White-Hat Strategies vs. Black-Hat Strategies

You’ll often hear SEOs talking about “white-hat” and “black-hat” (or the questionable area in between, often dubbed “gray-hat”), particularly when it comes to link building techniques. This section will outline the differences and cover some of the pros and cons of each approach.

White-Hat Strategies

White-hat strategies are those that are very low-risk to carry out and usually fall well within the webmaster guidelines laid out by Google and Bing. Using white-hat techniques means that you stand very little chance of running into problems with the search engines when it comes to losing traffic because of a penalty. White-Hat Strategies vs. Black-Hat Strategies

A few examples of white-hat tactics are:•Creating your own unique, insightful, and quality content•Building a genuine, engaged community which interacts with your website and each other•Promoting your website to relevant people in a genuine, personal way by writing personalized message

Pros include not having to worry about getting yourself into trouble with automated or manual spam penalties from the search engines. White-hat strategies usually work best for real users, too, and can help build long-term assets that are strong and unlikely to disappear overnight.

Cons include having to focus on the long-term goal rather than short-term gains. White-hat strategies can sometimes take some time to have a big effect on your traffic and revenue because they are less aggressive.

Black-Hat Strategies

Originally coined as a term to describe computer hackers, black-hat has also been used to describe techniques that directly violate search engine guidelines. These techniques seek to exploit loopholes in the search engine algorithms and rank websites higher than they actually deserve to.

Cloaking•Showing different content to the search engines compared to what you show to users•Injecting hidden links into a website you do not own by exploiting a security flaw•Hidden text on a page that is only shown to the search engines, not users, typically full of keywords you want to rank for

These tactics don’t work in the long-term, because the search engines are always looking to stop them from happening. This means that traffic and rankings can drop pretty much overnight if you’re caught using these tactics, so we strongly advise steering clear.

Link Building Metrics

There are various metrics associated with links that you should be aware of. These metrics can help you judge the value of a potential link, helping you assess whether it is worth pursuing and how much resources you should put into acquiring it. Knowing these kinds of metrics is also useful when you are doing link profile analysis (a holistic report of the number and types of links on a website), whether on a competitor’s website or your own.

Domain Strength

Domain strength is the cumulative value of an entire domain. Instead of looking at the value of individual pages, we look at the domain as a whole to understand how strong it is.It is usually displayed as either Domain Authority or as the homepage’s Page Authority.PageRank is calculated by Google and based on the number and quality of links pointing to a web page. It runs on a scale from 0-10, with 10 being the highest. We can use the PageRank of a website’s homepage to get an idea of how strong it is. Although technically this is only the PageRank of a single page, it is still a good indicator of the strength of a domain, because the majority of a website’s links will be to the homepage and PageRank flows from there to internal pages.It should be noted that there is a difference between “Toolbar PageRank” and the actual PageRank used by Google. Toolbar PageRank is visible to you by installing the Google Toolbar on your browser or by using a browser plug-in/extension that pulls data from the same source. It is updated every 3-4 months by Google, which is different from the actual PageRank that is more fluid, constantly updated by Google to be fed into their ranking algorithm.

For that reason, the PageRank you see in the Google Toolbar could be several months old. This is why new web pages mainly have a PageRank score of 0: They need to wait for Google to update the toolbar.Domain Authority is calculated by Moz and runs on a scale of 0-100, with 100 being the highest. It uses a number of signals taken from the Moz crawler and tries to predict how well a domain will perform in search results. It is useful alongside PageRank as another indicator of how strong a domain is. In terms of link building, site strength is a good metric to use because you want to get links from websites that are very strong. If the links you get are from strong domains, they will pass more strength to your own website, which is a clear signal to Google that you have a good site that deserves to rank well.For example, CNN has a PageRank of 8 and a Domain Authority of 99. Lots of other websites link to CNN because it is an authoritative website with high-quality content. Because of this, CNN is not very likely to link to low-quality websites, so if you get a link from CNN, it is a signal that you have a good website, too.

Tools to measure domain strength•PageRank extension for Chrome•MozBar for measuring Page Authority•Google Toolbar for PageRank (for Internet Explorer)

Page Strength

There will be occasions when you have the opportunity to get a link from a page that already exists on a website, as opposed to a new page that is created for a blog post or news item. An example could be an existing list of some kind to which your link gets added; perhaps your coffee shop is added to a page with a list of the best espresso in Seattle.In cases like this, you should assess how strong the page is so that you know how worthwhile the link is to you before you put too much effort into acquiring it. There are two main metrics, and they are nearly identical to those for domain strength: PageRank and Page Authority.We’ve already talked about PageRank. Page Authority is another Moz metric that is very similar to Domain Authority, except that it only applies to a single page rather than an entire domain.The higher the PageRank / Page Authority of the page you want a link from, the more likely it is to help you with your SEO efforts.

Anchor Text

We’ve already covered the meaning of anchor text; now lets consider what it means as a metric for SEOs.Anchor text can give Google an indication of the subject matter of the page being linked to. So if I linked to a page using the words “fitness routine,” then it is likely that the page being linked to contains information about fitness routines. Google can then use this information as part of its ranking algorithms. In this case, they may decide that the page being linked to should rank higher for the keyword “fitness routine” and close variations.For many years, having a lot of links pointing to your website that contained your keyword as the anchor text was a very good way of helping you rank well for that keyword. While this is still the case to some extent, it does appear that the strength of anchor text as a signal is diminishing slightly. This is most likely because of the over-optimization of anchor text by SEOs and Google’s readiness to penalize such websites through the Penguin update.Rand talked about this in an episode of Whiteboard Friday and gave some indicators of what Google may use instead. Number of LinksDue to the changing nature of the perception and use of anchor text, it is probably best to be cautious when building links. Try not to build too many links that have the exact same anchor text in them, particularly if the links are not of the highest quality, such as links that are from low-quality domains, non-editorial sitewide links, or links that have too much anchor text (for more details on link quality, check out this post on State of Digital). You should try to make your link profile look as natural as possible, which often means getting links that use your brand or company name as the anchor text.

Number of Links

When link building, you will obviously want to keep track of how many links you have built. You will also want to check into how your website compares to your competitors’ sites to see how far (or how far ahead!) you have gotten. As we’ve discussed in previous chapters and seen in surveys, the raw number of links pointing to your website is a strong ranking signal. However, you do need to remember that the quality is equally, if not more important than the number. As a metric, number of links can be useful to us in two main ways:1. Measuring progress / success of a link building campaign2. For running comparisons between your website and competitors’ sitesBoth of these uses still need to factor in quality of links in order to be helpful to us. When we compare our number of links to a competitor’s number, it can sometimes show gaps that may explain ranking differences. If you’re trying to rank for the keyword “wooden tables” and the websites on the first page of results all have over 1,000 linking domains, that gives you a solid sense for the competitiveness of that niche and the kind of attention you need to earn in order to rank among those results.

Linking Root Domains

Not to be confused with the raw number of links, linking root domains is an even more powerful ranking signal to Google. When we say linking root domains, we mean the number of distinct domains that link to us, not the raw number of links.For example, if CNN linked to you from five different news stories, that would be counted as five links, but only one linking root domain, since all five links came from cnn.com.If the BBC linked to you from one news story, that would be one link and one linking root domain.Linking Root DomainsThe number of linking root domains is a stronger signal than the raw number of links because it is a better indication of the true popularity of a website. If we go back to how Google think of links as “votes,” then in this sense each website has only one vote to give you. No matter how many times they link to you, they still only count as one vote, which prevents the digital equivalent of “stuffing the ballot box.”Multiple links from the same domain can be the result of a number of things. Linking from multiple content pages is one way, but the most common ways are by what we call sitewide links. A sitewide link is a link that is placed in some kind of templated element of the website, such as the header, footer, or sidebar. The most common example is a “blogroll” link, as a blogroll is generally on every page of the website.In general, these types of links are not as valuable as in-content links from just a few pages. Sitewide links can sometimes be spammy, paid for, and not editorially given in the sense that Google would like. In fact, Moz published a case study of a site that was heavily penalized by Google for incorporating sitewide links on its clients’ pages. Therefore, you should treat them with caution, only get them from high-quality websites, and don’t be too aggressive with your anchor text.

Relevance of the Linking Page

There has always been some debate as to whether relevance is a strong signal used by Google to calculate the value of a link. Logic tells us that it should be, because it is natural for relevant websites to link to each other. However, what if you get a link from the homepage of the BBC to your website about coffee? You wouldn’t reject it just because the BBC website isn’t about coffee.If we look beyond link building for a moment though, you still want to bring targeted traffic to your website so that you can try to convert visitors into customers. For this reason alone, you should be trying to place links on websites where potential customers may visit. This means that the value of the link goes far beyond SEO and can become a source of direct income.As discussed in the anchor text section above, there are some indications that Google is moving away from anchor text as a strong signal and, instead, could be using analysis of an entire page to attribute relevance to the link. If this proves to be the case, then getting links from relevant pages could become a strong ranking signal.Right now, best practice should be to focus on quality to make sure you’re being passed link equity and on relevance in the sense that you want to attract the right kind of traffic.

Position of Links on the Page

Imagine you live in Seattle and you have a blog about coffee. You’re going to share a link with your readers to the website of a local coffee shop that serves the most amazing fresh coffee ever. Where would you place this link on the page?If you really wanted your readers to see it, you’d position it somewhere obvious. Probably in the main body of the page, probably near the top of the page, and probably within some content that explains how amazing the coffee shop is.You probably wouldn’t place the link in the footer, right? Many users may not scroll down the page that far, and even if they do, they wouldn’t expect to find useful links in that section.Google is able to work out the position of a link on a page, and from this could choose to value it differently. If the link is in the footer of a page, then Google could reduce the value of that link because they assume it isn’t a great link for users (otherwise, it wouldn’t be hidden away in the footer).Google can also use the position of links on a page in aggregate. For example, they could see if 50% of all the links pointing to your website are in some kind of footer. This could indicate low-quality link building, and Google may decide to take a closer look.Position of Links on the PageAnother example could be if Google finds that 50% of the links pointing to your website are from sidebars. Again, on its own, this may be legitimate, but it could also be a signal to Google that you’re buying links. Many link brokers will place links in the sidebar of pages as opposed to within the content.Because of this ability, you should make sure that you are getting links from websites which are happy to link from within content wherever possible. There is nothing wrong with the odd sidebar link, but too many of them does not signal a good link profile.

Broken Link Building

The Internet is filled with broken links. Often, these broken links exist on valuable, high-quality pages. Broken link building is a very popular practice that works on the premise of helping webmasters fix their broken links by providing a superior alternative for them to link to.

Although the specifics can vary, the basic process looks like this:

1.) Research broken links and find good targets2.) Content creation3.) Outreach

This process can be repeated over and over again. Sometimes you use your existing content as a suggestion to replace broken links, other times you create new content specifically for this purpose.Here are a few additional resources on how to perform broken link building:

Link Reclamation

Slightly different than broken link building is the practice of link reclamation, where you fix or “reclaim” links that once pointed at your site, or point to your site but fail to provide any SEO value.•The Broken Link Building Bible•Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice

There are many different types of link reclamation strategies.404sThese are links that point to pages on your website that no longer exist. Open Site Explorer is a good tool for finding these. (Preform a “Top Pages” search and sort for 404s). You can either redirect or fix these links on your end, or ask the webmaster to change the link.This chapter only describes a few of the hundreds of different link building tactics you can use (or even invent!). The specific tactics you choose will depend on your resources, creativity, niche, audience, and available time.For more inspiration, we recommend checking out Jon Cooper’s Link Building Tacticsor the Moz Blog’s Link Building category.A World of Link Building TacticsNon-linking Brand MentionsIt’s sometimes common and easy to find others writing about your site without linking to it. Often a simple email to the author is enough to secure a link. Tools like mention.net, Google Alerts, and Fresh Web Explorer are great at digging up mentions.Non-linking ImagesIt’s common to find websites that have posted your own images without attribution. Instead of filing a copyright or DMCA takedown notice, this presents a terrific opportunity to earn a link instead.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the process of approaching other websites to see if they will publish a piece of content that you write on their blog. While it is often an effective way to earn links using high quality content, Google has cracked down on marketers who abuse this tactic with low-quality content and over-optimized anchor text. As guest blogging became an increasingly common tactic, it became increasingly automated and the quality of the posts declined considerably. Google noticed. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, wrote a post declaring that we could “Stick a fork in it: Guest blogging is done.” If you can produce high enough quality content, many reputable sites will still gladly accept guest posts (Moz is one of them). That said, it shouldn’t be used solely in order to build links, as Google has gotten very, very good at finding and devaluing links built in this way.

Ego Bait

Ego bait is a piece of content that plays on the egos of the people who are featured within that content. The hope is that, by being included, these people feel better about and are more inclined to share the content with a link. You’ve probably seen examples of this before. Here are a few:http://www.thelovelyplants.com/10-gardening-blogs-to-follow/Lists gardening blogs along with a short description of each one.http://go.brandshank.com/top-10-electronic-music-blogs-2011/Lists the top 10 electronic music blogs based on a number of factors including Tweets, Facebook reach and MozRank.http://www.webdesigndev.com/roundups/30-most-influential-people-in-web-designLists the most influential individuals in web design and includes pictures of them, as well as their websites and social channels.All of these will get the attention of the people or websites being featured. While this can be a good way of getting high-quality links and traffic to your website, it is unlikely to get you huge volumes of links, because the content is usually quite targeted toward a few high-profile people or websites.

The process for ego-bait link building looks something like this:Concept and research targets > Write content > Outreach > Follow upStep 1: Concept and Research TargetsFirst, you need to come up with the concept for your content, and it will need to be somewhat related to the theme of your own website. For example, if you run a website selling garden sheds, you might choose one of the following ideas:

Top 10 Gardening Blogs of 2014•15 Inspiring Garden Designs•The Top Gardening Bloggers to Follow on Twitter

These are very simple ideas, but the point is to not over-complicate things.Once you’ve decided on your idea, you need to research whom you will feature in your content. There are a few things you should bear in mind when trying to find the right people:

Look for blogs that are active and have posted very recently.•Look for blogs that have good levels of social followings.•Make sure you can find contact details of bloggers.

Also—and this should go without saying—if you’re making something like a top-10 list, make sure that each person or site on that list is actually worthy of being on such a list. If your only motivation is finding people who might be willing to share, that could be obvious both to the people you’re attempting to bait and to the readers.

Step 2: Write contentThis part is also simple, but you should try to include as much detail as possible about each person or website you feature. Remember that you’re trying to get the attention of bloggers, and you want them to share the post and link to it. So, include the following, if you can:

A picture of the blogger or a screenshot of the website•A link to their website and Twitter profile•Why they are included in the list; what makes the blog or person really exceptional

Step 3: OutreachOnce the post is published, your next step is to send an email to the bloggers or websites that you’ve featured to let them know. Here is an example of an email you could choose to send:Remember to keep it simple. You can always add more detail if you want, but chances are the people you’re contacting are busy, so you want to get your message across quickly.

Step 4: Follow upWe’ll mention this several times throughout this guide to highlight the importance of this step: Make sure you follow up with the people you feature in your content. It can help to use a tool like Boomerang to remind yourself.

Content-Based Link Building

Content-based link building is becoming ever more popular amongst SEOs for a number of reasons, even though it can be one of the tougher approaches to carry out successfully. The basic process looks something like this:

Some of these you’ve already learned about in the chapter on building a link building campaign, so we’ll try not to repeat ourselves here. The basic premise is that you create an asset which you use to try and get links. This takes the form of a piece of content and can include something like:

An infographic• A data visualization• A white paper• A how-to guide• A video• An image gallery

You create these assets with a view to earning links to them from people who find them relevant, interesting, funny, informative, etc. You then reach out to these people in an attempt to actually build those links. Over time, you aim to reach a point at which you don’t need to ask for each and every link that you receive. Instead, you should be able to seed the content with a few key influencers in your community who can help spread the word on your behalf. This can take a long time to achieve and requires a lot of investment in exceptional content, but it is certainly possible.

Examples of Content-Based Link Building Campaigns

In this section, we will look at some examples of successful link building campaigns along with some analysis of what made them successful. One thing to note here is that the primary goal of the following examples may not have been links, but they were very successful, nonetheless, so there is something we can learn.

The Ultimate Guide to Worldwide EtiquetteThis is a small interactive piece of content that is not only nicely designed, but genuinely useful. It helps users understand the different expectations in different areas of the world when it comes to culture and etiquette.http://www.swissotel.com/promo/etiquette-map/This page currently has 68 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 63.

What made it successful?• It works very well and is easy to use; you simply choose your country and the content changes instantly• The design is very clean which means you understand what it does straight away• It is relevant to the type of people who would visit a hotel booking website• The content is genuinely useful to people because not knowing a local culture or etiquette is a common problem

100 Years of Rock Music VisualizedThis is another interactive piece of content which shows the different genres of rock music that have developed in the last 100 years.http://www.concerthotels.com/100-years-of-rockThe page currently has 198 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 53. Let’s look at why it attracted links:

The interactivity really adds to the content; it engages the user straight away & keeps them on the page• You can interactive with the piece and listen to samples of music• It applies to a large number of people (rock music fans)• It is in line with people who would use a hotel booking site focused on music venues

You vs. John PaulsonThis was a very smart idea by an SEO in the UK. It is an interactive piece of content that allows you to compare your annual salary with that of John Paulson who is a very successful forex trader.https://mahifx.com/john-paulson/It used to be hosted on the homepage and was used as a link building technique to get links to the homepage prior to the service being launched. Before it was moved, the content had over 200 linking domains. What made it successful?

It’s interactive but very simple to use; it only asks you for one piece of info (your salary)• It is very engaging; it keeps you scrolling down the page to find out more• The sheer scale of how much money John Paulson makes is hard for most of us to comprehend• It is very shareable as it is relevant to pretty much anyone, not just forex traders

18 Startup Founders Share Their Lowest PointsThis is a bit different to the previous pieces of content and mainly consists of written, rather than visual, content. It is a series of stories from startup founders who share their lowest points before become big successes.http://www.attendly.com/stories-of-failure-and-redemption-18-startup-founders-share-their-lowest-moments-before-coming-out-on-top/This page currently has 21 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 36. Let’s take a look at what made this happen:•It’s interactive but very simple to use; it only asks you for one piece of info (your salary)• It is very engaging; it keeps you scrolling down the page to find out more• The sheer scale of how much money John Paulson makes is hard for most of us to comprehend• It is very shareable as it is relevant to pretty much anyone, not just forex traders•It is different; interviews are usually about high points and successes but this was the opposite, so it can provoke people’s attention• The interviewees and their companies are very well known within their fields, so they probably have large social followings• This content can appeal to a wide range of people who are active online, therefore increasing the chances of getting links and social shares

Advanced Search Queries

There are a number of ways to search Google that are not immediately obvious to us as users. We are accustomed to searching for strings of keywords and this is how 99% of Google users search too. But, there is a set of search tools available to us that can make our results a lot more focused and specific to what we need. For link building, this means we can filter out websites that may not be useful for us and spend our time looking through ones that are. Here are a few examples using different advanced searches:

Notice the “inurl:resources” bit? This tells Google to only show results that have the word “resources” within the URL. Here is an example of one result that Google gives us:

http://cupcake-underground.blogspot.com/p/resources.html

This is a good potential link target, because your definitive guide to cupcakes is a resource that could be of interest to visitors to a cupcake blog. Therefore, contacting the owner of this blog and asking them to list your guide as a resource could result in a link for you.

Let’s take a look at another example:

We have combined two advanced searches here. First, we used the “intitle:resources” modifier, which tells Google to only show results that have the word “resources” within the page title. This is useful because sometimes the word may not be used in the URL, so our previous advanced search (with inurl:) would not find them.We have also used quotation marks around the word cupcakes. This tells Google to only return results that mention cupcakes on the page. This is useful in this case because searching for “food blogger” would probably be a bit too broad and we’d have to dig through a lot of websites that may not be relevant to the topic of cupcakes.Now you have three solid methods for finding relevant link targets and, at this point, you will probably have a nice big list of them in a spreadsheet. But, we need to do a bit more work before contacting the site owners.

Finding Out More About the Personas We’re TargetingIf you want to have a high response rate with your outreach, you need to spend a bit of time making sure that the websites you’ve found are as relevant as possible. food blogger “cupcakes” intitle:resourcesYou can do this by spending time learning about your target bloggers, Visit their websites, read through their content, try to get a feel for what they like and what they don’t like. Take a look through their social networks, such as Twitter, to see what links they have shared recently.In particular, pay close attention to whether or not they share other people’s content or if they only promote their own. Ideally, you want to find some evidence of them sharing external resources, because that’s what you’ll be asking them to do.As you go through each website, make some notes about what they’ve shared and what interests them. This is crucial because you’ll need this information later when you contact them. Otherwise, you’ll just be sending them a generic, templated email that won’t be personalized to them at all.A nice little trick you can use here is to put the blog’s URL into a tool like Tagcrowdwhich will analyze the content of the page and show you which words are mentioned the most.

Finding Contact DetailsOnce you’ve decided that the blog is within your target audience and seems relevant, you’ll need to find contact details. This is usually pretty straightforward, but here are a few tips that may speed things up a little.

Check the Header and Footer FirstMost of the time, you will find a link to a contact page in the header or the footer of a website, so check these areas first. If you can’t see a contact page, try an “about” page which often list contact details.

Install ToutApp For Google ChromeToutApp is a small Google Chrome plug-in that will actively try and find an email addresses on a page for you. When it has found one, it will be highlighted in your Chrome toolbar and you can click on it to find the email address.

Prioritizing Link TargetsBy this point, you probably have a big list of link targets, and you need to prioritize them and group them into buckets so that you can customize your message to them with greatest efficiency.

There are a few ways to prioritize link targets for outreach:

By domain metrics, i.e., PageRank, Domain Authority•By blogger influence, i.e., number of Twitter followers•By the likelihood of linking, i.e., a cupcake blogger vs. a generic food blogger

Domain Metrics

For now, all you need to know is that these metrics can measure the value of link targets just as well as they can measure the value of individual links.There are two main domain metrics to use when filtering and sorting your link targets: PageRank and Domain Authority. You could, of course, gather the domain metrics for each website one by one, but that would take far more time; there are tools available that let you gather the data in bulk.You can get the PageRank for your targets using Excel and the SEO Tools for Excel plug-in.You can also get Domain Authority into your Excel spreadsheet by using the Links API plug-in by SEO gadget.

Once you have these metrics, you can do a simple sort in Excel from highest to lowest and, if you choose, you can remove link targets that do not have high enough domain metrics. This particularly helps if you have a very large set of websites and you don’t feel that you have the time to contact them all. I tend to sort by PageRank first and get rid of anything that is below a score of 1. If I have a very large set of results, I may also get rid of anything below a score of 2.

I then sort by Domain Authority and will generally get rid of anything below DA30 or DA35, if I have a very big list. This isn’t an exact science, however, because a new website that may be very good and relevant may not have accumulated enough PageRank or Domain Authority yet. However, if you have a large list of potential link targets, you do want to be quite aggressive in narrowing it down so that you have a good quality set of remaining websites to work with.

Identifying Your Target Audience for Links

Once you have your idea mapped out, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out who will fall within your target audience. Generally, you just need to brainstorm subjects related to your content. Let’s take a look at an example.Imagine you are putting together a piece of content entitled, The Definitive Guide to Baking the Perfect Cupcakes. You are producing this content because you own a local bakery which sells cupcakes as well as lots of other lovely things.

Who would be interested in this guide?Food bloggers: the obvious choice!Parent bloggers: they may want to teach their kids how to make cupcakes and your guide will show them how to do thisRecipe websites: because your guide will contain lots of great recipes for different types of cupcakesParty websites: no party is complete without a plate of cupcakes

With just a minute or two of thinking, we’ve easily come up with four types of websites that may be interested in our cupcake guide. Now we can start researching these in more detail to get a better idea of whether or not we stand a good chance of getting a link from them.

Techniques For Finding Link TargetsIn this section I will outline a few simple techniques that you can use to turn your idea of “food bloggers” into a full list of websites that you can contact.

Find Lists of Bloggers

By far the most simple place to start is a search on Google like this:

This single search gave me lots and lots of great lists to search through. The big advantage of using this technique is that someone else has already done the hard work for you by curating the list.

You can then copy the list into Google Docs or your own spreadsheet. From here, you can copy and paste all the URLs into a tool like URL opener, which will open all the URLs for you with one click. You can then go through them all, find out if they’re relevant to your content, and if so, find their contact details.

Find Bloggers on Twitter

Followerwonk is a fantastic tool that is part of the Moz tools, and if you have a Moz Pro subscription you can use it for free. It allows you to do all kinds of cool stuff with your Twitter account, but the feature that we’re interested in allows you to search Twitter bios. We are going to search it for “cupcake blogger” to see if we can find anyone on Twitter who mentioned “cupcake blogger” in their bio:

You can select more options such as number of followers and location, but for now we want to keep the search quite broad. This search resulted in 12 people on Twitter being found:You can then download these results into a spreadsheet which makes them easier to sort through. It will also tell us if they have a website or not:

Not a bad result for a few minutes’ work! These are also super-relevant to our content, so we know that we have a good chance of getting a link or, at the very least, getting some good feedback from the blogger.

What Types of Links You Need

When defining the strategy for your link building campaign, you will need to think about the types of links you need to get. There are various types to consider:

1. Links to your homepage2. Links to “deep” pages (such as product or category pages)3. Links containing your brand / company name4. Links containing the keywords you’re targeting

Additionally, there are combinations of the above, such as a branded link to a deep page. Identifying what types of links you need will start with a detailed link analysis of your current website as well as a look at how you rank for certain keywords in comparison to your competitors. You can use Open Site Explorer to run this kind of analysis and see what your link profile currently looks like.The analysis will show you opportunities for improvement. For example, you may see that you’re not ranking for one of your main keywords. After doing some link analysis, you find that you have no links pointing to your website that contain this keyword, or, you find that the most relevant deep page has no links at all pointing at it. If you identify something like this, you have a tangible problem that you can work to resolve. In this case, it may mean that your strategy includes trying to build links to the deep page that currently doesn’t have any links and doesn’t rank for your target keywords.

Finding link targets

The first thing you need to think about is what types of people you should contact, as you want to make sure that you are contacting people who are likely to be interested in your content. If you contact people randomly, your response rate will be a lot lower, and you’re likely to give yourself and your website a bad reputation.Ideally, before you actually start a link building campaign, you should have a rough idea of who you think will care about what you’re doing. If you create a piece of content that you want links to, such as an infographic, you should ask yourself right at the start of the process who will care about it. More importantly, who will care enough to actually link to it?

This last bit is crucial. While you may find it quite easy to get people look at your content, it is a whole new level of engagement for them to actually link to it. Linking to something requires a bit of effort and time, so you need to make someone care enough for them to not mind doing this. The barrier for getting your content shared on social networks is much lower. More people have a Twitter or Facebook account than a website or blog, making it easier for them to share.

So How Do You Make People Care Enough to Link?You need to find a hook that makes people care. You need to work this hook into your content right from the start. If you put off creating your hook until the moment you begin your outreach, you may discover that no one cares about the point of your content, the result being that you will have devoted a lot of time to crafting content no one wants to link to.

There are lots of hooks, but the ones above should at least get you thinking about what you can offer to people that will make them link to you. A simple exercise you can do here is to go to your Facebook feed and see what links people are sharing. Note down what characteristics each link has and try to find patterns. Chances are that links shared on Facebook are funny, because many people use this platform for personal stuff and may not share more serious stuff there, with the exception of big news or controversial topics. Now go and take a look at your Twitter feed, note down which types of links are being shared there and ask yourself why. You may find that more long-form, informative content is shared on Twitter than on Facebook.

How to Start a Link Building Campaign

A link building campaign is the process of actively trying to increase links to your website, usually accompanied by some kind of overarching objective. It will use assets belonging to the website in order to acquire those links, and an asset can be anything from content and news to products and services

Structuring a Link Building Campaign

There are various components of a link building campaign; some will be crucial to success and others will be helpful but not necessarily essential. Much will depend on a combination of your available assets and resources.

Setting GoalsLink building is a form of online marketing, and with any form of marketing you should start with goals. Knowing the goals of your campaign right at the start helps to ensure that you create a strategy that gives you the best possible chance of success. You also need to ensure that the goals of your link building campaign tie in closely with the overall goals of your business. For example, “build 10 links” is not a good goal to hit if building 10 links does not have any impact on the overall success of the business.“You also need to ensure that the goals of your link building campaign tie in closely with the overall goals of your business.”Here, we encounter a slight issue. We learned earlier that links are a strong part of the search engine ranking algorithms. So, wouldn’t hitting a goal of more links help with rankings? Helping with rankings helps drive more traffic and this helps bring more customers, right? All of this is true, but the problem is that it can sometimes take time for the links you’ve built to start having an overall positive effect on rankings. It isn’t as simple as build links one day and see improvements the next. This is particularly true in competitive industries.This poses a problem for SEOs because it can be hard to show that a link building campaign is successful, even if it hits certain goals. For this reason, it is very important to not only set realistic goals, but to make sure that the goals you set are more intelligent than “build x links.” The goals need to tie into real organizational goals and ultimately have a positive impact on the bottom line of your business. For example, you may want to increase organic search traffic in order to drive more sales. At the same time, you need to educate those around you that SEO and link building doesn’t succeed overnight and that results are not instantaneous. Like any good marketing, the focus should be on long-term gains, not overnight quick-wins.

Finding Your AssetsAt the heart of any link building campaign is the asset that you’re going to use in order to attract and earn links. This can also be known as the “hook” that will make people care about what you have to offer, and will entice them into linking to you. Assets will vary from business to business and you need to identify which assets your business has that will be of interest to others and can be used in link building.One other asset that black-hat SEOs still use is money. Obviously, all assets will probably require an investment of some kind, but these SEOs approach link acquisition as a pure cash transaction. Buying links is strictly against Google’s guidelines, and if a website is caught engaging in this practice, it can mean a heavy penalty and loss of traffic. Buying links is risky and usually the risks will outweigh the potential loss, so we strongly recommend against it.

You’ll also need to make sure that the assets you create are relevant to the audience you’d like to attract. Aleyda Solis put together an in-depth walk-through that’s worth a look.