The Definitive Guide (2017 Update)

It’s no secret that link building is the most important skill in SEO.


The Definitive Guide (2017 Update)


It’s no secret that link building is the most important skill in SEO.


In fact, it’s a culmination of several different skills: you need to master content, sales, programming, psychology, and good old-fashioned marketing if you want other people to link to your site.

Bottom line? If you want more search engine traffic, link building is a must.

And in this guide I’m going to show you everything you need to build quality links.

Let’s dive right in.

Your speed doen't matter, forward is forward!

According to that Google engineer:

“…getting a link from a high PageRank page used to always be valuable, today it’s more the relevance of the site’s theme in regards to yours, relevance is the new PageRank.”

It turns out that your link’s position on a page is important.

Specifically, links stashed away in footers and sidebars aren’t worth nearly as much as links found smack in the middle of a page’s body content.

Bottom line? You want your links to appear within the main body of a webpage.


Quoth thy Google:

“…creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”


Link Anchor Text:
In short, I don’t recommend building links with keyword-rich anchor text. But if you DO get a link with your keyword in the anchor text, it’s time to celebrate.

Link Co-Citations: The text around your link also gives clues to what your page is about. So why wouldn’t Google use it?


Nofollow .vs. Dofollow

rel=”nofollow” is a tag added to a link that tells search engines: “Don’t count this link as an endorsement.”.

Obviously, when it comes to SEO, you want to get normal, “dofollow” links whenever possible.

Now that you can know how to size up a link’s quality, it’s time to start building them.


How to Get World-Class Links With Content Marketing:
Visual Assets

Visual assets are:

    Images
    Diagrams
    Infographics
    Charts and other visual-oriented pieces of content

Why It Works:

Visuals are super-duper easy to link to. For example, when you publish a chart on your site, you get a link anytime someone shares that chart on their site. This powerful “share my image and link to me when you do” relationship simply doesn’t work for text-based content.

List Posts: A numbered list of tips, techniques, reasons, myths…or just about anything.

In-Depth Ultimate Guides: A comprehensive resource that covers everything there is to know about a given topic (and then some).

Why It Works:

Ultimate guides pack an insane amount of information in one place. This makes your guide THE go-to resource for that topic.

How to Build Powerful Links With Email Outreach
If you want to build white hat links in 2017 (and beyond), you need to use email outreach.

Send Them a (Personalized) Script

If you want to scale outreach, you’ll need to use scripts.

The trick is to make your script not look like a script (more on that in the next step).

But now, here’s an example of one of my best-performing email scripts:

Hi [First Name],

I was looking for content on [Topic] today, when I stumbled on your article: [Article Title].

Good stuff! I especially enjoyed [Something specific from their article].

Also, I just published a new guide on [Your Topic]: [URL].

As someone that writes about [Topic], I thought you’d enjoy it.

My guide may also make a nice addition to your page. Either way, keep up the awesome work with [Website]!

Talk Soon,
[Your Name]



Broken Link Building:
Install Check My Links or LinkMiner
Find Pages With Lots of Outbound Links
Check For Broken Links
Email The Site Owner About Their Broken Link



Subject: Problem with [Their Site’s Name]



Hi [Name],

Are you still updating your site?

I was searching for content on [Topic] when I came across your excellent page: [Page Title or URL].

However, I noticed a few links didn’t seem to be working:

[URLs of broken links]

Also, I recently published [Brief Content Pitch]. It may make a good replacement for the [Point Out a Specific Broken Link].

Either way, I hope this helped you out 🙂

Thanks,
[Your Name]


Send Emails In the Afternoon
Send your outreach emails in the afternoon (in the recipient’s local time).

Why?

When you send your message in the morning, it gets lumped together with the 93 other emails that person has to deal with.

But when you send in the afternoon, there’s much less competition in the inbox.

I recommend using a tool like Boomerang to help time your outreach emails:

Reference: http://backlinko.com/link-building

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