SEO has changed drastically over the years, but one thing remains the same-the importance of links. The question now would be, “how do you build quality backlinks for 2015”? Watch David Jenyns as he shares his tried and tested techniques on building backlinks for SEO.
Did you find the video helpful? Don’t hesitate to share it with friends and colleagues. If you want to see more of the workshop recordings, check out the Authority Content Marketing System here.
Video Transcript: . Now the next step is let’s get some easy links.
Think about any partners or authorities or suppliers. Garry did this really well a couple of months ago and he gave me a call to tell me about it. Garry runs a print management company, probably the best print house in Australia. He’s got some fantastic clients. He works with Yarra Trams and he built up a really good relationship with them. He talked to them and they have a suppliers’ page. He got them on Yarra Trams of all things, a link back to his website, saying he is a supplier.
What I would do is think about, in your space, if there are any experts or authorities who you’re networking with or suppliers or anyone who you can easily get links from or references to. Don’t think just about getting the link. Think about who might have your target market and actually having a link on their website would be relevant and interesting for them to link back to you. They had a suppliers’ page and Garry got a link on that and that is a pretty good endorsement as well.
On the back of the book is the method and how it actually looks. Pick up any easy links by suppliers and authorities. I’ll talk about guest posts a little bit later. But if you’ve got any easy ones, just go for those first.
Then for directories, and I think this will probably diminish over time, but directories still are an important ranking factor, particularly for localized search. We’re talking about ranking on Google Maps. There is even a little bit of a loophole. Like I said, loopholes still exist, but they close. One of the really important ranking factors at the moment is Google looks at your Yelp reviews and things like that. Now Yelp is not even big here in Australia, but it’s huge over in the States. So getting a very good Yelp listing and having that linking back to you with some good reviews can actually can give you a bit of a boost in the local search, if you’re a local business, geographically targeted.
Things like that will close over time, but there are some. I just listed a few of the more well-known Australian based ones. It’s worth doing. Manually submit it though. Get a team member to do it and do it by hand. I’m unsure how relevant that will be in time to come but I don’t think it’s going to hurt you. Then we’ve got directories and reviews.
We touched on Google Now and what Google is actually doing. They really want to personalize search. Localization is very important. We’re going to see search results change. What you see when you search on Google and what I see when I search on Google could in future be very different. Google has all this information about us and they’re trying to serve the best and most relevant result to me specifically with everything that they know about me. That’s why I don’t think they’re going to be relying on the directories as much. They’ve got their own data that they’re going to be tapping into at the moment.
The next layer is reviews. Reviews are still quite important. Effectively they’re testimonials. Now some industries are more relevant to having reviews than others. If you’re in the food or the travel industry for example, you’ve got to be across all of the different review sites. Your business can be made or broken based on what people are saying about you on some of these platforms.
To get an idea, when someone goes out for dinner, who uses something like Urbanspoon? A good number of people.
TripAdvisor is another one when you’re traveling overseas, you can have a look at different attractions and things like that. They’re very relevant. I would be in those places and make sure it as well filled out as you can. See what you can do. James Jackson was talking about a very cool thing that encourages reviews from your clients. This is something that you should be doing. As part of when someone does business with you, you want them to post a Google Plus review about you or go post a relevant review on one of these different websites. If you can encourage that, it’s a good idea.
These are just some basics worth doing. We need to collect the reviews and the local directories. We’ll also pick up any easy links that we can. The easy links are most likely going to point back through to your home page. More often than not, these easy links are best done with your actual company name, the brand term.
That was the other big change with Penguin. With the anchor text, people were heavily optimizing themselves for the keyword that they wanted to rank for. Then Google dialed that way back. They said, hey, we don’t necessarily need to see every one of your back links with the keyword that you’re trying to rank for in that. We know if you’re trying to do that, it’s like you’re trying to manipulate the rankings. What they want to see are brand terms linking back to your website with your URL and things like that.
When building backlinks it is always good to start with the basics. Remember that quality comes first over quantity. Learn how Authority Content can be of help for your business.
