Daily Link Building tactics to move the needle
-
I know most of you may frown upon this question, but to those of you who are still going after blog commenting, forum posting, Q&A sites (even if that means you're getting nofollow links), do you have any recommendations on a guide/blog post that describes how to create a daily "low level" link building program to supplement the higher level, relationship dependent link building that you're already doing?
Thanks in advance!
-
I have clients that ask me this question (eg "how can I add quantity links to the quality stuff you're working on?") and I tell them to go ahead and do it if they're determined to do it, but the ROI of time spent is minimal in most cases. Some go ahead and do it anyways, which is fine in most cases as long as they're avoiding spammy practices and using branded anchor text.
Blog commenting, forum posting, and spending time answering Q&A sites can be effective and produce a good return - but the value is in the click-through, not the nofollowed links. They're rarely effective tasks to hire out to a VA unless that person has an understanding of your product and native English skills. You need to be able to provide value above and beyond the generic comments with an obvious link or cry for attention that most people use.
Here's one decent way to interact in forums, provide value, and see a decent ROI: http://pointblankseo.com/ecommerce-forum-link-building. Emphasis is on "interact" and "provide value" - without those two things you're just another spammer. The same concepts can be applied to blog comments and Q&A sites.
-
Hi pbhatt,
As I mentioned, due to my fear of the "Google Slap", I do all the SEO on my businesses myself. And just to clarify I have multiple VA's with them. Depending on the VA they do different things. But some of their primary tasks are things like answering my customer service emails, some reporting duties, sending out invoice, simple website updates, research tasks among other things.
The best place to use a VA in my experience is for tasks that are respective but need a human decision making (i.e. you can't get a software to automatically do it for you). For example for the emails, I have some canned response, but it needs to be personalized each time (nothing looks worse than a canned response that does not even answer a clients question). I know some people who also use WP that use their VA's to update their e-commerce site inventory, and another that is having them do convert old scanned PDF documents into eBooks and HTML pages. Pretty much anything that can be done via a computer or a phone they can do.
Ok, it is starting to sound like a sales pitch so I will stop. But hiring a VA really was a turning point in my business so I do tend to preach about them. The other good thing is that most of the companies - WhitePicket.net included - do not require long term contracts. So you can try them for a month and if you don't like them, you can just end it.
I hope this helps.
-
I think we're on the same page. I'm trying to find good guides that provide some structure around the type of link building work I can send to a junior member of my team or outsource to a site like WhitePicket. What kind of work is WhitePicket doing for you?
-
I agree with what Baldea says. SEO is a full time job, and if you are the only person doing it, as well as running your business, then you really won't have time to do it. I am also like Baldea in that I am usually the creator, manager, seo, etc of my online businesses, at least at the beginning.
I know it is not exactly an answer to your questions, but this information may help A few years ago I had my first successful online business, and I got to the point where I was spending all day on customer support, so I did not have any time to grow my business (which included doing SEO). At that time I read the book "4 hour work week". If you have not read it, I highly recommend it. There they mentioned something called Virtual Assitants. I was desperate, so I gave it a shot, and boy did it change my life. I know how a a staff of VA's taking care of the time consuming stuff, while I spend my time on Marketing and SEO (with the turbulence in SEO these days, I would not want to outsource the work to anybody cheap, and I still can't afford the real pro's).
I don't know if this is a step your business is ready to take, but it may help. I personally work with WhitePicket.net for my VA's (for full disclosure, I do have a relationship with them) but there are other ones out there. Just look around and find one that suites your needs.
I hope this helps.
-
Hi there,
We could talk about this subject endlessly and we still won't get to a point.
The fact is that for a "one person managed website" is just overwhelming to take care of all aspects (SEO, design, content, updates, copy-writing, marketing, customer support, etc). I'm saying this because I've spent a few years like that and it's just impossible. You can't stay in front of your PC 16 hours a day.
That being said, I'm in doubt when it comes to this "link building job". Okay, yeah, everyone say that we should do it, that is very important and so on, but the majority loose the main point of view: quality content.
You could do some research in your niche, create some comparison tools/data, come up with something new, interview someone and post all that on your website. Sooner or later, someone will be impressed by what you did and will eventually mention you in a comment, on a forum or even of his own website. Those are the links that counts.
If you really have time, you can use DigitalPoint forums, Yahoo Answers, SeoMoz forums, search for the latest news in your niche and participate constructively in some debates etc. But soon you'll realize that it doesn't worth the time.
Cheers.
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
-
.co.uk to .com domain move Dec 26th, still 40% down - do I risk moving back? (desperate)
Hi All, I'm desperate for a bit of advice. I run www.tyrereviews.com which has been my project since 2006, and after LOTS of hard work over 15 years held 1000's of P1 positions in the SERPs. I recently moved from the original .co.uk to .com to aid with future internationalising plans. I was very careful not to change ANYTHING else, just 301 from the UK to the .com and updated everything in webmaster consoles. My background is development and I spent weeks triple researching everything to make sure I followed all the google best practices, as this is my life's work and primary income source. From a tech point of view the change went perfectly, but sadly google quickly started deranking the new domain, and now two months on it seems to have stabilised at around 40% down on traffic year on year and mostly dropped from the UK region. This is mostly from medium to long tail keywords. One such example is "Michelin Primacy 4" in google UK, old webmaster tools is showing my average position this time last year as 1.4 and now I'm 12.4! The .com site is geo targeted to the UK by both webmaster tools and href lang tags. So, my question is, so I keep waiting, or do I give up andrisk the switch back to the uk domain before it's too late? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyreReviews0 -
Linking from purchased businesses to my own
Hi All, An SEO and Google guidelines question. We've recently purchased several local businesses that have websites. Legally, we've put a disclaimer saying we've purchased those businesses, the question is whether we should link from those sites to our main site. Will this bring a manual action from Google? It's legitimate that we'd like the visitors from those websites come to our main site because those business no longer named the way they were. So, is it OK to link from these sites to ours? Will this violate Google's guidelines regarding backlinking? Should we even link and if so add the rel:nofollow tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OrendaLtd2 -
Do you get links from new websites?
There's a new industry specific website that looks decent. It's clean and nothing spammy. However, it's so new it's DA is under 10. Is it worth pursuing a link from a site like this? On one hand, there's nothing spammy and it is industry specific. On the other...it's just DA is so terrible (worse than any of our other links), I don't want it to hurt us. Any thoughts? Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Cooking Recipes Blog Links
Hi, I am running an ecommerce store - cookware, bakeware, knives etc... I have someone I know personally that is a writer and one of her blogs is about cooking - lots of well established articles with keywords througout. Is there any harm in getting some inbound links from her blog on certain keywords? If so, should I limit the number of outgoing links per article she has? Any guidelines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Link Research Tools - Detox Links
Hi, I was doing a little research on my link profile and came across a tool called "LinkRessearchTools.com". I bought a subscription and tried them out. Doing the report they advised a low risk but identified 78 Very High Risk to Deadly (are they venomous?) links, around 5% of total and advised removing them. They also advised of many suspicious and low risk links but these seem to be because they have no knowledge of them so default to a negative it seems. So before I do anything rash and start removing my Deadly links, I was wondering if anyone had a). used them and recommend them b). recommend detoxing removing the deadly links c). would there be any cases in which so called Deadly links being removed cause more problems than solve. Such as maintaining a normal looking profile as everyone would be likely to have bad links etc... (although my thinking may be out on that one...). What do you think? Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
Do nofollow links affect link profile?
I've read that it's good to keep a natural link profile. Some naked links, some links going to our company name, some with anchor text, etc. Do nofollow links affect this link profile, or is it only followed links that are taken into account?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Best Link Solicitation Email Structure - Link Building
Hello, What is the best thing to say when soliciting a link for link building. Say you're contacting a site with a resource section where your competitors are listed. What would you say to be the most persuasive. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
SEO Link on Clients Site
Hey SEOMozzers, Quick question. In light of the possible 'over-optimisation' penalties pending from Google should we be looking to remove the SEO links to our site from our Clients websites? I appreciate that including a link to our site from an anchor text that includes 'SEO' in it may be like waving a flag to Search Engines saying we are carrying out SEO on our Clients sites. Obviously we would sooner risk a drop in our SEO keyword rankings than risk a penalty of any kind for our Clients. What is the recommended practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0