link building Archives - NextJSjointviews

How to Collaborate with the Right Link Building Agency

Posted on March 13, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Link building is an important part of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. A single backlink from the right page has the power to get thousands of new visitors to your site.

Take the example of Moosa Hemani, SEO and inbound marketing specialist who recorded a 203% increase in his traffic after his guest post on Moz.com.

Backlinks from authority sites can in fact do magic for your website ranking. This is because Google counts backlinks from reputed sites as votes for your page.

Other pages pointing to your site tells Google that your content is worth quoting and referring to and hence valuable.

However, building links proactively takes time and effort. There is a whole process of researching the right sites and reaching out to them for backlinks.

You also need to add value to your partners to gain their trust and links. This could be re-purposing their content in the form of infographic, writing a guest post or promoting their page on your social media.

Link building campaigns need expertise, time and resources. This is why outsourcing link building to an external agency is a good idea.

The right agency can boost your SEO efforts with link-building strategy. Here are the evaluation criteria while choosing the right link building agency for your business.

• Experience

Past work of the agency is good indication of their quality of work. Have they successfully delivered increased traffic before? Ask them for references of their clients if required. This way you can enter the contract with confidence.

Also, it is important to check the industries and size of companies they have worked in. A campaign that was successful for a big MNC may not be the best strategy for a start-up. Your agency must have the creativity to develop a tailor-made strategy for you.

Generally speaking, an agency who has worked within your industry with similar client profile is preferable. However, do not rule out an agency new to your industry without asking for detailed strategy proposal for your business.

Another detail to consider is the experience of the person who will be handling your campaign. Stellar experience of the agency is of no use to you if your account will be taken care by a fresher single- handedly.

• Ethical Strategies

You may come across agencies that will promise you 500% increase within no time. Practices employed by such agencies are often unethical, penalized by search engines and may cause Google to ban your site. Make sure your agency is not using black hat SEO tactics that will only hurt your business in the long run. Here are some black hat practices for your awareness:

Paying for backlinks is not allowed and is considered a serious offense by Google
Inserting links in others site without their permission or through hacking into their site
Irrelevant posting of links to your site in the comments section. There are even tools available for mass posting in websites that are unrelated to your topic.
Excessive link exchanging is a practice where links are exchanged between sites just to show backlinks to search engines and with no real benefit to site visitors. Such a practice of linking excessively to unrelated site is a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

You website will be the one penalized by Google even if you are unaware of such practices being used by your agency. This is why it is important that your agency shares all plans and actions with you honestly. This brings us to the next point.

• Transparency

Since you are entrusting a third party with your business site, it is important that you share a relation of trust and honesty. Your agency must share campaign details with your regularly. Setbacks and delays are understandable and should be shared with you clearly.

Unexplained delays in implementation and poor communication could be a sign of your agency hiding something.

• Business Philosophy

Very few blogs will talk about this, however, difference in business philosophy is often the underlying cause of problems. Imagine an agency that values perfection but is serving a client who values speed instead. The slow pace of delivery may frustrate the client whose priority is to move fast in the market.

When you choose an agency to work with, do check for alignment with their values and vision. There is no right or wrong in this. Some agencies will work best for you because their way of doing business fits perfectly with yours.

• Holistic Approach

Everything works together in digital marketing. This means that your link building efforts must be supported by good content, inbound sales process, social media and other channels. Building links around poor content will only lead to wastage of your resources.

Ideally, your SEO, link-building and content marketing should be done by the same agency. If not, they should at least work closely with the content and digital marketing team. Choose an agency that has an overview of your digital marketing and holistic approach to link-building.

Takeaway

These are the five ways to make sure that you choose and collaborate with the right agency. Remember to be patient as returns from link- building may take some months to show. Link-building is a long term exercise and therefore it is even more important for you to choose the right partner.

How to Use Social Media Profiles to Get Quality Links

Posted on January 12, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Getting backlinks from social media platforms is critical for your SEO and inbound digital marketing strategy. Quality links to your site indirectly help in your search engine ranking while also giving you targeted traffic for your website. With over 60 popular and niche social networking platforms there is plenty of opportunity to get right visitors to your site. According to Econsultancy’s State of Search Marketing Report 82% of digital marketing agencies integrate social media in their SEO strategy.

Are You Getting Enough Backlinks from Social Media?

You can check traffic from social media platforms by using Google Analytics. Use Campaign URL builder to tag your links and measure them in Google Analytics.

If you are not getting good amount of leads from social media consider using following methods to get quality links.

Use Personal Profiles Too

All social networking platforms have an option to create a personal profile or a company profile. Personal profiles with pictures and names of real persons generate more engagement than brand profiles. This is because people want to connect with real people on social media sites. While brand pages are good for announcements and advertisements, real conversations happen with actual people.

This doesn’t mean you have to discontinue your brand profile/page. What’s important to note is that both brand and personal profile have their own advantages. For example, LinkedIn does not allow company profiles to start a conversation with others. That means you can only respond to queries and your reach is limited. However, LinkedIn company profile allows targeted sponsored posts and many other helpful features.

It is ideal to have personal profiles along with business profile. Be sure to have genuine profiles as fake profiles will damage your reputation. You can use employee profiles to do this.

Build Links in Your Profile

The next step is to build maximum links in your social media profile that point to your website. Without these links all the social following and engagement would be wasted. You can move people further in your marketing funnel by inserting links to lead pages in:

1) Profile Descriptions

2) About us section

3) Pinned posts in Facebook and LinkedIn

4) Video descriptions in Youtube

5) Instagram Stories

6) Photos and photo descriptions(Instagram only allows this for paid ads)

7) Social Media Posts

Add Value to Communities

Only conversations that are in context gain engagement on social media. Promoting your own services or page is not meaningful to anyone. Instead respond to what people and communities are talking about and add value to the conversation with your knowledge. This could be your take on the point raised or a link to related and informative blog. It could even be something entertaining like a funny meme.

People will naturally get curious about you once you start sharing knowledge on a regular basis. This is when they will click to check out your profile and what you do. Promoting your services before building trust and authority is poor strategy to get links from social media. So do not sneak a link to your blog in comments section just yet.

Meaningful Interactions

It’s easy to lose depth of communication in likes and comments. You have many friends on your Facebook, however it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them will value you equally. To have meaningful interaction is to build relations by helping others reach their goals too. Since you only have so much time to devote to each person you follow, you must choose a few influencers or users that you plan to build long term relation with (more on this in the next point).

Try to reach important users through other channels like email or phone to build stronger relation. Help them reach more followers through cross-promotion or turn their post into an infographic and offer to link it on their blog. Over the long term these relations will pay off by sending more links to your profile and site.

Follow Right People

It’s important to be seen as industry authority if you want good quality links to your site. Your relationship and engagement with the right users is essential here.

Obviously your time is limited and this is the reason you must strategically choose the right people to interact with. Use tools such as Klout, Buzzsumo, FollowerWonk to find right influencers in your industry and monitor social media.

These tools also look at followers list to find an overlap between your and other industry influencer’s followers. This makes getting new followers and links more likely. Cross promotions and comment interactions with these influencers will benefit both of you in the end.

Join Niche Networks

There are lots of niche social networking sites apart from the big players such as Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter etc. Find out where your target audience is and start posting there. These niche sites typically have higher user engagements because of a stronger community. You will definitely find more success here if you strike the right chord.

For example, Imgur is a great platform to target geeky millennial men. Reddit has an active discussion on different topics (also called subreddits). Quora is another platform to build your authority and drive traffic through your links in answers.

Another advantage of these sites is that they have a transparent voting system which determines which posts, answers and comments are shown first. This makes it very easy to monitor content and know your user engagement.

Post Linkable Content

Some content has more potential to drive traffic to your pages. Links to quiz, comparison blog posts, interview with industry celebrities etc., are compelling invitation to your site. Be creative with content and use fresh features such as live videos, stories, online polls to drive traffic.

Your posts on social media platforms must be a preview into something interesting that drives users to click on it.

These are some of the ways leading content marketers are using to drive traffic from social media platforms. Do you use any of these and what has been your success with them? Let us know in the comments below.

90 Link Building Strategies to Use in 2018 [Infographic]

Posted on January 10, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Higher search engine rankings are based on the authority of webpages. As you probably know, quality links can increase your site’s authority as well as improves its SEO value. Link building helps you to increase the flow of high-quality links pointing to your website. It‘s a proven marketing strategy by many businesses for improving their brand awareness.

Google considers quality links to your site while ranking. Links indicate that whether your page is useful as a result. Search engines only want to show useful results to its users. So, all your SEO efforts for higher rankings are imperfect without link building strategies.

Do you want increase your domain authority through link building? Here is an infographic illustrating 90 linking building strategies that you can include in your SEO strategy in 2018.

Is Link Building Still the Most Powerful SEO Strategy

Posted on September 27, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Link building is one of the important aspects of SEO. It is the process of building links through the web that lead to your page. Google counts these links as votes to your page while ranking it. They indicate that your page is useful as a result. Without links your page would just be an island in the ocean with no roads to reach it.

Google uses metrics that tell about a page’s relevance to rank it. Search engines only want to show useful results to its searchers. Search engines have been using backlinks to rank page since the beginning. This is why any SEO effort to rank higher on search engines is incomplete without link building activity.

In fact, Backlinko did a study of 1 million search results last year and found out that links impacted search engine rankings more than any other factor.

It must be clear by now that link building has been and continues to be the most powerful SEO activity. It is also the most challenging activity for SEO. It takes unique and quality content to earn links from other sites. Also, links from just another site will not work to boost your ranking. Google looks at Domain Authorty of the site linking to you to determine backlink quality.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is the metric developed by MoZ to measure the quality of your site. The score varies from 1 to 100, 100 indicating extremely good site whereas a score of 1 indicating poor site.

Sites such as Forbes.com or Entreprenuer.com have DA of above 90. You must try to earn links from a higher DA site. A link from 75+ DA site is great but even a few links from 50+ DA sites can do wonders for your SEO. You should have minimal links from any site with a DA of 30 or lower as these can actually pull your reputation down.

Here is what you should know before you start your link building campaign:

1) Link building must be accompanied with on page SEO, quality content and great user experience on your site. Nobody wants to link to poor quality pages that are of little value to readers.

2) As pointed above make sure to earn links from high DA websites. Low DA links can actually harm your rankings on search engines.

3) Do not put links in irrelevant places. Inserting irrelevant links will confuse your audience. Ask yourself who will appreciate this content. This will get you targeted audience that convert better and spend more time on your site. This will in turn improve your ranking.

4) Be patient, link building takes time to show results. Kristina Kledzik found that it takes up to 10 weeks for link building to start showing its magic on rankings.

What can I do to get Links?

So how can you get good DA links to your site? Strategy is the answer here. Since results take time to show, you must have a calendar and strategy that you will follow diligently nonetheless. Here are some smart strategies that winners are using:

Strategy #1 Guest blogging

Search out leading blogs in your domain and offer to write a blog as an expert for them. Insert a link to your page in that blog to drive traffic to your site. Guest blogging is a good way to get new traffic and links from a high DA site. Make your expertise and reputation known to the blog owner when you request for a guest blog.

You can also ask other experts to write on your blog and insert the link in their site. This will only work if you have decent amount of following already.

Strategy #2 Popular Format Articles

There are some types of articles which always earn high number of links. These include:

> Round ups of industry experts. This is where you can ask industry experts for their opinion on a particular topic or issue. For example: You could ask leading digital marketers ‘What is their take on importance of social media?’. You need to then compile all the answers into one blog post. This way you will earn a lot of links from digital marketing blogs as everyone wants to know what the reputed experts have to say.

> Do research in your domain and publish the results in your blog. People always need data to substantiate their opinion and keep the article interesting. You can earn tons of links if you can study on interesting topics and share the results with the world.

> Visual content is very popular nowadays. It is 3 times more likely to be shared. You can even turn a leading text post into an infographic to save the effort of developing fresh content.

Strategy #3 Manual Outreach

This is simply reaching out to popular sites via email and begging them for a link. Leading bloggers like Neil Patel have used this strategy and it works! The key here is to write a piece of content that is valuable and pitching it to lots of site owners.

This is an aggressive strategy and requires high volume of requests to succeed. If your blog is a decent read a few bloggers are sure to respond and link to you.

Strategy # 4 Self created Non-editorial Links

This is inserting links to your page via comments in others blogs or forums.

You can also do this in Quora.com. Search for a popular question in your domain and write a well rounded and expert answer on it. Insert your link in the answer to let people know about your site here. People will visit your page if your insert a bait like ‘visit my site to know the data behind this result’.

However, don’t go too aggressive on this strategy. You don’t want to come across as a spammer and spoil your reputation on these sites.

Strategy # 5 Skyscraper Technique

This technique has been used successfully by many top ranking blogs. In this you pick out the popularly linked posts , study it and then write a post better than it.

You can make your post better by adding more points or presenting it in a better visual format. For example: if you find that a blog ‘5 ways to earn more links’ is highly linked to, then you can write ‘ 21 ways to earn more links’. You can then contact the sites linking to it, tell them about your improved version of the link and request to link to you instead.

Link building requires the most effort in SEO. It also requires a lot of patience. However, once links from good sites are in place you can expect increasing flow of traffic from these sources and see your ranking climbing up steadily.