Best place to start link building
-
I am new to SEO and want to start doing some link building using SEO moz to help. I am looking for pointers on where to start. Our business is www.hairbowcenter.com and we sell ribbon and hairbow supplies. We are lacking a lot of good links and I wanted to start focusing getting more. What tools should I use and where do I begin. I noticed our Pagerank is only 1 for our site and I want to get that up as well.
-
Are directories still a relevant way to start with link building after the latest google changes?
-
I usually don't use shortcuts when I research Mommy Blogs. The quality ones get a ton of requests for reviews and giveaways. You have to find a way to stick out from the bunch. I usually read a handful of posts and the "About Me" page before sending an email. That way I can personalize it, and possibly even find a good pitch (ie - if they do a product of the week, etc). Most good Mommy Blogs have a page devoted to PR or you can just use their contact form.
I haven't used them so I can't vouch personally, but http://momsparkmedia.com/ might be a good option for you. Looks like they act as a liaison between bloggers and companies.
I hope that helps!
-
Can you recommend some sites that you contract mommy bloggers from? It seems like from sites like this http://goo.gl/tJFSG, you cant easily find the contact info to ask for a review, and also seems inefficient to keep asking one by one.
Is there something like payperpost.com, specifically more for mommy bloggers, that has good quality blogs?
Thanks for your help
-
As mentioned above spreadsheets are the way forward or a simple word processor page. Adding all the information such as email contacts etc
Another good one is to check out whois information on sites and be like "a dog with a bone" be persistent day in day out and make sure you get in touch with the webmasters. Skype is a good tool to initiate conversations also.
-
I agree with the Twitter follow suggestion, but don't consider it even "a little grey hat."
My team and I have been able to get about one in five people we follow to follow us back. And we've seen more than a few convert into valued customers.
The best strategy is to be both selective and transparent. Don't go on a blitz where you follow hundreds of people from a few sources on a single day. Be very targeted. Follow people slowly and incrementally, after first providing something of value on your own Twitter feed....and jumping into discussions where you can provide expertise.
Too many people go on fishing expeditions in which they randomly follow people from targeted Twitter feeds. The targets may click over to your Twitter feed out of curiosity, but be turned off by one marketing message after another, but no real content. Or they may follow you -- and then have nothing more to do with you ever again.
-
As has been mentioned - links pointing to you need to be relevant and related. The place to start is look in depth at your competitors. Ascertain who they are - and see who links to them. If you can gain links from the same places that are relevant and regarded as authorities, and leave out their spammy links it will give you a good start.
Once you have found your competitors - read this post on using googles custom search engine for potential link mining here on SEOmoz, and delve into the world of search parameters to get your search for potential links on target.
When you are seeking links - avoid specifically going for just links to your home page - link diversity is key. If you are approaching an authority site about a specific product and you have a guide on how to use it or positive reviews on it, ask for a link to the deep page to ensure the relevancy is there.
-
You've received some good advice above and there's only one suggestion I would make. Although, I'm not a huge social networking fan I do think that Twitter can be a very useful tool. Although a little grey hat, the strategy is to follow users who you would like to follow you. A fair percentage will follow back. Then, mention them in your tweets, which they usually appreciate, followed by any other means of building a relationship. Once you have some sort of rapport opportunities can arise for back links.
-
I have a feeling you would do well with Mommy bloggers. Offer a giveaway to their readers or send them product for review. It's an excellent way to get exposure and links back.
Not sure where to start? I suggest finding those sites that rank well for the keywords you want and see who links to them. You may find a lot of great opportunities there.
-
Before you even start on trying to get links for the website, just ask yourself why others would link to you. You are an e-commerce website and it makes it even more difficult to get quality natural links - so being creative is important here - think of different strategies you can pursue so it makes your content more "linkable".
Could you provide any free tools or widgets that your readers might find useful? For a real estate guy, a free mortgage calculator might work well.
You could run a contest targeted towards women audience - have viral impact by social sharing - this usually ends up with several links from "mom blogs" and other portals.
As James suggested, go for Directories - those are easy links - but make sure they are thematic and relevant. There are very few general directories of value.
-
A good way to go about this is to create a spreadsheet, find niche related resources that you could possibly get a link on. Directories, Blogs, Related Websites, Guest Post Areas, etc. Organize them, than once you have a good list built, go after the links using common practices, calling, emails, social areas like Facebook and Twitter.
Once you've gone through the list you've created, target a new area in your link building campaign, and start the process over. Just keeps things a bit more organized
-
Dont worry about PageRank is is not a solid measurement of ranking anymore. In the first place you need to do up a plan of what you want to rank for as though you say you are looking for good links you are not clear as to what exact keywords you want to rank for. Look in the SEOMoz training under keyword research for some good tools on how to do this. Then I would as James suggest below start some organic and slow link building building over time.
Along with the tools here the simplest of tools is an excel spreadsheet where you build up a list of those keywords (start with the long tail ones mentioned on the page). Then go out an research what sites are speaking about this blogs, business sites. Build real relationships, work your social media strategy and over time you will get links - not lots of links but good links -
Your aim should be to be the authority in this area but in the first place work on above and even read the rest of this training page.
-
Hi,
Here are some ideas to get you started
1. Look for related directories online where you can submit your business.
2. Type in your related business keywords, then look at which competitors are ranking for these terms then go to OSE and research the links the competitors have built, you can pull a report.
3. Possibly start a blog and get fresh content related to the business on the blog each week, then syndicate the content via social media.
4. If you have social media channels for the business, start link building via them you can build links via Twitter, Stumble upon, Delicious and a host of other social website.
5. Think to yourself do you have any suppliers who you currently use, ask if they want to link to you or want to add a badge to their website which is for your business for example a partner of your website.
For further ideas here is a fantastic post:
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
-
Unsolved Why does Moz Crawler start with HTTP//1.1 version??
We have run Moz Pro's Site Crawl for example-domain.com Why has Moz's crawler decided to site http://www.example-domain.com (ie the non-secure version) as zero crawl depth page and report the actually live https://www.example-domain.com (ie secure HTTP2 version) as a crawl depth of 2? Surely the main live page should be the first crawled and reported as crawl depth = 0?
Moz Pro | | AKCAC0 -
SEO for e-commerce, linking, brand mentions, insights diagnostics
Hi, I run the seo for www.bilthamber.com It is an e-commerce site selling car care products, and we also manufacture our own products. I was wondering how the seo for an e-commerce site might compare to the seo for a blog or information based site, or other types of site. And also how the seo for a particular product page on my site might compare to a information based page on my site. Are the tactics the same? Should you try and rank for similar terms, the same generic terms, or complelty unique terms for the best seo? Or should every page try and rank for different terms, to ensure that the engines dont rank 2 or more different pages for the same search term? And how many keywords or search terms should I try and rank a particular product page for? Or an information page, or blog page? Is there a minimum or maximum that is recommomended? Does the more terms you try and rank for on a page take the weight out of each of them? So having 4 really good search terms might be better than having 10 ok generic ones? How do I find out what are my best, most highly converting, most profitable keywords overtime for Google? I can find some information like this, but it is showing the stats for Bing UK, not Google, even though Google UK is my main engine in Moz. My domain authority has decreased by 3 this week, this is the first time it has gone down since I started with Moz a few months back, can anyone explain why? And how this will affect the rankings ect, and how I can get it back up higher agian? And for linking and brand mentions, what are the goals of this feature? Should I find my mentions and ask them to talk about us more and link to us properly? I'm not sure if this is right. Should I be asking other websites to make links to our pages, or should it be organic? And for the insights section, I am recieveing tons of issues a lot to do with duplicate content, will having the rel=carnocial tag fix these issues? I know thats a lot for 1 question, but its been building up in my head! Thanks in advance! Max
Moz Pro | | BiltHamber10 -
Does Keyword Tracker rank eBay links as weaker competition than they actually are?
This might be a confusing question but hopefully I can explain it well enough and someone is able to understand where I am coming from. I have used the Keyword Analysis Tool to search the keyword "alice in wonderland fancy dress", the results come back saying that the competition for this keyword is 24%, which I consider to be pretty low. When I look at the Page Authority, Page Linking, Domain Authority and Domain Linking of each site which rank in the top 10 for this keyword I see that places 4 - 7 are taken by eBay links. I then look at the bottom three places (8 - 10) and although their Page Authority and Page Linking is not very high, their Domain Authority and Domain Linking is reasonable. Based on the results I have seen for other keyword, who's overall competition % was higher than 24%, I thought to myself that these bottom three links were actually quite strong, which made me ask the question "why has this keyword got a competition % as low as 24%?". I then wonder whether it was because the Keyword Analysis Tool ranks the eBay links as weaker competition than they actually are? My question to you guys: Does Keyword Tracker rank eBay links as weaker competition than they actually are? Or can anyone explain why the competition % for this keyword is so low but the bottom three links are actually relatively strong? And how do the eBay links rank higher than these bottom three links? Yes the eBay links are relative to the keyword but these eBay links are ranking higher solely on the fact that the Domain Authority is so high and have very little SEO in relation to the keyword, does Google not recognise that the bottom three websites would be more beneficial to customers than the eBay links? And if the eBay links are ranking so high solely on the fact that the Domain Authority is so high then shouldn't they be in the top 10 for almost every product related keyword? Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | conor10050 -
If I do the discount on mighty deals, does that start after my free trial or in place of my current free trial? Got to figure out budgets on tools for the year.
Question about discounts and how the work in junction with other offers for pro membership.
Moz Pro | | chris.oursbourn0 -
Need help locating a 404 link
My reports are showing a 404 error for a link to a page in our WP site for which we changed the URL months ago. I can't find where the link is coming from. I used Screaming Frog, but can't find where it might tell me the origin of the link, only that it exists. I am pretty sure it's internal. Can someone please tell me how to find the originating page so I can remove the link without having to comb through every page of the site to look for it? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | gfiedel0 -
Open Site Explorer - Link Export Not Showing Same Number of Links
Noob question. I'm using Open Site Explorer to hunt down some external links for a website. In the attached image (post-pressing the filter button), it says I have 889 external links, but after I've downloaded the CSV, I only get 695 links. Why the difference in number? And if I'm doing something wrong, how do I make sure I'm getting the full amount of external links to my client's website? Thanks! GG6wURf.jpg
Moz Pro | | EEE31 -
Best way to analyze keyword difficulty for 10,000+ keywords?
I've done quite a bit of searching, but can't seem to find a time efficient way to accurately analyze keyword difficulty for large sets of keywords. All of the keyword difficulty tools out there that I've tried are either 1) not accurate 2) slow (like seomoz's kw difficulty tool only allows 5 entries at a time). Can anyone recommend any shortcuts / tools / processes to analyze kw difficulty for large sets of keywords?
Moz Pro | | nicole.healthline1 -
Difference between Webmaster and SEOMoz back-link stats?
Hi there, I just noticed that there are differences between the links to my site showing on my Google Webmaster account and what is showing on my link analysis on SEOMoz. Has anyone noticed this? In webmaster I am showing 857 links to my site from 92 different domains. In SEOMoz I am showing 816 links to my site from 53 total linking root domains and only 39 followed domains? Does anyone know why this there is a difference? Are the links showing in Webmaster all indexed and followed links? Thanks in advance 🙂 Karl
Moz Pro | | onlineexpression0