Totally puzzled by link building/content marketing
-
Hey Mozzers!
I'm going to be starting link building for a website soon and I am having some trouble wrapping my head around a couple of things. First of all, in the current world of SEO, where should I be looking to generate links? Is it as simple as reaching out to bloggers and trawling through competitors links? Or is there something more? In relation to this, if I were to generate a good number of links from high authority sites, how would this effect my ranking for keywords (assuming the anchor text for those links is the website URL)?
The other thing I'm a little puzzled by is, if I were to write a great article on the websites blog and it gains traction in social media circles, people would (I assume) only share a link to the blog post instead of the actual article itself. How would this effect the ranking of keywords that I have optomised (anchor text etc.) for in the article? I assume this is where guest blogging would come in?
Any help would be HUGELY appreciated. I've been trying to logic this one out the last couple of days and just can't do it
Thanks a lot to anyone who replies
-
Hi Matthew!
Link building in today's SEO world is about relevancy, trust and authority.
The guest posting option is fine (asking blogs if you can write something for them), as long as what you're writing is an original and quality piece of content, and you're reaching out to trustworthy blogs that are, ideally, closely topically relevant to your own site for a link. In a perfect world all your links would be from relevant domains. However, links from irrelevant domains aren't bad - they still pass trust and authority, and having irrelevant links is part of a natural, diverse linking pattern. But if all or the vast majority of your links are from topically irrelevant domains, that becomes a problem.
I use Blogger Link Up and My Blog Guest to find prospective blogs to approach, but do your research, make sure you are reaching out to quality sites. Consider creating other content besides articles as well that stand a good chance of getting shared. Videos and ebooks for example.
Although having a peek at competitors' link profiles might give you some good ideas, don't just copy everything. Again, you want only quality links - links from relevant trusted websites to your own. So don't try and copy anything that doesn't meet this criteria.
You want your links to resemble a natural link building pattern and that gives you the biggest clue as to what is acceptable nowadays - so from a variety of sources, using a variety of linking/anchor text including the URL itself as you'd expect if they were just creating from people sharing your content around, and in a natural context (e.g. part of a review, or a resource link in a genuinely useful comment on a relevant article). Be very careful about deliberately creating links with your exact keywords in the anchor text. For example, if you were targeting the keyword 'car wax' you'd be better off linking to your site with natural variations such as 'here's a great article on car wax' 'here's how to apply car wax' 'the pros and cons of using car wax'. I think anchor text carries a lot less importance nowadays and Google will take more of a signal from the content on the linking page and linking site (but on the other hand, if you create lots of exact-match anchor text links to your site, Google does then pay attention as you risk a penalty). So yes, get natural-looking links from authority websites in your niche and you should see an improvement in your rankings for your target keywords. Link building aside, focus on creating great content first and foremost, because in time that'll earn you natural links anyway.
Your second question - if people start talking about your article and sharing it, yes they will just share a link and that's what you want. You don't want them to share the actual content of the article. There would be loads of duplicate copies of your article all over the web then, and that's not good for SEO! (sorry if I have misunderstood this part). Getting all those social shares is good though, it's sending a signal to Google that your site has something worth sharing, that perhaps it's an authority on your subject.
Hope that helps a bit!
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
-
Link building - unique root domains
Hi there, I was wondering when asking for a link, does where on this page it is? For example will someone's high traffic website (e.g. example.com ) provide more page authority than another link on this site ( e.g. example.com/blog ). If this is the case, is it best to get links from multiple pages if possible or will this not effect SEO? Thanks
Link Building | | charliedavi0 -
Best Methods - Link Building
We are having more and more "new" customers coming to us who have been hit by various algorithms imposed by google. After we have run a site health check and corrected everything, we plan and come up with a link development plan which suits the clients needs. Much of out link development work is safe comprising of; 1. Guest Blog Posts - where we develop creative content with the customer to publish. 2. Industry blog posts - where bloggers write about i.e. "the company" 3. Social media - posting pictures, commenting on forums, etc 4. Paid directories with authority We don't develop links in any other way and it brings results in the long term. Is anyone out there doing something else? Link building can sometimes be like walking on a tight rope. Thanks and happy holidays Gary - Elite Group Marketing London
Link Building | | GaryVictory0 -
Got a link building question here
I've been doing a lot of back link analysis on my competitors and noticed that a lot of links are coming from wordpress.com, blog.com, blogspot.com, etc blogs. These are free blogs in the format of http://www.username.blogplatform.com. These individual blogs seem to have product reviews and mentions for many different products (we are an e-commerce website). I would like to know if anyone has done any outreach to the owners of the third party blogs. This looks very different from guest blogging and I want to know if there is a way to reach out to these blog owners in order for them to write something about our products. Please let me know if anyone had any success with this, Thank you
Link Building | | BryanCroft0 -
Are Links/Resources pages considered spam?
I'm dabbling with link building in a non link-happy industry, traffic safety (IE Traffic cones, barricades, safety vests, etc...). We currently are doing #RCS in terms of giveaways for college students as well as discounts in a wider EDU Outreach campaign as well as legitimate guest posting. I have started to use Link Prospector, and got a list of links/resources pages that we can get info from. I found some great links through here, including ways to get links from higher-profile .gov domains, but was wondering if it is worth it to go after the high(er) quality links/resources pages. By higher quality, I usually set a floor of a DA 25-30 and have a limited amount of external links per page. These would be for branded keywords (IE the company name/domain) and not exact match anchor text. I'd really like to see how other SEOs feel about this. Thanks Zachary Russell President, ProTech Internet Group
Link Building | | Zachary_Russell1 -
Link Building the Right Way?
There are still a few things that I need clarifications for link building. I have joined many forums and I am following some big website (Seomoz / search engine watch / search engine land) and such for ideas about link building. There are various different suggestions among them for example about Create a blog, Profile links, Article directories,Web 2.0 submission,Press release submission, Infographic submissions,Company directory submissions,Video submissions,Niche specific directories,Logo/Graphic/Web design directories,Free web directories,Non-English directories,RSS directories,Guest posting,Games Submission's and social bookmarking, Blog commenting, Forum posting.Q&A,Wiki Links,Local listings,Getting trackbacks. one would say to use it the other would say not to, can you please guide as to what is the right way to follow these suggestions. Also nofollow backlinks have any effect on the SERP? Thanks.
Link Building | | KLLC1 -
How many days/hours a month should I dedicate to link building ?
I realise that the more time you dedicate to link building the better, but what would you say is the ideal amount of time that I should spend link building to see a significant improvement in rankings? The keywords I'm trying to target are medium to difficult. So far, I've been spending one day link building but since I'm making all link submissions manually, I haven't seen great results, even though I've been link building for a couple of months. How many days do you spend link building? Thank you in advance for your help! 🙂
Link Building | | SEOBunny_0 -
Build Links with Bloggers
Hi! A few days ago, someone asked about how to ask links from bloggers and we got good answers, specially from Egol. But, I do want to add to that question: after conducting research on each blogger and make sure they have good quality content, how would you factor in their page rank, visitors, page view and social media info? if they don't have much traffic, with PR3 (we are PR4), which means we can't count on too much traffic from them, but, will backlink from such places deemed as quality link by Google? I do understand the higher number in PR and traffic is better, but, in our case, they don't come by often. Is it still worthwhile to do the lower sites?
Link Building | | ypl0 -
Do-Follow link from Linkedin/Facebook/Twitter/About/Google Profile, how to:
Tell us, a technician method of building do-follow link on high quality social websites. Thanks
Link Building | | leadsprofi0