Mark Mitchell

M Posted 10 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

SEO link building often appears to be a complex and time consuming process. But it’s not always as hard as it seems. In case you missed it, we are republishing this great piece featuring 10 simple SEO link building tactics that you can implement in a day.

A healthy backlink profile is key to your website’s overall search performance. Google and other search engines consider both the quantity and quality of your site’s backlinks in assessing its importance, credibility and authority. This, in turn, influences your site’s search ranking. So building and then using SEO backlinks effectively is crucial for SEO success.

Most SEO link building strategies for building up your site’s backlink profile tend to be either highly resource-intensive or complicated, if not both. With that in mind, we’ll outline 10 simple SEO link building ideas to build your backlink profile and thereby boost your site’s search performance and SEO management efforts.

With any of the tactics in this post, you’ll want to create a process for evaluating the sites you are thinking of obtaining SEO backlinks from. You also want to take care with the anchor text that you are requesting or using in your SEO link building – too much exact match anchor text can look spammy.

Leverage existing networks

There are a few ways you can leverage your existing network of online related businesses for links:

• For those businesses with which you already have a strong relationship, consider simply asking them for a link.
• For any businesses you’ve worked with, offer to write a testimonial in return for a link back to your site within the testimonial.
• For firms that you do a lot of business with, either as a partner or supplier, ask to be listed on their preferred partners or suppliers page (assuming they have one).

Engage with social media

Leverage social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to:

• Tell your company’s story
• Highlight your products and services
• Engage with followers
• Share career opportunities
• Drive word-of-mouth at scale
• And, get a backlink to your site

Network through professional associations 

If you’re a member of a business organization or professional industry association, it is likely its website carries authority and credibility. If there is a list of members, check yours to see that it has a link back to your site. 

Also, if it has a feature such as an “in the spotlight” listing, consider asking to have your business showcased. This would serve to increase the value of your backlink, as well as your brand visibility. 

Remember, it’s important that you build links naturally and with integrity, or you could face penalties from Google (like those from the Penguin algorithm).

Optimize images for SEO link building

If you use a lot of your own copyrighted images on your website, chances are that other sites may have used them without your consent. This may be more or less of a concern to you, depending on your vertical.

Instead of sending notices of intent to prosecute the offending parties, why not ask for attribution in the way of a backlink instead?

To ascertain whether any of your images are being used on another website, go to Google Images and do a site search (for example, Site:yoursiteURL.com). Click each image, then click, “search by image.” This will show if your image has been used on another site.

Start by reviewing the sites that have used your images without your consent, and contact those which appear to be reputable - the sites you want to be associated with. If you can find the contact information for the site’s webmaster, send them a note politely asking for an attribution link in exchange for them continuing to use your image.

If you don’t have many unique images for your site, it’s a good practice to take some high-quality shots. Be sure the images are relevant to your content and optimized for SEO. 

Create case studies

Another solid SEO link building tactic is asking clients to feature a solid case study on one (or more) of the products and/or services your business offers. Find out what has been most successful and made a genuine impact on their bottom line. Structure your case study with these three steps:

1. Present the challenges or background
2. Discuss the solution
3. Show the results

Have the client feature the case study on their website and use a branded link back to your site and the Web page of your choosing.

Flaunt your logo

Most businesses have a logo that has been professionally designed. Why not showcase yours? People are interested in logos, whether they be prospective business owners, designers or just pure logo geeks. This means there are a lot of popular websites showcasing different logos with high domain authority. 

Here is a list of logo gallery sites to investigate featuring your logo on:

• The Logo Mix
• Logo From Dreams
• Logo Design
• LogoMoose
• Logo Faves
• Logo Critiques

You can find more logo sites for your specific needs by searching for terms such as “submit my logo,” “logo showcase” and “logo designs.” An important point to remember is to check the sites are of good quality before you submit your own logo to them (one way to do a spot check is to look at PageRank and Alexa scores).

Upload your presentations to SlideShare

As the largest network on the Web for sharing presentations, SlideShare offers a number of online marketing benefits. For SEO link building purposes, there are just a few easy steps:

• When creating your presentation, be sure to add a hyperlink URL to it (for example, http://www.yoursite.com)
• Save your presentation as a PDF, then upload it to SlideShare
• Test if your link is working by running this query in search: site:example.com inurl:/slideshare/

Note: The presence of this link may be worth less than the actual traffic and branding potential that SlideShare could offer as part of a wider strategy.

Award a scholarship

Consider offering a scholarship to students enrolled in a program related to your business:

• Designate a page on your site explaining the scholarship offer, as well as terms and conditions.
• Notify the relevant accredited, reputable universities and colleges about your scholarship offer, and ask them to link back to your page for more information.

The .edu links typically carry high authority, but you’ll have to do your own analysis of each website, as not every .edu is authoritative. Case in point: in our latest research on the impact of Panda 4.1, some .edu sites did well, while others did not.

Further information on link building

Backlink building is important, but don't forget about internal links. Internal linking boosts your SEO results and also helps users discover more content on your site.

As your backlink profile grows bigger it is increasingly hard to keep track of all the SEO backlinks. Read our full guide to backlinking for more information on how to easily manage your site links.

Better assess your backlink profile with link audits or read our comprehensive guide to white hat backlink building.

brightedge

M Posted 10 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

The World We Live In

The internet makes massive amounts of data available to us at a moment’s notice. It allows people and businesses to interact with each other, do research, and make purchases. Online channels become increasingly important, especially organic search on average driving 51% of traffic to websites. In order to quickly identify the correct content and websites that will meet their needs almost all users will use a search engine such as Google. Typing a query into a search engine will generate a set of results that are a combination of paid and organic search listings. The user can then choose the most relevant link from these results or search again if the results are not helpful. The process mentioned above is the core of our industry and is executed well over 3 billion times per day, so it’s worth highlighting one piece for a bit closer investigation – organic search.  

What Is Organic Search?

Let’s define it before we jump into how it works and its effects on content performance marketing. Organic search is the process of using an unbiased algorithm to provide a user with content suggestions based on their search query.

This is important to understand because it is our job as content performance marketers is to build content that is going to drive success for our businesses. In order to do that, we need to create and tune our content to meet the needs of our target audiences.

If we can do that effectively, it is in the best interest of the search engine to serve our content to our target audience for us, providing highly targeted visitors to our pages at no incremental cost. This is the secret to the organic channel, and why organic search listings are so valuable. Other channels often come with additional cost for each new visitor provided. You can build a valuable and well-targeted piece of content once, and it can produce for your business for a significant length of time. We describe this as long-term content equity. See additional detail what is seo?  

How Paid Search Is Different

Now we understand what organic search is and how it can provide tremendous value to our businesses. The next question is how organic is different from paid search, since both types of listings are provided by search engines. Paid Search is the process of providing a user with content suggestions provided by third parties in exchange for payment.

This is significantly different from the way organic search works. Whereas in organic search the content is served based purely on its relevance and value to the person doing the search, in paid search the advertiser is paying-per-click to have their content highlighted and placed in front of the searcher. It is definitely possible to bring visitors to your site using this strategy. Traditionally, paid search is very popular because it can produce quick results and provides high keyword and user visibility.  

How BrightEdge Can Help

BrightEdge is the only technology that allows marketers to get an accurate understanding of how organic search rankings are tied to business value. It allows customers to track actual placement among all types of search results. BrightEdge users can switch data and reports between blended and classic rank results to gain more visibility and insight into the effects of local, images, videos, and more. You can also see how your content is performing across device types, like mobile, and in different regions within the same country. The image below from BrightEdge StoryBuilder shows Classic Rank in blue and significantly different rank for Blended or Universal results, which include universal rank types such as quick answers, images, videos, and shopping.

BrightEdge Recommendations provides content-based on-page recommendations which enable users to create high-quality, relevant content that guide multiple target keywords to an individual page. BrightEdge Anomaly Detection enables you to build custom rules around virtually any data point which trigger alerts to specific users when critical changes, like this one, occur and change your rank and performance. Using the BrightEdge platform means access to insight and more capability to respond to our always-changing industry environment. Contact your customer success manager or Request a Demo to review your strategy and response plan or contact us to learn how to start using BrightEdge today.