Why links are important

One of the key factors Google and other search engines use to determine whether your site ranks is the presence of links pointing to it. An abundance of high-quality, trustworthy external links that are relevant to your site are evidence to Google that visitors find your site useful. It is, therefore, in your best interest to earn and attract links to your site.

High-quality links are relevant to your own website. Google expects to see links that are natural; for example, if your site is about hair care products, it would be natural for hair styling sites to link to yours, but it would not be natural for a tractor company to link to you — see the difference?

In addition to relevance, reputation also matters. The more reputable a site is, the better. For example, a respected news site like CNN will provide a stronger link than the average personal blog. In other words, CNN has a higher PageRank than the blog. You can read more about how to identify quality links in Chapter 4 of this minibook.

Why links are dangerous

Not all links are created equally — and bad links, in fact, can do more harm than good. While good links increase your PageRank, bad links (links that are reciprocal, incestuous, or come from link farms, web rings, and bad neighborhoods) do quite the opposite. (Read more about all these types of dangerous links in Chapter 4 of this minibook).

Google can detect when you have bad links. Google can take away the link’s PageRank as well as the link and domain equity/authority, and won’t pass on any link value to your page. Google won’t count the bad incoming link, and if it suspects that you’re doing something sneaky and devious with it, it even penalizes you for it. The penalty could be as simple as removing all the link equity of your site, or you could have your rankings reduced on the results page. Google may even remove your page or your entire site from its index. Ouch! We’ve stated this before, but dishonesty (like crime) never pays.

Bad or spammy links are links that exist solely to manipulate ranking and PageRank — and if it appears your site has them, Google will lower your rankings.

It’s best to play on the safe side and never do anything to confuse or deceive the search engines. The easiest way for a search engine to catch you doing something wrong is to look like you are doing something wrong.

Complementary subject relevance

Complementary subject relevance links come from a site that has similar content to yours. The site’s content might not relate exactly to your site’s content, but its subjects and themes are close enough to be complementary. If you have a classic car customization site and you receive a link from a website devoted to classic car enthusiasts, this is a complementary link. Your site discusses something that the other site also discusses, and that site has declared your site to be worth reading. This kind of link is worth more than a link from, say, Harry’s House of Hamsters.

It doesn’t matter whether the link from the hamster site has great anchor text (the text that is the outgoing link). The search engine will read the surrounding text around the link on the hamster site, the overall content of the page, and the content of the site itself, and the search engine will figure out that this is a site about hamsters, and hamsters don’t really have anything to do with classic cars (unless, of course, instead of horsepower, your car runs on “hamster” power).

When the search engine notes that the site linking to yours doesn’t have a whole lot of relevance to your subject, it will say that the link is not a quality link, and the link is not going to add anything to your overall link equity. It also doesn’t matter whether the page linking to your site has relevance. If the linking site has a page devoted to mesothelioma (the cancer caused by asbestos) but the rest of the site is about peanut butter, the mesothelioma page just looks crammed in there. It dilutes that site’s theme and might raise a red flag with the search engines.

Figure 3-1 illustrates the power of sites that link to your site. The numbers are on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the least relevant and 10 being the most — and the higher the number, the more that link adds to your link equity.

The circle in the middle is your classic car site. The circle with the 1 is Harry’s House of Hamsters: It bears very little relevance to your site, so it carries very little weight. The circle with the 8 is a link to a large, official auto-trading website. Because it is a large, official website with a lot of expertise on its own and it has relevance to your site, the worth of the link goes up. (Note: We use these numbers simply to represent varying weights given by relevance — we're not referring to PageRank at all here.)

Then there’s the –2 poker site that has linked to you. The poker site comes from a spammy, spammy industry, used to shady doings and basically being a headache for the search engines. Having a link from one of those sites not only gives you no link equity but also might actually cause your site to get flagged for review if you have a lot of these kinds of shady backlinks. By associating with one of these sites, you make it easy for the search engines to assume that you are doing something shady, too. Although Google says that almost nothing someone else does can harm your site, that doesn't mean that there's absolutely nothing at all. Don't sweat a few bad links coming to you, but do your best to work on acquiring links from quality sites only.

The links you need to be attracting are the kind that have relevance to your industry. Remember, link equity comes from how much of an “expert” in your subject you are, and the more people with similar content link to your site, the more of an expert you are.

Expert relevance reinforcement

Experts naturally link to other experts. If you are an expert in your field, you are naturally going to be linking to other experts in your field. It’s like a Nobel Prize–winning physicist name-dropping another Nobel laureate in economics, as opposed to a kid who won his school science fair.

Experts require validation from their peers. When scientists publish a science paper in a journal, they expect other scientists to go out and test the published theory on their own, in order to receive validation from these other scientists. The same is true for websites. If an expert website discusses you on its own site and then provides a link to you, claiming you as another expert, that just reinforces what you say on your own site.

To put it another way, if the biggest, baddest, classic car customization site on the whole Internet has a link and a section describing you and linking to your site, that means a lot more than your brother’s very small classic car site giving you a link.

Quality testimonial links

In the preceding sections, we discuss three kinds of linking sites in this chapter — the good, the bad, and the really ugly:

• The good: The expert industry site; a big-name classic-auto trading site that links to your classic-car customization site, for instance
• The bad: A site that really has no overall relevance to your subject (such as the hamster site linking to the classic car site)
• The ugly: The spammy, spammy poker site that offers nothing of value and only makes you look bad

But there is one type of link that is considered the best of them all: the testimonial link.

A testimonial link is a link that appears in a paragraph in the context of a lot of relevant information and then points to you as another resource of information. The topic of the linking site as a whole needs to relevant to your site. Say that a site that sells parts for car restoration has a post describing how to properly customize classic cars. The site then provides a link to your site, as in the following example. Note that the text classic car customization business serves as the anchor for a link back to www.classiccarcustomization.com.

There are many classic car customization businesses out there, but for the best, you have to check out Bob's Classic Car Customization, which has tons of resources for restoring and customizing every kind of classic Ford, Chevy, and ’50s hot rod on the planet. Check out its gallery of restorations for some cool, classic autos.

A testimonial link is worth a whole lot of link equity and is one of the best kinds of links you can receive when it’s from a related site. Just be sure that it doesn’t come from any sites that practice the worst practices for linking that we outline in the “How Not to Obtain Links” section at the end of this chapter.

Link equity is always important to keep in mind when you’re vetting external links. One good testimonial-grade link is worth a lot more than a hundred decent links or a thousand bad links. Link equity through a testimonial link is the highest grade of link equity possible.

Generating link magnets

Remember playing with magnets as a kid and marveling at how the one magnet pulled the other to it by some invisible force? That law of natural attraction is the Holy Grail of link building — an ideal link is obtained when Internet users can’t help but link to your page because it’s worth sharing. This is the driving concept behind the link magnet. Link magnets are typically creative web applications, tools, how-to guides, reference materials, or any information that is unique and valuable to users. In a similar vein, link bait is content created for the purpose of attracting attention and links. The difference between the two is that a link magnet is for the purpose of attracting relevant links, whereas link bait is mostly good for short-term traffic. Rarely, link bait can translate into long-term links, but that’s only if you have good content to go along with the video or blog or other tantalizing things you’ve just released.

Generating information, applications, tools, or ideas that people talk about is a surefire way to generate links: This is the benefit of a link magnet. Developing an idea for a link magnet takes some dedicated brainstorming and creative thought, as well as a good understanding of your target audience and what they might find useful or even humorous. For example, research that generates data or insights into the differences between competing services might be highly valued by a technology audience.

Creative insight that grabs everyone's attention and generates discussion is what you’re after. When you come up with an idea, actual construction of the link magnet may also require hard work, although some link magnets can be developed with little effort. Articles and videos are two types of content that can perform well as link magnets.

Spreading the word through social media and press releases

If you’ve created a link magnet or posted valuable content to your site, you need to let people know about it. The saying “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t necessarily apply to your link magnets. Get your article, resource, video, or interactive application in front of people.

Of course, you should link to your article on your website, but you also need to spread the word to other websites. Social media is a great way to do that. One way to spread the word is by using social share buttons on your articles that allow people who view the content to share the page to their social media profile, — whether Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+ — by simply clicking a button on your page (read about adding social share buttons to your site in Book V, Chapter 7).

The purpose of attracting links to your content from social media sites is not just to get the link popularity from the links. After all, the benefit of these types of links is short-lived because news changes constantly. The real reward is that social media sites help generate traffic and awareness. Your goal is to spread the word about your article and get people to read it and want to share it with others by linking to it and discussing it. With luck, permanent and valuable links are built as a result.

Internet press releases are an effective and economical solution for distributing information to the public. After a press release is sent out through a third-party company, the information it contains is usually archived on that company’s website. Most of the companies that offer this service allow you to write your own content, including links to your site. This ensures that you acquire an inbound link that a reader can follow to learn more about you.

Press releases should be written once every couple months (minimum), discussing new services that are being offered, the latest deals available, and what is happening on your site in general. You can generate press releases for significant announcements or events worthy of a press release. A press release can also be used to help promote and bring awareness to your link magnet. For example, if you have created a chart or checklist as a link magnet, write an article that shows how helpful your chart, widget, illustration, or checklist can be and send out a press release announcing its launch and covering the main advantages.

You can do all your press release writing yourself, or you can hire a writing service to generate your release for you. It all depends on how confident you are in your ability to write for journalists. Good companies to use when distributing press releases include PR Newswire, eReleases, and Business Wire.

As with guest posting and paid advertising links (which you can read about later in this chapter), Google asks that links from press releases include a rel="nofollow" attribute. In July 2013, Google said that it treats links in press releases like paid links, and the search engine publicly discourages the practice of using press releases to build links for a search engine ranking boost. Google also suggests including only one link in a press release that points to a domain home page or About page to avoid being viewed as manipulative.

Here are some other tips for writing an article or press release:

• Avoid sounding like an ad. No one likes to read a press release that offers nothing more than a commercial. Gather quotes from relevant parties to support your assertions and work them into your text.
• Avoid promoting your company or product too much in articles. If your article seems too much like a sales pitch, people are less likely to read or link to it.
• Offer something new. Provide something new in your article. Avoid repeating the same information that may be online elsewhere.
• Use keywords in the title. The article should have a catchy headline that makes people want to read it but that also includes the keyword phrase you are targeting. Others will likely link to the article with the title, so including the main keyword phrases in the title can help you incorporate keyword-rich anchor text into the links.
• Avoid keyword stuffing. Use a natural writing style that appeals to your audience, and avoid overusing or “stuffing” keywords.
• Be truthful. Don’t use articles or link bait to lie to your visitors, because they will never return to your site if you can’t deliver something you promise.
• Tackle controversy. Don’t be afraid to tackle a controversial subject. Articles that cause people to think or want to debate the topic can make them more apt to want to post a link about it elsewhere.
• Always opt to use the exact phrase you are trying to optimize in your articles. If your keyword phrase is SEO training, it should appear right up front, not just in the title, but also in the first sentence and then throughout your text. Just as you do when optimizing a web page, you need to emphasize what you want people to consider to be the point of your article.

For more tips on writing effective press releases, visit www.bruceclay.com/blog/how-to-write-a-press-release/.

Guest posting

Guest posting refers to writing an article or blog for a website other than your own. As the name suggests, you're writing as a guest. Guest posting should be done on sites that are within your industry or niche. If you have a digital marketing agency, for example, guest posting on a PPC or web design blog would make sense. Guest posting for a cooking blog, on the other hand, would not make sense.

You benefit from guest posting, by getting in front of a new audience: You're providing high-quality content that potential customers will find useful. The next time they need your service, you will come to mind and earn business. Guest posting, then, is about expanding your audience and creating relationships with new readers. When a new audience sees your article, they may follow the link back to your site and engage with you further.

Guest posting should not be used as a tactic for increasing PageRank. In fact, any link that you include in a guest post should include rel="nofollow". In January 2014, Google cracked down on links in guest posts because many people were writing guests posts that offered no value and existed solely as a link to point back to their own site. Because of this, Google has taken a strong stance against guest posting for links. A single suspicious link in a guest post can lead to a fall in rankings, and in some cases it can even trigger a Penguin penalty. Your best bet is to include the rel="nofollow" attribute to any links in a guest post — better safe than sorry. (You'll learn more about using the rel="nofollow" attribute later in this chapter!)

Fostering relationships

Guest posting is actually one way to go about employing a larger strategy for building backlinks to your site, with that strategy being focused on fostering relationships. Think about this. The search engines’ continual goal to wipe out deceptive practices and shortcuts is really aimed at giving credit where it’s due. Search engines want to count links that happen because someone’s saying, “Hey, look at this! I really like it and you might, too!” Now consider something else: Who in the offline world is most likely to vouch for you? Your family, friends, and partners, of course! We’re talking about people who know you and have a relationship with you. The same principle holds true online. If you invest in your relationships with businesses, organizations, and individuals online, links will naturally follow as a result. Seek to create a network of supportive connections: You support what others do, and they return in kind. When you’ve created some valuable article or resource to share, give your online network a heads-up, and they may post links and happily share that content.

True relationship building is a very laborious process, so it makes sense to choose the right fit when you’re identifying whom to network with. The right fit will be enormously beneficial to both you and the other site because you’ll have similar goals, audiences, and topics of expertise in common.

As you look for people and websites to foster relationships with, you need to determine which sites are the best candidates. You may know of some off the top of your head; if so, great. If you don’t have a go-to list of networking targets and you want to get scientific about relationship building, you have a couple ways to go about it. One way is to use tools to identify influencers in your industry. An influencer is someone who has a good following and is respected online in a particular niche. Every industry has influencers, including yours, even if you aren’t already aware of them.

Many tools are available to help you discover who your industry’s influencers are. By the same token, your own industry may have forums, discussion boards, and private groups that tools won’t find and only true insiders will know about. But you can generally get started by looking at some of the most popular social watering holes, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Traffic Spy (www.trafficspyapp.com) is a desktop application for Windows and Mac that lets you enter your industry or keywords so that it can report back to you with the top content and people for those terms across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.

A tool that has in-depth analysis of Twitter influencers is Followerwonk (www.followerwonk.com). Figure 3-2 shows the results of a search for Twitter users with “classic cars” in the profile, arranged by number of followers. The tool also gives it a “Social Authority” score, a relative indicator of how influential that account is.

The other way to identify a business or person you want to build a relationship with is to research sites that link to the web pages that already rank for your keywords. Chances are that if the website has linked to your competitor, it might be a good candidate to start building a relationship with.

To discover what sites link to your competitors, follow these steps:

1. Identify your competition: Run a search on Google (or Yahoo or Bing) for your search terms, the keywords you’re trying to rank higher for.

2. Go through the results one at a time, opening the pages if you have to, to understand what kind of sites they are.

   If the page is a direct competitor or is not likely to link to your site, move on to the next URL in the results. (If the page isn’t a direct competitor, search for information on how to contact the site’s webmaster. These sites could be good backlink candidates, too.)

3. Make a list of the web pages (URLs) that rank well in your keyword search results page.

   These are your competitors.

4. After you identify your competition, find out who links to them by running your competitors’ URLs through the Link Analysis Report that’s available as a free tool on our SEOToolSet website (www.seotoolset.com/tools/free-tools/) or through another comparable tool.

   The paid version of the SEOToolSet has a competitive link analysis tool that compares six sites and their linking schemas that is also useful for this.

Look over the report, which shows external pages with backlinks to your competitor. Figure 3-3 shows a Link Analysis Report from the SEOToolSet free tools page that shows you sites that link to the sample page.

Here’s what you should look for as you review the various URLs shown on the report:

• Newness: If a page that appears on the report already links to your web page, examine the anchor text and see if it would be better to change it or even to point to a more relevant page on your site. If it's already a good link, ignore it. You want to find new candidates for backlinks.
• Relevancy: Make sure the content on the web page relates to your page content. You don’t want to obtain irrelevant links that won’t pass any link equity. Also, the page should not have dozens of links to non-related sites.
• Appropriateness: We get into this more in Chapter 4 of this minibook, but you don’t want links from bad neighborhoods. If the page is nothing more than a list of 100 random links with no content or theme, or full of paid ads, or looks spammy, or smells fishy … you don’t want any part of it.

When you’ve determined good websites and individuals to network with, you want to start interacting with them. Interactions can happen in many places, including in the comment section of that website’s blog and on social media networks. If you can subscribe to the blog RSS feed, do so, and read new blog posts and add your comments. The blog author will make note of you if she sees you in the comments section from time to time. You also want to search for that brand or individual on the popular social media sites. Follow the brand or person on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn (wherever the person is most active) and then like and favorite his posts, answer his questions, start discussions, and reshare his posts.

The end game in all of this is to strike up a true and mutually beneficial relationship for you and the other person or website. Then, when you have a link magnet of some sort that you think is relevant to the website or influencer, suggest that she consider visiting your cool chart, table, interactive tool, or other widget to see if she believes it would add value for her site visitors. You don’t have to ask for the link or share; if she likes your link magnet, she’ll make that decision on her own.

A share or link request should come only after a relationship is established. This may take a time, but there is no shortcut to a relationship and the value it can bring, whether in the form of links or otherwise. After all, you’re trying to start a business relationship that could have value in itself. In the best-case scenario, the other site’s webmaster gives you a backlink that lasts for a long time to come and may end up passing quality traffic to your site that goes beyond better rankings.

In all your interactions, you should seek to be genuine and human, show that you know what you are talking about, illustrate your expertise, and demonstrate your commitment to success for both parties. If you have a link magnet or valuable resource that you hope your network will share, consider how each website or individual in your network would react to a request and adjust your approach accordingly. In some cases, it might be appropriate to pick up the phone and call the webmaster or even visit the website’s offices in person. (Visit them in person after you've made phone or email contact, please: We don't want to encourage cyber-stalking!) It all depends.

Soliciting paid links for advertising

Obtaining a free link is not always possible. In those situations, you may want to come up with a plan to approach websites’ webmasters about direct advertising on their sites. In that case, you have to determine a price point that is acceptable to you and to the other site as well. In some instances, a partnership may be developed that benefits both parties. If an agreement for a paid link is secured, in whatever form that link takes — a text link or a link on a banner or display ad — you want to be sure that you include a rel="nofollow" attribute on the link.

When soliciting paid links, remember to do it only for the traffic or the advertising. Obtaining a paid link gives you no direct SEO benefit and soliciting a paid link in order to increase your ranking is definitely not recommended. Google hates that. A lot. But if you’ve decided to try to solicit some paid links for the advertising traffic, you need to properly evaluate the websites you are looking at in order to make sure that you get a quality link and don’t get ripped off.

First, check out the site and see how much traffic it gets. Also, take a good, hard look and determine whether the site uses spam techniques. If you think that it’s a good legitimate site, send that site’s webmaster a solicitation letter. Suggest a trial run for your ad; for example, you could pay the site for a month’s worth of advertising, and then you can check to see whether your site’s traffic has increased.

You have other methods of gauging or estimating traffic to a site before you purchase advertising. Most sites that are serious about selling ads have demographical and traffic data available. Sites such as Experian Hitwise (www.hitwise.com), comScore (www.comscore.com), Compete (www.compete.com), and Alexa (www.alexa.com) can give you some idea of what they can do for you.

One thing to monitor is the quality of the traffic that your advertisement is bringing you. Is it bringing you conversions or just a lot of traffic? Your ad might not be worth the money you spend on it if the traffic doesn’t bring you any conversions. Instead, you can wind up just paying for the ad and the extra fees when your server gets hammered by all the new traffic.