Strategy

How to Monitor Your Backlinks this 2014 and Beyond

One of the difficult aspects of link building is finding websites or pages that can link out to your content or domain and bring targeted traffic to your website.

If you can’t find a relevant and high quality page to target for link building, then it’s impossible to increase links in your website’s link profile.

This problem can be solved by monitoring incoming links (new) pointing to websites that are related to your brand (whether or not they are your competitors).

Monitoring backlinks will help you in your link building activities such as:

• Easily prospect pages that linked out to your competitors (those who’re rendering the same product/service).
• Analyze the linking behavior of bloggers and webmasters in your space so you can easily plan a strategy that will guarantee links to your website.
• Plan how you can build links from websites in similar industries that your competition has no clue about.
• Create a content that is targeted to audiences of sites linking to your competitors that are likely to link to your website as well.

Becoming a proactive link builder rather than a reactive one can help you win the competition given that you’re the first one to find link opportunities that your competitors haven’t thought of yet.

Now the question is, how can you monitor backlinks of your competitors and even similar sites from related industries all at the same time?

The answer is to use Monitor Backlinks tool.

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Side Note: I’m a giving a discount coupon for those who want to purchase Monitor Backlinks (see the coupon code below).

What it does is that it allows you to monitor your links (obviously) of your domain as well as of your competitors all in just a single platform.

Let’s go first with monitoring links pointing to your website/domain.

Monitor incoming links to your domain

There are many reasons why you should start monitoring incoming backlinks to your website, but here’s a few ones you should consider:

• To build stronger connections with bloggers and linkers in your industry (those who linked to your content) by sending thank you messages to their emails.
• To identify which of your blog posts are highly linkable and which type of content you would want to invest further to attract more editorial links to your website.
• To document the number of links you are earning every month (so you can leverage some of your linking activities to add more numbers to your link profile).

With the above reasons, you should have now decided to monitor backlinks to your domain.

Monitor Backlinks tool has an easy to use and understand platform. If you’re a newbie in the industry, then this may work for you very well.

If you wish to monitor your website, you simply go to the Select a domain tab and choose Add New Domain.

Choose between the two buttons:

• Add Domain (yellow) – if you have a Google Analytics account in that domain, then choose this
• Add domain without Google Analytics – self explanatory

If you choose the first option, then select the Google Analytics profile of that domain.

Then click Add Domain.

Add the websites of your competitors or just skip this step if you wish not to monitor links of your competitors.

If you want to track rankings of keywords you’re targeting for your website, then add them to the next step (add your keywords).

When done, you should now see this platform.

Monitor incoming links of your competitors

You have an option to add the website of your competitor or a non-competitor site that is also targeting your audience.

If you’re working on a teen driving website you can choose a parent driving blog (non-competitor) as a domain for link monitoring.

This way you’ll have chances of finding link opportunities that your competitors haven’t thought of.

Now, if the tool allows you to add four competitors, choose two non-competitor websites for backlink monitoring and leave the other two for your competitors.

How to add domains of your competitors

Click on your website, then choose Competitors in the drop down menu.

Click Add new competitor.

Add the website of your competitor and click Add competitor button.

Now you can already track links of your competitors. If you wish to see your competitors’ links straight in the dashboard of Monitor Backlinks, simply scroll down the page.

Here’s a quick overview of the dashboard (competitors’ links).

There is an export button that you can click on if you want to get a spreadsheet of all the monitored links.

Getting value from link monitoring

It’s very easy to monitor links of your competitors and similar websites in your industry, but the most challenging part is to actually think of how you can maximize those link data to improve your link building campaign.

To get more insights from monitored links, you have to export them from the Monitor Backlinks dashboard.

Once you have the spreadsheet, you need to remove columns that are unnecessary to make decisions from link monitoring.

The spreadsheet should now have columns for:

• Ahrefs Rank/Rating
• Domain
• URL From
• URL To
• Anchor

Sort the links by increasing Ahrefs rating/rank to get a quick overview of the first hundreds high quality links.

Homepage links

If you consider building homepage links as your top priority, then you should only focus on pages in the URL From tab that only points out to homepage links in the URL to tab.

These are pages that are intended to link out to the homepage URL of your competitor.

You can also use the Anchor column of the spreadsheet to sort links based on their linking purposes (i.e. links pointing to homepage URL only).

See the quick tutorial below to sort links based on branded anchor texts (e.g WPBeginner  or WPBeginner.com).

You can get homepage links for your website by focusing on two types of links (pointing to your competitors).

• Internal pages (i.e. blog posts) pointing to your competitor’s homepage (e.g. Top Wordpress Resource Websites in 2014)
• Blogroll links using branded anchor texts (e.g. WPBeginner).

We’re only talking about probability of linking here not the certainty that those pages/links would definitely link to your homepage. There are cases that linkers would love to link to your content and not directly to your homepage (e.g. a list of best wordpress resources page linking to your content).

Deep links

If you’re looking for some deep links for your website, then you can use the spreadsheet to see websites who linked to your competitors’ deep pages.

All the URLs in the URL To column are internal pages of your competitors that earned links from pages in the URL From column.

If you will analyze how each of those linking to pages (URL From) linked to your competitors’ pages, then you can think of a strategy to possibly get links from those pages.

Examples of tactics you can use for each competitor’s linking page/site

Participate in offline local niche communities

This type of local niche meet-up is hard to find if you will not consistently monitor links in your space.

What to do with this kind of event?

• Invest your time in participating in this local niche community. Given that participants are part of your target audience, you have a high chance to get some coverage for your brand (when they start to write about you and your brand on their own blogs).
• Become a regular sponsor if you have a huge budget set for marketing/promotion. Links will follow from bloggers in your space (e.g. news, stories or blog posts about what they learned during the event) once you start doing some sponsorships.
• Show your expertise by speaking in the event. Links won’t be guaranteed using this approach but regular blog readers and additional subscribers are some returns you can obtain from public speaking.

Suggest a resource to a .Edu website

I know this is a common link building technique but if you’re adding a few texts to your outreach email, then you can get a higher conversion rate in your link building outreach.

You can add these sentences below to make your outreach more effective:

[Competitor’s content] has been a valuable resource for me since I started to learn about [topic]. Would you mind if I suggest a few more resources that you can add to your page?

Offer your content to be translated to other languages

If you published a content that is very well received by your audience, then you can offer your content to non-English blogs to publish in other languages.

Get featured on popular niche interview series 

One benefit of monitoring links in your space is that you’ll be able to discover interview posts featuring your competitors (bloggers/authors).

You can then reach out to those blogs who conduct interviews and ask if they’re still looking for more interviewees to cover on their blogs.

Make sure you send them links that show your expertise and experience about certain subjects you want to be known for to increase the odds of being interviewed on those sites

Get inspirations for your next content asset

Link monitoring will help you find ideas/topics from successful content pieces that are already published on the web.

You won’t need to replicate the exact content but just get insights on why and how it managed to get hundreds of shares and attract editorial links

This example shows that a high quality illustration guide best resonates the non-techy people including small business owners.

Monitor Backlinks Tool – Discount Coupon

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This is an exclusive offer this week, so don’t miss this out!

Follow me on Twitter and Google+.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

11 Profitable Backlink Sources

Building backlinks in 2014 has been tougher than pre-penguin years and will be more difficult in the years to come. Seeing that a lot of webmasters already knew common link building tactics we SEOs are doing, it’s easy for them to detect pitches/outreaches that only aim to get links that we want from websites we’re reaching out to.

That kind of scenario only shows us that we need to look for new strategies in link building, strategies that would give real value to our clients.

We are real marketers, not just SEOs. We should make sure that all our campaigns as well as our actions are profitable to the business of our clients.

In this post, I’d like to share 11 profitable backlink sources that will surely give you links that you need for your website.

1. User-generated content

There are so many user-generated websites that you can take advantage of to promote your existing content/page.

Slideshare is one of the websites that you need to start leveraging for content promotion because it can give highly targeted visitors to your website.

This is an example of how slideshare can drive relevant visitors to your site through a link/mention on an influencer’s slide presentation.

There are several ways to get visibility through links/mentions from popular slide presentations on Slideshare. Here are a few that you can consider:

• Build relationships with influencers in your space through blogger outreach and link inclusion in your site’s internal content (round-ups).
• Invest in building your brand on Slideshare by adding more highly valued slide presentations that are actionable and provide real insights to your community.
• Optimize your distributed content by targeting long tail keywords people are searching for to find information about your brand. Ranking for keywords using your visual content can help increase your chances of earnings/links from influencers, bloggers or speakers who are doing their research on the subject matter.

• Customize your Slideshare profile by adding eye-catching images to attract new subscribers as new brand followers.
• Link to your social accounts from your Slideshare profile (applicable for premium users) to pass link juice to your social accounts and to help grow your brand’s social following.

2. Capitalize on ranking forum pages

Forum marketing is one of the under-utilized content promotion techniques these days but if you will only look at the value that it provides to site owners or business owners, you would really want to invest in participating on industry-related forums.

This is an example of how marketing your website on forums can help you increase your referral traffic as well as bring potential customers/clients to your brand (which should be the aim of every link builder today).

How to find profitable forums:

• Do a Google search for “your industry” forums query, sort the page results by Domain Authority (DA) and list all potential forum sites in a spreadsheet.
• Add to your spreadsheet forums that are found using customer’s search query (e.g. shop [industry] business). Since this type of phrases is what customers are using to you’re your products/services online, they are more likely to buy/purchase from your brand.

• Reverse engineer your competitors’ websites and look for niche-specific forum sites where they are actively participating.

Now that you have a list of forum sites, you can now build links using forum marketing. This is doable in two ways:

• Complete your branded forum profile by adding important details about your website/brand (never forget to link to your homepage URL and social accounts to get more visibility to those pages)
• Answer relevant questions on forum threads that you know you can provide value to (base it on your experience/expertise). Since the more you contribute on forums, there are chances that people would get to notice you and begin to follow your website/brand, leading to more link opportunities.

3. Industry newsletters

Newsletters from big brands/authorities in your space are good link sources given that they can really provide targeted visitors to your website for the main reason of the relevancy, between the newsletter link and your website.

This is a just an example of thousands of newsletters that people received from brands, some of them could bring traffic to your page/website, some are not. Nevertheless, they are places that can increase the online visibility of your business.

How to find websites that have relevant newsletters:

• Use Twitter search to find newsletters that are connected to your brand (do searches for [industry] newsletter)
• Do Google search for [industry] newsletter and find pages that allow users to earn mentions in newsletters either through content contribution or simple community participation.
• Track upcoming newsletters using Fresh Web Explorer or Talkwalker Alerts.

How to get links from newsletters:

• Become a regular contributor for blogs that send weekly/daily listings of articles to their existing subscribers.
• Identify the types of content people are consuming in your space, create those content types on your site and heavily promote it (contact the content manager and just simply share your content). Classic example is Moz Top 10.
• Submit your content to community sites in your industry and earn a mention from weekly newsletters they’re distributing to their members (e.g. Inbound.org’s Daily Digest). Start connecting with active members in those communities to help your content rank high on the listings through their individual upvotes.

4. High traffic directories

Getting targeted traffic is one of the best benefits you can get from directories (whether they are local or niche-specific).

The reality is some people are still using directories to research for top blogs/sites in your space, which if capitalized could provide continuous visits to your website (these are visits that are likely to engage with your brand in the long haul).

Alltop is one of the high quality directories that are strictly reviewing site submission to ensure that they only list sites that people could get value from (which are based on the authority and utility of content produced by them).

How to get inks from high traffic directories?

Submit your site to high quality directories with strict editorial guidelines. Usually they accept websites that have regular content (blog posts). So make sure you always keep your blog up to date to get higher chances of getting accepted on those directories).

How to find high traffic and customer-converted directories

• Use customers search queries to discover local and niche directories (where to buy [product/service], shop [industry] business or shop [local] business)

• Quickly search for curated list of directories in your space (e.g. top car directories), filter out websites that have low Domain Authority, without strict editorial guidelines and would need reciprocal links before being accepted to their listings.

5. Authoritative curated list

Earning a mention from a curated content adds credibility to your brand and can send trust, relevancy and authority signals to search engines, which makes it easy for your website to rank for highly competitive keywords.

There are so many ways to leverage this content-centric link building method, a few of them are:

• Create a spreadsheet of blogs that consistently curate lists of websites, tools, resources or content pages. Find them using Fresh Web Explorer or any other alert mention tools. You can use any of the following phrases to find those blogs:

“your keywords round up”

“your keywords round up post”

“your keywords weekly round up”

“your keywords mash up post”

“your keywords post of the day”

“your keywords post of the week”

• See the type of content industry curators are including in their lists. Replicate those content types and publish them on your blog. Reach out to those curators and get links.
• Invest in building relationships with industry curators (start with five persons). Incentivize them by giving free access to premium products or offer something that will catch their interests and get them know your brand.
• Help the page to get to the top spots of search results by mentioning it from your guest articles and from your other link building efforts like forum marketing and blog participation, to help it earn organic traffic, which can be turned into referral traffic back to your website.

6. High-tier resource pages

A resource page/post that provides comprehensive information about a certain topic will naturally earn editorial mentions from relevant websites/blogs which helps the content to get more eyeballs from its targeted readers (bringing more traffic to the website where the content is hosted).

I always believe that earning editorial mentions should be one of the link building goals that SEOs should start targeting today, besides the traffic and conversions linking pages could bring to websites they’re handling. Editorial/contextual links could prove the following:

• Your content/page is valuable in terms of the message and new information it contains.
• Your content/page reveals your brand’s expertise on certain topics.
• Your content/page has a story that is educational, humorous or interesting (which is worth sharing to other people).

This is a screenshot of my client’s Google Analytics account that shows the referral visits he earned from an authoritative page (editorial mention).

This could also happen to your website by performing any of the following online activities:

• Spend at least 15-30 minutes answering relevant questions on industry forums (show your expertise by adding brief but straightforward and actionable answers).
• Optimize your content assets both for search engines and users by adding industry terms/phrases, local and niche entities and maintaining the purpose of each of your asset throughout the process of writing/creating them (check out this post by Distilled about content matrix).
• Use content promotion strategies applicable to your content piece to have higher chances of earning links from your target linkers/bloggers. You can follow these actionable tips by Brian Dean.

• Always look at the longevity of the information of your content (evergreen), since it always matter if you want to consistently earn links from researchers/bloggers who’re looking for references for their works. If you have timely pages on your website, you can just combine them into one big post, making them more up to date and ultimate resource in your industry (e.g. turn your link building 2014 and 2015 posts into one big resource page).
• Identify assets in your website that received a lot of natural links in the past six months using Ahrefs or OSE, then think of ways on how you can add more valuable information to them. By doing this, you’ll get more chances of earning contextual links once your start promoting it to previous and new (potential) linkers in your industry.

One example of this is my updated link building post where I included additional contributions (tips) from 6 link building experts (you can click on the link to check out their contributions).

7. Contribution request on Twitter

Journalists, researchers or even bloggers today are now using Twitter to find insights or tips from top personalities or influencers that they can include as references or additional information for their works (their own content).

You can find those types of people by manually searching their status updates on Twitter (use #journorequest or #prrequest as your Twitter search terms).

You can also automate this approach by using IFTTT and Twilert tools. Use the RSS feed of Twitter (from Twilerts) and Gmail as your IFTTT options. Make sure that you add your keywords or industry terms to your Twitter alert in Twilerts to generate relevant results.

IFTTT will send you email alerts when there are journo or PR requests found on Twitter. It will look something like this:

When you received this kind of email alert, it is time to approach the journalist/blogger by following this simple step by step guide:

• Follow the person’s Twitter profile.
• Ask the person if he’d like to give you his email (always direct the conversation to email to easily engage him, especially if you want to build a stronger relationship with that person).
• Provide a brief but useful comment/tip/insight about the topic for his upcoming post.
• Invest in building connection with that person to earn more mentions/links from his future posts (both internal and external content).

This approach is like pulling attention from people who’re ready to give you links but still want to get your contribution about the topic you’re an expert in. I guess this can be one of your powerful link building techniques that you need to start leveraging today to build authority/influence in your niche as well as to get the desired attention that you want for your brand.

8. Competitor link building

Competitor link research or reverse engineering is one of the untapped ways to find link opportunities in the early stages of a link development campaign.

You will not only be able to find your competitors’ backlinks but also can help you:

• Determine what type of content resonates to your targeted audience and make this as one of your go-to strategies when looking for better content ideas for your website.
• Estimate the number of linking opportunities you can prospect on based on the links acquired by your competitors (make sure that you identified correctly your competitors – those that are very similar to your offerings (products/services), market audience and status level).
• Estimate the number of linking root domains you need to pursue to rank for a specific keyword (this can be based on the average number of root domains pointing to the five pages ranking in search results for your target keyword).

To get started with competitor link research, you can use any of the following tools (for the link prospecting phase):

• Mentions.net (freemium)
• Monitor Backlinks (paid)

Mentions.net

Mentions.net allows you to find social and web mentions of your website as well as of your competitors’ sites. The tool will ease your work of finding those mentions since it will automatically provide you a list of web mentions in real time for keywords/sites you’re targeting.

Monitor Backlinks

This tool will allow you to track incoming links to your domain as well as to your competitors, making it easy for you to identify opportunities that are worth pursuing in terms of authority and relevancy of those links to your brand. It also has a feature that will generate the link data of links, such as their page and domain authorities, which if you will sort according to those metrics, you’ll find tons of high quality link opportunities (from guest blogging sites to resource pages).

If you’re still wondering how to use the tool, here is a short step by step guide for you.

Step 1: Login to the tool, add your own domain as well as domains of your competitors.

 Step 2: Select your domain and click competitors in the drop down menu.

Step 3: Click View Links on your preferred domain.

Step 4: Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Export button.

Step 5: Do the same pattern to all of your competitors’ links (from Step 1 to Step 4), then consolidate all the links into one spreadsheet.

Step 6: Use Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis to get link data of those links.  

Note: You can only generate data for every 200 links (batch basis).  

Step 7: Export the list of links with link data from Ahrefs.

Step 8: Remove unnecessary columns and only include Ahrefs Rank, Domain Rank and Domains (All Referring Domains) columns.

Step 9: Include those additional data (Ahrefs Rank, Domain Rank, Domains) to your previeous spreadsheet.

Step 10: Filter your data by ascending Domains (Referring) and Domain Rank or Alexa Rank.

Click Sort & Filter in Excel, then choose Custom Sort.

Click Domainsin the Sort by drop down list, then choose Largest to Smallest in the Order section. Click Add Level, then choose Domain Rank in the drop down list and Largest to Smallestin the Order section.

When done, you now have a spreadsheet of all the links acquired by your competitors, sorted by the highest to lowest Referring Link Domains and Domain Rank.

How to leverage your list of competitors’ backlinks and mentions

• Reach out to those brands that mentioned your competitors’ domains/pages and just simply share your own page/post (make sure it is very similar to your competitor’s content).
• Determine how your competitors managed to earn/get those links. See if they focus on creating content assets in a consistent basis and replicate that same method to your brand.
• Invest in building relationships with curators and influencers who link to your competitors’ domains, as they would naturally link to you as well when you have solid connections with them.
• Create another list of link opportunities for roundups/curations (where your competitors get links from). See the type of content those curators/bloggers link out to and create that type of content.
• Discover authoritative media outlets that mentioned your competitors’ brands (with or without links). Create another spreadsheet for Press Media or journalists, and reach out to them when you have a new brand story that you want to be covered.

9. Testimonial link building

If you’re an affiliate in your industry (helping other companies to generate sales through your product reviews), then you can use testimonials as your value proposition in your linker outreach to get links from industry shops.

As an example, I had a client who’s working as an affiliate marketer in the tech industry and one of his main goals is to build links to his website to increase his site’s domain authority and get more traction on other relevant blogs.

So what I did is to create a list of Wordpress shops that have testimonial or press pages that link out to site owners/users that used their products (Wordpress themes) and also those who just want to provide testimonials for those shops.

You can also apply the same approach by first discovering testimonial pages that can possibly link out to your domain. Do Google searches for terms like:

intitle:testimonials OR inurl:testimonials [keyword]

intitle:affiliates OR inurl:affilaites [keyword]

Intitle:what people are saying [keyword]

Intitle:buzz OR inurl:buzz [keyword]

Intitle:press OR inurl:press [keyword]

For the testimonial outreach, you can use the email template below:

Hi [Name],

I’m Venchito J. Tampon Jr., an affiliate marketer at [my blog]. I stumbled upon your product and [say something about their tool…].

I’m wondering if you would be interested for an additional testimonial for your testimonials page.

Please let me know and I’m willing to add one.

Best regards,

Venchito

Don’t stop the connections you started with those Wordpress shop owners, once in a while, reach out to them through email or social accounts to get more chances of earning links from their blogs/pages.

10. Second deep broken link building

Broken link building is one of my go-to link building tactics when new clients come on board, seeing that there are always value this link building tactic provides to potential linkers we’re reaching out to for link inclusion.

There are two ways to perform broken link building:

• Suggest link with the link to replace the broken of your similar content (there must be a direct relevancy between the broken link and your content).
• Suggest at least two resources to the webmaster (one link of your content and one link of another similar content but not from your competitor).

How to find broken link opportunities

You can use any of the following approaches to find opportunities for broken link building and create a huge list of resource/links pages.

Advanced Search Queries

The first link prospecting approach in broken link building is the use of advanced search queries. An advanced search query is composed of a keyword and a search operator (e.g. inurl).

Following is a good list of advanced search queries that you can use to create your first list of link opportunities.

(intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) "keyword”

(intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) "keyword” useful recommended helpful

intitle:links "keyword”

intitle:resources  "keyword”

So for example you’re looking for resource pages about cyberbullying (or simply bullying), you can add that keyword or use related phrases to the above list of search queries. The end results will be:

(intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) "cyberbullying”

(intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) "anti bullying” useful recommended helpful

intitle:links "cyberbulling”

intitle:resources  "anti bullying”

Use any of the above search terms when doing prospecting for links pages on Google.

Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering is simply digging into your competitors’ backlink sources. This is doable in two ways:

• Tracking backlink sources of a specific URL.
• Tracking backlink sources of a specific domain.

URL-specific backlink sources

Using again the above example, your first need to find a similar content from your competitor or simply a page that is already ranking in search results (for the target keyword you want to rank for).

Grab the URL of that content, paste it into your favorite link building tool (either Ahrefs, OSE or CognitiveSEO) and discover resource pages that link out to that content.

Domain-specific backlink sources

Find a domain that is highly relevant to the keyword you’re targeting. As for the above example, you can reverse engineer a bullying website to discover more resource pages.

Since that website is directly discussing your keyword (bullying), you could find several pages that link to it.

Using top anchor texts as search queries

This method is doable in four easy steps.  (thanks to Garrett French for this awesome tip!):

Step 1: Identify your main keyword

If you’re in the driving industry, your main keyword is driving.

You don’t need very specific keywords in this method since you want to find a huge list of link opportunities (with main keyword, you’ll have chances of creating a bigger list of resource pages).

Step 2: Do a Google search for your main keyword

Search your main keyword in Google and grab the URLs of the pages listed in the top spots of your search results.

Step 3: Grab one URL from your list of pages and identify the top anchor texts used by linkers to link to the page.   

With Ahrefs, you can find the anchor texts used by linkers to link to the page by clicking on the Inbound Links tab and choosing Anchors in the drop down list.

Step 4: Do the same pattern to all of the pages you listed in your spreadsheet. Grab each of the URLs and find their most linked anchor texts.

Step 5: Create another list of anchor texts used in linking those pages.

Step 6: Use anchor texts as your keywords and add them to your advanced search terms.

For the above example, you can add the phrase – “country driving tips” to your advanced search query - (intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) useful recommended helpful.

Your new search query would be: (intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) “country driving tips” useful recommended helpful.

So by using your list of new keywords (anchor texts), you’ll be able to discover new resource pages that link to the pages you listed in your spreadsheet.

What to do with your list of resource pages:

• Identify if there are broken external links using Check My Links Chrome Extension.
• Reach out to the owners of those resource pages and just tell them that you found error links.
• Suggest your content URL as the replacement to the broken link or simply suggest it as an additional resource to their lists of resources.

You may also check out the following posts about broken link building.

The Broken Link Building Bible

Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice

11. Blog commenters

For blogs that already gained authority in their respective industries, it’s easy for them to build links since they have content (videos, blog posts, images, etc..) that will naturally attract links as well as build a solid community that is willing to support the brand in any of its online marketing efforts.

Relationships matter in link building. It helps amplify the content produced by the brand once the community (brand loyalists) starts to promote the content to their own followers either on their blogs or social networks.

If you don’t want to start from scratch when finding link opportunities for your blog, you can always go back to those who already connected with you in the past. They are the people who spend time leaving comments on your blog posts and are already familiar with your brand.

To find those commenters, you can use SEERInteractive Comment Contact Exporter, which will allow you to export a list of commenters, with their emails, websites and specific posts where they left their comments.

For commenters who didn’t link to their websites, you can still get the URLs of their websites by splitting their emails into Names and Domains.

Step 1: Select the Emails Column.

Step 2: Select the Data menu, then click Text to Columns. Choose Delimited then click Next.

Check the Other check button, add @ then click Finish.

The end result will be a list of blog commenters, with their corresponding emails and websites. You can also add link data to your spreadsheet by using Ahref’s Batch Analysis (follow the steps I shared earlier).

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Earn Reciprocal Links That Google Will Approve Of

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two websites. It is a link pursued by many search professionals in the past, for their own sake to achieve immediate higher rankings in search results. However, this practice (unethical reciprocal linking or link exchanges) had been disapproved by Google and was already listed in the link schemes page of Google Webmaster Tools as one of the link building methods that can negatively impact a site’s ranking in SERPs.

The question of white hat SEOs today is, “If reciprocal links are voluntary given by site owners whom you had linked before from your own website, do they still count as unnatural ones?”

To answer this question, let’s take Matt Cutts and Bill Slawski insights about reciprocal linking.

Experts take on reciprocal links

Bill Slawski

Chances are that if the links on your blog or site are open and transparent and reasonable (rather than excessive), providing value to your visitors, and reasonably cover similar topics or complementary ones, to sites that might link back to yours, that a search engine might find them to be legitimate. If you include indications on your pages that you will link back to others who link to you to boost rankings in search results, you may have more reason to be concerned. If you engage in link farms or link schemes or reciprocal link programs, a search engine might find your pages to be “suspicious,” and may be taking a closer look.

Source: What are reciprocal links and what do search engines think of them?

Matt Cutts

Use your gut. Trading links is natural and it's natural to have reciprocal links. At some level, natural reciprocal links happen, but if you do it way too often, it looks artificial. My advice is to go with your gut and if you're worried, you can use nofollow.

Source: Reading Between the Lines: Matt Cutts on Reciprocal Linking

The insights given by Bill Slawski and Matt Cutts only prove that reciprocal linking is ethical if it is earned and not intentionally built for search ranking purposes.

Earning reciprocal links from relevant sites/blogs is possible if you can perform any of the following link development methods:

How to Earn Ethical Reciprocal Links

Content curation

Curating internal content pieces from your own website or external content from different domains in one big post had been a common content generation technique in this age of content marketing. Given that content curation will only take 2 to 3 hours to complete (from gathering all the links/URLs of relevant pages/domains to publishing the content asset), many content marketers are using this method to consistently publish content on their blogs and to follow their current blog posting frequency.

Getting trust from influencers or authoritative personalities in your industry (especially if you’re starting out to build your own brand) is much easier when you initiate linking to their websites from your own content (as what content curation really does).

The only challenging part in the content curation process is generating a good topic that best suits the interest of the brand’s targeted audience. People won’t care about the list if it does not attend to their specific need/want.

Here are some ways to help you think of a good theme for your curated content:

• Discover popular topics in Reddit. Search for subcategories that are related to your website or content theme (you can also find location-based categories to check out more niche-specific posts).
• Automate topic generation from Quora using IFTTT technique. List all relevant questions in a spreadsheet (questions that you received in your inbox) and choose the best topic among all questions for content curation.

If you own a blog, you can start your list of content ideas with the following themes:

• List of the most popular/commonly used tools in your niche.
• Experts/influencers that are actively participating in your community.
• Highly resourceful guides/ebooks that can help your audience learn about new topics (e.g. beginners guide to investing)
• Industry-related video/audio content (podcasts) that provides new information to your targeted audience.

Here are a few examples of curated content that managed to earn citations/mentions from relevant community discussions, blog communities and news sources.

How to earn reciprocal links to your curated content

• Reach out to site owners/content marketers that you mentioned in your curated content (the law of reciprocity will take place - you don’t need to ask for links).
• Cultivate relationships with influencers and upcoming authorities in your niche that are part of your list by sharing their works on your own social accounts, commenting on their blogs or simply sending them friendly emails.
• Ask your website visitors to add/submit their suggestions/tips that you can include to your curated content (you’ll get more chances of earning links using this approach given that the contributor would like to mention your content from his blog posts or include it in his website’s brand portfolio to add credibility to his name – this is true if you already have an established authority in your niche).

Another example of this content-based reciprocal link building is my link building resource page (curated content) that helped me earned a link from another curated content (link building resource by Linkarati).

Though there are little chances that the same scenario could happen to your website, content curation is an effective content-based link building method that you can consider for your brand’s content marketing campaign.

Mutual guest blogging

Perform guest blogging with the sole purpose of building relationships with target bloggers/influencers, as this kind of goal will help you get a higher number of links than what you normally expect from a guest blogging campaign.

There are so many ways to start this type of content distribution campaign, but the following step by step process has guided me to take actions in guest blogging (from prospecting to outreach).

• Identify your brand’s targeted audience by looking at the unique value proposition of your products/services (asking yourself who are my customers is a good starting point to determine your primary audience).
• Create a list (spreadsheet) of all the relevant blogs where your targeted audience/readers reside. Discover them by doing a Google search for queries like “travel blogs” OR “travel blog “submit” OR “contribute” post.
• Make sure you add to your spreadsheet the names of your point/contact persons (content managers who’re handling the blogs of those domains)
• Pitch point persons with personalized and straightforward emails - asking if they’re still accepting guest posts for their blogs (you can also add to your existing guest articles or blog content to your pitch to prove your writing ability).
• Write guest posts with topics that haven’t been covered in your industry (unexpected hook in your guest posts could increase the quality of your posts and could attract more readers; some of them could also become your blog’s regular readers).

Here are a few ideas that you can consider when writing guest articles:

• Insights from an active blogger/influencer in your niche about a specific topic (expert interview)
• Curated content (list of popular blogs, bloggers or social influencers in your industry)
• Your own feedback about the current news happening in your local area or niche
• Case study from your brand that will prove your brand’s edges/expertise
• A review of a product’s unique selling point (this is applicable for product websites that have blogs as their subdomains). This approach has higher chances of content approval given that the content features the product of the target blogger/brand.

When guest posts are accepted and published on your target blogs, cultivate further your relationships with your target bloggers. Sending emails to them (twice or thrice a month), asking if they have new updates from their brands or if they’re looking for feedbacks about their products is one good way to build long term connections with them.

Mutual guest blogging will help earn additional links on the part of the guest blogger aside from the link from his guest post, when:

• His guest post earns links from the readers of the blog where he contributed (citing the post as a reference for their works – second tier link building).
• The target blogger includes the guest post as an example of the target blog’s best posts (which can be included in the guest post / contributors page)

On the other hand (on the part of the blogger who accepted the guest post), mutual guest blogging will help him earn reciprocal links when:

• The guest author uses the guest post as a reference for his own blogging works.
• The guest author includes his guest post in one of his branded pages (e.g. about me page)

Guest blogging will definitely benefit both parties (the blogger who hosted the content and the guest blogger). But aside from links and relationships that are built during the guest blogging process, it could also lead to another form of relationship-based link building technique - content partnership.

Content partnership

Content partnership is simply coordinating with another author/influencer/brand to come up with a new linkable asset that will surely benefit the audiences of both parties involved.

There are many ways to pursue content partnership with a prominent/new author in your industry.

The most common way to do this is to start an outreach campaign that aims to partner with big brands or popular authors for a content collaboration project.

The key to make your campaign successful is to establish first an authority in your industry through publishing highly resourceful content assets on your site in a consistent basis. Since the more you show your expertise through your blogging activities, the more chances of earning trusts from people that you want to engage with for your content partnership campaign.

As an example, I’d like to show you the exact conversation I had with an influencer in the internet marketing industry:

This conversation resulted to a possible collaboration for big content assets that we will launch in the next few months.

You can also make this happen to your industry by first creating a list of all the authors/influencers who are active in your industry’s online communities (forums, blogs, Q&A sites and social networks). It is very important to look only for authors who’re not competing with your brand (e.g. if you’re a service-based company, then look for brands that offer products in your niche).

Then you can separate authors that would need a long period of time to connect with to those who can easily be engaged with.

Finally, it is time for you to take actions that will lead to building strong relationships with those people in your list. Here are some methods that you can apply:

• Share their content works on your brand’s social profiles (making this as a regular activity of your brand will get them remember your business).
• Invest in participating on offline events that will make them familiar to you as you can easily talk to them personally without any boundaries at all.
• Link to their content assets from your site’s blog posts when you find their works relevant and useful to add to your content.

During the process of cultivating relationships with your targets, you can already ask them if they would want to collaborate with you for a content partnership opportunity.

The only intriguing part in this approach is deciding on where you should place the collaborated content (to your website or to your content partners’ domain).

Whichever website you both decided to place your content on, it is best to come up with at least two content assets so both of you will have a chance to host one content piece.

On the part of the author who hosts the content, he can earn reciprocal links from his co-author when:

• The co-author link to the collaborated content from his blog post (introducing the new published content).
• The co-author contextually links out to the content from his site’s branded pages (about me, press/publications page, etc..)
• The co-author includes a link pointing to the content from his domain’s resource page.

Small brands can also take advantage of this approach by just going out from their comfort zones and initiating conversations with people that’ll help them create highly linkable assets that will naturally earn links and increase the online presence of both parties (both brands).

Social networking

Growing your social followers and increasing your social visibility could help you build a small but solid community of interested readers/advocates/followers of your brand.

Leveraging your social activities is also one way of adding natural and high quality backlinks to your website.

To get started with social link building, you can choose the social networks where you want to maximize your brand visibility.

Grow those networks through consistently adding new followers to your profiles (you can use ManageFlitter for Twitter and Circloscope for Google Plus or engaging people who’ve shared posts related to your industry (use Advanced Twitter search for easy discovery of relevant tweets).

When you already have an established Twitter community, you can export your Twitter followers in a spreadsheet (check out this blog post by SEER Interactive) and sort the list by highest to lowest number of followers and remove any profiles that don’t have website links in their Twitter bios.

Think of ways on how you can provide value to your target linkers (followers in your list). You can try any of the following:

• Publish a blog post listing down the must-follow Twitter influencers in your niche (make sure you include your targets in the list).
• Check out the content published on your targets’ blogs, see if they have valuable content that you can link to from your own blog posts.

You can then reach out to those targets, telling them that you linked to their blogs from your site’s internal content (the likelihood of getting reciprocal links using this approach is higher given that you provided value to your targets even before you contact them).

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building Quotes and Ideas from the Experts

by Venchito Tampon Jr

How I Increase My Client’s Website Search Traffic by 5,913% and Earn $440 in 14 Days

Increasing search engine traffic for any website is one of the main goals of search marketers given that it can help speed up generating more leads/revenue/conversions to a certain brand from any space.

Similar to any marketing process, achieving search marketing goal would need specific strategy and actions to plan ahead of time and to set base metrics that will determine if the campaign reaches the goal or not.

The strategy and actions that I applied to my client’s website (which will be my case study for today) are all pretty basic what hat SEO optimization techniques. However, it gave me the following success rates after two weeks:

• 5,913% increase in search traffic

• $440 Adsense earnings

The main concept of my approach in search marketing as a whole (including off site – link building) is providing the best experience for my users. This is what search engines are looking for every website and would basically the core deciding factor of ranking a certain domain on search results.

User experience primarily points out to two things – user’s need and the specific action to satisfy it. Learning to quickly identify needs of your users could help you understand your market environment and think of ways on how to attend to those needs.

How to Increase Search Engine Traffic through Basic On Site Optimization

Analyze your industry’s search environment

My client’s website belongs to health niche, particularly in the home remedies industry which is a very competitive space.

To get started with my white hat SEO strategy, I did a competitor analysis on a few authoritative websites to see how they provide the best experience to their users through proper site architecture, content placement and user-based web design.

This gave me an idea that the type of content that people in the home remedies niche would want to read are mostly short list type of blog posts.

The main reason is obvious. People who’re looking for solutions for their health-related problems won’t spend time reading a long article on quick and effective ways to get rid of pimples. They want immediate solutions for their problems.

This led me to another idea that those who’re searching for quick home remedies would normally use long tail phrases for their searches instead of using main terms as search queries (they want to quick solutions).

The demand for these long tail keywords is extremely high and some of them tend to be low in competition which are good topic ideas to target for content generation.

This simple competitor analysis helped me get a better feel of my client’s website status in its industry’s competition.

Find the searchers’ intent to match with your categories

Categories are foundational pages of a domain that allow visitors to walk through each webpage of the site and help them complete their desired actions (as to the main reason why they visit the website).

Optimizing categories based on how the searchers should flow through each page of your website could give your audience satisfaction.

For my client’s website, I created a spreadsheet to list down categories that best suit the searchers’ behavior.

I only asked myself a question, “how can I help my users find his/her want(s) on my site particularly when he landed on my homepage?”

This led me to a good list of categories that makes each blog post organized in a way that matches to the searchers’ behavior.

• Gender – Men/Women -
• Age – Children/Youth/Adult/Seniors
• Many more…

If you landed on the homepage of the site and you don’t have any specific home remedies in mind, you could easily check and find categories that fit to your persona (e.g. age, gender, etc..).

This kind of categorization helped my users find the exact blog post that he/she wants to read. This could also give him a reason to come back to the website again given that he was satisfied on his first search visit.

You can also do the same on your website by looking at classifications from a taxonomy that is related to your industry. Taxonomy is the practice and science (study) of classification of things or concepts, including the principles that underlie such classification.

You can use the following Dewey Decimal Classification Systems to identify industry-related categories.

• Wikipedia’s List of Dewey Decimal Classes
• Dewey Decimal System - A Guide to Call Numbers

Optimize your content for long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are composed of three or more words that tend to align to specific intents of the user. These phrases are easier to target for rankings particularly on blogs given that they are less competitive than head terms.

Discovering long tail phrases for keyword targeting would basically need some handy tools. You can use any of the following for keyword research:

• Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)
• Google Analytics (Real Time)
• Keyword Tool.io
• SEMRush

Google Webmaster Tools

Go to GWT – Search Traffic – Search Queries to find keywords that your visitors are using to find your site’s internal pages.

Take a look at this screenshot below.

Optimizing the page with the exact search query: wasp sting home remedy (or other variations, i.e. – home remedies for wasp sting), helped the page rank for its desired long tail keyword as well as for other industry related phrases.

Google Analytics

Though Google has decided to hide the big portion of its keyword data (non-provided keywords), you can still use Google Analytics to find some long tail keywords.

By checking you’re the Real Time section of your GA account in a regular basis, you can find gold keywords that you can target for your future post/content.

KeywordTool.io

Another tool that you can utilize for keyword research is KeywordTool.io. I already covered this tool in my post about organic link building but just a recap on how to use it, here is a short list.

• Grab your head terms and find additional keywords using the tool.

• Add when, what, why or how to your head term to find more topic ideas.

SEMRush

There are tons of ways to generate topic ideas using SEMRush and you can check out this comprehensive guide by Rishi Lakhani for a complete list of methods on how to use the tool.

If you already have a good list of keywords, you can optimize your pages by including the targeted keywords on the title page, meta keywords, header tags and first 50 words of the body copy.

Other optimization techniques:

• Link to the most important pages from your site’s other relevant pages. Go to GWT – Search Traffic – Internal Links and see if your most important pages (besides homepage) get a lot of internal links from other pages.
• Improve your site’s loading speed for positive user experience. Use tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom.
• Optimize your images by targeting keywords in their alt texts.
• Track and fix code errors through W3C Markup Validation

More Resources:

• Annie Cushing’s Audit Checklist
• Screaming Frog Guide

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by Venchito Tampon Jr