The Rules of Link Building - Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

Are you building links the right way? Or are you still subscribing to outdated practices? Britney Muller clarifies which link building tactics still matter and which are a waste of time (or downright harmful) in one of our very favorite classic episodes of Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we are going over the rules of link building. It's no secret that links are one of the top three ranking factors in Google and can greatly benefit your website. But there is a little confusion around what's okay to do as far as links and what's not. So hopefully, this helps clear some of that up.

The Dos

All right. So what are the dos? What do you want to be doing? First and most importantly is just to...

I. Determine the value of that link. So aside from ranking potential, what kind of value will that link bring to your site? Is it potential traffic? Is it relevancy? Is it authority? Just start to weigh out your options and determine what's really of value for your site. Our own tool, Moz Link Explorer, can 

II. Local listings still do very well. These local business citations are on a bunch of different platforms, and services like Moz Local or Yext can get you up and running a little bit quicker. They tend to show Google that this business is indeed located where it says it is. It has consistent business information — the name, address, phone number, you name it. But something that isn't really talked about all that often is that some of these local listings never get indexed by Google. If you think about it, Yellowpages.com is probably populating thousands of new listings a day. Why would Google want to index all of those?

So if you're doing business listings, an age-old thing that local SEOs have been doing for a while is create a page on your site that says where you can find us online. Link to those local listings to help Google get that indexed, and it sort of has this boomerang-like effect on your site. So hope that helps. If that's confusing, I can clarify down below. Just wanted to include it because I think it's important.

III. Unlinked brand mentions. One of the easiest ways you can get a link is by figuring out who is mentioning your brand or your company and not linking to it. Let's say this article publishes about how awesome SEO companies are and they mention Moz, and they don't link to us. That's an easy way to reach out and say, "Hey, would you mind adding a link? It would be really helpful."

IV. Reclaiming broken links is also a really great way to kind of get back some of your links in a short amount of time and little to no effort. What does this mean? This means that you had a link from a site that now your page currently 404s. So they were sending people to your site for a specific page that you've since deleted or updated somewhere else. Whatever that might be, you want to make sure that you 301 this broken link on your site so that it pushes the authority elsewhere. Definitely a great thing to do anyway.

V. HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Reporters will notify you of any questions or information they're seeking for an article via this email service. So not only is it just good general PR, but it's a great opportunity for you to get a link. I like to think of link building as really good PR anyway. It's like digital PR. So this just takes it to the next level.

VI. Just be awesome. Be cool. Sponsor awesome things. I guarantee any one of you watching likely has incredible local charities or amazing nonprofits in your space that could use the sponsorship, however big or small that might be. But that also gives you an opportunity to get a link. So something to definitely consider.

VII. Ask/Outreach. There's nothing wrong with asking. There's nothing wrong with outreach, especially when done well. I know that link building outreach in general kind of gets a bad rap because the response rate is so painfully low. I think, on average, it's around 4% to 7%, which is painful. But you can get that higher if you're a little bit more strategic about it or if you outreach to people you already currently know. There's a ton of resources available to help you do this better, so definitely check those out. We can link to some of those below.

VIII. COBC (create original badass content). We hear lots of people talk about this. When it comes to link building, it's like, "Link building is dead. Just create great content and people will naturally link to you. It's brilliant." It is brilliant, but I also think that there is something to be said about having a healthy mix. There's this idea of link building and then link earning. But there's a really perfect sweet spot in the middle where you really do get the most bang for your buck.

The Don'ts

All right. So what not to do. The don'ts of today's link building world are...

I. Don't ask for specific anchor text. All of these things appear so spammy. The late Eric Ward talked about this and was a big advocate for never asking for anchor text. He said websites should be linked to however they see fit. That's going to look more natural. Google is going to consider it to be more organic, and it will help your site in the long run. So that's more of a suggestion. These other ones are definitely big no-no's.

II. Don't buy or sell links that pass PageRank. You can buy or sell links that have a no-follow attached, which attributes that this is paid-for, whether it be an advertisement or you don't trust it. So definitely looking into those and understanding how that works.

III. Hidden links. We used to do this back in the day, the ridiculous white link on a white background. They were totally hidden, but crawlers would pick them up. Don't do that. That's so old and will not work anymore. Google is getting so much smarter at understanding these things.

IV. Low-quality directory links. Same with low-quality directory links. We remember those where it was just loads and loads of links and text and a random auto insurance link in there. You want to steer clear of those.

V. Site-wide links also look very spammy. Site-wide being whether it's a footer link or a top-level navigation link, you definitely don't want to go after those. They can appear really, really spammy. Avoid those.

VI. Comment links with over-optimized anchor link text, specifically, you want to avoid. Again, it's just like any of these others. It looks spammy. It's not going to help you long-term. Again, what's the value of that overall? So avoid that.

VII. Abusing guest posts. You definitely don't want to do this. You don't want to guest post purely just for a link. However, I am still a huge advocate, as I know many others out there are, of guest posting and providing value. Whether there be a link or not, I think there is still a ton of value in guest posting. So don't get rid of that altogether, but definitely don't target it for potential link building opportunities.

VIII. Automated tools used to create links on all sorts of websites. ScrapeBox is an infamous one that would create the comment links on all sorts of blogs. You don't want to do that.

IX. Link schemes, private link networks, and private blog networks. This is where you really get into trouble as well. Google will penalize or de-index you altogether. It looks so, so spammy, and you want to avoid this.

X. Link exchange. This is in the same vein as the link exchanges, where back in the day you used to submit a website to a link exchange and they wouldn't grant you that link until you also linked to them. Super silly. This stuff does not work anymore, but there are tons of opportunities and quick wins for you to gain links naturally and more authoritatively.

So hopefully, this helps clear up some of the confusion. One question I would love to ask all of you is: To disavow or to not disavow? I have heard back-and-forth conversations on either side on this. Does the disavow file still work? Does it not? What are your thoughts? Please let me know down below in the comments.

Thank you so much for tuning in to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I will see you all soon. Thanks.

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* This article was originally published here

A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing Your SEO Traffic Using Ubersuggest

There are a lot of tools out there and a ton of SEO reports.

But when you use them, what happens?

You get lost, right?

Don’t worry, that’s normal (sadly). And maybe one day I will be able to fix that.

But for now, the next best thing I can do is teach you how to grow your SEO traffic using Ubersuggest. This way, you know exactly what to do, even if you have never done any SEO.

Here we go…

Step #1: Create a project

Head over to the Ubersuggest dashboard and register for a free account.

Once you do that, I want you to click on “Add Your First Project.”

Next, add your URL and the name of your website.

Then pick the main country or city that you do business in. If you are a national business, then type in the country you are in. If you are a local business, type in your city and click “Next.”

If you do business in multiple countries or cities, you can type them in one at a time and select each country or city.

Assuming you have your site connected to Google Search Console, you’ll see a list of keywords that you can automatically track on the left-hand side. Aside from tracking any of those, you can track others as well. Just type in the keywords you want to track in the box and hit the “Enter” key.

After hitting the “Next” button, you will be taken to your dashboard. It may take a minute but your dashboard will look something like this:

Click on the “Tracked Keywords” box and load your website profile.

What’s cool about this report is that you can see your rankings over time both on mobile and desktop devices. This is important because Google has a mobile index, which means your rankings are probably slightly different on mobile devices than desktop.

If you want to see how you are ranking on Google’s mobile index, you just have to click the “Mobile” icon.

The report is self-explanatory. It shows your rankings over time for any keyword you are tracking. You can always add more keywords and even switch between locations.

For example, as of writing this blog post, I rank number 4 on desktop devices for the term “SEO” in the United States. In the United Kingdom, though, I rank number 16. Looks like I need to work on that. 😉

What’s cool about this report is you can drill down on any keyword and track your rankings over time. For example, here’s what my site looks like now…

The purpose of this report is to track your SEO progress. If you are heading in the right direction, your rankings should be going up over time.

Sure, some weeks your rankings will be up and other weeks it will be down, but over time you should see them climb.

Step #2: Fixing your SEO errors

Once you have created your first project, it’s time to improve your rankings.

Let’s first start off by going to the “Site Audit” report. In the navigation, click on the “Site Audit” button.

Once you are there, type in your URL and click the “Search” button.

It can take a few minutes to run the report, but once it is done it will look something like this.

Your goal is to optimize your site for as high as an SEO score as possible. Ideally, you want to be reaching for 90 or higher.

Keep in mind that as you add more pages to your site and it gets bigger, it will be increasingly harder to achieve a 90+ score. So, for sites that have more than a few hundred pages, shoot for a score that is at least 80.

As you can see above, I’m getting close to the 80 mark, so I’ll have to get my team to go in and fix some of my errors and warnings.

When looking at this report, you’ll want to fix your critical errors first, then your warnings if you have time. Eventually, you want to consider fixing the recommendations as well.

Click on “Critical Errors” if you have any. If not, click on the Warnings” option. You’ll see a report that looks something like this:

Your errors are probably going to be different than mine, but your report will look similar.

Click through on the first issue on the report and work your way down. The report sorts the results based on impact. The ones at the top should be fixed first as they will have the highest chance of making an impact on your traffic.

If you aren’t sure of what to do or how to fix the issue, just click on the “What Is This” and “How Do I Fix It” prompts.

Again, you will want to do this for all of your critical errors and warnings.

Once you do that, go back to the “Site Audit” report and scroll down to where you see your site speed results.

Your goal should be to get an “Excellent” ranking for both mobile and desktop devices. If you are struggling to do this, check out Pagespeed Insights by Google as it will give you a detailed explanation of what to fix.

If you are like me, you probably will need someone to help you out with this. You can always find a developer from Upwork and pay them 50 to 100 dollars to fix your issues.

After you fix your errors, you’ll want to double-check to make sure you did them right. Click on the “Recrawl Website” button to have Ubersuggest recrawl your site and double-check that the errors were fixed correctly.

It will take a bit for Ubersuggest to recrawl your website as it is going through all of your code again.

Step #3: Competitor analysis

By now you have probably heard the saying that “content is king.”

In theory, the more content you have, the more keywords you will have on your site and the higher the chance that you’ll rank on Google for more terms.

Of course, the content needs to be of high quality and people have to be interested in that topic. If you write about stuff that no one wants to read about, then you won’t get any traffic.

Now, I want you to go to the “Traffic Analyzer Overview” report.

Put in a competitor’s URL and you will see a report that looks something like this.

This report shows the estimated monthly visitors your competition is receiving from search engines, how many keywords they are ranking for on page 1 of Google, their top pages, every major keyword they rank for, and the estimated traffic each keyword drives to their site.

I want you to go to the “Top Pages” section and click the button that says “View The Pages That Drive Traffic To This Domain.”

You’ll be taken to the “Top Pages” report.

Here, you will see a list of pages that your competition has on their site. The ones at top are their most popular pages and as you go down the list you’ll find pages that get less and less traffic.

Now I want you to click “View All” under “Estimated Visits” for the top page on your competition’s site.

These are the keywords that the page ranks for.

And you’ll also want to click “View All” under links to see who links to your competition.

Save that list by exporting the results (just click the export button) or by copying them.

I want you to repeat this process for the top 10 to 20 pages for each of your main competitors. It will give you an idea of the keywords that they are going after that drive them traffic.

Next, I want you to click on the “Keywords” navigation link under the “Traffic Analyzer” heading.

You’ll see a list of all of the keywords your competitor ranks for and how much traffic they are getting for those keywords.

This list will give you an idea of the keywords that your competition is targeting.

Now, by combining the data you saw from the “Top Pages” report and the data you got from the “Keywords” report, you’ll now have a good understanding of the type of keywords that are driving your competition traffic.

I want you to take some of those keywords and come up with your own blog post ideas.

Step #4: Come up with blog post ideas

You can come up with ideas to blog on using a few simple reports in Ubersuggest.

The first is the “Content Ideas” report. In the navigation bar, click on the “Content Ideas” button.

I want you to type in one of the keywords your competition is ranking for that you also want to rank for.

For example, I rank for “SEO tips.” If you want to rank for that term, you would type that into the content ideas report and hit the “Search” button.

You’ll then see a list of blog posts that have done well on that topic based on social shares, backlinks, and estimated visits.

It takes some digging to find good topics because ideally, a post should have all 3: social shares, backlinks, and estimated visits.

When you find a good one, click “View All” under “Estimated Visits” to see the keywords that the post ranks for.

If you write a similar post, you’ll want to make sure you include these keywords.

And you’ll want to click “View All” under links to see who links to your competition. Keep track of this as you will use it later. You can do this by copying the list or by clicking on the export button.

You can also get more ideas by going to the keyword ideas report. So, in the navigation bar, click on the “Keyword Ideas” button.

From there, type in keywords related to what your competition ranks for and you will see a list of long-tail suggestions that are similar.

You can also click on the “Related” link in that report to see a bigger list of related keywords.

And you can click on “Questions,” “Prepositions,” and “Comparisons” to see even more keyword and blog post ideas.

Typically, the more search volume a keyword has the more traffic you’ll get when you write about it.

Now that you have a list of keywords and topic ideas, it’s time for you to write and publish your content.

If you are new to writing blog posts, watch the video below. It breaks down my writing process.

Step #5: Promotion

I wish SEO was as simple as fixing errors and writing content based on popular keywords but it isn’t.

Remember how I had you create a list of sites that link to your competition?

You know, the ones you got from the “Top Pages” and “Content Ideas” reports.

I want you to start emailing each of the sites linking to your competition and ask them to link to you. See if someone else is linking to your competition. If they are, it shows you that they don’t mind linking to sites in your space. This means that there is a good chance you can convince them to link to you as well.

You’ll have to browse around their site to find their email. But once you do, send off a personal message explaining why your content will provide value to their readers and how it is different/better than what they are currently linking to.

In addition to that, I want you to go to the “Backlinks” report. In the navigation bar, click on the “Backlinks” option.

In this report, I want you to type in your competitor’s domain. You’ll see a report that looks like this:

You’ll be able to see their total link count, link growth over time, and, most importantly, a list of sites linking to your competition.

Now type in a URL of a blog post that your competition has written and that you know is popular (do this in the search bar). Next to it, in the search bar, change the drop-down to “URL” and click the “Search” button.

Once the report is done loading, you’ll see a new list of links pointing to that specific URL on your competition’s site.

I want you to do the same thing. Reach out to all of those URLs and ask for a link as well.

When doing this, you’ll find that a lot of people will ignore you but you need to think of it as sales. You need to follow up and try to convince people. The more links you get, the higher your rankings will climb in the long run.

Even if you only convince 5 people out of 100 that you email, it is still not bad as something is better than nothing.

Conclusion

My goal with Ubersuggest wasn’t to create too many reports, but instead, make the tool easy to use so you can generate more search traffic.

And as your rankings and traffic climb, you’ll see within your Ubersuggest dashboard how things are going.

What’s beautiful about this is that it will crawl your site automatically once you create a project. This way, when new SEO errors appear, Ubersuggest will notify you.

So, are you ready to improve your SEO traffic? Go to Ubersuggest and create a project.

The post A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing Your SEO Traffic Using Ubersuggest appeared first on Neil Patel.

* This article was originally published here