Promotion

Mastering Link Research Campaigns

Link research is perhaps the most critical phase in link building as this is where your initial link building efforts will come into play.

Building a long list of link opportunities requires the use of search engines, link prospecting tools (e.g. Ahrefs/OSE) and creative mind – as you have to think outside of the box in order to pop up new link research methods that are more effective than your previous ones.

This post is my presentation from last week’s MORCON (Master Online Rankings Conference) at Pampanga, Philippines, where different agency marketers, SEOs and managers had gathered to learn basic and advance strategies and tips on link acquisition, SEO and PPC.

Let’s get straight to the technical part of this post.

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Advanced Search Operators

If you’re an advanced link builder, you are already familiar with common search operators (inurl and intitle) that filter page search results based on pages’ URLs and meta titles. This helps you prospect for pages closely related to your keyword and/or to content you’re likely to recommend to industry bloggers.

You may want to check out this guide on Google search operators, if you’re newbie in the industry.

These search operators (inurl and intitle) are commonly used in blogger outreach and resource page link building approaches.

But there are two search operators you may haven’t use for your link targeting campaigns or at least heard/read on other SEO and link building blogs.

Inanchor and tilde

Let me explain inanchor search operator first.

This search operator returns pages that have your target keyword as the anchor text.

In our internal research, we’ve found out that using inanchor search query may give a higher number of relevant pages than a simple inurl search query.

Here are some tactics where the inanchor search operator is highly useful.

Content contribution using inanchor

Finding niche blogs to target for content contribution is easy if you’re just working on a few campaigns but scaling it to around 10 or 15 or even more requires additional and effective link prospecting methods. That’s where inanchor search comes in.

Adding inanchor search operator to your current search phrases (write for us, become a contributor, submit a post, etc..) would help you gather new blog opportunities that aren’t discovered through inurl queries.

Ready to outreach opportunities

Response rate doesn’t only rely on how convincing your outreach templates and what details have you personalized for each specific link target, but in many cases, it depends on how ready the blogger/webmaster to respond to your pitch.

Inanchor search operator plus “contact me” allows you to find bloggers with high intent to respond to pitches. If you’re looking for quick blog prospecting, (e.g. 50 niche blogs in less than an hour), then maximizing the inanchor search is a good choice.

inanchor and inurl combination

Combining inanchor with other search operators gives you relevant link opportunities. For instance, you can use both inanchor and inurl search operators in one search phrase (see the image below).

Inanchor:”start your own blog” inurl links OR inurl:resources returns niche-specific resource pages with the blogging anchor text.

Link sourcing

If you plainly search for a target keyword/phrase with the inanchor search operator, you won’t get exact link prospects from the search results, but it would reveal new links pages of your competitors – which you can somehow consider for competitive link research analysis.

Head over to your favorite link building tool and look for pages/sites that are linked to resource pages of your competitors. Identify some footprints in URLs to initiate more link research phrases (useful-wordpress-links.html can turn to inurl:useful-wordpress-links.html).

inanchor and minus site combination

If you’re looking to build high quality links to your branded pages (about me/us, our team, press page, etc..) from interview and roundup pages, then getting straight to mining those opportunities is a good place to start.

Use inanchor search operator to find branded linking pages (best if you can indicate the name of the industry influencer to populate more search pages). Make sure you add a minus site search operator to remove pages of the influencer’s website from the search results.

Tilde

Tilde is a search operator used to find synonyms of a particular keyword.

Tilde (~) and Minus ( - ) Search Operator

Combining tilde with minus search operator can pop up new pages targeting synonyms of a keyword, but doesn’t have the exact target keyword. But with our internal research, using this search operators combination would give you the opposite – Google will still reveal pages that include the keyword even if you use the minus search operator.

Even if that’s the case, I’ve found out that tilde search brings pages that are laterally related to your niche.

A tilde search operator for blogging phrase would reveal sites/pages about web writing, communication and wordpress.

Resource inclusion for general bloggers

Tapping into other niches aside from your main industry is critical since you don’t want to go too far away from the root theme of your brand.

However, there are products or tools that could be targeted to general bloggers of almost every numbered industry.

If you own a Wordpress plugin, theme or hosting, then it is likely to be included in the recommended resources of travel, fashion, health, beauty and entrepreneur blogs.

You can use the search query, [recommended resources for NICHE bloggers ~guide] to find this type of links pages. Change the niche with the industry of your choice, and you’ll mine new link opportunities for your website.

Pro tip: If you have an affiliate program, then prioritize in outreach resource pages that have external affiliate links.

Tools

Tools speed up the process at some point, particularly when doing link research campaigns. They would help you to filter link opportunities based on set metrics as well as bring undiscovered link targets.

Here are two link prospecting tools you may want to check out for future research: Linkminer and Brandmentions.

Linkminer

This link building tool is mainly used for broken link building, its features are catered to resource pages, such as:

• Finding broken links (404s) on specific pages
• Seeing the number of external and internal links right on the search results (which minimizes the time you spend landing on pages with low linking potential). Pages with low to zero external links indicate that webmasters won’t consider linking to other references or resources.

If you want to effectively use Linkminer, you can check out this link building tutorial on PointblankSEO.

BrandMentions

Mentions on the web, whether they are on forums, social or blogs, are proofs of your site’s branding, especially if they are actually earned.

Looking for those sites/blogs who recently mentioned your content (unlinked or linked) does help in analyzing the status level of your brand. Being top of the game means that you need to see which of your competitors are producing quality content (audience-targeted) and to identify new platforms where their content pieces are promoted.

Some cool benefits of using Brandmentions:

• Allows you to spot influencers using the topical mentions research, which helps your content ideation process run smoothly, as you are able to target the content to these influencers - which increases the shareability of your page.
• Notifies you of any mentions of your brand, staff member or page that you can leverage for relationship building – simply sending “thank you” messages to those who mentioned you makes a lot difference than pitching cold emails.
• Helps you compare the number of web and social mentions between your brand and your competitors.

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/influencer-outreach-in-content-marketing/

Metrics

Setting standards for your link development campaign helps you not only in filtering out low quality domains from your list but most importantly, in providing real value to your website or to your clients’ sites.

We're not using domain authority as our sole metric.

Let’s talk about some of the metrics that aren’t being used by link building firms today.

Engagement

What engagement does is that it validates the readership of a particular blog/site. The more engagement it receives (i.e. number of comments per post), the higher is the number of readers for each post (99% this is true).

When looking for blogs, try to set a benchmark for engagement. For instance, you would only want to consider blogs that have the average of 5 comments per post. This will help you ensure that you’ll absorb additional readers from the blog once you acquired a link from it (for newly contributed content).

Social Shares

Numbers don’t lie. The same is true with social shares.

Using social shares as one of your base metrics give you the assurance that there is a community ready to read your content, once it has been published on other blogs.

This also amplifies links to your content, as you can build additional links from bloggers who would have read your content or see your link and cite you as one of their references from their own blogs.

SEMRush Traffic

With Penguin 4.2 coming up at the end of this year, content creators and link developers should set organic traffic and link analysis as quality metrics/factors when performing link prospecting.

http://www.semrush.com/info/seedebtrun.com

SEMRush is a great tool of analyzing whether the site has been penalized in its recent years by simply looking at the organic traffic data (blue lines). Recovery that exceeds its latest drop should be considered, but those that have a steady downfall won’t be a good choice to add to your list.

One bonus tip… Create your own checklist

One of the agency hacks that will certainly develop your overall link building campaigns, which we’ve been using internally in our link building team is the use of checklist.

A checklist for every campaign removes inefficiencies in link research as well as it guarantees quality links in your lists. This is definitely you have to try for your company. Let me know in the comments if this works for you.

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

How to Increase Responses from Link Requests (Classic Examples, Recommendations and a lot more)

A link request is an email sent to a prospect with the goal of earning a link back to the sender’s website.

That phrase is now popularly termed as, “outreach email” or “outreach template”, seeing that the value that this approach provides is far better than just earning a link. A single outreach email could also be translated to new relationships, partnerships, engagements and business sales and conversions.

So when we discuss about link request, you won’t just get a link, you build connections.

That is why link request (outreach) when combined with content, is one of the most utilize link building tactics and many internet marketers still believe that it is the most effective link building method that you can still apply to build authority to your pages and to improve your site’s search performance.

Now, the question is how you can write a link request email that will get you results for your website.

To answer this question, I took a few examples of emails that I received for the past three months to show you mistakes  that most link specialists/PR managers and the like online marketers are doing and how to make these link request emails effective in getting responses from targets.

Let’s get started.

Example 1: Shopping cart abandonment email

This PR email pitch is almost perfect for an outreach campaign but the sender forgot the first thing people would want to open an email and actually read it – interest.

Yes, I wrote a post about link building for ecommerce and blogs but it doesn’t mean that I’m really looking forward for another post or even a visual content about the said topic. My site covers only link building and content marketing (which you may know already, if you’ve been a long time reader here).

How to improve this email copy?

• Include a few personal details of the webmaster/blogger (e.g. name, blog/site name, etc..) to spark a little connection while the recipient is reading the first paragraph of the pitch.
• Target tech, SEO and internet marketing blogs that primarily discuss ecommerce topics in their content. This is the first set of linkers that you might want to engage with in your content promotion.
• Identify the value that your content is offering. If you go back to reading the pitch, you can think that CRO blogs would be a good fit to target with their approach.

Example 2: Hospitality trends email

How to improve this email copy?

• Subjects should be made catchy and is something that the recipient would be able to connect to. Since I’m only interested with SEO, internet marketing and business topics, I will not bother myself replying to this type of email.
• Include personal details of the target (again). Take a quick look at the about me page and homepage, you’ll definitely identify the author of this blog. J
• Encourage to check out the content first before asking for a link. If I find it useful, I will spend one minute to login to my website, edit my post and link to you.

Example 3: For guest email

How to improve this email copy?

• Support your information about your writing experience with proofs of work. If you’re an experienced writer, then why don’t you give me samples of your best articles?
• Never ask for a link in your first pitch, it would only give the impression that you’re sending an email to encourage me to link to you (where is the value of your pitch?).
• Make sure you have a clear point in your pitch. If you’re only asking the person to check out your content, then that should be clear from beginning to the ending paragraph of your message.

Example 4: Product review email

How to improve this email copy?

• State your position in your company (even though people won’t care about your career status, including your company position adds credibility to your pitch).
• Provide details about your product (i.e. features and why should I care about it)
• Don’t ask for a review if you don’t tell the person the value of your offering.

Examples of good link request emails

Example 1: More link links email from Wordstream

Why this email works?

• First name first. Elisa stated my first name and that catches my attention (pretty basic but very important).
• The pitch was straightforward and clear (by reading the first few words, I already know what to do).
• The branded signature makes me want to check out the brand and personally connect with Elisa.

Example 2: Resource link building

Why this email works?

• The pitch is actually what I actually looking for (I stated in my recent post I that I want to receive actionable tips to add to my resource page).
• It answers all my questions (what, how, why of the pitch).

Psychology 101 for linker outreach

Let’s get straight. Psychology of persuasion and influence is what we, link builders need to further improve the way we approach link building and outreach today. Because with psychology in mind, we’ll be able to tap into other people’s interests, and get them take any action that we desire for our brand.

Given that we reach out to real people, we should also make our principles and methods real as well.

The Six Principles of Influence were created by Robert Cialdini, Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. He identified the six principles of influence that we can apply to any content and link development campaigns that we’re doing today.Here’s how.

1. Reciprocation

Link building should benefit both parties (you as the person who wants a link and the person you want to get a link from).

With reciprocation, the first initiative should come from you. The same goes with link building, if you start linking to other relevant sites, people will eventually link to you as well.

Here are some ways to show reciprocation in link building:

• Create a resource page for non-competitors’ domains. If you own a service company website, why not publish a page that lists down all the best tools in your industry.

• Link to other relevant content sources (e.g. influencers’ recent posts) from your own blog’s content. If your piece is relevant and almost has the value/information similar to your content source, you would have a chance to acquire a fresh link from your influencer’s site.
• Share other brands’ content on social media platforms with a mention to the author’s social profile. This would help your brand to tap into other brands/influencers/authors’ radars and solidify the relationships you have with them. This will in turn, entice them to share or even link to your page once you start reaching out to them through blogger outreach and content promotion approaches.
• Make other domains’ visible on other blogs by linking to them from your third party content (e.g. guest posts). Reach out to them and tell them that you mentioned their posts in your guest articles. This approach will eventually provide you links in your second layer link building.

Initiating link building activities to relevant blogs/websites in your niche gives you more link opportunities than just simply reaching out to people and asking to view, share or link to your content.

2. Liking

Finding your common grounds with your outreach targets is one of best ways to get their attention instantly.

Here is how you can find your commonalities with your prospects:

• Identify sources/links that they consistently share on social places and see what specific blogs they love to read and share to their followers.
• Discover their interests by stalking to their websites, looking at how they respond to their community followers and finding what topic they usually publish on their sites.
• See where they publish their content works. Use Reverse Image search and Google search to find pages/blogs where they had their posts published.
• Spend 3 minutes finding their best links and analyze how do they get those links, (do they participate in industry-related communities?)

Include details in your pitch that will relate and/or connect you to your outreach prospect.

3. Commitment and consistency

Commitment is hard to express when you still don’t have any consistent activities on your website. Reaching out to a prospect with the intent of committing yourself for collaboration/partnership activities would need first to show consistency on your content and link development efforts.

Here’s how you can do it:

• When pitching a content manager/blogger for regular content contribution, make sure that you include links to your other site’s author profiles where your guest articles are visible. This approach would prove that you have previous commitments on other brands.
• When performing broken link building method, you can include a personal commitment to your pitch, telling to the webmaster that you’re willing to make aware of him of any error issues (dead links) that you might encounter on his website. This will show a little interest from your part to provide value to his website and to his site’s targeted audience.

4. Social proof

One of the effective ways to capture the interests of your outreach prospect is to show social proofs in your email message. There are many implications of showing social proof in your link request pitch:

• It exemplifies your authority as a brand/author/publisher.
• It makes your recipient feel that you’re capable of providing value for their website and for their readers (if in case, you want to use guest blogging approach).
• It humanizes your pitch (impressing others that you’re an engaging person in your industry).
• Adds credibility to your content particularly when you show examples of influencers who’d shared your posts in the past.

Social proofs are commonly added to pitches to ask a webmaster to become part of his community (regular contributor), exclusive partner and/or requesting to become an affiliate marketer of his product/service.

5. Authority

Authority is what most brands would want to achieve in their respective industries, given that it provides them opportunities to easily inculcate their messages/intentions/stories to their communities who already trusted them  through the efforts that these brands made in the past (content, partnership, engagement, etc..).

It also makes outreach campaigns more effective in earning responses and mentions from people, seeing that they already know what the brand is all about and what the brand is capable of contributing to the community.

Authority is achieved through many content and link development efforts such as:

• Consistently publishing linkable assets that people won’t find from anyone else and are filling content gaps in the industry.
• Participating in online communities where expertise and experience could be expressed (interviews/crowdsourcing, taking advantage of journalists asking for free tips/advices, answering questions on forums, Q&As and blogs, etc..)
• Building a solid social community on social platforms such as Google+ and Twitter by actively answering  questions on social communities where you know you can add value to and consistently adding/following social people who’re actively sharing relevant posts and participating on communities (you can use ManageFlitter for Twitter management and Circloscope for Google+)
• Become the go-to brand in your industry by publishing guides, whitepapers, ebooks and podcasts/webinars that discuss questions/topics that are raised by people in your community.

Other resources:

How to become an Influencer through Content and Relationship Marketing

How Being an Authority can Boost Your Online Sales

6. Scarcity and exclusivity

Taking advantage of the idea of scarcity and exclusivity when offering premium content to your users/subscribers/customers is one of the best ways to promote your offerings (products/services) as well as earn links from your outreach and content promotion campaigns.

Here are some methods where you can apply scarcity and exclusivity to your content creation and link development campaigns:

• Provide an exclusive content only to your existing subscribers (e.g. free ebook). This will allow your brand community to give importance to your emails that have information/data that you haven’t been published on your blog.

• Send exclusive offers to active bloggers in your industry (i.e. sending them free access to your brand’s new premium products). Allowing this to happen in the first few weeks before your launching campaign could give a boost to the traffic and link opportunities to your product’s page once it goes live (bloggers would be excited to write reviews or add insights to their existing reviews given that they want to become the first few persons to cover your new tool/product).

Actionable tips to improve your link request/outreach emails

• Follow any link-request instructions indicated in the page where you want to get links from to have a higher chance of getting response from your target. Contact email, required subject line and name of the person to contact to are a few examples of details that may be added by your outreach target to his resource page.
• Spend time writing your pitch to your link prospect. Making your email personalized and straightforward makes it easy for the recipient to understand your main intention/purpose of outreach. You can check out these resources from BuiltVisible and SEERInteractive about linker outreach.

Other resources:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-write-email-to-get-a-better-response-rate

http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/content-based-outreach-for-link-building/

http://kaiserthesage.com/persona-link-building/

Source: 1

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Building Organic Backlinks the Right Way

Organic links are often termed as, “natural links” and are considered as votes for the site. These links are products of highly-targeted content or link bait pieces that aim to provide specific value/information to users (i.e. how-to guides).

Link baiting has long been discussed on many SEO blogs and probably because of its popularity and an easier process than creating viral content pieces. Popular link bait pieces is more than just a one-time strategy and if you’re not lucky enough, you would need a year or two see the best results using this link building strategy.

However, unlike any viral content pieces, paid advertising and big budget won’t be necessary in the first time frame of building your link bait assets. You would only need a proper execution of the process to get things done correctly and get you earn high quality organic links.

A lot of the tips that I’ll be sharing below require content assets to execute organic link building effectively.

Link seeding

If you’re doing link building for startups and newly-established blogs, this technique could land you various link opportunities that your competitors may haven’t know about.

The process starts with identifying “long tail queries” that your target audience might be using to find your products, your brand and informational content in your industry.

I personally use KeywordTool.io for this technique for the following reasons (which are also present in the tool page):

• It generates up to 750 suggestions for every keyword (which are mostly long tail queries).
• Best alternative to common keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner.
• It's absolutely free.

To start with, you can create a list of keywords that your audience is using to find your unique selling point (service, product, blog, etc..). Then discover more topic ideas by grabbing those keywords in KeywordTool.io.

You can simply use your main keyword, e.g. “personal injury” or add words like, “when”, “how” “what” “where” to your main keyword to yield more informational-based long tail queries.

Don’t forget to select your country search when performing this in a local basis.

To populate the list, you can grab discovered phrases and do the same keyword research technique to discover more topics and search queries.

List down all the brand and industry-related keywords and search queries in a spreadsheet and choose only the informational-based keywords to look for link opportunities.

Do a Google search for each of the keyword but be careful when you do continuous search (follow tips in this post to scrape search engines without pissing them off).

Here is a list of link opportunities that can be generated using this keyword-based link strategy:

• Ranking outdated resource pages that need additional information/data/diagrams.
• Forum boards/threads that rank for long tail queries because of the continuous answers/question of members participating on those threads.
• How-to guides that need visual content to better serve the users effectively.

These link targets could give you chances of generating new links for your page/content/site. The more organic links you earn from them, the more referral traffic they can bring to your website.

Conversion link building

Links that help achieve the brand’s conversion goals are more valuable than ordinary referral links. Aside from the fact that they can generate leads/sales, most of this link type is evergreen. Evergreen links are links than tend to last and provide more value to the linking to page/site because those links are placed naturally and strategically and built with conversions intent.

For instance, you can link out to your informational pages from your content distribution pages (i.e. guest post) instead of directly using anchor texts to link to any page of your website. A good example of this is this guest post by Adam Connell at BoostBlogTraffic.

The author byline provides a link pointing to his free guide (ebook).

Linking out to information pages and conversion-captured pages (e.g. where users can stay and subscribe to your email list) could benefit your branding strategy given that you can target two birds with one stone (links and subscribers, links and followers or links and leads).

Make sure that the content you contribute on other authority blogs/sites are topics that are related to your business so that people who can see your informational link can convert into customers/followers/email subscribers.

Another organic link building technique that you can start trying is link building from pages that are highly visible on search results (targeting ready-to-buy queries or conversion-based keywords).

You can use the same keyword research tool earlier and find conversion-based keywords. Add phrase like, “where to buy” or simply add “where” to your main keyword. Identify if the resulted long tail queries can drive conversions to your brand and use them to search for more link opportunities.

Given that the searchers are ready to purchase in this phase of search, earning links from these ranking pages can continuously drive conversions to your website.

Improve your site’s linkability

Improving your site’s linkability would need proper foundation on your website given that if you’re able to fix your site’s technical issues, your tendencies of ranking for industry-related keyword is higher, which can result to more linking opportunities (when bloggers start to reference your content from their sites).

Here are a few technical and content tips to enhance your website’s linkability:

• If you removed your old pages that are still sending traffic and links to your website, you can create new pages that contain the same information as your old pages have. Then redirect old URLs to your newly-created content. Share your new pages on social networks so you’ll have tendency of earning fresh new links and shares.
• Make your most important pages visible on your homepage by including a link to your linkable assets and/or most converting pages or adding image links pointing to those pages.
• Create new resource pages that curate internal and external links (e.g. introducing a beginners’ guide to…). Then build contextual links to these pages through community discussions, guest blogs and/or link outreach to resource pages that are related to your content.  You can check out this post on link building using content organization.
• Add appropriate social sharing buttons that your audience is actively using (e.g. Pinterest for photo blogs). You can also add buttons that your target audience might be using to share your content (e.g. Inbound.org share button for online marketing blogs).

Content upgrade

Every content piece from every industry requires continuous improvement or update given that there are always new information/data/analyses that need to be added to provide more value to a particular group of users.

The best way to find pages that need upgrade/update is using link building tools like Outdated Content Finder, Screaming Frog and Open Site Explorer.

OSE has its new feature where you can filter the top pages by http status. This could give you provide you more information on which links are broken but are still sending relevant traffic to the site.

Do a reverse engineer to your competitors’ websites and non-competing websites that have the same brand attributes. Grab one URL to OSE, filter the Top Pages by 4xx. Do the same to all of your competitors. Then create a list of all the broken links your competitors’ sites have.

To see if those dead pages are good opportunities to upgrade, you can use Archive.org or any tools that can bring you back to the history of those pages. Identify if the lost information of those pages is relevant to your brand and can easily be your team’s expertise.

Create a content that is comprehensive and engaging to the users, surpassing the old information found on the broken pages. Make it more interesting by investing design formats (images, slide decks, videos) to it.

Reach out to the people who linked to your competitors’ dead pages and asked if they can mention your new content in replace for the broken link. Generate more organic backlinks by including your new content on community discussions/forums, Q&A sections and social media groups.

More Resources:

Sky Sraper Technique

Creating and Developing Content Assets Like A Pro

Strategic content distribution

Distributing your content on other related blogs (i.e. guest posts) could provide you more than one link. Here are a few tips to maximize the value of your content distributed pieces:

• Aim to provide unexpected hooks to your guest contributions given that the more people are consuming your content, the higher are the tendencies that your piece can attract more shares which will later on turn into organic links.
• Exceed the expectations of your guest blog target by providing useful information that no one in your industry has published on. This could give you an opportunity to be featured in the top contributors page which is good not only to build more internal links to your distributed content but to brand you as an author within that specific niche. You can check out this post on how to guest post strategically on other relevant blogs.
• Target content-focused websites that are authoritative in a very specific industry you’re targeting. The more closely related the site is, the better, since you can easily drive conversions from those content distributing sites.

Use SEMRush to find guest blog targets that are content authority in your industry. When they increase their rankings/search traffic after the recent Panda update, it means that they have proven their content authority in a particular niche. If you target them for content distribution, you’ll benefit more value from those sites in terms of link building, conversions, and social sharing.

Target long tail keywords in your content distribution pieces like in your slide presentations. If these pieces happen to rank for those keywords, it can generate new users to see, consume and even include your pieces from their blogs.

You can also track those followers who’ve shared your slide decks on their websites. Ask if they can also link to your website as the source of the information. You can even get higher conversion when you create a page designed for all the slide presentations, webinars and videos you’ve recorded/uploaded both on and offline.

Interaction Link Building

Building relationships with your customers/followers/brand loyalists could bring a long way to the branding of your website. It is also the easiest way to understand your audience’ needs and let them contribute insights to your content creation.

Add a quick survey on the blog section of your website, asking which topics they would want to see on your site. You can also ask questions regarding the content format, length of content and other content elements to generate more feedbacks from them.

The more targeted and useful to a specific persona group, the higher is the likelihood of earning the trust of your target audience which eventually will bring organic backlinks to your website.

Email your customers using a personalized email copy to inform them about your new product features. A simple email template with no ads, images, videos and attached are more likely to convert to new feedbacks and sales.

Email from Positionly

Create alerts from Q&A sites like Quora to get updated with timely questions that you can immediately answer in a daily/regular basis  (use IFTTT).

Those questions can also be the main topics of your content, which can help you rank for several long tail keywords given that the topics might be the exact keywords users are searching for in Google.

Final Thoughts:

Organic link building considers great content to  passively and actively acquire relevant and high quality links. By using the above actionable tips, you can generate fresh new content and links to your brand/site.

If you want to conduct an organic link building campaign, you can contact us for link building services quotes. 

Image Credit: 1

by Venchito Tampon Jr