Backlinks and blogposts
-
What is the best procedure for link building? Does blogposts help?
-
unfortunately, paid links do work, just ask J.C. Penney! you will find more value long term getting organic links and those you build through participation.
-
I would start by creating an inventory of your linkable assets and taking a peek at your existing natural links in Google Webmaster Tools. Try to understand why those who already chose to give you a link did so and try to create more cause for linking through content and value on your site.
Once that's out of the way you can move onto finding references of your brand online and create links where they don't exist and they should:
- Mentions of your brand
- Your logo (try tool called tineye for that)
- You URL (but not linked)
Also cover all meaningful directories relevant to your niche and location.
Another great way to get links is by thinking about your business relationships (suppliers, customers, office space, partners...etc). Here you can gain good value through nice contextual linking situation or a testimonial.
Occasional article, blog post/guest blogging, blog commenting can help - though I would advise against use of your key term instead of name in blog comments. That's something spammers tend to do.
If you run out of ideas you can always take a look at your competitor's links using tools such as:
- Majestic SEO
- Linkscape
Or you can use free tools including Yahoo and Google's own link: command.
For more try to read material written by http://ontolo.com/link-building-tools and informatoin already available on SEOMoz http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide
Good luck!
-
I checked a few compettitors and it seems like they are getting links form a blog netwrok. They are pretty good on serch results for competitive keywords as well. what would you say about that? It seems to me they are paid links.
-
Blogs are great. We have people guest blog for us and this does two things. A) keeps us from having to be very creative, and B) opens the community up by having the blogger reach out to their people to say Hey, I just wrote a blog over here. This almost always turns into inbound links, shares, and Llikes.
Best procedure would be to make sure all on-page is done first. Then I just reach out into the community that has synergies to what site I am working on and start to interact with them. I find forums that allow followed links and participate (sometimes this is only via the signature).
Whatever you do, actually give good information on blogs, forums and such. When you start to look spammy, people reject you.
-
Hi! First of all, good luck on your linkbuilding efforts - it's not an easy job.
To answer your second question first, blogging can help with linkbuilding in the following ways:
-
if you write on your own blog with quality content (the more helpful and/or thought-provoking it is the better), readers may link to your post from their own sites or blogs
-
if you guest post on someone else's blog, you will often get backlinks to your site - sometimes within the post, from good anchor text, and sometimes from the author bio at the end
-
commenting on blogs can also help - if you comment often (and wisely) on a blog in your niche, you may develop a reputation that will lead the blog owner and readers back to your blog to see what you have to say. Make sure that the name you use to write the comment is linked to your blog or site, so they can get back there if they want to. You can also (on rare occasion), drop a link to your site if it would be perceived as helpful.
-
if that comment name has your keywords, that can also provide links to your site - but considering most blogs are no-follow, that opens up the great debate about the value of no-follow links, which is a little broader than should be addressed in this question. And with search engines focusing more on the context of links instead of just the anchor text, it's worth assuming that in a short time - if not already - keyword rich blog comment names are not going to be driving so much value, so you can put in a little effort there, but the main idea is to use those comments to drive a following that will want to come to your site, see what you have to say, be impressed, and link to it of their own accord.
The first question - "What is the best procedure for link building?" has a much longer answer, and there are plenty of guides put out by the big SEO names on the web to help. SEOMoz has one of their own: just put "link building guide" into that search box at the top of the screen and you'll get a good number of guided resources.
We're actually working on our own linkbuilding guide at our site - kind of a step-by-step practical compilation of all the ideas that we've seen in blog posts etc. over the two or so years. Hopefully it'll be ready in about a week or so and I can come and post the link to it then.
Update: here's the promised link building guide. Take a look and see if it helps.
One hint, though - if you go on Delicious and search for "linkbuilding" tagged pages, and see which pages were tagged the most times, that can give you an idea as to what resources people thought were most valuable as ideas for linkbuilding.
Good luck again,
Aviva B
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Backlink Transparency with SEO Agency
Hello everyone. I recently started working with an SEO agency and today they gave me an updated keyword report which showed some increase in rankings. I was not aware that any backlinks had been created yet so I asked for a report of the links. Their response is below and I am just wondering if this is normal practice being I have not worked with any type of SEO agency yet. "
Link Building | | wonderd24
Hey Daniel, We release a small report on them which the guest blog team will do soon. We don't reveal all backlink sources unfortunately because people have tried to bother the webmasters we have and basically steal our techniques. But rest assured you will be ranking at the top of the pack with our methods 😃
"1 -
Why is this working for a competitor? Non-relevant backlinks helping them out?
A competitor is using a weird strategy, one I know isn't legit, however it's not only helping them, but doing in with a lot of speed. I've ran their info through ahref, majestic, moz, semrush and for backlinks they have 225ish, here is their breakdown. 169 follow links from their parent distributor site ( which is located in their parent's site's footer ) and then 3 to 5 links from sites that relate to SEO, marketing, unrelated things like pocket calling article and comment spam. maybe 5 of those links are from anywhere close to a related site, and those are from spammy directories from out of country. Why would these backlinks be helping them so much, and how can I get in front of them when these craptactics are working for them? They have 250 backlinks - 25 of them are follow We have 300 backlinks - 90 are follow and from relevant sites like EPA.gov, some EDUs and related sites to our niche. Some explanations or words of wit would really be helpful here, as I feel like something isn't adding up.
Link Building | | Deacyde0 -
Impact of distribution of backlinks across multiple pages
Community, I would be interested to see if anyone has been seeing any experiments, experience documentation, or other data that would give context around the impact of pointing backlinks not just to your money page / home page but distribute it across pages. When doing competitive research I often run into competition which has lower domain strength and page rank but a link profile that is more spread out across their domain; these competitors often outrank my site despite their individual page properties being weaker. Any reference to existing documented experiments, personal experience or guidance is welcome.
Link Building | | italiansoc0 -
Backlinks from Open Site Explorer not updated
Hi folks! I was checking the backlink profile for my website - wishpicker.com - we got linked to by a large number of prominent websites in the last couple of months. For some reason, this does not seem to show up when I do a backlink search on OSE. Is there something that I need to do here/ fix? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | AB_Newbie0 -
Backlinks From Press Releases - Should I Disavow Them?
About 2 months ago, I published a press release through PRWEB with a link back to my website of course. Now it must have been one of those morning where the coffee wasn't strong enough as my website already has a Penguin penalty I'm trying to get lifted. The intent wasn't to spam the web but rather to gain some traction in the business hosting world. Like I've said, the coffee must've been too weak that morning as it didn't even cross my mind to see if I could "nofollow" the links in the press release. I just hit the submit button... As I'm in the process of submitting a disavow links request to Google, I'm wondering if I should include the URLs to copies of those press releases? I mean, there's no way I can find all those links as it was submitted not long ago. Google and link tools will keep discovering other copies of the PR for months to come probably.
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Backlinks from Trade Website - Are they worth it?
Hi I am doing some linking building for a niche and slightly dull industry. I have found that trade magazine want a lot of money to publish press releases with back links. The publications are relevant to my industry but have a low page rank on Google. Is it still worth paying for these links? Thanks David
Link Building | | DavidLenehan0 -
SEO value to Reddit backlinks?
Can someone point me to an authoritative article on the value of Reddit links? I'm trying to determine if it's something we want to put effort into doing on a regular basis. Are reddit links followed? It seems like some are and some are not.
Link Building | | BostonWright0 -
Creating Backlinks On Behalf of Client
I'm on my first SEO project with a law firm. I'm at the stage where I am doing competitive backlink research on other law firms that my client gave me. I saw a blog site called typepad. It has a high domain authority so I was going to recommend to my client that they set up an account and blog away! Since it's a law firm, I am not qualified to start blogging on behalf of my client and I know they are extremely busy so now I have to "ride" my client to get busy and start creating content. I feel like I want to do more for them on the blog side to keep things going but not having a law background, probably not doable. Question: Do most SEO's do the blogging for their clients, farm it out or keep pushing their clients to do it? I also want them to sign up with articlebase but the same thing is going to happen. I have to push them to write articles. I guess this is my job? -Bob
Link Building | | Czubmeister0