Posts About ‘Linkbuilding’

Understanding Your Link Profile – Part One

sos-feature

I’ve always believed that link building without knowing what your current link profile looks like is a bit like flying blind. Especially with the recent goings on, as an SEO you really need to have a good understanding of who’s linking to you, and in what context those sites are linking. Ideally, you should have a good handle on anchor text distribution,  page rank distribution and also a solid idea of what your competitions link profiles look like – i.e do you fit in or does your site stand out like a sore thumb?

As a minimum step when starting a link building project, I’ll make sure I take a good look at the client’s current link profile, focusing in on what the anchor text looks like; and to try and ascertain what sort of link building has been conducted in the past. That helps me to make some decisions about what anchor text to target, and what I might be up against. Key to this is being able to quickly gather the data you need and organise it in a way that tells the right story. (more…)

The value of content: why exactly am I writing this post?

SEO content memes

As both a writer and reader of all kinds of blogs, I’ve been thinking a lot of late about the quantity and quality of posts that are out there, particularly within the search marketing realm. I’ve spoken a lot about the feeling of drowning in content with friends and collegues, who are experiencing the same sense of growing disinterest.

As connoisseurs of the SEO/digital industry, I think we all recognise that there is a ridiculous, possibly simply excessive amount of content being pushed out on a daily basis.  And alas, all too ironically, a fair amount of it is written not because the subject matter is interesting but because people are just out hunting for links using tried and tested content methods. (more…)

5 Ways to Increase your Link Building Efficiency

tactics-field

We all know that link building is hard. It takes time, effort and patience to get good quality links. So any minor tweaks or improvements to your process and the tools you use can have a big effect on your hit rate. Below I’ll talk about five small tips and tricks to help with your link building which will not take loads of time to execute and put into your existing process. (more…)

Link Building Through Blogger Outreach

TOPSHOTS

Last week I was kindly invited to speak at the latest Search London meetup in London which is organised by Jo Turnbull. The topic I spoke about was Link Building through Blogger Outreach.  I know that this is an area that many people are interested in so I wanted to turn my slides into a blog post which will hopefully help many of you who build links.

Being honest about link building, it isn’t that easy. But it can be made easier with the right processes and the right tools. I’m going to outline a process for content based link building which will include the use of a number of tools.
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8 Link Building Tools I Couldn’t Live Without

tools

I’d say roughly 80% of my time as an SEO is spent link building. It can be a tough challenge sometimes, but I always find it satisfying to see the fruits of my labour coming through. Whilst I strongly believe that link building is all about hard graft, and that you should be able to do the job with all but an email address; the following tools certainly make my life a lot easier. Included in this list are tools that I use for a variety of things such as valuing a link prospect, right through to identifying poor quality links that I might want to consider removing. (more…)

Penguins, Anchor Text and Headaches: What Do We Do Now?

Anchor Text Post Penguin update

As a link builder, what particularly interested/scared me most about the Penguin update was the part which penalised the use of over-optimised anchor text. I must’ve read 10 blog posts about it but still, in amongst the bumph remains my biggest question; what anchor text am I supposed to use now? I’m not going to focus on the Penguin update as a whole, instead I’m going to delve into the world of exact match anchor texts, and try to work out exactly what us link builders are supposed to do now that the Penguins are in force. (more…)

Does Linking to “Bad” Sites Hurt You? Cutts Says No to an Extent

Bad links, there is a lot of discussion going around them at the moment with Panda and Penguin fresh in our memories. And with all the ‘outing’ going on, you better watch your steps right?

The question asked to Matt Cutts in his latest Webmasterhelp videos “What happens if I link to a good page that later becomes spammy?” therefore is one where the answer is listened to carefully by many SEOs.

The question is whether or not a site you link to, which used to have good content before, now turns ‘spumy’, will have a bad influence on your rankings. The answer? Cutts says ‘not to worry’, at least as long its not too many of these kind of links.

Is Google Declaring War by Banning an Agency for Mistakes on Clients Sites?

red-card

Again the search industry is once again in uproar. Why? Because somewhere somebody took a wrong turn, someone else saw it and told Google. And now Google is upset.

To be honest, it’s like looking at my kids sometimes, but that’s a different story. What is more interesting at this specific point is Google’s reaction yesterday to the alleged buying of links by search agency iAqcuire: they didn’t kick out the clients for who they may have bought links, they kicked out the agency.

It was smart find by Barry Schwartz at Searchengineland last night when he did a site command search for [site:www.iacquire.com] and didn’t get any results back. There was no site there, which usually means either the company has withdrawn itself from Google or has made a mistake (I’ve seen enough ‘no index’ which shouldn’t have been there in robots.txts around the globe over the past few years) or the company has been penalized by Google. (more…)

Breaking Free of Panda/Penguin

Peter Young and Neil Walker at SAScon

The next SAScon session I chose to attend is called ‘Breaking Free of Panda/Penguin’ and features my good friend Peter Young from Mediacom and Holistic Search, and the original SEO rapper and Jason Statham lookalike Neil ‘SEOmad‘ Walker.

Cause and Effect

Peter kicks off by listing the issues Google is looking out for in web spam, such as cloaking, malware, sneaky redirects, link wheels, paid links, and many more of such tactics that Google disapproves of. Temporal spikes – i.e. link velocity – is also a big warning signal for Google’s web spam fighters.

Neil asks who in the audience has been hit by Panda or Penguin, and who’s received bad link warnings in GWT. The most hands go up when asked about Penguin, indicating the severity of this latest update. (more…)

Link Building on the Highway to Hell

jimilinks

Thinking Like Mr G.

As a teenager I spent hours, days and weeks, practising guitar. I was so passionate about it that I would play until my fingers (and ears) bled and I had no choice but to stop. For me, my future was going to be full of magical rock performances, international stardom and illustrious guitar solos.

But as I got older, I started thinking about the music I liked and what I enjoyed – more often than not, it was its simplicity that I admired. Overly technical musicians, who were only concerned with playing as many-notes-per-second as possible turned me off and I started searching for musicians that knew when to hold back. In short, they knew what not to play, as well as they knew what to play. (more…)

Link Building & SEO strategies for e-commerce #SMX Munich

linkbuilding-for-ecommerce

Continuing on from SMX Munich last week, this session was so informative, it deserves its own post! A cracking run down of tips and tricks for e-commerce websites from Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget.

“People think that link building is hard, but it’s not, you just have to want to own the content that you are building and sharing – even if that content isn’t that great you can still get links from it.“

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