Backlinks = Rankings, Rankings = Traffic – Deal With It

Link building, done correctly, is hard work. It's laborious and filled with lots of rejection. In many ways, it's like telemarketing – nobody likes it, but it pays off. In fact, link building still works better than anything else to boost organic rankings.

Google's Matt Cutts recently confirmed the continuing value of links here and here. The key quotes:

...backlinks…are a really, really big win in terms of quality for search results ... backlink relevance still really, really helps in making sure we return the best, most relevant, most topical set of search results.

...backlinks still have many, many years left in them ... over time backlinks will become a little less important ... we will continue to use links in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and websites.

So what are the takeaways from these videos? Most commenters picked up on natural language processing and authorship, as probable ranking factors moving forward, without acknowledging the core message of the videos – links still matter a lot. And they will continue to matter for many years.

I don't blame anyone for chalking these videos up to Google FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), but the evidence doesn't stop there. I'm sure that you're familiar with the Penguin algorithm. How about manual penalties, for unnatural links? If links didn't matter, would there be an entire industry dedicated to link audits and sanitizing backlink profiles? Would Google spend so much time and resources battling spammy links? Of course not.

Still, there is a whole contingency of "link deniers" proclaiming that "link building is dead." These folks are just as fervent in their beliefs as the "truthers" and "birthers" despite factual evidence that runs to the contrary. (There's a pretty good chance you will read their comments, below.)

So why are so many people running away from the single most important task in building organic rankings? The answer is pretty simple. Not only is link building hard, but if done improperly, it can result in a penalty and in the most extreme cases can even get you sued!

Can you blame SEO professionals for running away from that hot mess? Of course you can – and you should.

Every marketing campaign focused on building organic rankings needs a link building component. Thousands, if not millions, of pages of great content are published on the web daily – most will never be seen by human eyes. Great content alone, in a competitive niche, rarely ranks without links.

There's a big difference between link building (baiting, earning) and link spamming. The kinds of links that matter are the ones that are editorially given. Links with innate value, not necessarily SEO value. These links require human intervention for placement. A link that can be dropped automatically by anyone has little value and often leads to abuse and trouble.

So, what are some effective techniques for building links in 2014? Actually, the same strategies advised by Cutts way back on March 4, 2010 still hold up today:

• Create controversy: Use it sparingly like spice. The occasional rant is best and if over-used, loses its effectiveness.
• Use humor: Offered as a "softer" alternative to controversy. Can be equally effective – especially if original. (The Oatmeal has built a franchise on funny)
• Participate in blog and forum communities: Not as a spammer, but as an interested community member who gives back to the community by answering questions that help people. This builds credibility and opens up opportunities to attract links.
• Publish original research: Doing a little work to dig into a subject can get a lot of links.
• Use social media: Think about where your target audience spends their time. Is it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? You need to be there as well. Like blog and forum communities, getting to know people via social media opens up link opportunities.
• Create a "Top X List": Like controversy, this is best used sparingly or it can get old fast
• Blog frequently and establish yourself as an authority in your field: If authorship had been in place when this video was produced, I'm sure that would have been mentioned, as well.
• Create how-tos and tutorials: They may not attract a ton of links, but a few good links can have a huge impact – especially on the long tail. These are also a natural for video.
• Create a useful product and give it away for free: Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions, WordPress plugins, anything open source.

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From Link Building to Link Earning: 3 Ways to Transition

Within the link-building era, life was simpler for an SEO professional. Everything was straightforward and the equation was simple – getting x number of links (let's say submitting your site to dozens of Web directories) equated with a certain ranking in search results.

A lot of search experts acknowledged that even though links aren't everything when it comes to search engine optimization, they carry a lot of weight in the search engine's ranking formula. From the need for better ranking results people developed lots of techniques to build links, either manually or automatically.

As you can see in the picture above, the overall interest shift from link building to content marketing is rather clear. Google wasn't too happy with the fact people were focused on desperately gathering links for their sites and forgot the fact that they should be focused on offering real value in order to earn those links.

With Penguin and manual penalties, Google started annihilating these shady techniques one by one. Even so, a few manual link-building techniques still work. The transition is more of a mentality transition from the concept of constructing link profiles to investing time and effort into growing them organically.

Why Link Earning?

While everybody's proclaiming that "content is king" and how link earning will change the face of SEO forever, it becomes pretty clear that very few know exactly how to get there. In all the hype and all the enthusiasm over the next trend, people are more confused than ever as to how are they going to transition from the old ways to the new.

I can't recount how many times I've read about quality over quantity, without seeing some reasonable and graspable meaning for it.

It's obvious that the mentality of creating relevant and meaningful content helps, both you and the community. But how do you end up to earn links?

Everybody expects relevant results from Google. Having irrelevant or shady sites ranking in the top of the search results helps neither you, the visitor, nor Google the search engine. This is one reason why Google works hard to improve their algorithms in order to rank those that deserve to be there.

If you aren't fully committed to this new method of obtaining organic inbound links, you should ask yourself how you would feel if you knew Google's Matt Cutts was looking at your site's links.

If you have any second thoughts about showing any of your links to Cutts, that means your site might be in trouble sooner or later.

Key Differences Between Link Building and Link Earning

Link building and link earning really aren't two different concepts – they are two sides of the same coin. Link earning is higher on the evolution ladder than link building, because you actually have to prove to be more resourceful and offer helpful information to the searcher.

One key difference between these two concepts is that link building is based on your obvious intent of finding websites that would place a link to your site, voided by relevance or value. On the other hand, link earning starts with a brainstorming and creative thinking process.

Figuring out your content strategy and putting ideas on paper should be your first step. You need to keep in mind that real value is relative to your target audience and to other websites or influencers that will want to share your content.

3 Link Earning Tactics

We've written a lot about earning and building links and how they differentiate from one another and why you should choose link earning as a way to increase your link portfolio. Now it's time to show you some methods that you should start to apply in order to earn those organic links.

1. Amazing Content

This is the most conceptually simple, yet hard to implement, efficient link-earning technique. You can dodge it or ignore it.

The creation of amazing content is absolutely vital to earning links. You should conceive this amazing content to not only provide usefulness to readers but also to be shareable.

Once you build something searchers are finding useful on your site, be sure they will gladly help you spread out the word and link back to you. Amazing and engaging content can prove to be very efficient if done properly, as it will spread like fire on sites, blogs, and social media platforms, without a too much of a manual hassle.

2. Engaging Contests

Another good link-earning idea would be to create engagement within the community through contests and giveaways. Host contests on your site and then promote it online. Networking with influencers and website owners and ask them to pass on the information to their readers.

You could say asking other website owners to post information on their site on your behalf would seem like an unnatural link building technique, but it's not the case. It's an experience from which everybody gets to earn something. Especially you, since you're going to have a lot of coverage, which will generate many organic links.

3. Awesome Free Resources

The most compelling reason for people to start talking about you and share links that point to your site would be freebies. Nobody will pass the occasion to get some useful free resources. And by resources I mean some form of content or an app that is not very hard to produce and users may find very useful.

If you want to be successful with this technique, you need to really understand your target audience's needs.

Conclusion

For the moment, Google still ranks sites with shady link profiles. In my opinion it is only a matter of time until the SERPs are cleaner and sites that use shady link-building techniques can't rank well. There are various creative ways in which you can make link building work for you without putting your site at danger of being penalized.

Webmasters should tend to focus less on manual link building and more on delivering awesome content and community help!

Overall you'll have a lot more to earn if you invest a lot more of your time to earning links and dishing out information that people actually want to link to. Besides getting links you'll also raise your brand awareness and you're going to consolidate a strong position in your niche. You'll get ranking, new visitors, and a social presence!

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Inorganic vs. Organic Backlinking Strategies: Getting Back to Basics

The backlink within the practice of SEO is an ongoing topic of conversation for marketing, sales, delivery and reporting of SEO services. Even in a post Penguin world, SEO professionals are still asking questions such as:

• What’s the best way to build backlinks that will have a positive long-term impact on a web presence?
• Is quantity better than quality?
• Should I buy backlinks?
• How do I protect a web presence from future Google algorithm changes?
• How do I know how many organic backlinks versus inorganic backlinks my web presence has?

SEO Strategies & Backlinking Strategies

An SEO strategy is about one thing: being found organically by your customers and prospects for highly converting keywords; keywords that are relevant to your audience. Relevance of content is earned when diversified, relevant content sources with authority and influence reference your content. Or, in other words, link to it.

A backlinking strategy is simply about these three concepts:

• Relevance: Is this link coming from a relevant source that further supports the relevance of my content?
• Authority and Influence: Was the source of this link written by an authoritative, influential person or business?
• Diversity: By adding this link to my web presence am I diversifying and adding value to my digital footprint?

Every backlink you build should pass the RAID test.

If you're able to answer yes to these three questions, then you likely have an organic backlink that is going to positively impact your organic search visibility.

If you can't answer yes to these three questions, then you have an inorganic backlink that will have no impact on organic search results and may even penalize your web presence at some point in the future.

The Origins of the Backlink Pre-Search Engines

In the academic world, when content is published in the form of a thesis there are citations within the content that point to other relevant content from authoritative sources that support the content, thus making it more relevant to the reader. Sounds like a backlink.

Google's origins are academic in nature, having started as a research project at Stanford University. Larry Page was focused on, “the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).”

The research project then went on, “to convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page.” The output was, “for a given URL … a list of backlinks ranked by importance” or relevance.

That was 1996. Seventeen years later, relevancy is still at the core of Google's organic search algorithm, especially when it comes down to backlinks.

How Do You Get Relevant, Authoritative, Influential & Diversified Backlinks?

Roll up your sleeves and get to work. The really great organic backlinks that are going to add long-term value to your web presence, digital footprint and organic search positions and conversions won't happen overnight by buying or trading them, or submitting to directories. Remember, inorganic backlinks don't pass the RAID test.

Building organic backlinks takes a lot of heavy lifting in an approach called Optimized Content Marketing. Publishing fresh, relevant, optimized content on a continuous basis through industry blog sites, press releases, white papers and case studies that demonstrate knowledge and thought leadership, plus socializing the content through your social networks will create a strong inventory of organic backlinks over time.

This long-term approach to SEO will also protect you from any future Google algorithm changes and will make it extremely difficult for your competitors to outrank you.

Reporting Data for Organic vs. Inorganic Backlinks

Great SEO services and results start with great SEO data. Accurate, timely SEO data is required in order to make great decisions about what to do next to a web presence in order to make improvements for organic search.

Be wary of SEO backlink data sources that include inorganic backlink data in their data sets. It is irrelevant to report on backlinks that are inorganic and have no impact on organic search. Reporting on a growing backlink count over time when those backlinks are inorganic is useless and will create unrealistic expectations with your clients.

Summary

Backlinking strategies within an SEO strategy are often overcomplicated. It doesn't have to be this way. Practice an optimized content marketing strategy and test each backlink with the RAID test and your web presence will excel over the long term in Google.

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How video marketing powers SEO

While there is plenty of disagreement among marketers as to the best method to improve your search rankings, there is one specific strategy that is sure to benefit your business. What’s the secret sauce? Believe it or not, leveraging your online videos is often key to increasing search rankings. 


We all know that the search engines use social signals as a factor in their overall ranking algorithm, and as the role of social signals becomes increasingly important, so will the role of online video in your overall search and social strategy. 

This year, the number of consumers viewing videos online is predicted to reach 169.3 million in the US alone. With numbers that significant, what marketer would argue against the tremendous opportunity video can offer to enhance online presence search rankings?


Customers prefer two minutes to ten

Let’s face it; most people would rather spend two minutes watching an interesting video than spend ten minutes reading an article. Consumers are extremely busy, and they are constantly bombarded with messages that may or may not be relevant to them.

Video is the fastest way for your company to show your audience why they should do business with you. Not only is video a great way to share your story, it’s also a great way to build links back to your site, and if all of the stars align, maybe your video will even go viral. This is where the major search engine optimization benefit comes into play.


Videos are shared

In their simplest form, search engines bring searchers the most relevant data to their query, and inbound links help the search engines determine the data’s relevancy. When viewers find your video to be valuable content, they are likely to share it, thus facilitating the linking-fest.

Whether it is in the form of information, humor, controversy, entertainment, instruction, or inspiration, the video needs to be compelling enough to make the viewer want to share it. The more shares, the better for your overall online presence.  


Videos increase engagement

A recent comScore study showed websites that contain videos hold a viewer’s attention two+ minutes longer than sites without video content. Visitor time spent onsite is just one more factor that the search engines are looking for to determine relevancy. The fact that your website can hold your viewers’ attention is a big thumbs up.Another recent study, from aimClear, states that videos in universal search results have a 41% higher click-through rate than plain-text results.


It is no secret that SEO is essentially one giant puzzle with numerous moving pieces, but with universal search, videos offer businesses one more way to get heightened exposure in the search engines. According to a Forrester research study, having a good online video marketing strategy can actually increase your likelihood of achieving first page Google rankings by up to 53 times. For as popular as online videos have become, video marketing is still widely underused by businesses.


Grab it while you can

The “video” search is far less competitive than the “everything” search on Google, yet most marketers are ignoring this opportunity to jump ahead in the search results by implementing an online video strategy. There have been many instances where I have performed a web search using the “Everything” option. A particular business may not rank in the top ten positions on the first page, but when I perform the exact same search using the “videos” option that same business is number one.

This is a tremendous opportunity for businesses to get a one up on their competitors. Granted, the content contained within the video needs to offer value to the viewer. Google tends to show favoritism to informative videos versus strictly sales videos, so this is something that you may want to keep in mind as you develop your strategy. 


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