SEOmoz Beginners Guide Ch7 Pt 2 Review
This part of the Guide is all about the different types of links, how to measure the value of a link and strategies to build links to your site.
LInk Building Basics
It starts of with link building basics and the three different types of links.
They are:
- Natural Links
- Manual Outreach Link Building
- Self Created, Non Editorial Link Building
Self created or non editorial linking takes many forms, blog commenting, profile links, forum commenting. It is the old stand by method of creating links. While you can get a lot of links this way, the value of these links has diminished over time so I wouldn’t go overboard trying to get links of this type.
Link Metrics
Link metrics are important because they help you determine the value of a link.
When you plan your link building campaign, you’ll want to use certain tools and metrics to help you decide where and how to get your links.
One metric to check is a pages’ title tag to see if it is relevant to your page content. If it is then you may want to get a link from that page.
SEOmoz has a couple of tools, Moz Rank and Domain Authority, that measure the value of a page and its potential as a link source.
You want to check out a competitor’s link profile to see where the valuable links are coming from for that page.
You want to make sure that a page sourcing a link to you does not have too many outgoing links on it. That will dilute the value of all outgoing links if there are too many links on the page.
And finally you want to see the traffic referral potential of a page. Some pages can send a large amount of targeted traffic your way and you want to spot those pages when you can.
Link Building Strategies
There a number of strategies outlined on the chapter that you should be aware of.
- Get your customers to lin
- Build a company blog. Make it a valuable, informative and entertaining resource
- Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking
- Be newsworthy
- Find directories or listings of relevant resources
For the readers in the crowd, there is a transcript of the video. Just click read more.
Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going to be Part 2 of Chapter 7, of the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO. This is the video series about the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Chapter 7, Part 2. So in Part 1, we got some understanding of the importance of links. Actually, if we go back here, you’re going to see we talked about the growing popularity of your site and links, and how important links signals were. If you want to find out about what those links signals are, you go to that video and here in Part 2, we’re going to talk about link building basics. So, what they do here is they say link building is an art and indeed, it is more than an art. It is a very important, but tedious activity. It takes a lot of hard work and time to build links.
They give you three types of links. The first type of link, they call it the Natural Link. Those are the links that come naturally to your web page and you don’t do anything about it. You simply get those links because people are interested in your content. Frankly, that’s the way I do most of my linking. I’m too lazy to go out and do the rest of it, no. I don’t like buying links and I just don’t like any form of artificial linking, because I know that eventually you get nailed. So Natural Links, just let it happen and be happy about it.
The second thing, they call this Manual Outreach link building. So this is where you go out to other blogs and you might ask to do a guest post or exchange links, or just through some form of form submission or frankly, through some social interaction. Here they say ask a professor to link back to you. You create links coming back to your site. The third one is Self-Created Non Editorial. This is where thousands of websites offer any visitor the opportunity to create links through guest books links, profiles, blog comments. This is fine and you can do a lot of this. This is kind of the old, classic way.
A lot of these links don’t have a lot of value and they’ve been discounted by Google, so these are the three ways to do it, the Natural, the Manual, and the Self-Created. I just stick to the Natural for the most part, and I just follow a natural flow.
Now, in addition to those three types of ways to build links, they come and describe six different metrics that you can use in order to determine the value of the link and to get links, so the first one is, when you want to try and get the value of a link from page or if you’re trying to get that to link to you, you look at the title tag and see how relevant that page is for a particular term you’re trying to rank for, and see if it’s in line with the nature of your content.
Another tool you can use to measure the importance of a link is moz link. This is specific to SEOmoz and it’s a tool that they have, a metric that they have that measures the popularity of a given web page on the web, and the higher the popularity, the more valuable that link. SEOmoz domain authority measures how likely a domain is to rank for a given key word or search query. So that’s just another way of saying, “Gee, this page has a lot of domain authority. Maybe I’d like to get a link from it.”
Competitor’s back links. They have a tool called Opensite Explorer at SEOmoz and I use the Market Samurai in addition to that. There are a lot of ways that you can go back and take a look at back links of a particular page and see what the highest authority link is in that back link profile. So maybe you can go find and get links from the important pages that the competitor is getting its links from.
Number of links on a page. When a page links to you, you want to make sure that it doesn’t have too many links on the page. A hundred links is the maximum that usually would apply to commercial shopping type pages. The more links it has on that web page going out, the more diluted the value of the link is, that’s basically it.
Potential referral traffic. Links that send high amounts of direct click through traffic, not only tend to provide better search engine value for rankings, but also targeted valuable visitors. You want to see whether the link coming back from that site will generate traffic that is targeted, and more focused on what you have to offer. Rather than a page that sends you a ton of traffic that really sends tire kickers instead of important traffic that’s targeted to your page.
Then, it goes on to say that all these concepts and metrics are important, and if for any reason they’re not working, then you should either start a new campaign and look for better quality links. Also, you should check your on page optimization which we’ve talked about in other chapters. That means you want to make sure that the key word you’re targeting is optimized in your title, in your description, in your URL, and in one of your headers.
Then it goes on to give you five link building strategies, so how can you get links to go back to your site? Well, get your customers to link to you, get your friends, get anybody that has something that is relevant to that web page, and to your website in general, to link back to you. Build a company blog, make it valuable and the blog would be part of the company web presence that’s dynamic and changes and gets updated. That’s what you want to do. Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking.
All right, so this goes back to the old create content that your customer is looking for. Make it unique, make it important, make it relevant, and you’ll get that content, if successful, shared on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google Plus, on Digg, on Stumble Upon, etc., and that will build links back to your site. Be newsworthy, be current, be fresh, so that’s another way. Find directories or listings relevant, so yeah, you can go to directories and do an all entitle, which is an attribute which will show you directories that are relevant to your site, and see if you can’t get some interaction coming from them. My personal opinion is directories are getting more and more discounted.
Show me the money. This is just a paragraph to tell you don’t buy links, just don’t buy links. Now there are going to be people that will tell you, SEO companies optimize and that’s really in a sense, links that are bought, don’t buy links. If you go to someplace and they want to charge you and send you links, it’s just a matter of time, if you get found buying links and that sort of thing, you’re going to get nailed. I don’t ever bother with it, so I’ve never had that problem. But my problem has always been making sure that I don’t get penalized for some sort of SEO optimization reason, but that’s certainly not coming from linking. There is a movement now, with Penguin updates that’s really going after all of the linking.
That’s the end of Chapter 7. I hope this video has been helpful and I hope that you get your mind around these link building important aspects of the SEO and Internet marketing and that’s it. So this is Claude Pelanne, at Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well, and we’ll be talking to you soon.
About Claude PelanneClaude Pelanne is an internet marketer and consultant who comes out of television broadcast. He works with start ups and small business to optimize their online business.
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