[Build Backlinks Online] Heart to Heart About Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Heart to Heart About Link
Building - Whiteboard Friday'


Posted by iPullRank

With best practices for link building continuously changing, it can be
difficult to keep track of which work well and which should be removed from our
repertoire. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Michael King (a.k.a. @iPullRank) makes
a case for dropping some tactics in favor of others.








WBF Heart to Heart about Link Building - Michael King






For reference, here is a still image of this week's whiteboard:





Video Transcription



Greetings and salutations, SEOmoz fans. My name is Michael King, a.k.a.
iPullRank. I'm the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire. It's been a
minute, but I'm back.


So today I really want to have a heart to heart about link building with
everyone in the viewing viewership. Here's the thing, guys. I've been telling
you about tactics that I employ that I have a lot of success with, and it's not
that you're not doing them. It's that the ones that you are doing, you're
continuing to just run into the ground.


Now, let's talk about that for a second. So these are emails that I get all
the time where people are like, "Hey, I write guest posts. Do you want one?"
They'll send me a really generic guest post about SEO. I'm like, "Did you read
my site?"


Now, I don't react too kindly to that but real webmasters, like the guys who
have blogs and they're trying to live off of this, when they see emails like
that, they're going to get pissed at you. So stop doing that. Stop it. Stop it.
I'm tired of those things.


Now, a lot of times you guys are outsourcing all this writing to just random
people. You're using WriterAccess, or there's another one that just gives you
really low quality stuff. Stop it. Use Contently. It's actually really awesome.
They have some subject matter experts. They have people that write for Mashable,
things of that nature. So if you want to get some high quality content that's
actually going to stick, you're going to have to pay some money for it. Quality
needs to be a main KPI here, because if you're doing these garbage guest posts,
it's just not going to work.


Now, infographics, everybody's doing infographics now too because you're
like, "Okay, well, the guest posting isn't really working for me. What else can
we do?" Here's the thing, we're actually doing an infographic study right now
where we're analyzing thousands of infographics, trying to get a sense of what
works and what doesn't. What we've noticed is bad infographics are three times
as likely to have links. Excuse me, not three times as likely, but they are
linked to three times as much.


Now, we've also noticed that the quality of them is kind of indicative of
what you can get from an SEO company. Now, I don't have a Ph.D., nor is Raleigh
who worked on this. He also doesn't have a Ph.D. The people at Google, they all
have Ph.D.'s. So if I can figure that out, they're probably going to figure that
out pretty soon too. So please stop doing that.


Now, a good pro tip about infographics, we noticed during this study that if
you have the scrolling share bar on the left, you're 45% more likely to get
shares. I think I said that wrong again, but those infographics have 45% more
shares than the ones that don't have them there. Got it? Got it.


Now, back to the guest posting for a second. A lot of you guys out there are
just putting your links in the author box. Not a good idea for two reasons. One,
it's clearly spammy. Two, you're creating an easily findable footprint. I can
take your author box profile, throw it into Google, and I see 560 guest posts
that you did. Now I can easily recreate that. Stop doing that. What you should
do instead is do environmental linking, because that way, one, it's harder to
figure out exactly what you're trying to link to, and you're not creating that
same type of footprint.


So environmental linking looks like this. You have three links scattered
throughout the copy, and they're all to disparate sources so it's harder to tell
which link you were going after. Now if you have a really specific page for your
actual link, make sure you don't just put like NFL.com for the other link. You
need to make sure that this environmental linking makes sense, so that way you
don't create an easy to find footprint. But again, guest posting, if you have
to, go for it, but I would rather you guys stop running that into the ground.


Okay. Now some stuff that you should do. Have real conversations with
webmasters. I always say this, but one of the easiest ways to have a compelling
conversation with somebody is to put their site in the Social Crawlytics and see
what is the most shared post on their site. The reason why that works is because
so many people are sharing this content, they're expecting that other people are
going to reach out to them and talk to them about it. So it's not as much of a
cold call as when you're like, "Hey, I write guest posts. Do you want one?" No,
you're having a contextual conversation. So go with that. That's probably the
best tip I can give you at all about link building.


Then I did a Whiteboard Friday - it was actually my first one - about a year
and a half ago, and I talked to you about how to build links using social media.
You should probably check that one out again. But what we continue to notice is
that having a first touch in social media is, again, way more effective than
just sending out emails. So just jump into a conversation with a prospect.
SEOmoz's Followerwonk is great for that. You just type in the keywords of the
people that are relevant, and then you can just hop into a conversation with
them. Do that. It works.


Blog contests, they work two ways. They work not only from the standpoint of
getting links by having people post content on your site and then get them to
promote it, and then they can win that contest based on the number of shares,
whoever gets the highest shares. But they also work from a standpoint of getting
people to place that content on their own sites and link back to you. So there
are two ways you can go with that. You can use blog contests as ways to get
content or ways to just get links. So they're really effective, and that way you
can just give one prize and you get tons of links from tons of people. Go for
it.


Now, using ads to build links is actually really effective as well. Carson
Ward from Distilled wrote a post about this where he tried out using Reddit ads
and Facebook ads, paid search ads, and he saw that it was really effective. So
when you have a good piece of data visualization, that's a great way to kick
that thing off using StumbleUpon paid discovery is a good way to get a lot of
people that are interested in that vertical or that space to see it. If it's a
good piece of content, you're going to see tons of shares, and you're going to
see some links as well. So I wouldn't bet the farm on using ads for links, but
it's a good way to supplement whatever you're doing. So go with that.


Thought leadership, obviously you come to SEOmoz. You know thought
leadership works. It's what I'm doing right now. This post, regardless of how
good it is, the one that you're looking at right now is probably going to get
300 links because of the fact that at least 300 sites scrape SEOmoz every time
they put something up. So if you build up yourself or your brand as that thought
leader, you're going to continue to get links just from hitting Publish, like
Rand always says. So go for that.


Credit requests, so if you have a ton of high-res photos on your site, do a
reverse image search and see who's stolen your photos. Ask for credit. It works
really well. You can even also use this for your logo. If you're working with a
pretty big business, throw their logo on a reverse image search. Tons of people
are placing it all over the place. Ask for the credit or ask for the link. It
works really well. It's easy. Some people actually also use the threatening
legal action if they don't get credit. I don't go that far, but it works.


BuiltWith.com, so sites use a variety of vendors. So put their domain into
BuiltWith.com, see what vendors they're using, what products they're using, and
then reach out to those companies to do case studies. I actually just did this
recently with a pretty large brand. We did a webinar for them. The reason why
I'm saying that is you should make sure that these people will offer you a link.
We got links out of it, but their company policy is don't pass equity with those
links. So they do a pass through and a no follow. So make sure that if the link
is the goal, that they will actually offer that link. But it's really effective
as well.


Link begging, a ton of people think that doesn't work anymore. It works like
magic. In fact, if you do persona-based link begging, it's a lot more effective
because if you build a persona of the people that you're going to be reaching
out to and you figure out what it is that they actually like, what they're into,
you can craft a canned message that's going to resonate with them a lot more
than just a, "Hey, I saw you mention this word. Can you link to my site?" So if
you say something to the effect of, "Oh hey, I was watching the Discovery
Channel the other day," because you know they like it, "and I saw this awesome
thing, and in fact on my site I have something that's relevant to that too. I
noticed that you were also into this. Why don't you link to this because I think
your subscriber base might be really interested in it?" It actually works really
well, and it still does in 2013. Try it.


Share monitoring, so if you have a piece of content that's doing really well
on Twitter, yeah, Twitter mostly, throw it into Topsy.com and then you can see
all the people that shared it. Then what you say is, "If you like it, then you
should have put a link on it." I'll let you laugh at that right now.


Anyway, so you'll just quickly identify people that have shared your
content, ask for a link because they already like the content, and it's real
easy to figure out if these people are worthwhile because you can just pull down
their Twitter profiles, again using Followerwonk, and figure out if they have
sites or not. Then you can also use social authority and domain authority in
context to figure out whether or not that's a worthwhile prospect. So share
monitoring works awesome.


Mention monitoring, so you guys, I hope you know about the Fresh Web
Explorer by now because it's a great tool. You can monitor mentions of your
name. You can monitor mentions of anything. So you can quickly identify sites
that have mentioned the keywords and then reach out to those sites and say,
"Hey, can I get a link because you mentioned me," or whatever it is. Go for it.
It's great for reputation management, especially if you're looking for names.


Linkstant, so it's a product by Rob Ousbey and Tom Critchlow, formerly of
Distilled. Rob is still at Distilled. What it does is it basically lets you know
when somebody's about to link to you or they have just linked to you. The way it
works, you put a piece of JavaScript code on your site and then you create an
account, not in that order, on Linkstant.com, and whenever a new link comes in,
you get an email. Then a big use case of that is a lot of times when people are
on WordPress and they put in their links, they double check to make sure the
link works and then you'll know while they're still writing so you'll get that
email. You can email them right back like, "Hey, saw you were about to link to
me. Can you link to this thing instead," or so on and so forth. So that way you
can make sure that you're getting the right anchor text that you want and it's
still a natural thing and you're building that relationship with somebody that
you didn't know. Go for it.


Broken resource recreation, everybody talks about broken link building. I
don't know how much they talk about recreating something that used to exist on
the web that's no longer there. We actually built the BrokenLinkIndex.com just
for that purpose. So you can search by keywords to identify things that no
longer exist on the web and then go to the Wayback Machine to see what it used
to be and then create a better version of it. Then what you do is you look at
that original resource in Open Site Explorer to see how many links it has, reach
out to all those people that are still linking to it, say, "Hey, this is gone,
but I have a new version that's even better. Why don't you link to that?"
Incredibly effective.


Video outreach, something I came up with myself. There's a tool called
Vsnap.com, and what it allows you to do is send a one minute video to anybody
for any reason. The thing that's awesome about it is you get a view count as
well, so you'll know when they've watched your video. So use that for link
building. Again, start with checking out somebody's site and having a
conversation. Send a short video to them. They see that you're real. They see
that you're not some random guy in India. No disrespect to the people in India.
But they see that you're a real person that's actually out here, putting
together good content. You can quickly build a relationship with them, and you
can see whether or not they actually got your email.


Have rebuttals. Rebuttals are something I never really thought about in link
building. I just always assumed that if they said no, whatever, keep it moving.
But our team in Arizona has actually developed a really strong system of
rebuttals. So in the case when somebody will say, "Oh, we only put up links for
payment" or something to that effect or, "We only put up articles for payment,"
we really focus our messaging or our response or our rebuttal to say, "We don't
pay publishers for this, but we do really focus on content strategy. We also
focus on promoting the content once you place it." So make sure you have
rebuttals that show why the content that you're placing with these people is
valuable and how you can continue to add value to their site.


A lot of people that you reach out to, especially for guest posting, they
have pretty dormant sites they haven't updated it in a year. You can focus on
the freshness that you're bringing to their site and how it's going to continue
to bring traffic back.


My whole point here is that make sure you have a good system of rebuttals
because you might lose out on opportunities that could have easily been shifted
into opportunities that you might have thought weren't.


So to close this off, I actually thought to do this because I'm in the
middle of doing a really big analysis of all the link building we've done in the
last year, also this infographic study, so look out for those things because
there's going to be even more insights in there for you.


That's all I've got for today. I'll catch you guys on the next one. I'm sure
I'll be back on the blog soon. We've been doing a lot of cool research. Can't
wait to share it for you guys. All right, guys.




Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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