BUILD LINKS POST- PENGUIN

HOw TO

A publication of

INTErmEDIaTE

SEO FrOm THE

EXPErTS SErIES

By KELVIN NEwmaN, SITEVISIBILITy

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Introductory content is for marketers who are new to the subject. This content typically includes step-by-step instructions on how to get started with this aspect of inbound marketing and learn its fundamentals. After reading it, you will be able to execute basic marketing tactics related to the topic.

INTrODUCTOry

IS THIS EBOOK rIGHT FOr mE?

Not quite sure if this ebook is right for you? See the below description to determine if your level matches the content you are about to read.

Intermediate content is for marketers who are familiar with the subject but have only basic experience in executing strategies and tactics on the topic. This content typically covers the fundamentals and moves on to reveal more complex functions and examples. After reading it, you will feel comfortable leading projects with this aspect of inbound marketing.

INTErmEDIaTE

Advanced content is for marketers who are, or want to be, experts on the subject. In it, we walk you through advanced features of this aspect of inbound marketing and help you develop complete mastery of the subject. After reading it, you will feel ready not only to execute strategies and tactics, but also to teach others how to be successful.

aDVaNCED

THIS rESOUrCE

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... brings your whole marketing world together in one, powerful, integrated sys-tem.

HUBSPOT’S aLL-IN-ONE marKETING SOFTwarE.

marKETING aNaLyTICS

Y

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Video Overview

Analyze your web traffic and see which sources are generating the most leads.

NBLOGGING

Create blog content quickly while getting SEO tips and best practice pointers as you type.

MEmaIL

Send personalized,segmented emails based on any information in your contact database.

SEarCH OPTImIzaTION

s Improve your rank in search engines by finding and tracking your most effective keywords.

ULEaD maNaGEmENT

Track leads with acomplete timeline-view of their interactions with your company

qSOCIaL mEDIa

Publish content to your social accounts, thennurture leads based on their social engagement.

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SEO FrOm THE EXPErTS: HOw TO BUILD LINKS POST PENGUIN

Expert Advice By Kelvin Newman

Kelvin Newman is the Director

of Strategy at SiteVisibility. He is

responsible for R&D and maintaining

the SiteVisibility web presence,

including the No.1 ranking Podcast

and Blog. Kelvin also worked for Emap

consumer media working across high

profile magazine titles and websites

including Zoo, Arena and Empire.

FOLLOw mE ON TwITTEr@KELVINNEwmaN

FOLLOw mE ON TwITTEr@DETECTIVEDDUBS

Designed By Desmond Wong

Desmond is currently a creative

designer and inbound marketer at

HubSpot. He has worked with a variety

of start ups, medium, and large sized

companies over the years with a focus

in branding and business development.

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There’s no question that the Google Penguin update, which was

created to combat manipulative link building practices, is one of the

biggest shifts in Google’s search algorithm history. Despite this huge

change, there has been a tendency within the search industry to

overstate its impact.

Most of the people who believe they’ve been negatively impacted or

penalised by Penguin haven’t actually been impacted -- they’ve just

been overtaken by more effective competitors.

The make-up of a good link building campaign has changed, but in

most cases the tactics that have been taken off the table haven’t really

delivered value for years. The people carrying out the tactics couldn’t

wean themselves off those approaches. Yes, they kept them busy, but

they weren’t delivering results.

Despite all this, in order to build links that work in a post-penguin world

and deliver value in the future, you need to evolve. If you want to get

traffic from search engines, the only thing you can be certain of is

change.

Introduction

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Every single time someone makes a search on Google, a competition

takes place. You compete against your rivals to rank and potentially

get traffic and business. The important thing to remember is that this

competition is with your competitors; not with Google. They’re the

referee, not the opponent.

Everything you do is in the context of your competitors, and this has

been emphasised more in recent Google updates. Your links are

evaluated in the context of your competitors. So, you need to understand

that landscape. You have to know how you compare.

Think of your links as an investment portfolio. Putting all your investment

in Oil wouldn’t be a sensible investment strategy, nor would relying on

one type of link.

Part One: Your Links in Context

Google’s search algorithm will rank links to your webpage based on how they compare in the context of your competitors.

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Penguin exists with one simple purpose, to ask the question: is this an

un-natural link? It’s an algorithm, a piece of software based on rules and

patterns. We could try and replicate those rules and patterns, but the

algorithm is created to understand human behavior, and nobody is better

at that than another human being!

It’s difficult to make hard and fast rules about which links could harm

you/have no impact, but some important things to think about are

Will the link potentially send traffic?

Will the traffic convert?

How similar is your link portfolio to the ‘market’ ?

Does the link look like it exists for SEO reasons?

Can you be proud of that link?

Part Two: What’s an Un-Natural Link?

That last point is really important and gets to the core of what link

building post-penguin is about, every link you build you need to be proud

of. No more links hidden away in ten tabs deep in an excel spreadsheet

or part of an aggregate number of new links. You

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want proper links you can send to your boss or client and say “Look at

this link we built”. These are the kind of links that even people with no-

appreciation of SEO can see will have value.

A well built link is almost self explanitory in the way it uses proper keywords and how it is laid out. See how the keywords and structure of the links above correspond with the keywords in the meta description.

How is the trust of your links distributed? How does that differ from your

competitors? Spreadsheets like the one below from Tom Anthony do

a great job of visualising how your links differ from your competitors.

Whose links have outliers? Why do they tend to attract links of certain

levels of trust? What sticks out like a sore thumb?

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Each competitor is represented by different color on the line graph. Notice how they each perform a bit uniquely from one another.

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While understanding that you need to be proud of the links you’re

building helps you avoid the links that won’t help, it doesn’t help you

attract inbound links. That requires insight and understanding, in

addition to appreciating a problem that others actually want to link to.

Think about who you want linking back to your content, and create

content that directly helps accomplish that goal. Those problems may be

straightforward ones such as

My website needs more traffic.

I want to produce content that resonates with my audience.

What perm is best suited for my hair.

Where can I buy girl scout cookies.

I want to know more about marketing.

You can help these visitors solve these problems, usually with content, and the

link will follow. Creating helpful and relevant content for users will enable you

to build effective links.

Part Three: The ‘How’ Part of Link Building

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Sometimes the problem you’re solving can be more complex. Here’s an example:

Imagine there’s someone at a university careers service who

has a glut of talented graduates interested in engineering but

struggling to find a job. There are a few different ways you could

help them solve that problem. Perhaps you could write an ebook

to help them improve their cover letter, or arrange a face-to-face

mentoring session to guide them into their new career. Perhaps

they need a seminar that reviews the extra work they can do

to make themselves more employable. All these different types

content ideas could help lead to links and long-term value.

Here’s another example:

What if the audience for your website is first time homebuyers

struggling to navigate the jargon, plethora of services, and financial

implications of purchasing their new house? Could you work on an

interactive tool that takes them through a decision tree to navigate

some of the difficult decisions they have to make? You could

produce a checklist of all things they need to get sorted before

they move – especially if you put them in sequence and help them

input the details into their iPhone diary. You may want to help them

escape all the paperwork and help them dream about how they’re

going to turn their house into a home.

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Every situation will be different. But if you understand who you’re trying

to attract a link from, what type of topics they’re interested in, and their

different pain points, you can use that information to create content

people are really engaged with. This helps to attract links, social

signals, and everything the search engines love.

Here’s one last example:

Maybe your target audience for linking back to you is a small

business owner who knows they should be doing more to market

their business but doesn’t know where to start. Can you produce

a super-in-depth questionnaire that really helps them understand

which social network they should be targeting? Consider a series

of podcasts that they can listen to while driving to their next

meeting that helps them make more intelligent buying decisions,

or a blog post full of ideas that they can use as inspiration next

time they brief their agency.

Create content that you know your audience will be interested in and searching for.

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Now let’s review different content types for link building.

Part Four: Killer Content Types for Link Building

Surveys, Insights, & Data

Survey results are news-worthy – so long as the results are significant.

Something that’s news worthy will naturally be link worthy. Starting a

survey is simple; it’s getting that survey promoted to the right people and

enough people that’s difficult.

If you already have a mailing list and a potential gift to give away for

those who fill out that survey, you’ll be able to attract a good number of

people in no time at all. If not, it’s still possible to conduct research.

Avoid the temptation for “Eight out of Ten Cats” statistics and try and

conduct respectable research.

When you conduct relevant and respectable research on topics that are interesting to your audience, your content will be naturally link worthy.

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Whitepapers & Ebooks

A thought leadership whitepaper can be a perfect example of this link-

building tactic in the B2B market place.

With a little bit of imagination, the whitepaper can also work in B2C

applications, though it’s likely the content will go by a different name. At

SiteVisibility, we’ve done well with consumer facing whitepapers, though

we’ve called them ‘Downloadable Guides’ or ‘Print and Keep Guides.’

Audiences love resources like whitepapers, ebooks, and downloadable guides. Creating this type of content is a helpful link-building tactic that will attract visitors, establish though leadership in your industry, and develop your link authority on those topics.

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Podcasts & Video Content

Podcasting and audio isn’t particularly fashionable at the moment, but

it still works. We get around seventeen thousand listeners per show of

the Internet Marketing Podcast. That volume dwarves the readership of

many blogs.

On the other hand, video is very popular and can also attract great links.

If there is anything we’ve learned from the internet, it’s that videos have the potential to become extremely viral content. Adding podcasts and video to your content library will allow you attract more effective and shareable links.

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Blog & News Content

If you can be the first to cover some breaking news (also referred to as

newsjacking), everyone who subsequently covers the topic will refer

to the originator. If you want to regularly attract high quality links, you

need to do your best to be the originator as often as you possibly can.

If writing swiftly isn’t your style, spend time writing articles that are more

research or thought based, but are unique and the best of its kind.

Utlising a blog as a content creating machine and news source is one of the most effective ways to build high quality links that rank well and develop link authority.

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FAQs & Resource Centre’s

Everyone was a beginner at one point or another. In every sector, there’s

someone starting out who wants to pick up the basics as quickly and

painlessly as possible.

There are always people on the internet looking for quick and simple solutions to their problems. Providing visitors with a simple webpage with answers and helpful tips to common questions and issues can put you at the top of their search listings.

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Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a very common tactic being used to build links. This

is where you provide an article or blog post in exchange for a link. It’s

recently come under a lot of scrutiny as a viable link building option, and

Matt Cutt’s did a video with his own advice on how best to implement it.

Here are three quick tips to keep in mind when it comes to guest blogging:

Quality of the site providing the link is key.

Anchor text should not be your primary concern.

Consider to what extent Authorship may help provide a quality

stamp.

Guest blogging can be a beneficial link building tactic for both parties involved. The authors can beneifit from having links on authoritative sites with large volumes of traffic, and the website can benefit from having high quality content to share with its audience.

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Infographics & Interactive Content

Infographics and Data Journalism have become some of the most

wide-spread types of content generated for link building. This has led to

backlash, but in the same way there are good blogs and bad blogs, there

are good infographics and bad ones.

Recently we’ve seen more success with interactive infographics that are

built around sharing data or information.

Visual and interactive content is both highly shareable and lovable. Use this form of content to help improve your link building efforts.

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