Hello everyone this is my first post on my new website so welcome to my agency site and perosnal marekting and SEO blog. i will make an effort to update you every week on some important topics in SEO, some of my own personal challanges ranking sites and a bit of indusrty secrets 😉
From my perspective and many other experts, SEO is far more complicated than traditional PPC or any other sub-niche in the marketing world. especially when you are competing against multi-million dollars companies on Google's SERP'S. I noticed the topic of proper link building, and particularly in competitive niches keeps coming up every now and than in popular SEO communities with people looking to get more info and how to work with suppliers and implement best practices.
I receive many private messages from students and peers about proper link building methods.
I thought now would be a great time to share some methods you can utilize in your link building Assignments to help you:
- Avoid rookie mistakes
- Secure better links
- save some cash while doing so
This is not just another “Link Building Strategies” post as there are so many of those.
Here you will find extremely useful tips for buying and analyzing links the right way.
All of my advice comes from true experience in the field as an SEO Expert and Agency CEO that sells links in huge volume every month dealing with many suppliers.
So withouth further ado – here are my 16 tips for masterful link building.
Treat your Link Building efforts as a planned campaign:
Recently I was talking to a client of mine to whom i provide SEO Coaching Services, about the difficulty of monitoring and scaling SEO efforts compared to traditional PPC on FB and GADS for example, but it doesn't have to be that hard.
like any other marketing activity, plan your linking moves like a pro!
- Alwyas Prepare your content up front to save time and expanses. also to control the topics that will be written.
- Create a detailed google sheet or Excel file, containing all of your desired anchors to target after analyzing rankings and competitors using Ahrefs.
*Side Note: Anyone who knows how to work with Ahrefs in a successful manner can create an advantage over competitors and harness new sites to his aid
- Determine how much are you willing to pay per link and the deadline for secuiring the desired amount.
- Decide how much budget is available for the entire SEO campaign (Articles, pay per links, Reachout efforts, costs of systems needed for project)
- Understand the average price per link in your respective niche. you can figure this out from talking to some site owners and links suppliers. its imprtant to understand that costs per links changes drastically between different business categories.
Organize Your Anchors, URL'S and linking sites properly in a google sheets file
Like I mentioned in tip number 1, anchors (keywords) are everything, the linking anchors will be the key factors Google will be scanning to understand the relationship between websites.
some sites or admins can have issues with certain anchors, especially in the betting, trading or some financial niches.
for a new website, I would recommend focusing on brand anchors (brandname.com or “brand name”) in 60-70% of all linking articles to your site, in later stages you can focus more on long-tail kw's, Exact match anchors but for now, you want to boost your DA a bit and make sure your important pages are located in close proximty to the homepage to let them enojy the power of the links a well.
Besides your own anchors and links make sure to add the sites linking to yours so you have all the info for your campaign in one master file.
Provide your link supplier or site owner all the info possible
Always notify a your supplier on your deadline to publish, your main niche, chosen anchors in the article, and topic for the article beforehand to prevent confusion and denied backlinks. this back and forth ping-pong can be tediuos and drag out the project, so make sure you and the person on the other side are defenitley on the same page.
Try to create and organize all your articles before reaching out
In most cases, preparing all the content will help you reduce expenses of backlinks and not be dependent on content creation of suppliers or other sellers that in many cases write very poorly or use spinned content.
(most link builders in the world are from India and Pakistan while many of them are amazing, nice and professional people, alot are complete beginners who can barely speak English, nonetheless write quality content, a lot of them provide poorly written content and spinned content that can cause big trouble if published).
when you have all your articles set up all you need to do is, focus on publishing in quality sites and things runs smoothly.
Use Ahrefs Batch Analysis Feature for Bulk work
Number 5. is a mssive tip fellas. A hidden gem inside of Ahrefs, the amazing swiss-army tool for SEO's is the Batch analysis – if you're working with hundreds of sites or even want to analyze dozens of potential sites for guest posting, this is the ultimate tool which allows you the skim through all the data needed and export files to further develop in Google Sheets.
This feature literally saves me hours of analysis every month, besides, I can't imagine doing SEO without Ahrefs in general.
Always Check IP addresses before buying links, and ask for samples
This one might sound obvious but this practice can easily be forgotten. many PBN owners have multiple sites sharing the same IP. make sure you check for different IP's, and I'm mainly referring to different C-Class for each site you want to publish on. I'm not against pbn's in general, some are amazing and well structured and maintained, but when dealing with network owners make sure your do your due diligence according to this list. minor mistakes like such can affect rankings negatively.
Always check with Google if your article has been indexed, the bigger the site, the longer indexation takes
Checking if your articles are indexed is very easy. copy-paste the first paragraph of your guest post into google search. you want to see the article highlighted in the first result, obviously. if you dont see it over there you can also check the page source of the article to see if theres a “noindex” tag in it.
Make sure you inform your supplier if there are any issues, or don't pay up until its indexed properly.
If your having serious difficulty with a supplier, or didn't receive what was promised use the “dispute payment” feature on Paypal or Payoneer, however, give your seller a chance to correct mistakes if those have occurred.
Notice the placement of your link in the page, and other links besides yours
you want your links to be higher up in the page compared to other links, this is not a myth. notify your supplier about this demand. many editors create long round-ups that can contain a lot of businesses, figure out what type of article you are going to get, make sure your link is not in a bad neighborhood with some shady businesess.
look out for spammy links, unrelated businesses to yours linking on the same page, too many links, overly condensed articles, adult or barely legal industries on the page as well.
Use No-Follow links often and image links
On contrary to common perceptions, No-follow links works great and are an awesome option to diversify your anchors selection, and linking methods. usually to check DF/NF links, you will go the page source, type ctrl+F and insert no-follow to check your link.
you can also use the following chrome extensions:
Another great alternative is image anchors, it is highly recommended you use infographics or branded images and leverage them for link building opportunities
Naked URLs linking is not great and most sites don't like it
For some reason, Google is not a fan of naked URLs (https://example.com) , he would rather crawl textual anchors, and many sites don't accept those kinds of anchors because they don't want to alarm google of foul play, be aware of this, you would prefer linking a clean brand name 9 times out of 10.
take this advice with even more serious consideration if you're active in the gaming, forex, crypto or adult industry were google's rules are far more strict.
Always Diversify your backlinks portfolio
A brilliant SEO once told me, “you want to build links like you're drunk”, this reminds me of that old jacky chan movie ” Drunken Master” where he fights so gracefully only when drinking.
point being, you want to execute SEO efforts which portray in the eyes of Google as natural and unintentional while gracefully running the show like a true SEO boss.
Step your Gmail game UP
Outreach is basically a synonym for quality link building, we spend a lot of time communicating with Links sellers, admins, editors, etc.
follow-ups and creating templates are some of the tasks that can take a lot of time.
here are some neat Gmail extensions for Chrome I use to better maximize my time and skills:
- Boomerang for Chrome: a very popular tool for Gmail, it allows you to set up automated follow-up notification, create templates, click tracking and much more
- Discoverly– this refreshing extension will provide you with all the necessary data, social media contacts available about the person you're communicating with. use it to gather valuable info when doing outreach.
- Find That Lead – this Chrome extension can help you scrape updated contacts from websites. the free version allows to scrape up to 50 domains per month if I remember correctly.
- Grammarly for Chrome – I had to mention this tool even though all of you probably using it as well. Grammarly has changed my life in this aspect, as a foreign English speaker.
- Buzzstream – not a Gmail extension per say tho its an amzing online outreach softawre that proivdes amazing results an Email opening rates. it is paid but they have a 14 days trial you can use for some eash tasks.
PRO TIP: besides polishing your write-ups and emails, Grammarly has a built-in plagiarism tool on their website you can check your articles with.
Backlinks from sites with high traffic cost much more nowadays
Today, every site that has decent stats for some traffic would charge an amount to publish your articlem everyone wants to make some money.
It feels like the hot trend of 2019 is to link only from high traffic sites, because people read about it in some blog. although this not always is possible due to budget limitations or the complexity of your niche, admins today charge far more than they used to a couple of years ago.
Some even fake traffic using bots.
Don't get me wrong, high traffic sites that are relevant to your niche are absolutely amazing if you are not able to publish in such sites, always go for high relevancy in your domain selection and content creation. on general sites, like pbn's or news sites, look if there are suitable categories for you to publish on.
Beware of buying links of free sites and web 2.0 blogs
I'm talking about sites like Medium.com, bloglovin.com or any open-blog platforms that anyone can register and publish content in 5 seconds, Google allocates minimum link juice to such links and the worst part is people selling those links in high prices.
always check if there's some “register”, “Open Free account”, “Submit Guest Post” on sites you're analyzing before buying links, ask your seller “is this a free site?”
some people nurture accounts on open-blog platforms, in this scenario, this can be useful. when you're working with people who have old, verified accounts or a high number of subscribers on those platforms, you will get more power to your links and earn some impressions as well.
If possible, Utilize your connections and client's budget to some private projects
Besides being an SEO expert I also run affiliate websites, from my perspective it would've been stupid of me not to use all the experience I gathered in recent years to my own advantage. I have connections with thousands of sites, I know how to approach site owners, I comprehend entire keyword difficulties by heart.
I know who are the best writers and programmers, I know how a converting website operates. all those skills allowed me to set up my own projects for more income, without interfering with my client's activity.
it even helps them in many situations ( for example, sending more traffic to their funnels by competing in the rankings as a different business entity).if your client has a big budget that allows some room for trial and error you can learn some important lessons that will 100% serve you in the future for personal projects.
Take Bing and Yahoo in consideration and index your site in those Search Engines
one last tip I can offer you is simply to index your site in Bing and Yahoo. you would be surprised with the results. Bing and Yahoo operate slightly different when it comes to ranking parameters and indexing sites, there are many guides about those differences online.
I should tell you Bing offers some great tools in the console for SEO's and are super User-Friendly compared to Google. make sure you are not missing out on some sweet sexy traffic.
that's all folks 🙂
i hope i didnt forget a ton of stuff to write about, I might write a future post with some more tips and insights
I really hope you find certain methods helpful and this post enlightening, feel free to ask any questions, I would love to know your thoughts.
Nevertheless, I should notify to whom may be interested, I provide Internaional SEO Services and backlinks in many foriegn markets and languages and weekly / monthly consulting at the aforementioned niches, working with some of the biggest companies in those categories.
PM me if needed
Cheers,
David.