 5 minutes every week to see their latest status updates and conversations and use that as your basis for content ideation.
Create an outreach database listing down all influential social sharers, which you can later on pitch to share your content (if it is highly resourceful, they wouldn’t bother to link to it).

The marketing flywheel will continuously move the moment the content was massively shared on social networks, since bloggers and influencers who would have seen the page and find it useful will again share the content to their followers and visitors or even link to it from their own websites.

Even after weeks or months of publish, the page would still attract organic social shares and editorial links from researchers and bloggers who’re looking for references for their own works.

My older post on content promotion strategies is a good example of this link building strategy (social prospecting) because up until now, the content has been attracting social shares almost every day.

Link intersection

Understanding the linking behavior in a certain niche is still one of the effective ways to build authoritative backlinks that doesn’t rely heavily on the niche competition and/or difficulty level of the industry, but on the quality of crafted content and blogger relationships used to support the page.

One link building principle that you can take advantage of is link intersection, which is basically finding domains or pages that have intersected or linked to at least three resources that are similar to your content.

For this link building strategy, you can use Citation Labs citation tool to automatically generate a report of links with corresponding number of occurrences.

This method is useful when prioritizing your outreach activity for a long list of linking pages, since you can actually get an insight if there’s a high potential that a certain page will link to your content (when it is linked to other multiple resources as well).

You can use the tool in any of the following link building tactics:

See which pages and domains are actively and consistently linking to at least two of your competitors’ sites/pages given that if they’ve linked to those sites, they can also link to your content.
Find listing pages (manufacturers/suppliers) that have high potentials of linking to your content which will primarily be based on the number of times your competitors’ sites were included.
Determine local/international media outlets that previously mentioned at least two of your competitors. Once you’ve picked up those news sites, find a way to interact with their journalists or reporters to get some coverage for your brand.

There are other ways to execute link intersection in your link building strategy, and I might write a post on that topic alone.

Strategic blogging

Blogging is a powerful marketing tool because of its ability to instantly connect the brand with its target audience in a non-promotional way and being able to capture their interests – making them loyal subscribers and brand evangelists.

Aside from its connection ability, blogging can help speed up link acquisition by constantly producing high quality blog posts that are comprehensive and useful enough to be linked from relevant blog posts (old and newly published).

Part of maximizing the linking potential of a certain content /page is making sure that it can constantly be found in the search results by optimizing the page for basic on site optimization.

Keyword research is a basic yet vital activity in search engine optimization. It helps the search engines understand what the page is all about by including industry keywords and phrases that specifically defines the purpose of the page.

When it comes to keyword research for blogs, targeting long tail keywords is the best approach to increase the odds of ranking for multiple industry phrases in search results, which if successfully done, will definitely bring newly targeted visitors to the content over time.

Here are a few tools to consider when executing a keyword research process:

Google Keyword Planner (an instructional guide here)
Keywordtool.io
Google suggest

You can also check out this recent webinar by Nick Eubanks about competitive keyword research for search engine optimization.

Keyword research that is accompanied with basic on site optimization and tactical content creation will certainly make the blogging process much easier and effective in getting more targeted traffic from search engines.

Roel Manarang shared a comprehensive case study on how the combined efforts of optimization, content and keyword research will make a newly launched blog successful in earning 1000 visits a day.

Here are some more useful tips that you can immediately apply to your blog to size up links and blog traffic:

Invest in creating cost-effective content pieces like crowdsourced content and curated page wherein the efforts put into these pieces will pay off once they’ve captured the attention of potential linkers in the industry.
Update older webpages by optimizing them for timely keyword phrases (e.g. best practices for 2015) in order to improve their ability to rank for long tail keywords in search results (in which a a constant search traffic is assumed).
Invite bloggers to become regular contributors for your blog in exchange for monetary and/or non-monetary benefits (free access to premium products, social media exposure, lead generation opportunity through email, etc..).

You can read this post on increasing blog traffic which was just updated by Rand Fishkin last year.

Second-tier link building for long term traffic generators

A proper tier link building process is building second layer of linking pages that’ll support the initial set of linking domains, with the mindset of driving targeted traffic to the site’s internal pages.

To start with, it is very important to identify your brand’s traffic generators by looking at your site’s referral acquisition data.

The higher visits and potential revenue they generate for your business, the more you should focus on building links to them.

There are several non-labor intensive methods that you can use to build second-tier links to the first linking pages of your website, including:

Cite your initial linking page as a resource when participating in industry forums and Q&A websites.
Produce the right content pieces on other blogs and link to your initial linking pages with proper contextual relevancy (ensure that those pages are relevant to your contributed content).
Mention pages that have linked to your website in your interviews and guest appearances on other websites (podcasts, videos, etc..) since there will be opportunities to build links from those participated content (i.e. an end of the post list of tools/resources you’ve mentioned in the podcast).

Build exclusive local partnerships

The best element of earning highly authoritative links these days is relationship. Building the foundation of relationships with every thematic local brand through various online efforts that benefits both parties will definitely create a huge impact to the website’s branding and to its link acquisition strategy.

In the recent Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin, he shared a handful of ways on how a brand can maximize the value of advertisements to yield SEO value:

Get direct traffic through ads on blogs, forums, niche websites, or news/media sites.
Participate in conferences and events by becoming a corporate sponsor. Give creative giveaways to your audience (e.g. free wifi).
Choose outdoor/TV/radio/print advertising activity that can generate the highest business value to your brand.

In all of these platforms, a small business is more likely to invest in the first platform – blogs/forums/niche sites advertising.

Given that visits are targeted to a specific group of users/customers (since you are able to choose which website you want to advertise in), the link acquisition rate using this approach is higher, more especially if the content being promoted is highly resourceful to the target community.

Other local activities your small business can start executing today include:

Creating a local guide such as an events calendar for a certain location/city and start distributing the page to your local partners.
Provide testimonials for other local businesses whom you’ve partnered with in the past. It’s a give and take approach (you’ll get reviews for your company as well afterwards).
Speak at local events in your town and in your universities or colleges near you. Start by engaging with local organizers visible in Meetup.

Local partnerships will take your small business into many places. By simply connecting with other brands, you start to widen your brand reach and being able to build alliances that are sustainable and beneficial in the long run.

Create link building machines

Link building machine is a term used for content assets that guarantee a constant attraction of natural links both from authority websites and mid-tier blogs.

With link building machine, you maximize your efforts and focus on creating and/or improving a single content piece one at a time.

Your aim is to build multiple of this machine type in order to increase your branded authority in your industry and being able to invite other related brands for corporate partnerships or alliances.

For small businesses, here are a few link building machine ideas that you can initially create for your website:

Compile all branded images (pictures of local events, staff members, office locations, etc..) into one solid page and make it more visible to your audience by linking to it internally from your homepage.
Start providing online coupons to your potential customers and give discounts to those who would be able to share/promote your coupon page on their own blogs/sites.
Create your own referral or affiliate program simply by publishing a page that invites your visitors to refer your services/products to their readers and followers in exchange for a monetary payment and/or a premium access to your products.

Get premium product reviews

Product reviews are useful for brand recognition and authority, since the more reviews you acquire from industry blogs, the more branded searches you’ll get for your website every single month.

Inviting industry bloggers to write a review about your product is a challenging activity these days, particularly for brands that don’t have bigger budget to invest in paying their future promoters.

For small business owners, you can simply spend time in searching for prospect bloggers who have a history of writing product reviews and are targeting the same group of users as yours. Find those bloggers in any of the following product review platforms:

Engage with these bloggers and offer a long term partnership opportunity wherein they can generate regular passive income from your company through affiliates or referrals. Establishing relationships with product review writers will pay off in the long run since they can eventually evangelize your product without the need to pay them for their works (they will be accustomed/attached to your brand’s offerings and benefits).

Create a linkable jobs page

Every small business has a recruitment process whether it is assigned to a specific person or the CEO of the company or the Director himself does the hiring process.

For corporate websites, jobs page is an important tool to acquire talented and skilled workers who’re very interested to work for the company and has a good background of what the business’ offer, vision and mission are all about.

Create a jobs page that bloggers would likely to link to it because of the completeness and accuracy of the qualifications of applicant included in the page.

This jobs page of SEO Hacker is an example of a linkable jobs page. It is currently ranking for the keyword phrase, “SEO jobs Philippines”.

Distribute business assets to external local web properties

Content pieces crafted by your local staff can be distributed to external web properties in order to increase their visibility and become channels of link acquisition for your website.

There are tons of external properties on the web that have opportunities to add direct backlinks to your website. To name a few:

Business profiles. Make the company details complete to avoid removing your company from the list because of its spam-looking profile.
Video distribution sites like Vimeo. Add local promotional videos of your company and share video links on social profiles to get clicks on them.
User generated sites like Slideshare. Invest in building a well-designed portfolio of contents you’ve presented in offline events, since this can somehow drive potential revenue to your business (e.g. Sean Si’s presentation portfolio).
Podcast directories. If your site is involved in audio or podcast activities, submit these contents to podcast directory sites to build authority and audience in that particular platform.

Collect all available resources of your company and maximize their visibility potentials by submitting them to external web properties.

Engagement marketing

Engagement marketing is a free way to build links in this age of digital marketing, given that you don’t actually have to invest a huge amount of money to start with, just an hour every week is enough to start connecting with like-minded people in your industry.

Send customized products to bloggers and influencers who had engaged with your brand.

James Norquay from Prosperity Media received a set of cupcakes from the guys at Cupcakes at All Occasions. This gotten James’ attention and certainly help him strengthen his relationship with the cupcakes company.

Another great example of engagement marketing is this letter of appreciation from the Wordstream team, which is headed by Larry Kim.

There are still other ways to associate yourself with other brands through minimal and non-expensive engagement methods.

Here you go. These are the 11 link building strategies you can easily implement to your small business website. Let me know in the comments section which of them you want to use for your company.

If you are looking for a link building agency to partner with you, then don't hesitate to contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

6 Ways to Improve Backlinks in Your Link Graph

Link graph by its definition is the nodes (pages, documents) connected by directed edges (links). It helps in the ranking of documents of specific websites or entities.

Understanding link graph in its basic elements and identifying which existing links need to be improved could had a drastic effect on the site’s overall link and search performance,

It would also impact conversion marketing activities such as email signups from referred visitors on restored links on other sites and additional leads from recovered links on other blog’s broken pages (404).

In this post, I’m going to share with you 6 effective methods on how to improve your existing backlinks – getting the most out of their value and seeing improved results in your search marketing campaigns.

1. Reclaim unlinked branded mentions

Brands with websites that have executed high-par branding performance can potentially draw a good amount of mentions from other relevant websites to the site’s key pages (content or sales page)

You can take advantage of these branded mentions for link development by ensuring that all of them are properly linked to the appropriate pages of your site.

Unlinked branded mentions could be translated to powerful backlinks by reaching out to the site owner or blogger with a sweet and short email.

Here’s an email copy that you can use for linker outreach.

Hi NAME,

I’m Venchito Tampon, marketing coordinator of BRAND NAME.

I reached out to you because I found your site, SITE NAME, including our resource on RESOURCE TOPIC in your page – www.url.com.

I’m wondering if you can give us a credit by inserting a link pointing to our RESOURCE TOPIC content.

Hoping for a positive response.

All the best,

Venchito

A few things to consider in branded link building:

If branded mentions are acquired through media link building – news release, interviews, round-ups, etc.. – ask the content creator to link out to the brand’s company page or best, your site’s homepage.
For media link building, you can also ask the webmaster to point your link to your sales page (e.g. link building services) to pass not only link juice to your site’s key pages but also to drive visitors through referral links.

Take advantage of keyword-specific branded keywords (e.g. curtain blinds) when pursuing links from other sites/blogs. Search for existing blog posts with the exact keyword-specific phrases on the page and try to get a link in them. It does help in sending positive signals to search engines of the relevance of your brand with other websites.

You can check out this guide on Moz detailing how to use unlinked branded mentions for link acquisition.

2. Translate no-follow to do-follow

Attribution to links is not a big issue anymore these days, as whether you built a no-follow or do-follow link, either of the two is qualified to amplify your content, to bring brand awareness and potential conversions to your website.

You can check out these two resources to deeply understand the power of no-follow links:

Though both attributes (no-follow or do-follow) are valuable in brand recognition and link development, one needs to be prioritized as it passes link equity to the site – do-follow.

Translating a no-follow to a do-follow link would work in any of the following cases:

When a link is built through media purposes (news, round-ups, stories, etc..), you can easily ask the content creator to change the link attribute.
When the no-follow link pointing to your homepage comes from a high DA website, it is advisable to convert it to do-follow in order to maximize the value from the link, as it would help improve the overall domain authority of your website.

You can find the percentage of dofollow and nofollow links in the backlink types of Ahrefs platform (in case you’re using this tool).

3. Fix linked pages pointing to site’s broken pages

As link building campaign progresses, some links on the linking pages from other sites/blogs dilutes. Others are now pointed to broken pages of your site, which is a lost opportunity to gain new brand followers as well as potential clients/customers who would have seen the information displayed on your broken page.

It is imperative to regularly monitor any broken pages in your website and identify if there are existing links pointing to them.

If inbound links are appropriately point to a similar page of your broken page, then it would help improve your link profile, as referred users could still consume a similar content as they have read when the broken page should have been lived.

There are two options to fix this issue.

Recreate the broken page

You can recover the content on your site’s broken pages by republishing it (only if the information in those pages is still included in your database).

Dive into Archive.org and see if you can recreate the older version of the broken page. Make sure that you produce a more comprehensive information than the original version.

Invest in design. Most of the organic content pieces on the web aren’t originally written by topic experts but through interactive designs and format, the new resource defines a new perspective on the topic.

Once you have published the updated content piece, you can redirect the broken page to its new version, to maintain the link equity passing through the linking pages.

Ask existing linkers to link to a similar page

Another method to sustain link equity from your site’s broken pages is to ask existing linkers to point out instead to similar resources.

You can start by identifying pages that provide similar information to your site’s broken page using top content feature of Ahrefs.

Once you’ve determined similar resources of your broken content piece, you can reach out to its existing linkers and ask them to point their existing links to your updated content piece.

4. Balance anchor text percentage

Anchor text variation is a major discussion in the link building world since Penguin started to roll out on April 24, 2012.

Choosing what anchor texts will be used in every link built/earned is still an issue for most newbie link developers out there, as they want to make their sites’ link profiles as natural looking as possible.

As I always quote on every interview that I’ve been a part of, “don’t make your link profile natural, just be natural”.

If your site’s link backbone has any of the following cases in anchor texts, then you may need to apply link improvement tips (which will be discussed later on):

Anchor texts aren’t relevant to the domain or page’s topical authority (e.g. finance/loan keywords to a tech blog).
The volume of commercial anchor texts is greater than the number of branded keywords.

Invest in topical authority content to earn new links and diversify anchor texts

What most seasoned content marketers and link developers would state about the benefits of creating high quality content is simply the ability of a resource to acquire new links for the site, which would help increase the domain’s search performance.

Investing in linkable assets doesn’t just help the brand earn new links. It also helps diversify the anchor texts – commercial keywords and branded texts.

Don’t execute linker outreach to ask for anchor text replacement

If links had been existed for years, then it would be unwise to reach out to the linkers and ask for replacement in anchor texts (changing texts to preferred phrases).

Instead, you can invest your time in improving your existing content to earn more editorial links, which are high in anchor text diversity.

5. Improve content based on its perceived value from existing linkers

Content marketing has always been about delivering substance to readers.

The reason why most bloggers and industry influencers would want to link to you is the perceived value your content brings to the table.

If content’s information is being updated to intersect with the uprising trends and ideas in the industry, there is a likelihood to grow the number of links acquired each month.

Link development involves updating your old or existing content pieces to better serve a specific linkable audience.

A few ways to improve content assets to populate more links for the brand:

Analyze why linkers linked to you in the first place. Get content improvement ideas from the anchor texts in their linking pages (g. here’s a great list of local job sites from www.domain.com).
Adding more context on topics that haven’t been made detailed in your content (e. list of job sites on a career improvement content) would help your resource to earn additional contextual links, as it can tap industry-specific blogs (e.g. job search sites).
Identify industries aside from your main target niche that can be penetrated by your content. You can look at all the inbound links of your resource using Ahrefs.

Other useful resources:

6. Make existing linkers link to you again

Recurring links from high authority domains send signals that search engines use as a ranking factor to determine a page’s authority.

Getting a blogger/influencer link to your website again is one effective way to improve your site’s link acquisition process, as you could also drive additional social signals and brand followers to your website.

Here are some ways to generate contextual recurring links from your existing linkers:

Share content pieces of target bloggers/influencers on your brand’s social media profiles to build rapport with current linkers.
Reach out to existing linkers and share your newly published content asset (if it’s highly useful, they’ll definitely link to it).
Create content partnerships with non-competing brands by offering options where both parties would be benefited. You can check out listed options in this post by Jason Acidre on scaling link building process using influencer marketing.
Demonstrate expertise on high traffic publications by contributing content on a regular basis. This will consistently send qualified traffic and conversions to your site and can also lead to getting invitations to become a regular contributor on other relevant blogs too.
Build links to content partners’ sites from your contributed content pieces on other industry blogs to facilitate reciprocity (content partners would likely return the favor of linking to your site as well from their guest content pieces).
Invite linkers to participate in your brand’s online community activities (e.g. webinars, online forums, blog discussions, etc..). There is a high potential to let them link again to your site by featuring you in their new content – tips on XXX webinar.

Useful resources on link improvement:

If you're looking for a link building service for your company, you can contact us for inquiry.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building Tactics for Large Websites

Link building is one of the most important development processes in online marketing, specifically in helping the site’s key pages rank for targeted keywords resulting to more discovery of the information and context of the brand.

Moz concludes that links would still be valuable in ranking a page(s) in search results, especially for non-competitive phrases, leaving no pages rank without at least one webpage linking to each of them.

Links are considered as a valuable elements on the web, as they help web searchers to find more relevant resources by clicking on webpages attached to the content they’re reading through. These serve as a source of web traffic and converting customers who are ready to purchase a product/service from a linking brand.

Different businesses across industries had started investing in link development campaigns given that they already see the value in this online marketing practice as links don't just pass ranking signals to site’s page(s) but make the brand more relevant and important to its industry (brand recognition).

In reality, not all big brands had already maximized their resources to the extent that they have the highest dominance in the market share.

Here are a few reasons why large websites couldn’t dominate their own industries’ market shares despite having more than enough resources in their campaigns:

Weak connections with bloggers and industry content creators leading to low number of editorial links acquired every single month.
Not understanding the right market segments – this results to low percentage of conversions when doing a linker outreach campaign.
Using all available resources (i.e. budget) on a one-time blogger outreach campaign (e.g. giveaways or product reviews).

Link building campaigns for large websites should be planned strategically – maximizing all the efforts exerted by the team, utilizing available resources of the brand (images, partnered organizations and associations, offline events, etc..) and delivering the best value to linkable audiences through creating industry’s comprehensive guides.

Let’s take a look at some creative link building tips that can certainly skyrocket the number of links your brand could develop to its website over time.

Resource Inclusion

Publishing resource guides of any size and of any format (image, text, video, animated, etc..) is one of the well-known methodologies to guarantee high quality links to a specific site/page since the more you are perceived to be the authority of a certain market segment as you continuously produce informative content assets, the likelihood of earning contextual links from industry publishers and bloggers who’ll be referencing your content from their works would be much higher.

Contextual links earned from bloggers who would include the resource guide in one of their existing and/or future blog posts can boost the content’s page authority and can help the brand to absorb visitors from the linking blog/site.

One effective way to include your resource guide on other blog’s content is to pitch bloggers with this customized email template.

hoping to add a resource to your [ title ] article

Hi [Name],

I've been reading your site, www.domain.com and I'm hoping that you'll take the time to look at a great resource that will fit in as a complement to your article on [topic].

We just written a post on offline branding that teaches you how to use promotional items to build brand recognition. So I thought this might be a really great additional resource for your audience.

Let me know if you're interested in including our post.

Looking forward to hear from you!

Regards,

Venchito

A few reasons why this email copy works:

The words in subject line are all lower case.
The template includes the Name of the blogger and his/her Brand/Blog name.
It specifically targets an article or page (title).
It explains the reason why the resource guide should be included in the post.
A polite statement is added at the end of the email, which serves as a call-to-action of the whole message. A yes/no question would only stop the conversation immediately.
Straightforward and has stated the intention.

Here are other tactics that you can also apply to improve your outreach’s response and conversion rates:

Leave a sensible comment on the blogger’s recent post. This gives him/her familiarity of who you are as a brand.
Share the blogger’s latest post on your brand’s social accounts (e.g. Twitter). Make sure you tag his Twitter profile so he can receive a notification when you started to share his posts.
Brainstorm an email template with your team members that you can test out for your target industry (see #4 actionable tip in this Ross Hudgen’s post).
Schedule your email messages at the best time of the day and week (Tuesday to Thursday, 10 am to 3 pm). You can use Sidekick or Boomerang as your email scheduling tool.
Test other value propositions in your outreach, such as fixing the code issues of one of their site’s key pages, setting up a new CDN for them, offering a new website layout (you can give them a premium website theme), doing a research for their upcoming post or purchasing or getting a royalty-free image for them (e.g. Stock and Stock).
Find generic points in his blog and/or his about me/us page that is worthy of a mentionin order to spark a conversation.
Share your latest brand achievements (the highest number of shares in your recent guest post on other blog, a contributed content for one of the authoritative publications in your industry, publications you have been featured in or active number of social followers).
Request referrals from other bloggers to get immediate blogger outreach opportunities in your prospect list which you can easily tap via a simple email (you can include this statement – Jason referred you as one of the popular bloggers in the fashion industry).

Wikipedia Creation

Wikipedia is one of the top user-generated websites that allows web users to create their own branded pages for their businesses or websites, referencing their brand’s history, tools, features, experiences and other valuable information that can help news reporters and researchers to better understand their business/website as a whole.

Publishing your own branded Wikipedia page does help you in so many ways, such as:

Improves your online brand reputation management. Seeing that web searchers would be able to find your Wikipedia page as one of the top ranking pages when searching for branded keyword(s), having a Wikipedia page for the brand would certainly develop trust and credibility across potential brand followers.
Boosts the domain/page authority of your homepage, tools page and/or other web properties, such as Chrome/Mozilla extension add-on (if you’re offering a web-based tool). The links that you would be getting from Wikipedia will not only pass ranking power to linked pages but could also bring referral visitors who will likely reference your brand in their blogging works – if they are content creators.
Helps the business/site earn hard-to-replicate links from news site authors and industry publishers, who are looking for stories and answers to questions for their future content piece. Since Wikipedia has its related page searches, it would be easy for researchers to find other brands in Wikipedia that are similar to their current reference/search.

There is one effective content creation process to get you create a Wikipedia page for your brand, especially if you’re working on several link development campaigns.

Here’s a sample Wikipedia page for one of our clients.

Step 1: Grab all the required information from your client.

Wikipedia has a standard format flow of information that you need to follow in order to publish a branded Wikipedia page.

You need to get the following branded details straight from your client:

History of the brand
Features of the tool/service
Remarkable experiences of the brand
Achievements and recognitions
Founder’s name and his/her experiences starting out the company/website

You can simply ask these questions to your client or compile them into one document and shoot this over to him.

Step 2: Write up the Wikipedia page according to its formatting guidelines.

You can write the Wikipedia page by yourself with the given answers to questions above or outsource this task to a content writer, charging around $10 to $30.

Step 3: Hire an experienced editor to submit your entry to Wikipedia.

If you’re looking for scalability in creating Wikipedia pages to all established websites of your clients, then hiring an experienced Wikipedia editor could help you quickly run the process.

People Per Hour is an outsourcing website that has thousands of trusted and high quality virtual assistants with skills varying from content writing to web development.

Scaling Wikipedia content creation is easy by hiring an experienced Wikipedia content editor to submit your entry, following the site’s formatting guidelines.

Other useful resources:

Blogger Outreach Survey

Reaching out to bloggers is one of the most utilized content promotion tactics nowadays, seeing that this market group is easy to connect with (most responsive audience group) and have higher placement rate compared to other audience groups like corporate site owners, press release and news site content editors and other industry publishers.

Siegemedia recently published a guide on how to effectively pitch bloggers by first understanding their content calendar.

Actionable points that you can draw from the guide are the following:

By understanding the average number of days industry bloggers are taking in advance for every blog post they write can help you get in front of that time period, pitch the blogger with your content asset and obtain a link from his blog.
Planning your content creation process ahead of holidays, seasonable events and celebrations can give your team members a space for content promotion which can help increase placement rates on blogs.
Determining what topics your bloggers really want to cover on their own blogs (i.e. breaking news) can help you create a “must” content piece that content publishers would be willing to include in their upcoming posts.

Pitching bloggers in advance for content ideation, resource/link inclusion in their upcoming online magazines and coverage for their news/stories is a sure-fire way to increase blog placement rates and continuously develop relationships with content creators.

More blogger outreach guides:

Relationship Link Building

Relationships signals editorial links which can’t be replicated by your competitors. What most link building agencies fail is not being able to maximize their existing connections with partnered associations/organizations, bloggers, content creators and co-industry experts, to the extent that they can’t influence a certain market segment in the industry resulting to lost link opportunities.

There are many methodologies that can help develop relationships with old and new bloggers and content creators:

Send valuable gifts to active bloggers in the industry. Here’s a case study from last year by James Norquay on how to gain contextual links, mentions and social shares to your brand/site by giving gifts to bloggers during seasonal events (e.g. Christmas).
Create a local event that features industry experts across your city. Make sure you invite bloggers in your niche who have built readership and social following on the web (you can send them free tickets or transportation fees to get them participate).
Check out both unlinked and linked brand mentions using Fresh Web Explorer. Reach out to bloggers who have credited your site/page and say a simple thank you to them. For unlinked brand mentions, you can send an email asking them to properly link to your site/page.

You might want to check out this Moz post by Ruth Reedy on how to build links in person.

More relationship building resources:

If you’re looking for link building services for fashion websites, then you can contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building Tactics for Fashion Websites

With all sorts of link building tactics that come into play nowadays, not all of them will work on different types of niches. Some would need to have a creative component in order to fit into a specific industry and it would require a thorough research to do that.

In the fashion industry, executing a link building campaign isn’t simple yet is possible to do so with creative elements, such as:

Visually-appealing images. Content consumers in the fashion niche are more likely to view images than reading how-to posts and case studies.
Engagement opportunities. Fashion bloggers have high linking tendencies when engaged in an event where they can be provided with relevant value (benefits/incentives).

In this post, I'm going to discuss creative link acquisition techniques that can skyrocket your link building results and develop brand awareness across your web communities.

Content-driven Partnerships

Content marketing still play a vital role in link acquisition, as it covers the most important part in building a relationship with a potential linker – trust.

Content develops trust building in so many ways such as:

Increasing page’s trust score when industry users, especially content creators perceived the content piece as a comprehensive and authoritative resource, thus, linking to it from their own relevant blogs/sites.
Consistently publishing linkable content assets on different topics with the most useful information and data will establish brand recall for target audience – this approach will help them remember the brand when topics are being discussed on different web entities, such as forums, Q&A sites and blog communities.
Content brings low to medium profile content creators to established authorities in the industry (if it’s not the content Rand Fishkin shares on Moz, then up until now, we still don’ t recognize him as a digital marketing expert).
Independent brand publishers who produce data-driven content are being sourced as references on high quality articles from authoritative domains in the niche.

Trust building helps outreach specialists to improve their linker outreach as they can have reasons why someone from the other side of the conversation can link to their page/content.

As content being their main component, these methodologies would bring reasons to your emails to get opened, responded and turned into link opportunities by potential linkers.

Fix an outdated content on a highly linkable domain by creating a new version of it – adding new information, refreshing data, and changing interests/trends would make it more comprehensive than the original source. Use Outdated Content Finder by Greenlane SEO for this approach. To get the most link opportunities, you can reach out to blogs/resource pages that have linked to the original page and simply note that they might be interested to link to a new/comprehensive content on the same topic.
Enhance one area in a linkable content through creative ways, such as translating the page to other languages where other target groups will also benefit from the resource or using technical skills to improve the process/tool/product (which will somehow require investment in effort and money).
Help someone clean up his malware-infected site(s) by reaching out to him and letting him know about a malware-infected link in one of his pages, then suggesting a good resource (your content) for replacement. You can use Scrapebox to identify malware-infected links on niche-specific pages.
Help bloggers with Wordpress sites which are open to hackers and content thieves to be secured. Identify first the site’s vulnerability using tools like Sucuri and w3af. Then let them know about their site’s technical issues. You can check out this post on UKLinkology about link building with wordpress vulnerabilities.

Another way to partner with fashion-oriented sites is to collaborate on a “get the look” or “outfit” content pieces around popular TV personalities, movie characters and commercial models then distributed these output content as guest posts to fashion blogs, women blogs, teen blogs and other related industries.

You might also want to apply this content partnership process that we’re currently testing for some of our clients’ link building campaigns:

Identify 50 fashion bloggers or non-competitor fashion-oriented sites that regularly publishes content on their blogs – their blogging frequency signifies that they would need someone to help them with in producing blog posts on a regular basis.
Prioritize your list of fashion linkers according to readership size (subscribe to their blog feeds to see their estimated regular readers), social following (number of followers on Twitter/Facebook), average number of comments per post (for blog engagement) and search rank potential (using SEMrush metric – traffic cost).
List down their names and possible email addresses in a spreadsheet (use any of the email finder tools in this Matthew Barby’s post).
Create a custom pitch for each of the fashion blogger. Make pitches straightforward and short.
Ask if they’re interested in partnering with you for content development and distribution.

Here are a few ideas that you can push through in your outreach campaigns:

Interview someone from the fashion company and publish the output on your own blog. You can add more exposure to it by promoting on Facebook (sponsorship ads at $5 cost). See this post for an additional reference.
Combine complimentary fashion images from both ends (from your own brand and from the other company) into one big post. Sharing the content piece on both brands’ social networks can increase the chances of making the post go viral on social.
Make a variety of content contributions. This will develop the relationship you’ve built with fashion content creators as they can see you as a content authority in the industry since you’re not just publishing text posts but also other content formats like infographics, interviews, animated gifts, etc..

Here is a slide deck by Grant Merriel which was presented at SEO Summit 2015, about the 7 sales techniques that you can use to improve link outreach.

7 Sales Techniques to Improve your Link Outreach from Sean Si

Organized Category Pages

Category pages are best targeted pages for link acquisition as it funnels link equity through its subcategory pages or direct product/services pages which makes them rank for related search terms.

There are tons of fashion ecommerce stores who under-utilized the power of linking to category pages and optimizing them as well for search ranking potential. This led to missing link opportunities given that users might find it easily for them to quickly scan a category page by reading the category page’s description. Then including these category pages as references and/or additional resources for their own blogs or resource pages.

Miss Selfridge brand does a great job in optimizing their category pages by adding above the fold descriptions for each of their product categories. This will be made easy not just for users but also to search engines to understand what the category page is all about.

It’s not effective to just count the value of keywords that you’ll be targeting for category pages by simply looking at available set of search volume of those keywords. You can watch this Whiteboard Friday of Rand Fishkin on how to properly estimate the value and volume of keywords in a given market or niche.

Other useful resources:

Conduct Offline Events

This methodology sounds familiar to seasoned link builders and SEOs out there but what most of the advanced ones usually forgot when conducting offline events is making every single event beneficial for bloggers who they want to target for brand exposure and link building.

Seminar participants are tired of seeing the casual seminar every time they attend events so adding creativity for each of the seminar segments wouldn’t get them overwhelmed but also engaged in a way that they would want to share their experience on their own blogs.

Farfetch goes beyond the usual fashion blogging event. Rather than making each blogger as spectators, they let bloggers dress themselves up as models with high end clothing from their top designers. They hired professional photographers to take high quality images of their guests. Then they created animated images (gifts) from photos captured at the event.

The fashion animated gifts will be emailed to respective bloggers after the event so they can use them in blog posts. This is an evergreen content that targeted bloggers could use for the longest time as long as those photos are relevant to their future blog topics.

Here are some additional ways to add more creativity to fashion blogging events – if you’re planning to conduct one this year:

Add fashion-related social competitions to your event so you can track which individual bloggers heavily promoted their looks (individual animated gifs) on social platforms. Choose a winner and give a considerable incentive – clothing or any wearable – he/she might also review your brand incentive as a sign of his/her appreciation.
If you’re planning to start your own blogging event, try to reach out to popular fashion blogger groups in your city/country (e.g. London Fashion bloggers). Get them as sponsors or invite their popular fashion speakers/bloggers to participate in your event – this is doable if you have something to provide to them for free (i.e. pay flights/transportation fees for some of your participants).
Start your offline engagement by first attending one fashion blogging event across your city. You may want to read this post at Pop Goes Fashion on how to get invited to fashion and beauty blogger events.

There would certainly be an investment of time and money when conducting fashion blogging events but the return of investment in terms of brand exposure and additional high quality fashion-centric links is high.

Other useful resources:

Branded Social Integration

Social media is certainly one of the popular content distribution channels that a fashion-oriented brand/blog would need to take advantage of.

A few reasons why social integration is an important content distribution channel:

It adds impression to viewers and potential customers of the value that the brand is able to provide since most of the content promoted on social are branded images.
It helps build a community of bloggers and readers for the brand. Simple interactions on social are good enough to engage potential brand followers and get them involved in some kind of events and brand-driven activities (user-generated content participation, offline workshops, etc..).
It helps potential customers go through the bottom of the sales funnel. Since they always view fashion products of any kind on Twitter/Facebook, they already have brand recall on what specific company they want to buy products from.

Farfetch started a social campaign which was part of their blogging event discussed earlier.

The campaign was named as #digitaldressup, which is basically getting bloggers to talk about the event with them clothed as models for the event.

The social results obtained from the event are detailed below:

Instagram – uploaded 60 fashion photographs with an audience reach potential of 15,434 people.

Twitter – overall 96 #digitaldressup tweets with total Twitter audience reach of 83,935 people.

Building a memorable social experience is one of the effective ways to attract links in the fashion world, as you get to involve fashion content creators and linkers with your brand and engage them with other fellow fashion enthusiasts.

Manufacturing friendships is the key. It won’t give you a guarantee set number of high quality backlinks at the start but sooner or later, your site’s key pages and your brand itself will get recognition in the community and eventually earn significant amount of links.

Other useful resources:

If you’re looking for link building services for fashion websites, then you can contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building for Real Estate Websites

Real estate industry has been one of the highly competitive niches across the web, particularly in offering potential buyers to view their detailed property listings through different marketing methodologies as well as capitalizing on these channels to convert potential customers into happy clients.

The “content is king” mindset isn’t enough to build links to a realtor’s website – creative content marketing strategy with a solid team in play is needed to beat the link building competition.

However, there are a few considerations that must be kept in mind when planning to conduct a link building campaign for a real estate website, which some of them are stated by Garett French in the latest roundup on link building failures:

Realtors are not website/publishing savvy - some of them want online brand presence alone.
Most realtors are non-responsive (too busy to respond to emails since their main agenda is to exceed their quota sales and/or expand their business operations).
Realtors have low perceived value of publishing non-sales content on their websites.
Geography is a vital factor for realtors as linkers.

In this post, I’m going to show actionable tactics that skyrocketed results for some of the newly-branded websites in the real industry today.

Creative Content Marketing

Content marketing has grown its demand for the last decade as more and more companies are turning to this inbound marketing approach since they find it as a very effective tool to increase brand awareness, following and industry authority.

In driving results through content marketing campaign, the requirements won’t only limit to the number of content creators in a team and to the expected campaign’s budget, but more so to the number of visitors/consumers engaged in a certain type of content as well as to how many of them are converted to customers/loyal followers.

A specific content campaign is being measured through metrics defined on its content marketing goal(s) (which are clearly explained in this Whiteboard Friday edition of Moz).

One measurement that is still underrated by many digital marketers is the page/site’s usage data, which can highly reflect the quality of the site/page and the level of experience it provides to its users.

Certain types of content in the real estate industry had been effective in bringing positive usage signals to the site where these content assets are hosted.

A few of them are:

Listicles
Heatmaps (and maps in general)
Big, delicious full screen images
Really meaty infographics
Curated video content

Movoto paved a way to becoming one of the content authorities in the real estate niche – publishing high quality and interactive content assets that both earned hundreds even thousands of social shares and generated hundreds of editorial links from top media outlets, niche-specific blogs and web communities (forums, Q&A sites, etc..).

There are so many actionable tips that we can digest from Movoto’s content marketing campaign that you can also apply to your real estate blog/company or to your other related website (since this list of methodologies are result-driven regardless of the type of industry).

For content ideation:

If working with a team, you can setup a regular brainstorming session daily to generate content ideas and themes that could resonate to your target audience, not necessarily your potential customers (here’s a sample spreadsheet of Movoto that you can use for your own brainstorming session).
Tap other industries that have verified linkable audiences, active social sharers and/or content researchers/editors to increase the chances of getting eyeballs for your content (niches like video games and finance could be tied up to real estate industry). See this Marvel Character Map and Hyrule Castle of Movoto).
Look for specific needs in web communities and drive your content with a mission to solve people’s problems (topics like disaster tips, emergencies and plumbing are most-sought themes in real estate related sub-reddits).
Publish seasonal content that have high tendencies of going viral and does help in acquiring more social shares and contextual links to your domain. One incredible example is this content piece from Winkworth.
Create buying guides for potential real estate clients or customers so they can simply follow a step by step process on how they can partner with your real estate company to buy or sell their houses offline.
Produce content assets that can be annually updated to continually serve your audience with the right information every year. This will also help your site earn links from real estate bloggers/researchers as they would still find your content valuable years after it has been published on your blog (e.g. Savills House Price Predictions) .

Here is a comprehensive post from Paddy Moogan on generating content ideas using Buzzsumo – you may want to check it out for future references.

For content creation:

Invest time and effort in brainstorming for headlines of your content to increase clicks from users coming from different sources (search, social and referral). Check out this short and actionable checklist on headline writing).
Make specific call to actions visible on your page to funnel visitors down to your sales funnel (encouraging them to subscribe to your email list, to share your page on social networks or click on a link pointing to a related sales page).

For content distribution:

Cite your content from your externally-distributed posts on other blogs to get additional referral visitors and potential linkers to your site (getting coverage and exposure on high traffic blogs are beneficial for your brand especially if it is where your target market is).
Reach out and connect to industry influencers and real estate bloggers who’ll find value and most likely share your content to their followers and readers.

After a month or two, you can search for blogs who have mentioned your brand or your content but haven’t linked to your site/page. You can ask them to cite you as the original source of the content, especially if the piece is legally owned by your brand (i.e. infographics, whitepapers, etc..).
Monitor incoming links to your domain and interact with link creators. This will help you build a community that could later on benefit your content marketing campaign since having a solid following base can help you consistently attract social shares and contextual links from networks of the said community.

Local SEO

Optimizing your website for local search experience is one of the effective ways not only to drive targeted users from search when ranking your page(s) for industry-related and local-based search terms, but to increase your chances of earning links from content creators and industry publishers who are looking for references for their content works.

Jason Acidre recently published a list of actionable SEO tips that mainly discuss the common yet underrated techniques to optimize a website for search:

Maximize crawl budget to pass link equity to site’s key pages.
Optimize for Knowledge Graph and Google Quick Answers Box
Optimize for long-click to drive more visitors from ranking pages.
Bulk-up more signals on pages you want to rank.
Continuously work on and monitor your brand’s external linkable assets.

Aside from the SEO tactics mentioned above, there are still other techniques that you can use to build and/or earn direct or indirect links to your page/domain through local SEO activities, such as:

Contribute offline external content to real estate columns to get more exposure for your brand in the local real estate scene.
Reach out to local event organizers and offer something valuable to them in exchange for a logo/brand promotion (sponsorship, speaking engagement, etc..).
Use social media sites like Twitter to engage with your existing social following. You can tweet out questions and ask their most important consideration when moving to a new neighborhood. Use their answers as added information and tips to your content.
Provide the right information in your branded pages (company, our team, services, etc..) so when people do a Google search for your brand after they received a real estate flyer, it would be easy for them to find the exact details they need about your company.
Write an area-based intent title and description in your page. Don’t use other locations where you’re not selling houses at. Misleading search users on your website will negatively affect your site’s usage.
Respond to negative reviews of your brand on local review sites like Yelp to preserve good reputation.
Submit to local directories and citation sites to increase your site’s domain authority and to improve the local relevance of your brand.

Other useful resources:

Engagement-based Social Media Activities

Having created your own branded pages on different social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, etc..) isn’t enough to build brand awareness in this marketing platform – social media.

Engagement with social users using your branded social profiles is still the key to bring social signals to your content/brand, which will also help you eventually earn links from bloggers and content creators who would find your real estate content on social media (through social sharing) – making it as useful references for their own blog posts.

A few of these engagement activities are:

Share content pieces from non-competitor real estate brands on your own social accounts (e.g. Twitter) to get to your target influencers’ radars and absorb their social followers as well.
Tweet out tips and learnings from your brand’s latest local real estate events. You can create your own branded hashtag (e.g. #realestatebrandtips) and use it consistently when sharing tips on real estate. As for local events, here’s a good example of a real estate coffee chat.
Make a Twitter list of the columnists and bloggers in the real estate niche (start with regular contributors of Bigger Pockets). You can also create a spreadsheet of these content creators, listing their names and contact information so you can easily reach out to them via email if you have something valuable that you can share to them. Organize the list according to your priorities – # of social followers, influence score or # of sites they regularly contribute content.
Keep track of the latest social conversations (real estate trends, updates, tips, etc..) so you can generate ideas for your content that can serve interests of your target audiences.
Spark conversations that can help your brand communicate with your existing social followers. You can ask a question like “name your top 3 local SEO personalities that have influenced or inspired their career the most” (the results that you can generate from this can be used for your next blog post).

Other useful resources:

Content Sourcing

This principle is originated from Jason Acidre, which is basically defined as a process of tracking regular sources of popular news sites in the industry (finding what domains high-tier news sites are regularly referencing from their (news sites) content is a long-shot tactic that you could take advantage to consistently earn links to your page/site).

The benefits of this link building technique are not limited to the direct links that you can build from A-news sites and to the indirect (second-tier links) you can get from domains linking to your contributed content on news sites, but content sourcing will also help your brand to acquire additional social followers, blog readers as well as conversions to your brand.

You can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to scrape external links from a particular site or its category pages to see which domains these popular news sites are referencing to.

If you’re looking for link building services for real estate websites, then you can contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Build Contextual Links that Your Competitors Can’t Copy

A contextual link is a powerful type of backlink that is placed within the content of a page, earned through linkbait approach (utility of the content and blogger relationships) or voluntarily acquiring it by providing external content piece on a specific blog/site (e.g. guest post with a link pointing to your content/page).

Contextual links pass more ranking ability or link value than those links placed in the lower portion of the page. This gives rise to the importance of building editorial/contextual links to increase the authority and importance of your content, page or domain.

On a more detailed level, Bill Slawski shared other elements that might be considered by Google in context scores/identifiers (term used to create a score for each backlink) – which would make your contextual link building more powerful when primarily look at.

These elements include:

The number of links to the document
The importance of the documents linking to the document
The freshness of the documents linking to the document
Other known ranking factors

If there aren’t many of the said context identifiers in a document, the ranking value for that link that might be passed to another page will be ignored (this patent refers to as a hypertext relevance signal).

In other words, even if there are hundreds of backlinks pointing to your page but they’re not as important and authoritative in the eyes of Google, then they’re nearly useless for your target content/site.

Before getting straight to actionable tips on how to build high quality contextual links to your website and give you a few case studies to support those methods, let’s first understand some elements of contextual link building.

Elements of Contextual Link Building

Trust

Trust is still one of the important components of link building since what constitutes a prospect linker to give you a link will mostly depend on two things:

How your brand’s content piece helps their audience, if they own a blog.
How well they know your expertise as an industry author/content publisher (which can be implied in the quality of the content).

Trust building is like planting a seed. It takes a considerable amount of time for your target audience (linkers) to give a vote of confidence on your content/brand.

Authority

Authority gives boost to the ranking potential of a page/domain, thus, helps accelerate the overall influence of the brand over its targeted space/sub-segment (if there are many sub-niches in one industry).

Authority is essential in link building, in a sense, that a content piece must be linked to by relevant and authoritative pages in order for search engines to perceive it as an authoritative page.

SEObytheSea is a good example of an authoritative domain in the search marketing industry that earned its reputation because of a few trusted websites that contextually link to its blog pages (e.g. Moz).

It’s the trust and authority of the linking page that matters these days.

Content Asset

A content that is considered as an asset of the company/site would definitely be given attention to by its content creator, particularly on the side of its content promotion phase.

If you consider every content piece that you publish as a business asset, the confidence and efforts you’ll exert in promoting the page is much higher than simply thinking of it as an accomplishment check to your editorial calendar (blogging frequency).

In the exact link acquisition phase, it would be easy for you to write an outreach pitch to a particular group of linker audience since you are confident enough that outreach responses would certainly convert to editorial links, based on how helpful it is to a particular blogger/webmaster.

The question is, “Could it be considered to add as a useful resource to an existing relevant content?”

Effective Strategies to Earn Contextual Links

Build evergreen and linkable content assets

Evergreen content is a content piece that constantly attracts attention, traffic and links and stays “fresh” for readers for the longest period of time (almost) because of its untimely information and data.

Linkable content is a content asset targeted to a specific linkable audience that aims to solve a certain problem and/or to fill a missing gap/information in the industry.

Combining evergreen and linkability principles to a content asset would certainly make it a powerful linkbait piece that will constantly attract natural backlinks even several months or years after it has been published.

So how can you build an evergreen and linkable content asset? Here are some actionable ways that you can follow.

Search for a linkable topic in your industry

Linkability of a topic is not based on the search volume of a niche keyword or phrase, but on the amount of existing resource pages and blog posts that can potentially link to your content asset.

How can you find a verified linkable topic?

Think of the audience that you want to target for your content. It may not be your target customers but a specific group of content consumers. If the linkable audience is part of your core group of customers, then there’s a high chance to build links to your content and at the same time, generate leads and sales from it.

Now, here are verified linkable audiences that you can target for your content piece (from Citation Labs):

Teachers
Caregivers
Parents
Senior citizens
Veterans
Health conditions sufferers
Job Seekers
The Unemployed Workers in the Non-Profit sector (people curing societal ills such as homelessness, poverty, abuse)
Members of any underserved communities (immigrants, people with disabilities, etc.)
Local community
Students
Families of Substance Abusers

If your company is selling blinds and curtains, then one of the topics of that are mostly discuss about is sun protection.

In order to determine if that topic is linkable, you need to find at least 50 available links pages or curated content on that particular topic (50+ pages in the search results).

Do a Google search for consumers + topic.

Example search queries:

“for parents” inurl:links.html “sun safety”

“for parents” inurl:links.html “sun protection”

If you still don’t have any potential linkable topics, here are some of the methods that you can use:

Search for “site:.gov or site:.edu + industry head keyword”. Scan the results pages or even click on each page listed in the search results. See what topics are being discussed. Given that you are getting content inspirations from non-commercial pages (government and educational domains), the likelihood of searching for a relevant and linkable topic is higher.
Visit the product or service features of your company (especially those ones that are different from your competitors). Understand how your brand can help serve your customers (mission driven). In the above example, curtains helps protect the family at home from sunlight – which is the basic function or purpose of a curtain.
Grab the URL of a popular guide/resource in your industry and plug it into the Google Keyword Planner’s landing page feature. You’ll uncover keyword opportunities that are somehow linkable in nature.

Now that you have a linkable topic, you can then proceed to the actual content creation.

Create a linkable topic

There are two important considerations when creating a linkable content: information and format

Information

I believe with what Brian Dean emphasized in his latest post at Backlinko that choosing the right topic or information is 90% of the game.

A content piece with unique and useful information for relevant search terms attracts positive usage signals, signaling search engines that the page deserves to rank higher in search results.

There are many methodologies to find useful topic that will fit into your next content asset, a few of these content ideation strategies that worked for me are:

Using open data resources to grab credible online information related to your online sphere (Data Gov, Google Public Data and Freebase).
Inviting content creators and industry influencers to participate in creating the content by asking them simple niche-specific questions (28+ Failed Link Building Experiments).
Asking customers for stories not necessarily pertaining to your brand (products/services) but a topic that will accumulate interest across your community (i.e. struggles of pet lovers).

You can check out this post on how to develop your content assets like a pro.

Format

Format makes information readable to visitors, making it easy for them to consume the content.

A good content format helps bloggers and potential linkers to scan the page and instantly decide whether or not it’s worthy of contextual links on their websites.

For linkable content assets, here are some examples of formats that can concise your information:

Calculator
Guide
Infographic Preventing _____
Tutorial
Online Tools
Cost Estimator
Guide For Parents of _____*
Guide For Educators of _____*
Guide For Caretakers of ____*
Safety Checklist for _____
Guide to Legal Rights for _____
Online Locator

A few more formatting tips you can consider:

Use bold and italic text features strategically, only when you want to emphasize important concepts, so visitors are able to scan (especially skimmers) through it and pick out the essential information at a glance.
Make external links open in a new window so readers don’t lose your site whey click on them.
Use Bucket Brigade (a classic tip from Brian Dean) to break information and get users stay on the page for a longer time (e.g. words like Here’s the deal:, now:, what’s the bottom line?; you might be wondering:; this is crazy).

Once you have published your content piece, it’s time to get promoted it in front of your listed potential linkers.

Outreach to verified linkable audience

Here are some outreach tips to dramatically increase your conversion rate:

Write your outreach email specific to the target linker’s page (including Name and Blog’s title in your messages would add more responses to your campaign). This is pretty basic but I still see a lot of link request emails failed in this part.
Short and straightforward emails convert better than longer and detailed ones.
Let your potential linkers where and how you found them (this removes the stranger barrier in the conversation).
Don’t instruct to link to your page/content. Since they are linkers, they know what to do after you’ve shared your content.

Evergreen and linkable content pieces can consistently help your brand earn contextual backlinks that guarantee increase in page’s authority and might improve search ranking potential eventually.

Regularly connect with content creators

Relationship building is still one of my favorite link building tactics, since this strategy doesn’t depend on the current status of the blog and how many keywords it ranked in SERPs but more on the level of confidence and trust the potential linker has put into the content creator.

Since the day I started to focus on link building as my main theme of this blog, I’ve built almost a hundred strong relationships where most of them helped me build my business and get me acquired voluntarily-given links coming from different sub-niches of this industry (blogging, affiliate marketing, conversion rate optimization, etc..).

To give you an example, here are three bloggers that I’ve built strong connections with, to whom I owe some of the editorial links I earned from other blogs:

Rohit Palit. I pitched him an email last year, asking if I could become a regular contributor for his blog, Techtage, which after months of contributing posts resulted to a good friendship.
Christopher Benitez. He asked me to participate in a blog interview (just this year), where I was glad to answer questions pertaining to link building topics. This gave an instant connection between me and Chris.
Dennis Seymour. He reached out to me a few months ago, then eventually turned out to be one of my fellow SEO bloggers.

The relationship I had with Rohit resulted to some good link opportunities – contextual links from some of his content contributions on other blogs, not Techtage.

Below are some screenshots of contextual links I earned from Ahrefs, a link building blog where Rohit became a regular author.

Chris, on other hand gave me some links from Business2Community and Internet Marketing 101.

Dennis built recurring links to my blog (2 editorial links from Leapfrog – here and here).

A few tips on how to earn links from relationship building (with content creators):

Target low and mid-tier bloggers when trying to increase your influence size. There are higher chances to receive positive responses from mid-tier expert authors than those highly influential ones.
Involve yourself in social groups (Facebook and Google+ Communities) that are relevant to your industry. Become an active contributor by answering questions where you have knowledge to.
Direct your conversations from email to social platforms (like Skype and Facebook) to regularly engage with bloggers in real time.
Become the first linker to their blogs. Create a friends section/page on your website and list them down as your co-bloggers in your space.

There are almost no effort exerted to relationship building in order to earn links (aside from the time you put into conversations).

Imagine if you have 20 industry friends and they happened to link to any of your posts (at least 2 every 6 months). That’s 80 links every year (6 contextual backlinks each month) with no costs involved in the link acquisition process.

Take advantage of local meetups

Local meetups are small gatherings that regularly happen across a city, with program schedules designed to learn from industry experts/speakers and to network with colleagues in the blogging sphere.

One of the misconceptions of some marketers today is that local meetups doesn’t add any business value nor does it bring direct customers. In short, they say that attending in a local meetup is a waste of time.

I believe that one of the important benefits of local meetups (and relationship building in general) is the set of intangible benefits they provide to a certain person. These intangible benefits include client referrals, speaking opportunities, advertising chance (mostly free) and other things that would impact the business revenue and to the website the brand is operating.

Two years ago, I attended my first MORCon (Master Online Rankings Conference), one of the premier internet marketing conferences here in the Philippines.

This gave me a chance to network with the best brains in the search marketing industry including Jason Acidre and Glen Dimaandal (quick note: they are now the top officers of the organization).

Besides networking, it helped my link building blog to get some contextual links straight from the speakers themselves (Sean Si, Vic Abrugar and Roel Manarang).

Here are the screenshots of those links.

Push out strong context with high linkability intent

One of the primary reasons why most content pieces didn’t get much traction on the web – earning links from other niche-specific blogs is that they lack in uniqueness and strong opinion.

Expertise is best seen in content when the content creator justifies a strong argument and/or concludes one statement that makes as his/her main point in the page.

One of good example of how you can earn links through exemplifying a strong statement is this link from Hausman Marketing Letter.

As you can see in the image below, the author included the introduction of my post in his article, which I believe became the strong unique proposition of my content.

When writing highly linkable content:

Cite external links or sources in your post where you got credible data from. No need to include them if they are information solely produced by your brand.
Think twice or thrice before releasing a statement/argument. It can either give you a break in the industry or break your reputation literally.
Provide unexpected hooks in your content that haven’t been published in other blogs. This gives you a high potential of getting cited because of your actionable points.

Invite industry experts to write content for your blog

One of the linkbait approaches that will still last effective even years from now is inviting industry authors to contribute a post for your blog. One reason is that this link building idea isn’t scalable and couldn’t be done in a regular basis unless you’ve got a long list of industry authors, whom you can reach out to for guest content contribution.

There are many ways to entice someone to create content for your brand, but here are some that you can try:

Pitch an industry blogger with a proposition to expose him to a large audience (readers) and social (followers), in case, you’re a big brand that happened to have a new blog in your website.
Initiate linking to his/her blog from any of your posts (whether old and new). Tell him that you linked out to his/her content via email or social. There’s an instant connection when you converse with him and had him respond to your messages.
Provide free access to your brand’s premium products/services in exchange for his content.

Below is an example of a contextual link I earned from Glen Demands blog, which linked to his guest post on my blog.

This link building approach can help you earn links given that the guest author will cite his guest content in his personal blog and/or in his posts contributed to other blogs.

Offer to translate your content or accept an approval to do so

Translating in your content proves to be a very effective strategy to build contextual backlinks that will certainly pass ranking value and referred traffic to the linked page/content.

Since the translated content is published on another blog where the audience hasn’t been approached by the original author, the likelihood of absorbing new readers and social followers from the blog where content is translated would be higher.

A few considerations to keep in mind:

Receiving pitches to translate your content is better than pushing your content out to potential linkers (mostly non-English bloggers). You might have a low chance to turn a conversation into one link primarily because of the language barrier.
When approving a proposal to translate your content, make sure to check out their blog one in a while to see if they’re really linking out to your content/page (as what they have said in your conversation). You can also setup alerts for mentions (linked or unlinked) to ensure that the niche blogger is linking to your piece. You can use Monitor Backlinks for this approach.
Invest in building content assets on one main topic (for example in my case, link building) to constantly remind your audience about your expertise, since this is the main reason international bloggers would want to translate your content and be published on their own blogs.

Here is a screenshot of an email that I received few weeks ago. It is a pitch asking for approval to translate my content in Arabic language.

Imagine if you published at least expertly made piece every week and three bloggers are willing to translate them to other languages and then, published it on their own blogs. That’s 12 contextual links every month with no effort and cost at all.

Accept interview opportunities regardless of the blog size

Interviews are content evidences of the expertise of a certain brand or author. Through answering industry questions, potential readers would have a better understanding on what the brand is and how capable the author is when producing articles for his blog.

I’ve been receiving a lot of interview opportunities these days and had been answering all of them as much as I can.

Here are a few things that I managed to do in the past few years with regards to interview linking opportunities:

Accept interview opportunities regardless of the domain authority of a blog. What you want to build here is the momentum of earning interview links.
Focus your answers on one topic. Though surely you will base them on the questions, but if they will ask you what topic you’re comfortable of discussing about, always try to focus on one (in my case, it’s link building).
As soon as the momentum starts to build, you can answer questions from other sub-niches of your industry (in my case, it is affiliate marketing, blogging, conversation rate optimization and startup).
Try to get at least one contextual link pointing to your page/content and one link for your brand.
Never abuse linking to all of your content (this will only cause bad impression to your future potential interviewers).

Examples of recent interviews:

Leverage connections with industry curators

Curation is a content marketing approach that gains its popularity for the past several years, for the reason that it gives mutual benefits to the author of the page/content being linked to it and to the curator himself. The cited author gets a link while the curator has provided an article for his blog.

Engaging with curators in your industry could actually help your brand expand its audience reach, as you can be seen and visited by readers from other blogs, which gives another opportunity to earn another set of links.

Ways to properly engage niche curators:

Leave sensible comments in their blog posts. Try to get their attention by answering their last question (their call to actions at the end of their posts) and/or cite an experience/example based on the topic of their post.
Simply share your content without pushing them out to link to your content/page.

My recent links from roundup posts:

If you are looking for a link building agency to partner with you, then don't hesitate to contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Acquisition and Backlink Audit with Link Assistant and SEO Spyglass

Link building hasn’t changed a lot in the past few years. Still, the following concepts are still valuable with how we should view link building as part of our online marketing strategy:

You need to diversify links - either an asset you create or your product
You need to put this asset in front of a relevant audience who have the ability to share it
You need consistency - one new asset every year is unlikely to cut it
Anything that scales is at risk

With that being said, here are a few common yet still very important activities needed to execute in a link building campaign – with the help of SEO Spyglass, an SEO Analysis tool and Link Assistant, a link building tool from the SEO Powersuite package.

Backlink audit

Backlink audit has been an integral part of the regular activities of search marketers, primarily because they want to make sure that backlinks earned/acquired have low penalty risks and shouldn’t impact negatively to the website’s health.

One of the cool features of SEO Spyglass (a premium product of SEO Powersuite package) is the link risk audit, which makes the said process easier for marketers.

Elements that you have to check when executing a backlink audit process:

Branded keywords VS commercial keywords
Sitewide VS non-sitewide links
Homepage VS deep links
Type of content on page (where links are placed in)
Site relevance

Here are a few things you need to consider in order to have a healthy backlink profile:

Stop scaling link building tactics in order to acquire hundreds of links every month (remember link building is heading towards quality and usage signals specifically on content consumption rather than on the amount of backlinks built each month).
Stay away from link partners that allow paid (link buying) and/or link exchanges (most of the time, they’ll have high penalty risks).
Head towards link earning rather than link building alone. Start by publishing content pieces targeted to different segments of linkable audiences, then slowly build a community out of it (build not just link partners but social/brand followers who will be willing to share/link to every new content you published on your blog).
Don’t push potential linkers to link to your page/site with specific commercial keywords. Let them choose what keywords they’ll use in external linking.
Monitor incoming backlinks using tools like Monitor Backlinks or LinkAssistant, in order to protect your website from negative SEO attack.

Disclaimer: I am not an affiliate of SEO Powersuite (I will not get any commission from your purchase.

Targeted link prospecting

Listing down multiple relevant link opportunities these days don’t matter anymore. Becoming more targeted even with a short list of link partners would give better results when done right.

Targeted link prospecting isn’t a rocket science, as you can simply use link building tools like Link Assistant in order to grab domains that linked to your competitors but haven’t link to your website/page.

With LinkAssistant’s tool, you can easily sort the list of link partners gathered through link research, according to set metrics of your campaign (Domain PR/ Page PR/ Alexa Rank – a few links data available in the tool).

When data for all link prospects are scraped, you can proceed straight to outreach, since Link Assistant would easily give you possible emails that you can contact to for link request purposes (I consider this process as one of the good features of Link Assistant).

Another link search method that you can use is harvesting all URLs located on a specific webpage.

So if you have a list of resource pages, then pages/URLs located in those links pages are potential link partners that you can add to your spreadsheet.

Link Assistant allows you to do that by simply choosing the “harvest all URLs located on the webpages you specify” option.

So if you’re doing broken link building, then this is a great way to prospect for more link opportunities.

Here are a few more methods to keep your link prospecting activity targeted as possible:

Be more specific with your link phrases, instead of searching for “gardening” inurl:blog in Google, try to use how to build a garden shed inurl:blog inanchor:shed – this will leave you more targeted potential linkers since they may have published a post on gardening shed and might include your resource guide in their content pieces.
Find industry blogs instead of company/corporate domains, given that they are more receptive in email outreach than staff members who are working on a day job.
Use MillionShort to remove the top popular websites in search results (generic top domains that rank in multiple keywords – e.g. Examiner.com).
Get interested industry linkers/publishers from page 4,5 or 6 of search results. Given that they don’t usually receive several emails from bloggers/content creators, they’re more likely to respond to your outreach email, as compared to websites ranking in the first or second page.
Use related search phrases (at the bottom of the search results) as your link phrases to find more targeted link partners.
Follow external links in target posts and resource lists, and add them to your own link prospecting sheet.

Other Useful Resources:

SEO Powersuite has other two products, Website Auditor and Rank Tracker. While SEO SpyGlass and Link Assistant are heavily used for link building, the other two tools are no less important for well-rounded SEO strategy.

If you are looking for a link building agency to partner with you, then don't hesitate to contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

11 Off-page SEO Strategies to Get More Website Traffic

Off-page SEO doesn’t only revolve around links. Brand signals, co-citations and latent semantic indexing are a few concepts a search marketer has to deeply understand in order to maximize his/her efforts in implementing link buildings strategies for the campaign.

In this post, I’m going to show you 11 off page SEO strategies that can help speed up your link building process, boost your online rankings and get more website traffic from search engines.

1. Use LSI keywords as link phrases

We normally use LSI (latent semantic indexing) as a way to improve a page’s relevance to a specific search query – letting Google easily understand the page by means of looking at synonyms and connecting phrases/keywords.

So if the page is a review about “Cars”, the animated film, then there should be included words or names like “Pixar”, “Owel Wilson” and “McQueen”.

Further, aside from its relevance benefit, LSI keywords can also be used as phrases when finding link opportunities.

For the given example below, you’ll see that the phrase used is weight loss which if added to the advanced search query, will reveal some related industry terms like “wealth management tips” and “wealth reduction”.

Add them to your common link prospecting terms - “wealth management tips” inurl:links OR inurl:resources, and go ahead find more backlink targets.

Another example is when you do a Google search for the phrase, “diet tips”.

Simply by observing you’ll see niche terms like “healthy habits”, “fitness links and resources” and “fitness info” – which are all included either in the ranking page’s meta title or meta description.

Become more observant at niche-specific keywords as they can open up hundreds of link opportunities by doing a Google search for them.

2. Convert highly useful PDFs to accessible pages

Research papers and data-backed documents are mostly designed in a portable document format (PDF).

These pieces are crafted with excellence and accuracy, but what’s missing is that not all of them are accessible to the public (keep aside those confidential company pages).

What you can do is to convert these highly useful PDF documents into one accessible page.

I suggest you find three or four of this type, compile all information into one page (make sure all details are interrelated with each other), then publish it on your blog.

To find PDFs related to your industry, you can use the advanced search query: filetype:pdf, plus your industry keyword .

Below is an example of a pdf file that is discovered by searching for “gardening tips” on Google.

As you can, the document has 18 root domains, which if added to other documents’ link targets would probably summed up to 40 or 50 backlink opportunities.

You can reach out to these potential linkers and simply share your accessible page. Conversion rate would be much higher because of the utility and packed information of the content.

3. Improve relevance with keyword integration to brand

Helping search engines understand what your brand is all about and the purpose of each of your pages could pull up your rankings both for commercial and non-commercial pages as well as easily increase brand recall within your community – as users can know your brand based on your website’s context (which is a very effective off-page SEO strategy).

See how big G understands Ahrefs. Though a lot of the keywords in the image below are not aligned to what their products are offering, still brand recall is evident.

Ahrefs penetrated into a specific and competitive sub-niche (link building) where its customers are taking place.

Here are a few tips on how you can increase brand recall for your website and integrate desired keywords with content distribution efforts:

Write descriptive author bios that particularly gives emphasis on what your brand is capable of providing for (either it is a service, resource or message).

When asked to answer interview questions, suggest titles that will best describe your brand and your staff member in order to add up recall to your company.

Invest in building expertly-made content for your website in order to attract recognition and interview opportunities – where you can somehow control the context of the page.

Participate in online forums and target only one sub-industry. Answer questions based on brand’s experience and try to include case studies that’ll provide value to thread participants.

Keyword integration to brand promotion will certainly take time but what’s mainly important is to get big G understand the brand in the right context – where ranking keywords will help generate sales for the business.

4. Create targeted landing pages for external web properties to increase click through

Landing pages that are crafted with benefit-driven content and powerful copywriting skills will not just drive potential customers to the brand but possible linkers from the community.

One good example of a targeted landing page is this bonus content from Backlinko, which can be seen if you click on the link below Brian Dean’s guest post on Bufferapp blog.

This idea isn’t new for savvy marketers, but when done regularly for external web content (i.e. regular columns), it will impact the domain’s referral traffic data – since visitors are much more likely willing to visit the site when there’s an added value offered beforehand.

You can check out this post on 25 landing page best practices.

5. Boost social following with Manage Flitter

Social signals are off-site SEO signals that strongly indicates a site’s user activity or behavior which can help its page(s) rank higher in search results with a minimum requirement for links.

One of the main techniques that I’m implementing these days for my social campaign is a robust following/unfollowing activity.

To speed up the process, I use ManageFlitter, a social media marketing tool that generates data on a daily, weekly or monthly basis (example image below).

My normal approach is following a certain number of social users every single day then unfollowing those people who haven't followed me within two or three days.

Note: Please read the Twitter guidelines to avoid any chances of getting suspended.

Here are my basic requirements of a targeted social user:

Users not following me (you)
Twitter search (#seo) – at least once in their tweets, they included the hashtag “#seo”
Profile image
English (tweets and profile must be in English)
I (you) have never followed
More than 100 followers
Has an average of 2 tweets per day

The tool will charge you $12/month for 5 social accounts.

The good thing with this automated tool is that you can scale the social activity - even spending 5 minutes/day. This will certainly boost your social presence and bring in referral visits to your website once you start sharing useful content.

6. Build authentic and personal relationships with industry folks

Earning authority backlinks today is almost impossible without having real relationships with industry publishers and content creators.

Relationship building is a tedious activity that requires a balance of time and planned action. Investing too much time with influencers who can’t give benefits to your brand – as they may not be interested to the value you are offering is probably a waste of time.

On the other hand, expecting a relationship to immediately yield results would get others pissed off and would produce bad impression about your brand.

Andrew Gale wrote a very interesting case study on how he managed to get 20% conversion rate in outreach by offering unique value to each prospect.

Here is a short recap of his outreach process:

Pre-engage outreach targets by sharing their latest content on social, participating in conversations where it is relevant and understanding deeply their interests as influencers/bloggers.
Personalize your email with enough boosting of their egos – could be more effective if you praise one of their posts.
Show that you appreciate their post and elaborate how your post is going to make theirs even better.
Offer or give something for free (value/ego boost)

7. Get cited links from supplier websites

Profitable links should be best placed in websites where customers are engaging and have high purchasing power.

If you are a supplier of any product from any niche, then getting backlinks from general supplier sites would help customers to directly find your brand.

You can create a profile in Thomasnet, add a link pointing to your company site, complete all the information and earn some referral traffic once your page has been published.

Here’s a sample of a company page that has all the necessary information – from logos to types of services offered.

8. Identify ranking potential through link analysis

Improving pages’ rankings in search results and building importance across your industry are a few goals that a link acquisition campaign should at least achieve in long term.

One of the effective methods in determining if there’s a ranking potential in a particular keyword or set of keywords is by looking at the average number of referring domains for each page listed in SERPs.

For instance, the keyword phrase, “gardening tips” has thousands of monthly searches, so when you do a Google search for it, you’ll see authoritative domains outranking the less popular sites in the gardening industry.

If you have a new website, you can compete with these bigger brands by publishing a content asset that is optimized for the phrase, “gardening tips”.

Instead, you might want to go to another route – that is finding other keyword phrases that don’t only have low competition level but wherein you’ll have high chances of ranking based on link analysis.

Basically, link analysis could help you estimate the average number of backlinks that you have to build for your page/site in order to get to the top 5 of page 1 for the target keyword, “organic gardening tips”.

The first domain ranking for that phrase is a list post from Listolic. Currently, the page has 68 referring domains with 16 new links for the last 2 months.

This means that the benchmark or average number of links that you have to build should be around 70 in order to outrank its existing links plus incoming links acquired each month.

Do the average math for the five ranking pages in SERPs and identify what number you have to achieve when building links for your content/domain.

From that average number of referring domains (let’s say 40), you would want to find evidence of at least ~400 resource page type opportunities that high potentials of linking to your site (assuming you could convert at around 10%).

You can check out this in-depth guide by Nick Eubanks on the subject of ranking potential.

9. Acquire image links by inviting guest contributors

In my first several months of blogging, one of my main struggles is blogging frequency – that is publishing articles consistently on your blog without any chance of breaking the momentum.

Achieving it won’t be possible if you don’t invite other industry publishers for your blog. But with that sole purpose (follow blog frequency), I’ve found that there is a higher chance of earning links by inviting guest contributors rather than creating content all the time by myself.

One backlink that I earned several months ago is this image link from the homepage of PageonePower.

This isn’t an ordinary image backlink since it demonstrates authority – notice that keyphrase “where we’re published”. It adds value to the backlink given that visitors of that site would find that my link building blog is an authoritative publication in the search space.

Here are some actionable tips on how this off-page SEO technique will help you acquire authoritative backlinks:

Collect data of industry friends that have an engagement history with your brand as they are more receptive to invitations since they knew about your website and you as a publisher. A few months ago, I’ve been receiving a lot of guest content contributions from my local industry peers, primarily because I’ve been active in speaking at local SEO seminars here in the Philippines.
Add a monetary benefit to their guest contributions – both one-off payment and additional price once their post gets traction on the web (i.e. if they reach 1000 visits in one week). This technique would motivate them to create content that are highly useful and can potentially attract new incoming links.

10. Move the ladder by pointing out specific pages for broken links

Broken link building isn’t new to many folks reading this post today.

However, improvements in implementing this off-page SEO strategy should be the number one priority of every link building team.

One way to move the ladder is to point out the right pages that a resource page should be linking to.

Start with finding broken links in the page (use Jon’s LinkMiner – it’s updated regularly and my most recommended Chrome extension tool).

When you collect all the data such as broken URLs and anchor texts, try to understand why these links are broken. Search for the correct links and include them to your outreach.

For example, this career resource page has 8 broken links, found using the LinkMiner tool. One broken links should be directed to http://careers.npo.net/ and one is 404 page, which if investigated is in a development stage for a redesign.

In your second conversation with the potential linker, you can use those details as an added value to your outreach.

Here are the ones I encountered in this page: http://www.lewisu.edu/resources/careerservices/careerhelp.htm

npo.net/jobservice - the company has a new website http://careers.npo.net/
internsearch.com/ - the site is currently under redesign

This approach will take a few minutes of your time but can highly increase your conversion rate because you’re giving value as opposed to just emailing them broken links in their resource page.

11. Use Launchrock to build initial trust signals for new websites

Most of the time, new websites don’t have initial traction in the community leaving it impossible to acquire its first set of blog readers, email subscribers and/or potential customers.

However, one of the ways to build some initial traction is to use Launchrock. It is a site builder platform that can help you create one landing page (may it be the homepage) for your website.

A few tips to maximize launch campaign for new websites:

Build contextual backlinks from industry-related blogs by contributing useful content that can bring referral traffic to the landing page – helps your brand to acquire its first set of email subscribers.
Engage in niche-specific forums to create alliances with industry peers who’ll eventually help your domain earn its first tier of backlinks.

If you are looking for a link building agency to partner with you, then don't hesitate to contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

11 Linkbait Strategies That Will Help Build Brand Authority

Linkbait is viral content with the specific aim to attract links from the “linkerati” – this is a term coined to describe people on the web who might be able to give links.

Producing this type of content on a regular basis would help improve your site’s link acquisition process, build a momentous brand authority and passively achieve micro-goals for your business (increase email subscribers, receive more service inquiries, etc..).

Without further ado, let’s get straight to 11 linkbaiting strategies that you may haven’t been implemented to your link development campaign.

1. Topic consolidation with Email Digest

Generating ideas using content marketing tools is doable these days but the most crucial part is actually organizing them to come up with interesting and linkable topics.

Email digest from IFTTT helps a lot in this process. Using one email account, you can receive daily/weekly email updates on trending industry topics/themes that are likely to be suitable for linkbait content assets.

One example of email digest is this National Puppy Day trigger (image above) where you can receive daily updates on adorable puppy GIFs. This is one creative way to curate content pieces that are seasonable in nature, have a potential to go viral and can attract natural links from authority news sites.

You may want to check out this old but useful guide by SEER Interactive on IFTTT recipes for marketers.

2. Test headlines for clickbait strategy

Based on Copyblogger, an average of eight out of ten people will read a headline copy, but only two out of 10 will read the rest. This only proves the importance of writing enticing headlines in capturing the interests of a target audience to read your site’s entire post.

Peter Koechley, Co-founder of Upworthy said that, "The headline is our one chance to reach people who have a million other things that they're thinking about, and who didn't wake up in the morning wanting to care about feminism or climate change, or the policy details of the election”.

One way to improve the effect of headlines to page’s user/reader activity (i.e. time on page) is through headline testing.

Headline testing is a process of improving click through rates of a headline by first writing a few different variations of it, then asking respondents (targeted by age and gender) to vote for the best title and provide you the data – which title earned the highest vote.

For this specific activity, you can use TitleTester, a headline testing tool that doesn’t require split testing (back-end/front-end experiments) in order to determine which page title will yield the best result.

When thinking of headline variations, make sure you include your targeted keyword to your titles in order to help the page rank in search results for that preferred industry term. For the example keyword phrase, “how to increase blog traffic”, “15 Insanely Actionable Tips to Increase Blog Traffic” is a headline that can drive visitors to read the post and is good enough to help search engines understand the page’s context.

For more information on headline writing, you can check out this recent Whiteboard Friday on Moz.

3. Collaborate with influencers for add-on data

This is one of the main linkbaiting tactics that I’m executing lately for my blog posts – considering that the best way to attract initial authority links is through getting others participate in your brand’s content creation phase.

Influencer collaboration is not a rocket science activity, as you will only need to send an email or social message to an influencer, let him know of your upcoming post and ask if he is willing to share some examples of work/experience that are related to your page’s topic.

One value proposition that you can try out in outreach aside from the common bait techniques (monetary incentives, exclusive access to premium products, social/brand exposure, direct lead generation, etc…) is post preview.

Basically, you will include the add-on data to your post and contextually, you preview your readers on the upcoming article of your contributor.

As an example, my recent blog post on traffic generations included an experience-based tip from Roel Manarang, where he also shared some useful data to support his claim. One week after, he published a full case study about the same Facebook strategy he shared on my blog.

By using post preview as a unique angle to your outreach, you can increase your chances of getting a response(s) from your potential contributors.

4. Consumer insights using data and visualizations

The best way to produce user-interacted content is through generating insights and direct questions from consumers. This activity is often expensive as you would need to gather straight answers from your target customers with the help of survey tools like Google Consumer Surveys.

But today, you can collect consumer insights straight from Answer The Public tool and turn these knowledge to linkbait topics for your future content assets.

For example when you search for the term, “parenting”, this list of “which” topics could be seen in the page.

Now if you use your creative psyche to brainstorm content formats that will work best for the topics in the list above, then you would consider a “quiz” type of content.

The idea is to get your visitors answer multiple questions in the quiz (make it appear in the most visible areas of your site), then at the end, the quiz would give them results that will determine which parenting style they are currently using for their kids.

After producing your “linkbait content”, build your initial list of contextual links by reaching out to potential linkers in your industry (parenting/home-schooling resource pages and mommy bloggers). If the content is highly resourceful, the potential of earning links from those list prospects, as well as attracting additional backlinks from webmasters who would be able to consume the content is higher.

5. Build initial list length for maximum link potential

A good linkbait strategy has goals set in place. These could be exact figures (that are always approximate), which team members could use to push their efforts and capacity to produce campaign-driven results.

In link acquisition, setting goal links should be at topmost priority. Here’s a formula that you can use for maximum link goal potential.

As you can notice, the higher your target links are, the higher should be your initial list.

This becomes a useful tool in applying the Pareto Principle since you can simply focus on your initial list (initiate the outreach) instead of prospecting for additional link opportunities across your space.

6. Add on-page FAQ sections to highly-demand product pages

Frequently asked questions are tools for B2C / SAAS websites in nurturing interested customers with information that will trigger them to purchase the brand’s product/service.

In most cases, these FAQ sections are cited on many industry related web properties such as forum threads, where users are asking for more details about a specific product/service.

If your brand has built a good level of authority, then chances are your customers may have questions pertaining to your brand’s offerings, which may be visible on popular Q&A sites/forums.

Find enough volume of specific product related questions on industry community sites/blogs. Do a Google search for “brand” “product name” OR “service” then compile a list of questions you’ve found.

For newly existing brands, you can execute the same approach – Google search for “product name” OR “service”. There would be more product related question here since you’re taking it in a non-branded view.

Add on-page FAQ sections or quick links below each product page.

Make these sections linkable by placing them on visible areas of your commercial pages.

7. Content ideation using news aggregators

News aggregators are compiled volumes of the latest articles from top news sites.

One good example of this is Talll.

This makes your content ideation process easier as you can simply jot down notes or brainstorm topics that are most discussed in your niche based on the latest news you’ve seen in a news aggregator.

Combining this function with word cloud, the content brainstorming phase could be much simpler.

Grab the titles of the latest posts and plug in the all to wordle or any other cloud word tools.

You can simply generate industry themes/topics based on the visuals that the tool will produce.

8. Turn internal content to linkbait

For companies that conduct daily/weekly trainings, most of the time, they dug their internal content in their database – leaving it invisible to the public.

This type of content, when published on a blog, could significantly bring a good amount of editorial links to the brand since they can be referenced by publishers and expert writers from related industries, especially if the internal content is the most comprehensive resource on a particular topic.

Turn list posts into slide decks.

If the post itself managed to get traction after it was published, then chances are its converted content (slide decks) could also earn direct traffic from people who have read the post.

Find list posts in your blog that earned a good amount of natural links and convert them to visual content.

Include some quotes or citations from linkers of the original post to increase the odds of getting responses from your outreach.

Reach out to people who linked to the original post and let them know about the new version of the post.

9. Dig link opportunities with Youtube

Incorporating social media in today’s link building game is definitely one of the best moves of a seasoned link builder.

Youtube is a link building platform that can open blog link opportunities for your brand, since there are millions of viewers searching in this social search tool almost every minute, coming from different industries.

To start with Youtube link acquisition, find popular and/or untapped keyword phrases in Keyword Planner. A good amount of search volume here may comparably be tangent to search volume in Youtube as well.

Go over to Youtube and do a search for that keyword phrase. See what videos pop up.

Look for videos that are outdated but have gained thousands/millions of views in the past.

Be mindful of your industry’s search environment, as some niches like cooking should obviously have millions of views each month.

Recreate the content by publishing an updated version of the video and/or publishing a visual that shows the step by step instructions on the same subject (in this example: how to make a cake).

When your own version of content is published, you can now reach out to existing linkers of the original video, which you can find using link prospecting tools like Ahrefs (review here) or OSE.

Tell them about the new version of the video content. The potentials of earning links would be higher since you’ve shown the improvements of your latest asset.

10. Invest in linkable visuals

Visual content is a good brand asset that enables information to be more easily consumed by a target audience, since they can absorb fractions of data/message within a few seconds, simply by looking at the piece.

One of the visual content pieces you may be familiar with is infographics.

Infographics are not dead and many search marketing and B2C companies are still using it to capture a particular group of people, funneling them down to the sales funnel and potentially become their customers/clients.

It’s how infographics are made that make it dead or alive to a content/link building team.

In our latest SMX-style conference, PeepCon, Jayson Bagio shared a very interesting process on how infographics can naturally build links from relevant blogs/sites. You can find the presentation below.

Infographics - Building Links the Visual Way by Jayson Bagio from Glen Dimaandal

Investing in linkable visuals will work if they are carefully planned and executed.

Results from the campaign should also be analyzed to make necessary actions for constant improvement.

11. Reputation linkbait

Influence marketing is still one of the best linkbait strategies given that the value proposition here is the industry expertise of the content creator or brand.

There are many ways to actually execute influence marketing and some of the notable and common tactics are the following:

Build more expertly-made content both in internal and external web properties. Make it as comprehensive as possible, so potential linkers could easily remember the brand’s identity through the depth of the information/message being conveyed in the content.
Participate in industry web communities by answering niche relevant questions where you can provide unique insights on particular subject matters.
Build strong relationships with influencers and bloggers through offline efforts like networking at seminars/conferences, webinars and/or simple conversations via email or Skype.

You may want to check this linkbaiting post by Jason Acidre on his Kaiserthesage blog.

If you are looking for a link building agency to partner with you, then don't hesitate to contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

getting-good-links-without-link-disavowal-can-remove-penguin-penalty

19 SEO Experts Take On: Getting Good Links Alone (Without Link Disavowal) Can Remove Penguin Penalty

It has been an intriguing discussion in the SEO community when John Mueller (Google Webmaster Trends Analyst) answered this question:

If the majority of the links become the quality links, would this help a person to remove or would Google robot remove the Penguin penalty?

His answer was straightforward, “That would definitely help. Yeah.”

More information on the Q&A portion here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-good-links-penguin-19696.html

Moving forward, last week I asked 19 SEO experts to answer this specific/similar question:

Can good links alone get you out of a Penguin penalty even without disavowing the bad links?

The answers are listed below but to give you a short statistics. Here is what I’ve found out.

So without further ado, let’s hear what SEO experts say on this topic:

Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting

Google’s John Mueller confirmed on January 12th of this year that getting good links can get you out of a Penguin penalty. He did that in one of his Office Hours hangouts. You can read the write up from Barry Schwartz here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-good-links-penguin-19696.html

That said, what you don’t know, is how many good links you need to get. If you have been hit by Penguin, it would remain my advice to go through a link cleanup, removal, and disavow process. This will pretty much always speed up the process, and when you have been hit by Penguin you always feel the need is urgent.

On the flip side, I would also never simply to the link cleanup/removal/disavow either. You always want to be earning good, high quality links.

Dan Petrovic, Director of DejanSEO

This is a dangerous statement, taken out of context of what has actually been said. Penguin is not an on and off algorithm and as such has a gradient of impact. This means that a marginally affected website can overpower the negative effect if it just minds its own business and keeps on a whitehat path. That said, why would you do that? If you're in the business of optimisation you'd want to be responsible and actually optimise the situation by minimising the negative impact of the algorithm through disavowing all known toxic links. So in short, yes in some cases but you'd be silly not to take proactive approach to shorten or minimise the impact.

Cyrus Shepard, Senior Content Astronaut at Moz

Can webmasters escape Penguin jail without having to use the disavow tool? Yes, I believe not only can they, but in many instances they actually do.

Google representatives have made comments recently to indicate that Penguin works by examining ratios between good links and those deemed manipulative. While this is likely an over-simplified explanation, it makes total sense. Sites like Amazon, by their very nature, have a huge number of "unnatural" links in their profile, but these are potentially dwarfed by the number of good links that helps prevent most Penguin actions.

So the goal of the webmaster faced with solving Penguin is to improve the ratio of good links to bad. Using the disavow tool is one quick option, but one that also risks thowing out good links with the bad. An optimized strategy would also include considering a few of the following strategies to improve your link ratio:

Build more good links
Remove bad links through manual outreach
Do nothing, let bad links atrophy and disappear (takes a long time and is lazy, but I've seen it work in some cases)

In fact, Google itself recommends using the disavow as a tool of last resort, and there are many viable alternatives that may actually work better.

Richard Baxter, CEO of Builtvisible

Honestly, I don't think so. You'd have to increase the links to a domain an order of magnitude higher that whatever the current level (theoretically) is. Even then, I don't know because if it's a manual intervention surely it wouldn't be enough. Maybe if it was algorithmic in nature. Like I said, I wouldn't be too sure and I wouldn't want to risk the wait.

That's why it's smart to address a penalty and put *all* of your marketing energy into the link removal (I much prefer link removal as the primary solution) and Disavow (if the bad links can't be removed).

Larry Kim, CTO of Wordstream

Yes! Spammy links are measured on a relative basis not an absolute basis. Meaning, it has to do with the mix of good vs. garbage links pointing to your site, rather than just the absolute number of junk links. For example, a site like the NYTimes might have millions of junk links (from scraper sites, etc.) but have hundreds of millions of high value editorial links, so no penalty despite potentially having a high number of junk links. Thus it is often a much easier and scalable strategy for companies – especially companies who have an established brand, to pursue higher value links rather than attempt the seemingly impossible task of removing a large volume of links from sites you don’t control, or reviewing a link profile of millions of links and manually disavowing the junk links.

James Norquay, Director of Prosperity Media

Firstly you need to make a clear difference between Manual penalties and algorithmic action as they work differently. You are not going to get out of a "Manual Penalty" with only good links been built as you will need a disavow/ link removals as part of a reconsideration process. In regards to algorithmic action their is possibility to get out of this action by building a significant number of high quality links to your website to "dilute" poor quality links when the next algorithm runs. Tho it is still highly advisable to build a disavow as your website can be targeted by Algorithmic action and further along the track be targeted by manual action due to non disavowed links in your link profile. We have seen this happen to businesses in the past who are not savvy with this type of work.

Now in regards to case studies we have had a few here is one from a portal based client were building quality links was part of a recovery process as noted here - http://moz.com/ugc/increasing-organic-seo-traffic-by-400000-unique-visitors-a-month

Todd Malicoat, Founder of Stuntdubl.com

While there is always a possibility that a domain could acquire a lot of high quality links to trump a penguin penalty, I don't think it is often the case. Most penguin penalties stem from a lot of poor decision making around link building, or even negative seo impacting a domains rankings. While there used to be "no bad links", that is no longer the case. The use of disavow is important to the level of required regardless of the organic growth of your link profile, if a company has been engaging in questionable linking strategies in the past and incurred the wrath of a penguin penalty. While it is possible, it is certainly not optimal for best chances of success.

Mary Bowliing, Co-Founder of Ignitor Digital

As with many SEO questions, the answer is it depends. If you have a manual penalty in Webmaster Tools, then the chances of getting out of it without playing Google's mean mea culpa game are slim to none in my opinion.

If you have an negative algorithmic impact from Penguin, it may be possible, especially if you don't have many links to begin with and the bad links are from low authority sites. In those cases, continually beefing up the link profile with stellar links from relevant, high quality sites will have a positive effect over time. However, it can be a slow process that can be speeded up via disavowals.

I think too many SMBs and smaller agencies go overboard with disavowals and throw the baby out with the bathwater. The cause seems to be a misunderstanding of what's going on and the inability to distinguish bad links from good ones, so they basically end up starting all over at ground zero with links. While that's a very safe approach, regaining rankings can be painfully slow. With a more incremental approach, you can disavow your worse links and see what kind of response you get. Then take those hints and try again. I'd rather go through the disavowal process a few times and keep what links I can than toss them all away and start all over.

Peter Attia, Founder of Cucumber Nebula

I admittedly have little experience getting websites out of a penguin penalty. However, in the few times I’ve dealt with it, I’ve felt that a balance of both getting good links and disavowing the bad were required. I think heavily focusing on one or the other allows room for error. For example, I’ve seen people disavow links, not see any changes, and then continue to disavow links that were genuinely good and beneficial.

If you continuously rotate your focus on getting good links and disavowing bad ones, you negate the possibility of overcompensating.

In some circumstances, I think it’s better to just start over with a new domain. In which case, you could just go after good links and not worry about disavowing. This also gives you the opportunity to reach out to web owners and change your solid backlinks over.

Giuseppe Pastore, Founder of GiuseppePastore.com

I don’t have precise data to share in this case, but in my opinion is that it should be possible. We don’t know for sure which is the limit before getting hit by Penguin, and each link related signal might have its own threshold, but I can hypothesize that getting good links somehow adjusts your “Penguin score” and if they lowers it enough you are again out of the red zone.

This is very simplified of course, but it’s like adding salt to water: it no longer boils at 100°C. Good links are like salt: the more you add, the higher is the threshold for the new mix, so if you were very close to the previous, lower limit you’re now under the new one and you get back out of Penguin.

The real problem is understanding how much you’ve passed the limit and how many good links will bring you back. I fear there’s no answer for this and you might proceed by trial and fail.

Harris Schachter, Founder of Optimize Prime SEO

This is an interesting question, and personally I think it is a loaded question. I am sure it is possible to overcome a penguin penalty without disavowing links, but the handful of times where data strongly suggested penguin involvement, I always used the disavow tool.

Now, you won't get over such a penalty just by disavowing links (at least I've never seen it). You need to supplement such efforts with signals of quality - aka good links, positive UX metrics (low bounce, high time on landing page) and mentions/co-citations help too. For this proactive piece, natural search traffic increases from other engines than Google too, and when you see that you're on the right track.

So, to the question of do you need to disavow links to get over the penalty, my intuition tells me no; but experience tells me yes.

Brett Snyder, Founder of Knucklepuck

Not only do I believe good links alone can get you out of a Penguin penalty, I'm of the opinion this is the only truly effective way to do so. Google's algorithm is built off 3 core principles: trust, authority, and relevance (TAR). "Penguin links", as we'll call them, contradict these principles, whether intentionally or not. Focusing on simply disavowing links doesn't actually give Google any new signals that support your TAR and therefore gives them no reason to view you as a more credible source.

We know that link depreciation exists, meaning that the older the link the less weight it carries. This is especially true for "Penguin links" because these sites themselves present no signals that support their own TAR. We also know that Google is aware of negative SEO and "works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking," implying that they look to reconcile all the ranking signals associated with your site to determine TAR. Lastly, we know that Google is processed by an algorithm, meaning it uses a holistic approach to evaluating links at scale. They look not only at the link itself but also the page it is linked from, the domain that page is on, and the Trust, Authority, and Relevance associated with that domain. "Penguin links" are significantly discounted based on this, so any other signals we can establish will weigh heavily into how our site is perceived.

Therefore, the 2 biggest things you can do are:

Focus on implementing strategies that support Trust, Authority, and Relevance, understanding these are the criteria Google uses to evaluate ranking potential. Google looks for supporting signals and the more supporting signals you can present, the better impression you'll be able to present even if legacy signals are suboptimal.
Monitor new links to ensure there are no new signals that would contradict the TAR you're promoting for your site. Google's algorithm is constantly evaluating and re-evaluating your site and ensuring that we're establishing the right signals will influence how the site is qualified.

Marie Haynes, Founder of His Web Marketing

I wrote about this subject recently on Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2392097/can-you-escape-penguin-simply-by-getting-good-links ). While I think it is in theory, possible for good links to override bad, in practice I think it would be pretty rare. Most sites that are able to attract true, natural links in high enough numbers to override the bad links, probably weren't involved in creating bad links to start with.

John Mueller has said that Penguin is like a filter that causes you to be driving with the handbrake on. In other words, even if you were able to get enough new links to override the distrust that the bad links give you, you would still have your progress hampered by those bad links.

I've seen a lot of sites recover from Penguin, but I've yet to see one recover without doing an extremely thorough disavow.

Traian Neacsu, Founder of Ecommerce Marketing Books

Based on my experience, no. But it may also depends on how bad the profile is. If 90% of your links are spammy, then 10% good links will do no good. If 10% of the links are bad, then any good link will help. And it also depends on how nasty a bad link really is - for example, if Google finds out you paid for just one link you will get a manual penalty and will stay there no matter how many other good links you get.

Piers Moore Ede, Founder of Barefoot SEO

There's no easy answer to this question, but I would tentatively say yes. What seems to be happening now with penalties is that Google is assessing how important you are as a brand, how big is your reach in the real world. Interflora is an obvious case in point: they had enough spam to offer a definitive coup de grace to most sites and yet, lo and behold, they were ranking again within weeks. There seemed to be two reasons for this: one is that Interflora is a huge Adwords customer and so Google may doesn't want to completely bite the hand that feeds them. The second factor is that Interflora is the biggest florist in the world and Google simply couldn't offer a good service without them at or near the top. All of this is a roundabout way of answering your question: 'Can good links save a penalise site?' Here I take 'good links' as a synonym for what Jerry West calls RCS (Real Company Shit). That means there's just no shortcuts anymore, you have to get out there and build the best relationships you can, resulting in the kind of diverse, natural, authoritative link profile which shows Google that, although you may have been bad in the past, you're not only reformed but you're someone too important for them to keep out in the cold.

Andrew Shotland, Founder of Local SEO Guide

We see this all the time with sites that got hit indirectly by Penguin most likely because the majority of their backlinks were from crap sites. So those links got devalued and the site lost its rankings. In cases like these, they just need to get new non-crap links to start building "authority".

Joe Simmonds, Founder of SEO Success Melbourne

From what I've read and what I'm seeing with some client accounts, I'm getting the feeling that Google isn't handing out such harsh penalties for building bad links. It looks like they're choosing simply not count links from bad domains. I'm guessing that the harsh penalties that were handed out after the original Penguin algo roll-out were enough to get the disavow info that Google needed to figure out which links to just ignore. I could be way off the mark with this one but I think that may be the case.

So... can you recover from a Penguin penalty without disavowing bad links and only building new high-quality links? I think that the answer is yes, provided that the number of bad links was only just enough to trigger the penalty in the first place. Having said that, my advice to anyone with a manual link spam penalty would be work on removing all bad links and to disavow any that remain.

Bottom line is still that it's a dumb idea to build shitty links to your website. Go with business directory listings, social media profiles, real blog comments on good blogs, press releases, social bookmarks and links from businesses that you deal with in the real world.

George Stevens, Founder of NebStone

From my experience the quickest most effective way of getting out of a Penguin penalty is through disavowing bad links and don’t be scared of disavowing too many.

Google look at ratio of bad to good links so you could perhaps technically get out of a penalty by generating a high number of good links instead of disavowing bad links. However this would depend on how serious your backlink profile was looking – if you already had thousands of backlinks and 75% of them were bad links then it would take a long time to generate enough good links to balance out your backlink profile. If you only had a few backlinks then it may not take long to build a set of good links that would counteract any bad links you had.

However it wouldn’t seem sensible to ignore your bad links and only focus on building good links for a couple of reasons

1) If you want to increase your ratio of good to bad links in order to remove a backlink penalty, the quickest way to do this is through disavowing bad links (and building good links at the same time if you want to). Focusing on removing a penalty through building good links alone could take a long time.

2) It is a riskier method just focusing on building good links. You may think you’re building good links however Google may not agree, particularly in light of your link history, so in some cases you could even be making your penalty even worse.

3) Even if building good links works and removes the penalty it would still seem sensible to disavow bad backlinks as this can only increase your ratio of good to bad links.

Paddy Moogan, Co-Founder of Aira

In my experience, no, good links alone cannot get you out of a Penguin penalty. I was involved in one project in 2014 where a client had hit by Penguin and despite lots of great links
being built, they were still clearly suffering from a penalty and their traffic was not at the level we'd have expected given the links that were being built.

The links in this case were from a wide variety of very high authority, relevant websites that also sent huge amounts of traffic. This was sustained over several months with more great links coming in all the time. However they were still not seeing the organic traffic growth to match.

Again, for a quick overview of the answers, here is a simple graph for that.

If you are looking for a link building agency to partner with you, then don't hesitate to contact us today.

by Venchito Tampon Jr