In today’s digital market, SEO is all-important. Specifically, white hat SEO is all-important. A common tactic is white hat link building.

But what is white hat link building? For that matter, what is white hat SEO and how does it differ from regular SEO?

Read on to find out.

What Is SEO?

SEO is short for search engine optimization.

Every search engine is programmed with algorithms. Those algorithms help it pick out web pages that are relevant to Internet users’ searches. Additionally, the algorithms sort out potentially poor web pages and place them below better web pages.

This process is called ranking.

Thanks to their algorithms, search engines take a number of factors into account when ranking a page. Common factors include relevance, safety, reliability, and popularity.

White Hat SEO Versus Black Hat SEO

There are a variety of techniques that web pages can employ to rank higher. Unfortunately, not all of these techniques are recommended or helpful. Some of even hurt web pages’ SEO.

Proper SEO is called “white hat SEO.” In contrast, unhelpful and harmful SEO is called “black hat SEO.”

White hat SEO entails using fair techniques to influence search engine techniques. One of the most common techniques of white hat SEO is link building. Other common techniques include keyword usage and high-quality content.

Black hat SEO, on the other hand, stoops to using cheap tricks to manipulate search engines. Switch-and-bait content, invisible text, and keyword stuffing are all considered black hat SEO tactics.

Search engine technology has come quite a long way since SEO was first conceived. Now search engines can recognize black hat SEO on a web page and rank the page lower as a result.

For that reason, it is imperative that you stick to white hat SEO while developing websites and website content.

The Importance of White Hat Link Building

Search engines use links to rank websites’ relevance and trustworthiness.

In the past, web developers could get away with linking any word or phrase to any site on the web. In fact, the more links your content had, the higher your site’s pages were ranked.

That isn’t the case anymore. Search engine bots crawl over every readable part of web pages, including the links. Poorly implemented or irrelevant links are tossed to the bottom of the pile.

7 Techniques for White Hat Link Building

Thankfully, there are numerous techniques for white hat link building.

Let’s check out seven of them below.

1. Affiliation Links

One of the easiest white hat link building techniques is getting friends and partners to put a link to your site on theirs. In return, you’re expected to include links to their sites on your site.

Affiliation links are valuable in terms of SEO and networking.

Relevant, appropriate links both to and from your site are a sign of credibility and trustworthiness. As such, search engines rank sites with such links higher.

Site features on other sites also increase traffic to your site.

2. Directories

There are numerous business-oriented directories online.

Universal directories include Google My Business and Yellow Pages. Some directories host information for professionals in certain fields. For example, there are numerous directories just for lawyers, doctors, and dentists.

Search engine bots also crawl over these sites during the ranking process. Search engine algorithms read multiple instances of the same information as a sign of credibility. As a result, search engines rank websites with business profiles higher.

For that reason, it is important to open as many business profiles as possible. Once you’ve opened your profiles, include a link back to your website.

3. Linked Mentions

Often times, other websites post about products and services without linking to the products’ and services’ brand website. Common “mentions” include reviews, analyses, and recommendations.

Make a list of the sites that talk about your product. Reach out the web hosts and ask for a link back to your website.

A link back isn’t an unreasonable request. After all, the content that they’ve posted is about something you offer.

Additionally, keep track of the sites that praise your products and services. Linking to those sites in future content is a nice gesture that could further your networking opportunities.

4. Guest Blog Entries

Currently, guest blog entries are one of the most efficient white hat link building techniques.

Many websites have a blog area. Occasionally, web hosts will let a guest contribute a blog entry. The entry should be optimized like the rest of the website.

Guest blog entries are an excellent networking and SEO opportunity. Not only can you include links back to your website, you can develop a relationship with the site runners. The better the relationship, the more likely they’ll link to your site or invite you to guest blog for them again.

5. Regular Blog Entries

Don’t forget about maintaining your own blog!

A blog is a valuable opportunity for websites. In their blogs, web hosts can cover a variety of material related to their products and services.

The more material you cover, the more audiences you can appeal to. More material also means more space for white hat link building and keyword usage.

6. Visuals

Consumers love infographics and other visuals. In fact, 65% of consumers identify themselves as visual learners.

As such, be sure to include infographics on your website and in your blog entries. Make sure they’re easy — as well as fun — to read. Many infographics include cartoons and bright colors to help demonstrate facts and figures.

Easily absorbed information will make your website more likely to receive a link back.

7. Internal Links

An important but often overlooked white hat link building technique is internal links.

Internal links are links that go elsewhere on your website. They are most commonly used in blogs. Newer blog entries often reference older entries and thus include a link to them.

Search engines read these links as any other links. As a result, internal links help build your online credibility.

Internal links also funnel traffic to older material and give that material a view boost.

Need More Link Building Tips? Contact Us!

At BackLinks.com, we know you rely on link building to boost your website’s SEO. For that reason, we facilitate the buying and selling of links. We also provide our customers with online resources about SEO.

For more link building tips, please feel free to contact us!

If you’re a typical small to medium-sized business, you’re spending at least half of your marketing budget on digital marketing. This is a pretty serious expenditure and you might have trouble determining whether or not you’re getting the returns you need.

That’s why you should try low-cost strategies with great ROI like high quality backlinks.

Getting a return on your investment is one way to track whether or not your marketing dollars are being well spent. If you’re not in the top few results for businesses like yours in your area, you need backlinks to improve your SEO.

Improving your SEO doesn’t mean spending hundreds of thousands to get a few more hits. It can also mean building connections across your web community to share knowledge as you grow your customer base.

Here are 8 tips for building high quality backlinks to your site.

1. Share Your Links

Most of the phrases typed into search engines are in the form of a question. Sites like Yahoo, Reddit, and Quora are devoted to being resources for people who have questions.

To start building backlinks from these sites, begin by creating an account for your brand on each site. Then look for questions related to common questions that you get from potential clients. If you can briefly answer a question, add it as a comment.

If you’ve started a blog for your site, you can start adding relevant links as an example of a way to approach the problem. If you haven’t started a blog on your site yet, it’s time to start one. Along with backlinks, great SEO strategies must offer fresh content to share.

2. Write Guest Posts

Being a guest poster will help you attract new clicks to your site through the implied endorsement of the site you’re posting on. If you’re not a professional writer, you may not be able to venture too far outside of your level of expertise.

Start by finding blogs that relevant to your niche and seem to have a strong domain authority. So long as the sites rank higher than you, you should see some improvement in traffic. Don’t waste your time posting for blogs that have less traffic that you do.

Build a relationship with the editor or owner of the blog. Ask if you can submit some writing every few weeks. Rather than just promote yourself, try to add value to their website by getting to know what their goal is.

3. Add Links To Comments On Related Articles

This is a bit of a tightrope to walk because some blog owners will accuse you of spamming if you do this one wrong. Spamming will not only get you blacklisted by blogs but will also penalize you in the eyes of search engines. Even their bots know spam when they see it.

Find some articles that are written on a subject you know a lot about. When you see that a point is missed or if someone has an important detail wrong, add a comment with a link directing them to your rebuttal.

Be constructive and add meaningful commentary to the conversation. Your opinions will be welcomed if you seem friendly and sincerely interested in dialogue, even when you disagree.

4. Replacing Broken Links

This tactic is a little more time consuming but can result in some high quality backlinks.

Go through your favorite sites related to your field. Search for links that might be broken. If you find one, email the site administrator and suggest one of your own links to replace it.

You’ll build trust and have the endorsement of the site administrator built into your links.

There are “broken link checker” tools available on the internet. Run the site you’ve targeted through that tool and see what kinds of results you can get. You’ll be doing the site administrator a favor and giving yourself some extra support in the process.

5. Join A Blogging Community

Inbound, GrowthHackers, and Bizsugar are just a few examples of blog communities made for bloggers, by bloggers. People who subscribe are the kind of people who like to read blogs, so you’ll already have gotten over that initial hurdle.

Take a look at a site before you submit. Having your links supported by a spammy or unpopular site is no use to you.

Start by registering and building a profile. Whenever you post a link, tell people why it’s a valuable link. No one wants to follow a random link down a rabbit hole to spammy nothingness.

6. Write Testimonials

Do you rely on a certain group of products for your business or brand? Build high quality backlinks by reviewing those products on Yelp, Amazon, or whatever marketplace you get them from.

You might even see a little bonus from the manufacturer as a thank you.

7. Turn Mentions Into Links

If there are some sites where you’ve noticed you’ve been mentioned in a post with no accompanying link, don’t just comment with a link.

Contact the site administrator or author and see if they can add a link to your site. They’ll likely be more than willing to oblige, hoping that if they need the same, you’ll also give them a link.

8. Press Releases

Do you spend a fair amount of time sending press releases out to companies and websites announcing new products or company changes? Use this as an opportunity to build high quality backlinks.

If someone is reading your press release, you can bet they’re interested in your company. Take advantage of their attention by giving them even more reasons to love you.

High Quality Backlinks Can Be Helpful and Profitable

The aim of your backlinks is to share helpful information with your reading public. While your overall goal with your brand is to build profit, commitment to a brand is built on trust. High quality backlinks build trust with a community of clients.

If you’re ready to take your backlinks up a notch, contact us today to get started.

Link building is among SEO marketers’ most difficult responsibilities. It’s hard enough to generate links from prominent websites. But broken links could be dragging you down even more, putting your business in jeopardy.

Marketers often assume a new inbound link is a job well done. But links to your old or removed pages can accumulate. They will hurt your traffic and search rankings over time.

SEO experts call this ‘linkrot’. Once helpful inbound links can no longer serve their purpose. Outbound links to once great resources can hurt your credibility as well.

You need broken link building campaigns to maintain your domain and page authority. Marketers must have deteriorated links replaced with fresh, authoritative new ones. Keeping these connections updated is part of maintaining a healthy website.

Almost half of companies devote a majority of their budget to link building. So why do so many fail?

The Pitfalls of Broken Link Building

Broken link building is the process of updating broken links on third-party websites. When those websites link to outdated content on your website, they have become broken. Your goal is to have that third-party update their links to your relevant content.

Many organizations have little recourse for updating broken links. That’s because those links can appear anywhere. The process of identifying those links can be tedious without the right methods.

As a result, many companies come short in their broken link building campaigns. Many websites don’t undertake these campaigns at all. But identifying your problem areas can put you on track to a more successful website.

5 Reasons Broken Link Building Campaigns Fail

You may be taking great efforts to replace broken links. You may find that you are still coming up short. If this is the case, it’s likely a problem with your methods.

It may not be a question of what you are doing. It might be a question of what you aren’t doing. We’ve identified five likely reasons your broken link building efforts have failed.

1. You Aren’t Finding Broken Links Successfully

Discovering all broken links is a challenge for most internal teams. That’s because they can appear anywhere without notice. These links can go unnoticed for years and become toxic for your website.

Your first step in improving this problem is finding desirable sites. These are relevant sites you would like to link to your content.

Start with general search criteria. Refine your searches to bring back results more specific to your subjects. Then, identify the most recent content to ensure a long lifespan for inbound links.

You’ve now identified several desirable websites. It’s time to locate the undesirable ones. Even with sophisticated tools, this can be a long process for your team.

Choose the best resources for finding your broken links. Locating all these links will take time. But doing so will maximize the value of your campaign.

2. You Aren’t Focusing on Qualifying Pages

Reaching out to every website with a broken link can be an impossible task. You would have to craft messages for each individual website owner. You would have to follow up and negotiate on taking down the links.

You can maximize your time and improve results by qualifying pages. That means establishing which pages are most important to your SEO. Pages that rarely show up in search results aren’t worth your time, for example.

Start by looking at certain criteria. Don’t bother with sites that have too many ‘spammy’ outbound links. Sites that have no valuable content are a waste of time as well.

Identify sites that receive heavy traffic. They should be sites that attract your target audience members. They should meet your standards before you start reaching out.

3. You Aren’t Reaching Out to Prospects Successfully

Reaching out to prospects is another time-consuming effort. You don’t know how website owners will respond, if at all. You have to craft the right message to produce any results.

Start by building an outreach list in Excel. You will need to craft a unique message for each website owner. Find email templates online for a framework to start.

Be prepared to follow up with website owners. Track your progress in your outreach list. Create rough templates for each type of follow up email, increasing urgency as you go.

Don’t make your messaging complicated. Highlight this as a mutually beneficial effort. But don’t hesitate to double down on sites where replacing the link is critical.

Identify your existing pages that will serve as great alternatives. You’ll want to offer something of value when you ask them to remove the link.

4. You Aren’t Sharing the Right Resources

Website owners come in different shapes. Realizing their link is bad, they might remove it immediately. But they need to be motivated by a better alternative.

Be prepared with a few recent options relevant to the previous subject. You can share them in one or across several emails. You can keep track of the new links you share in your outreach list.

Try to minimize the amount of rewriting they must do. If a small rewrite is necessary, offer a suggestion for the new text. The less effort you request of the website owner, the more likely you’ll see the results.

5. You Aren’t Recreating Content When Necessary

You may encounter stubborn website owners that won’t update your links. Perhaps some of these are critical to your success. It might fall upon you to recreate old content.

That means creating a new page to which the existing link directs traffic. You will have to populate the page with relevant content. That may require a simple update to your old content.

You should also begin engaging website owners from your list of desirable sites. As you fix old links, you need to acquire new ones.

No broken link building campaign will produce perfect results. But performing these occasionally is a great way to maintain the health of your website.

Partner with Link Building Professionals

Broken link building is a process for which many internal teams are not prepared. It is infrequent enough so that those capabilities aren’t in place when you need them. Adopting the right tools can help you overcome these challenges.

BackLinks.com has revolutionized link building campaigns for over a decade. We take the hassle out of link building using automated tasks for your team. Contact us for a free SEO consultation and get started on your next campaign today.

Search optimizers are a special breed of marketers. They have a knowledge of marketing, buyer’s psychology and back that up with technical wizardry to get websites ranked highly in search engines.

It’s not an easy feat, yet they do it for countless small businesses every day. Businesses invest at least $500 a month on quality SEO, meaning no shady tricks that you might be penalized for later.

Do you want to know how a search optimizer works to make rankings rise?

Keep reading to find out how they work and why you need to hire one.

Why Is Search Optimization Important?

Search engine optimization, when done well, can be a boon for business. Let’s put it this way:

• 75% of users never click past the first page of search results.
• Leads from SEO have a 14% close rate vs. 1.7% for traditional ads.
• 60% of website traffic goes to the first three search results.

Having your company on the first page can turn into more traffic, more leads, and more revenue. That makes the investment in SEO worthwhile.

When SEO is done poorly, the consequences can be severe. Google can penalize your website, making it drop in rankings or disappear altogether.

When you hire a search optimizer, you want to be crystal clear that they use white hat SEO strategies. Here’s what else a top-notch search company will do for you.

Know Your Marketing Strategy

The first step to search engine optimization is to understand how it fits into your marketing strategy. Search optimizers will take the time to learn about your target market, what you do for them, and your marketing messages.

You’ll be asked who your competition is, how you’re marketing your business and what’s currently working in your marketing.

These questions will help the SEO pro to research keywords and your competition in the next steps.

Search Optimizers Will Perform an SEO Audit

An SEO audit is an in-depth look at your website from a technical perspective and from a user perspective.

An SEO audit ensures that any work performed on your website is done on a solid foundation. The search optimizer will make sure that search engines can find your website. They’ll also check how fast your website is.

Search optimizers will look at each individual page to see how they are structured and written. They’ll look at keywords, potential pitfalls as to why your page isn’t ranking highly.

Competition Research

Competition research is important to understand what you’re up against to rank your site. This type o research includes the keywords your competition ranks for, what their backlinks are, and how their site is structured.

This type of research also reveals where the opportunities are and discover keywords that your competition missed out on.

Keyword Research

Keyword research takes all the information from the first three steps to determine potential keywords. Those keywords are researched to determine the level of competition and the amount of traffic that keyword gets.

You want to hit the sweet spot between a search term that gets a good amount of traffic but doesn’t have a lot of competition.

For example, if you want to rank for fitness, you’ll find there is a huge amount of competition and traffic. If you drill down to a niche like suspension training for fitness, you’ll find that search term hits the sweet spot.

Internal Link Structure

If you have a website that’s been around for a while, you may have a lot of pages. Search optimizers decide what the most important pages are on your site and make sure they’re getting link juice.

That lets Google know that those pages are important pieces of content on your site. Google will then give those pages priority in search results.

Create Backlinks to Your Site

If you want to rank highly in SERPs, you need backlinks.

The first is that quality is much more important than quality. Backlinks are weighted according to domain authority.

The higher domain authority, the more weight a backlink from that site will have. The more weight a backlink has, the higher you can appear in search results.

What do you think has more weight, a link from a mom and pop shop around the corner, or a link from The New York Times?

The second thing is that blackhat backlinks don’t work. These tactics include duplicate content, commenting and adding links in forums and other blogs, and keyword stuffing.

The best SEO companies know this and will optimize your site accordingly.

Provide Content Direction

A search optimizer has put a lot of time into your website already. This is next step ensures that once people get to your website, they’ll stay because the content is interesting to readers.

They’ll come up with article ideas based on the keywords found in the research phase. Some search professionals will write the content for you or give you specific instructions so you can write the content yourself.

If your company serves a specific geographic area, the search optimizers will make sure that your content includes local references.

They’ll look to see if your traffic is coming from mobile devices or desktop computers. Then, they’ll make sure the content and the website are optimized for users.

Stay on Top of Trends

Google changes its algorithm between 500-600 times every year. That’s a lot of changes to keep up with. Search optimizers live and breathe SEO, and it’s their job to keep up with all of these changes.

They’ll keep up with trends in content marketing and social media. That gives you an advantage and increases your chances to improve your search rankings.

Hire Search Optimizers to Grow Your Business

Search optimizers wear a lot of hats from marketing to web programming. The level of expertise required to perform high-quality SEO work is huge.

That’s especially true when it comes to building backlinks for your website. Backlinks.com has over 10 years of experience working with businesses to build quality backlinks that get results.

Contact us today for a free SEO consultation.

Are you curious about what text links can really do for your website?

In the realm of digital marketing and site optimization, you may be thinking that links are seriously overrated. Maybe you’ve heard the text link hubbub but aren’t even sure what text links are.

On a fundamental level, text links are fairly straightforward. They are links incorporated within your web content that can send users to other web content.

Internal text links send users to other parts of your website, while external links send them elsewhere.

In general, search engine experts definitely recommend building text links into your overall digital strategy. Read on to learn why a link building strategy is central to your business’s overall success.

1. They Work With Your SEO Strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is dominating the digital marketing sphere, for good reason. It presents an easy and cost-effective way to rise to the top of search listings for certain keywords or phrases.

When your website is search engine optimized, you’ll have a greater chance of getting spotted on Google search results and gaining more customers.

Text links are key because they work directly with this strategy. You can create internal links, for example, whose anchor text is optimized for local and global searches.

When SEO and linking work together on your website, you’re harnessing your own marketing power double-time.

2. Link Building Helps You Hone Content

Text links present an easy way for users to bounce around your web content. A user reading a blog post on the intelligence of llamas, for example, may be directed to another blog post on animal IQ in the same post.

In this way, text links help you build the right content. You don’t want oversaturated pages with links and keywords, but you don’t want them to be few and far between, either.

Search engine experts recommend using text links as a way to distribute your content on your website. They can help you write efficient and purposeful content and eliminate anything that is redundant.

Writing relevant and honed content will, by extension, boost your SEO and authority in search listings.

3. Text Links Give You Authority

SEO is a fantastic strategy to boost your reputation as a reliable site according to Google’s guidelines.

Text links similarly will give you ranking authority. Building the right links means increasing your brand visibility through local searches and other digital means. Effective external linking will show Google that your site is worthy of attention and a good authority for a keyword or phrase.

4. Establish the Importance of Pages

Text links give you the opportunity to portion out content on your website based on what is most critical. For example, you can prioritize high-quality content by building the right external links, and let secondary content appear through internal linking.

Establishing the relationship between your pages will let you bring more visitors to your most important pages. As a result, you’ll get traffic where you want to get traffic and still have the option to send users to other informative pages.

5. Spread the Love of Authority

If you feel as if some of your pages aren’t getting as much authority as others, you can use links as a way to spread the love.

You can boost traffic to a less authoritative blog post, for example, by talking it up through text links in another, higher quality post. You can essentially even out the authority on web content so that visitors get an even chance to access all pages.

Search engine experts recommend using text links as an essential form of website building and as a way to ensure your site gets the authority it deserves.

6. Retain Users and Help Them Navigate

At the end of the day, site optimization strategies are all about the user. The more you can keep your user at the fore of your web development, the greater your site’s odds are for gaining and retaining traffic.

Search engine experts love text links because they really prioritize user experience.

Internal text links can keep users on your site for a longer amount of time. They can present an easy form of navigation and guide a user through a process or train of thought.

Links can optimize user experience so that you can get more conversions on leads and reap the benefits of high traffic.

7. Search Engine Experts Recommend the Pros

If you really want to make sure your link building strategy is on point, it’s worth it to consult a professional.

Link building services can help you hone your content, identify the right keywords and phrases for your anchor texts, and build page authority. You’ll even be able to optimize your SEO strategy along the way.

Professionals will also enable you to sell and purchase text links to ensure an ongoing return of your link building strategy. Clients can become affiliates in order to bring in some marketing revenue.

Reasons Search Engine Experts Recommend Text Links

Text links are an essential component of digital marketing strategies, no matter what business you operate. Search engine experts recognize the value of links in terms of what it can do for your conversion rates and search listing rankings.

Text links optimize the user experience of your website by creating easy navigation and keeping users on your site longer. They go hand in hand with SEO strategies and boost your site’s authority in Google’s eyes. Text links can help you build the right content and bring your users to your highest quality pages.

At the end of the day, reach out to a professional backlinking service to ensure that you are maximizing the power of text links.

At BackLinks.com, we’ve been in the link building industry for over a decade, and continue to keep our clients happy. Purchase and sell quality backlinks and even earn money as an affiliate.

Let us help you find the perfect text links to send your site to the top of search listings. Contact us today to learn more about buying links!

When it comes to SEO, keyword research is only half the battle. Keywords help search engines determine the relevance of your site to a particular query. To evaluate your site’s credibility, search engines rely on backlinks.

That said, savvy SEO developers know that they must be careful in their approach to link building. Bad SEO strategies like stuffing your site with low-quality links can quickly backfire. In some cases, they can actually hurt your search engine rankings.

If you need a backlink booster that won’t penalize your website, you’ve come to the right place. Here are the top tips for building links that will actually boost your site’s rankings.

Why Backlinks are So Important

The importance of backlinks is rooted in Google’s algorithm. Google uses spider bots to crawl through every page on the internet and to index these pages. The algorithm uses information about how often a page is linked to in order to determine the page’s importance.

In addition to the number of links to your site that exist, Google also considers the quality of the links. Links that come from higher quality pages are given more weight than links from low-quality pages.

In other words, the goal of any backlink booster should be to increase the number of high-quality pages that link to your site.

Anatomy of a Quality Link

To start an effective backlink booster for your website, you need to know what a high-quality link looks. Search engine algorithms look at three factors to determine a link’s quality: relevance, authority, and transfer.

Good links are relevant to the page they appear on. For instance, if you are developing a website for a craft beer company, a link from a tax attorney’s website would not be relevant.

A page’s authority can only be built over time. Getting links to your site from pages with high authority will help boost your own authority over time.

Transfer refers to the ability of a search engine to follow a link. Links must be DoFollow links so that the search engine can follow it to your site.

Publishing Great Content

So how can you get relevant, authoritative, transfer links to your site? The first step is developing great content on your site. The better content you publish on your site, the more other sites will want to link to you.

Write blog posts on topics that folks in your audience will want to read and share. Best of lists, profiles, and tutorials are all examples of types of blog posts that tend to generate traffic. If you have the resources, developing original research related to your industry can also build excitement around your site.

When you write blog posts, make sure to mention other websites that you respect. Linking to their page will catch their attention, and may prompt them to link back to your site. Publishing an interview with someone well-regarded in your field can be a good way to promote links to another site.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to distribute the content you produce. By sharing content, you can expose it to more people, and increase the chances of earning links.

Additionally, linking back to your page on your social media profile will count as a backlink to your site. For this reason, it’s crucial to always link back to your home page on your social media profiles.

The best backlink booster social media networks depend on your business and audience. For instance, LinkedIn is a good choice for professional companies, while Twitter and Instagram work better for small, local businesses.

Guest Posts

Writing guest content is a great way to get publicity for your site. With guest posts, you can leverage the popularity of another site to drive traffic to your own site.

If you are just starting to build your backlink strategy, article directories can be a good choice to get you started. That said, always be careful when choosing a directory. A low-quality directory can actually hurt your rankings.

Choosing a directory that is relevant to your specific industry can be a good way to improve the link’s relevance. For instance, Slashdot caters to IT businesses, while GrowthHackers is for digital marketers.

If you have a relationship with other professionals in your industry, you can send out emails pitching guest posts. This can be a good way to take advantage of connections you already have and to generate higher quality links.

Get Networking

It may surprise you to learn that one of the best ways to generate quality backlinks is to get out from behind your computer. Attending networking events in your area for folks in your industry can help you build your reputation.

Make sure to join local business organizations in your area. The local Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau are good resources for new businesses to meet other entrepreneurs.

When folks know who you are, they’ll be more likely to link to your page or to publish a guest post for you. You might even be able to develop a relationship where you become a regular contributor on a colleague’s blog.

Online Forums

One of the main reasons people get online is to research answers to questions. If you are an expert in your field, chances are you have answers that people are looking for.

Answering user questions can be a great backlink booster. Sites like Quora catalog questions on a variety of topics, while forums usually include discussions on specific topics. Presenting yourself as an authority on these sites can be a great way to generate links and drive traffic.

Get the Backlink Booster You Need Today

With these tips in hand, you will soon be on your way to building links that boost your site’s online presence. Building strong links will help you to start achieving the rankings you’re looking for.

Looking for more ways to get a backlink booster for your site? Then contact us. Our proven software will help automate your link building strategy.

Effective link building results in powerful link equity and prominence in search. This remains the gold standard of the SEO world.

Although black hat pre-Penguin tactics have effectively been eradicated, links are still as important as ever – though link farms won’t get you very far.

We know that link building is time-consuming, but are you getting the most out of your new and existing links?

Make sure you stay on the front page of Google: here are 5 advanced strategies to ensure your link equity isn’t diminishing over time.

1. Make Sure Old URLs Aren’t 404’ing

There are few things which frustrate people on the Internet more than broken links. But it’s such an easy thing to fix.

The dreaded 404 error will soon be followed by their departure from your website — almost inevitably. And if search engines find lots of dead links, it’s likely you’ll be punished in the search rankings.

This is to do with internal linking structures within your site. If you’ve updated or replaced pages, old links will stop working.

You need to set up an effective redirect to make sure people still find the content they’re being promised. Or, go and fix the individual broken URLs by replacing them with the new destination link.

2. Fix Broken Redirects

If you’ve migrated a website, it’s perfectly possible that there’s not just a problem with 404 links.

Broken redirects can sometimes happen simply because the site has been around for a while, with no migration.

Every time a URL changes, there is a chance for links to break, and for redirects to break. For example, if I change the name of a page for a second time — after building one redirect — I might break that redirect. Broken links will only frustrate people.

Use a decent analytics tool to identify broken redirects on your domain, and get to work on fixing them. It’s not a particularly exciting task, but it’s vital!

3. Don’t Forget About Content Quality!

If you have good content, your link equity is likely to be much stronger than someone without this asset on their side.

To get inbound links for your website, you have to create something that people care enough to link to. That’s easier said than done.

This content can come in many forms – video, audio, plain old text. It doesn’t matter, in theory, but the more shareable the content the better.

An entertaining, light-hearted video is likely to go further than a serious, text-heavy blog, for example.

Of course, formats which work well for some will be less effective for others. If a light-hearted video doesn’t work in your niche, it’s certainly possible to create great serious content which is still shareable.

Just remember to always offer your users something of value. For example, this might be teaching them something new, offering business strategy advice, or giving them money saving tips. It should be something interesting which they’ll actively want to pass on to their friends and colleagues.

4. Cross-Promote With Other Sites

Make sure you’re milking your website for as many backlinks as possible. Actively reaching out to other websites is a good way to make these links happen.

This process can be explained in three basic stages.

Firstly, you need great content (see number 3). Without this, you’re scuppered. No one will link to a site that they don’t see as being valuable in some way.

Secondly, you need to scout out allies. For the best results, you should specifically target websites covering similar topics and interests to the content you’re pushing.

The more authoritative the website, the better the link equity from there. So a link from, say, NBC or Forbes, being large and well-known websites, will be much more powerful than a link from your local grocery store.

But don’t discount the local grocery store either! All links matter, and you have to be a pragmatist — it’s far more difficult to convince a powerful website to link to yours. Fight for the ones you can get, rather than wasting your time in dead ends.

Thirdly, contact your new potential allies. Make them see the value in your content. If you’ve made good content, this will be easier. If the answer is a hard ‘no’, don’t be discouraged – there are plenty of other websites out there!

If they’re not so convinced, suggest a link exchange rather than a straight-up favor. If other websites can see the value for their own SEO in the relationship, this might close the deal.

5. Resurrect Dead Back Links

A hard-won link on a major website will give you no joy at all if it’s broken.

So the last thing you want after putting all the effort of link-building in is for your links to be killed off when another webmaster makes changes to their own site.

We suggest keeping a spreadsheet of key links you’ve built up over the years, and every so often making sure someone is checking that they’re still working.

If they’re not, email the other company and give them a new link. Most people will be glad you’ve done this, as you’ve actually also helped to fix a 404 error which users may attribute to their site.

You get your link back, improving your link equity – and their site has one less glitch. Everybody wins.

In fact, while you’re doing them a favor, why not suggest to them that they might like to link to that brand new article which you posted today?

Improve Your Link Equity Today

Link equity is the fuel that runs most SEO strategies. Keywords and good technical structure is all well and good, but without good links you’ll flounder.

When we talk about link building, we’re not talking about old school link farms. Those don’t work – don’t be tempted by anyone who tells you otherwise.

Why not get in touch for a free link building consultation, to see how we can help you on your journey to success?

We’ll throw in some more general advice about your SEO strategy too. Can’t beat a deal like that!

Not all search engine optimization campaigns are created equal. It’s entirely possible for SEO efforts to actually work against a site’s position on the search engine results pages.

The thing is, since SEO is complicated, ever-changing, and can take time to work, a lot of growing businesses trust in their SEO efforts too blindly.

Do you think your SEO campaign could be hurting your site traffic? If so, the faster you can turn it around, the better.

Read on for several ways you can spot a bad SEO campaign. It covers SEO basics that will help you understand if your optimization efforts are working for or against you.

How To Spot a Bad SEO Campaign

You don’t have to be an expert to spot bad SEO. You just have to arm yourself with the following information.

It Has Got To Be Relevant

Search engines succeed by providing the most helpful information to their users. Your SEO campaign aims to tell search engines everything about your business so that your site pops up for relevant searches.

If your SEO campaign is too broad, you could be losing traffic by the second.

Let’s say you’re a house painting company in Maine. You might think ranking for the keyword “painter” would be very helpful to your business.

However, it wouldn’t help you very much to rank for portrait artists in Alaska.

Make sure your SEO efforts are specific and focused on matching with searchers that are looking for what you actually sell.

You can figure out if you’re getting a lot of irrelevant traffic by analyzing your bounce rate.

Your bounce rate shows how many visitors leave your site after visiting only one page. This can clue you into an excess of site visitors looking for something you don’t offer.

A high bounce rate can also indicate if your site is too slow or otherwise off-putting. Speaking of…

Watch Your Page Load Speed

Page load speed is an important ranking factor for any site. Most internet users have a very short attention span and will hop off your site if it takes more than a second or two to load.

It’s not just the user experience that matters (although that is extremely important). Search engines also crawl your site pages for information, but only for an allotted time. If your pages are slow loading, search engines won’t know as much about what’s on your site.

Losing customers due to page load speed is totally preventable. Make sure you take notice if your site is becoming sluggish by using crawling software.

Keep It Ethical

Trying to cut the line by doing something unethical never ends well.

Search engines don’t like you trying to trick or cheat them, and they’ll penalize you if they catch you.

They see right through plagiarized content, falsified content (i.e. nonsensical repetition of a keyword), and black hat SEO techniques.

Basically, bad SEO would be doing anything in your SEO efforts that doesn’t involve producing quality, true, and relevant information. Google and other search engines will quickly catch on if your SEO efforts are against the rules.

Watch Your Audits

You should be auditing your site regularly to make sure that you’re not being targeted by the black hat SEO efforts of a competitor.

A negative SEO attack, such as one done by link spamming, can be detrimental to your ranking.

By regularly monitoring your link profile, you can see if there is any unusual or suspicious activity such as a huge spike in backlinks. It could be an attempt meant to devalue your domain or confuse search engines, plummeting your ranking.

The sooner you catch a negative SEO attack, the easier it will be to restore your site’s reputation.

Monitor Your Reviews

You’re probably aware that reviews play a role in your search engine rankings in addition to your overall reputation.

Be sure to monitor your reviews, especially on listings like Google My Business. If there is a sudden tsunami of negative reviews, you could be the victim of a targeted attack.

The good news is that Google My Business and similar directory listings offer you the ability to flag fake reviews. Report them right away to increase your chances of recovering your rightful reputation.

Verify Your SEO Advice

There are near endless sources on the internet claiming to have the best advice for your next SEO campaign. Even many popular articles have conflicting information. It’s easy to see that there’s no way they could all be right.

In fact, a 2016 study found that 59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked. So 6 out of 10 of your friends are “endorsing” information they haven’t read, much less verified.

So how do you spot what’s actually good information about SEO?

It’s about two things: accuracy and age. Accuracy can be hard to spot if you’re not an expert, but you can look for the age of the information easily.

Even if we assume that every single SEO article had accurate information at the time of publishing (which isn’t the case), the information could be out of date because of an update to search engine algorithms.

Always check when the article was published and assume most SEO information that is several years old is probably out of date. The SEO tricks of 2010 won’t work the same way today!

It is crucial that whoever runs your SEO regularly checks in with trustworthy sources of information about updates to search engine algorithms and SEO trends.

Need Better SEO?

Now that you have a better understanding of some SEO factors that can work for and against you, you’re probably excited to put good SEO to the test.

A key part of every successful SEO campaign is building quality backlinks.

Building backlinks is essentially advertising your site on other websites with significant domain authority. This makes your site look great in the eyes of search engines.

Backlinks.com has been doing quality business for over 10 years. Sign up today to start getting the links you need to actually improve your rankings on the search engine results pages!

In The Secret to Getting Authority Backlinks, we listed the ways you can get natural backlinks. One of those ways is reaching out to influential content creators. Influential content creators can mean industry leaders, journalists, or bloggers who have the authority to shape public or industry opinion.

Here, we’ll go into detail about how you can get high authority backlinks from bloggers.

Ask the Right Way

It’s a given that you should ask nicely. But how do you go about asking bloggers for high authority backlinks? Do you send them an email, tweet them or message them on Facebook?

If you want the safest and most professional option, go with email. But don’t send a form letter. Spend some time drafting an email that makes the recipients feel like you did your homework.

One way to do this is to talk a bit about a recent post they published or a specific topic they covered in their blog. You can then tell them how much you enjoyed their work. But don’t overdo it with the flattery.

You should also be clear about why you emailed them in the first place. Don’t heap on the praises, wait for them to thank you, and ask for a link. Your initial email should have covered that already and sending multiple emails will look like you’re spamming them.

Be Creative

Don’t assume that just because you’ve been leaving insightful comments, the bloggers you’ve been following will automatically give you high authority backlinks. It’s a good start for cultivating a relationship with them but it’s not enough.

In addition to fine-tuning your email outreach, you have to be creative. Lucky for you, there are tried and tested ways to do that.

You can tap specific bloggers (related to your niche or industry of course) who review products and services. You can also interview and be interviewed by others. Another way is to regularly write statistics posts, which bloggers can use as a source.

If you want to ramp up your efforts, try writing testimonials. You could also speak at events, do something newsworthy such as holding a charity event and look into using tools such as HARO.

Go Over Your List

Now you may be wondering why this isn’t the first tip listed. But hear us out. If your list is all high-profile bloggers, you might be missing out on some great opportunities.

For one thing, A-list bloggers frequently receive similar requests. You have to entertain the possibility that no matter how well your email was drafted, your request for a link can still be declined. In this case, you have to move on to something else.

If you go after mid-tier bloggers, you have a better chance of increasing your visibility. Coverage from five or more mid-tier blogs is certainly better than one post from a top blog.

Plus, if your product or service consistently get featured on smaller blogs, in time, larger blogs will pick up the story. After all, it would look bad if they are the only ones in your niche not covering your story.

Be a Good Guest Blogger

Getting high authority backlinks is just one of the benefits of guest blogging. By doing guest posts, you establish yourself as an authority in the industry and you also get more traffic back to your site.

But there’s quite a leap from wanting to guest post and finding the perfect guest blogging opportunities. You can’t just produce content for any blog. It has to be a blog related to your niche or industry and it has to have an established following (also on social media).

If you’ve already compiled a list to guest post on, great! Now you can prepare your pitch.

Take note, however, that blog owners may have different guest posting guidelines. Your best bet, of course, is to follow these rules closely.

Don’t submit an idea when the guidelines say to submit a full post. Write in the format they want the post in and make sure your pitch includes why you would be a great guest blogger.

Try the Broken Links Method

Do you want an easy way to get a blogger’s attention? Let him or her know that there are broken or outdated links on his/her site.

Don’t worry, this won’t make you look obnoxious. Serious bloggers know that harmful backlinks can affect their SEO rankings. You’re actually doing them a favor by letting them know.

But don’t just stop there. You’ll get more mileage by recommending other websites to replace those broken links. This is where you slip in a link to your own website.

A couple of tips. When you reach out to bloggers using this tactic, don’t make it seem like they owe you for doing this. Be friendly and helpful by providing the exact location of the broken links.

Let the Pros Handle It

Getting high authority backlinks is doable. But as you could see from the tips already mentioned, it takes some time and effort.

If you have other tasks on hand that you want to devote more resources to, you should consider link building services. Quality ones know blog relations, link baiting, and other tactics that can help you secure those high-quality links.

You also don’t have to worry about them linking irresponsibly. They have all the right tools at their disposal. And believe us, some of those tools don’t come cheap.

Take advantage of their catalog of industry contacts and get those high-quality backlinks without breaking a sweat.

Need Help Getting High Authority Backlinks?

We’ve been doing link building for over a decade. Our software has helped more than 100,000 of pros with buying and selling links. If you’re looking for the most trusted name in the industry, look no further than BackLinks.com.

No matter what your niche or industry is, we have a huge inventory of high DA sites to place your links in. Or you can automate the process with customizable link queues.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about link buying and SEO. You may also browse our blog for more information on link building.

People are now watching one billion hours of videos on YouTube every day. We’ve all fallen down the YouTube “rabbit hole,” losing hours of time after intending to watch a single video. But did you know that YouTube backlinks can give you as a serious boost in the search rankings?

Many people are still ignoring the incredible link building strategies waiting on YouTube. It’s easy to consider YouTube as “just video marketing” or a good place for “brand exposure.” Unfortunately, this means they’re missing out on a massive link building opportunity.

Luckily, this post will cover everything you need to know about YouTube backlinks. Let’s get started.

Building Links on YouTube

Building links on YouTube can seem complicated at first glance. But with a little practice, you’ll be a pro in no time. Here’s how to get started:

Keyword Research

By now, you probably know that anything in SEO begins with keyword research. And YouTube SEO is no different.

Your aim is to look for keywords that have results from YouTube on the first page of Google. These are known as Video Keywords.

In general, the search engine will use video results for the following keywords:

• Funny videos (“Charlie bit my finger”)
• Sports and fitness related (“Tae Kwon Do videos”)
• Tutorials (“How to curl your hair with a straightener”)
• Reviews (“Hostgator review”)
• How-to keywords (“How to train a puppy”)

Why is this so important?

If you optimize your video around keywords that don’t have any video results within Google, you’ll only be getting traffic from people who search on YouTube. But if you optimize your video for Video Keywords, you can snag a whole lot of targeted traffic to your videos straight from the first page of Google.

How do you Find Video Keywords?

The first step is to simply look for keywords in your chosen niche. Then you can see if those keywords have video results on Google.

Next, you need to check if enough people are searching for that particular keyword. Look for one that’s getting at least 300 searches a month, which will mean it would also be getting plenty of searches within YouTube.

The goal is to get that video to rank well in Google so that those 300 people searching for your keyword will choose your video. That will mean that your video will be getting high-quality traffic which can be passed on to your website.

Create the Best Possible Video

The more effort you put into creating your videos, the more you’ll get out of them. If your videos stink, they won’t rank- regardless of how well you optimize them for SEO.

YouTube judges the quality of your videos based on how many people are interacting with them.

These metrics include:

• Video retention (how many people watch)
• Comments (how many people are engaging)
• Subscribing after watching (a signal that your video is useful)
• Shares (on social media sites)
• Favorites (people adding it to “watch later” or favoriting it)
• Thumbs up/down

Longer videos rank the best on YouTube. If you have something interesting to say, don’t worry about it being too long. Aim for at least five minutes.

Upload with YouTube SEO

Here’s how to make the most of YouTube backlinks with your video:

Filename

Use your keyword in your video’s filename. For example, if you’re aiming to rank for “meal prep recipes,” you’ll name your YouTube video meal_prep_recipes_video.mp4.

Title

This should be at least five words long. That way you can use your full keyword while avoiding keyword stuffing. Put your keywords at the beginning of your title for a slight SEO boost.

Description

This is hugely important. YouTube and Google can’t yet “listen” to your videos, which is why they rely on this description. They use it to determine the content of your videos.

Put your YouTube backlinks to your site at the very top of your video. This will maximize your click-through rate.

Make sure you include your keyword within the first 30 words of your description. Aim to include your keyword at least 4-5 times, and write at least 250 words for your description. This will tell YouTube and Google what your video is about without looking like spam.

Tags

Tags also help show Google and YouTube what your videos are about. They help you rank for your keywords, and help you show up as a related video in the sidebar on the right-hand side.

Using Annotations for YouTube Backlinks

Another place you can use backlinks for your website? In the YouTube Annotations.

These are little boxes that pop up while a viewer is watching your video. Use a compelling call-to-action and add your website, and you’re likely to see a huge increase in visitors for that page.

It’s often a good idea for the presenter to draw attention to the annotation when it pops up. Tell your viewers what the link is for, and let them know why they should click on it.

Using YouTube Cards for Backlinks

These are different from annotations in a big way: They work on mobile devices. This can make a massive difference to your clickthrough rate since so many people use their smartphones and tablets to watch YouTube videos.

Walmart uses YouTube cards incredibly well. They use a little “i” icon (for information) in the top right corner of their videos. When you click on that button, a “more info” button appears. These clickable links lead to the landing pages on the Walmart website for the items shown in the video.

If you do this well, with compelling images and links leading back to your site, you’re likely to see a massive increase in your visitors for those pages.

Wrapping Up

Ready to get started with your YouTube backlinking strategy? It doesn’t need to be complicated. Simply create an interesting video, choose the right keywords, use SEO effectively, and make the most of annotations and cards.

Have you been making the most of the backlinking opportunities available on YouTube? Get in touch to learn how we can help you get high-quality backlinks for your website.