Community
1,490 viewsOn Tuesday, 24th May, we had yet another exciting twitter chat! This time, our topic centered around Link Building tactics in 2016.
If keywords are the heart, link building is the soul of SEO!
There is no question that search engines rely heavily on external links to evaluate the relevance and authority of your website. After all, links are among the top three ranking factors as Google announced earlier this year.
But, all links are not equal. And, building great links requires dedication and time!
There are still some who are tempted by the easy road. They try to acquire links quickly through unnatural means. This path is dangerous as it leads to the dark side of SEO.
Eventually, if you use the wrong link building approach, your website could drop out of the SERPs completely.
So, what are the right strategies? What link building tactics could get you in trouble? What tools can help you automate the process of organic link building? How should you reach out to people?
Our chat covered all these pressing questions and more!
We were glad to have Venchito Tampon as our guest speaker. While he started his career in content writing at an early age of 17, he is now the proud co-founder of Sharp Rocket. Sharp Rocket is a link building and content marketing agency which is dedicated to delivering high-quality service to local as well as international clients.
Needles to say, a lot of valuable insights were contributed by our community.
Below, I have a quick recap of the chat! Steal all the best tips you can 😉
First, we asked our guests to share their “secret recipes” for link building. Let’s find out what they had in stock for us!
Q1: What are the best Link Building Strategies in 2016?
Content Marketing was advocated by most of our participants.
Indeed. Generating awesome “evergreen” content can help you build valuable links. And, more than anything, you need to establish this as a long term strategy if you want to create a strong link profile.
Our community also mentioned another approach to Link Building – Relationship Building. And specifically, they suggested going offline to acquire links and build relationships. I have to say couldn’t agree more with this one!
Guest Speaker’s insights:
“Broken link building, guest blogging, guestographics, linker outreach, link reclamation and influencer outreach”.
From our community:
@RankWatch A1. Relationship building is a new link building strategy in 2016. #Rankwatchchat
— Hardik Oza (@Ozaemotion) May 24, 2016
A1:
In actionable terms, Quora, Influencer Outreach and Optimized Blogging #rankwatchchat— Sid Sharma (@sid_091) May 24, 2016
A1: Guest posting is a great strategy. It brings value to the audience & creates natural mention/link #rankwatchchat https://t.co/n0cdp2JY9A
— Amel Mehenaoui (@amelm) May 24, 2016
@RankWatch A1 find innovative ways to display helpful content, build relationships, go offline to earn links #rankwatchchat
— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) May 24, 2016
Most people fall into the trap of black hat SEO because of the temptation to build links quickly. In a nutshell, the “right thing to do” and the “quick thing to do” are completely different concepts when it comes to link building. This got us to our next question:
Q2: What are the tactics that can get you in trouble?
These black hat tactics, can get you in a lot of trouble with Google!
Paid links are a big NO! You can also get on Google’s radar if you acquire a lot of new links in a short span.
Among the other tactics which could get you a penalty our participants mentioned getting links from de-indexed websites, buying paid post links and spammy blog comments.
Guest Speaker’s Insights:
“Getting links from private blog networks (PBN), duplicate content submission from irrelevant websites with your links”
From our community:
A2: Getting Links from website which are either de-indexed in google or penalised by Google #rankwatchchat
— Vishwas Bishnoi (@dadlusG) May 24, 2016
A2: Buying #backlinks is against #Google‘s webmaster guidelines. So don’t buy them. Re #rankwatchchat @RankWatch https://t.co/x2dvy1HLDh
— Amel Mehenaoui (@amelm) May 24, 2016
A2 Stop using directories and bookmarking sites immediately. Don’t even think about buying links #RankWatchChat
— Devanshu Arora (@devanshuarora) May 24, 2016
In mid-April Google removed the PageRank toolbar, which was of course for the greater good! The revealing of the PageRank scores gave SEOs the impression that Google favoured link building over other ranking factors. And this gave rise to the link-selling economy.
That is why we were quite interested to know how the removal of the PageRank toolbar now would affect the web.
Q3: How do you see the post-PageRank toolbar world?
As one of our guests pointed out, PageRank was just a small part of Google’s giant algorithm. A number of other factors are also used to determine your rankings.
With the removal of the pagerank toolbar, as an alternative, some might seek estimates from third party sites to judge the authoritativeness of the web page. However, it will of course be all guess work.
So our participants made some key predictions. One, the number of people emailing just to ask for links would reduce. Two, the number of spammy blog comments would sharply decrease.
Guest speaker’s Insights:
“SEOs and marketers will have different metrics to determine the value of a single link“.
From our community:
A3: Surely It was Imp but pages with lower PR could beat pages with higher PR if they had other factor in favour of them! #rankwatchchat
— Vishwas Bishnoi (@dadlusG) May 24, 2016
@RankWatch A3. As usual. People are considering other matrices like DA, citiation flow, PA and so on! #rankwatchchat
— Hardik Oza (@Ozaemotion) May 24, 2016
A3: In one phrase: Dynamic Nature of SEO and SEM, environment changes every minute! #rankwatchchat
— Sid Sharma (@sid_091) May 24, 2016
Q4: What are your tips for a great outreach email?
Talking about generating backlinks, we asked our participants to share their personal ingredients for a great outreach email.
First things first – the Subject line – keep it direct and personalized.
Then proceed to introduce yourself. Keep the email short and polite. And most importantly be upfront about your intentions. These tips would give you better results.
Guest speaker’s Insights:
“Templated outreach emails with few customizations to personalize to outreach”.
From our community:
@RankWatch A4 personal relationships will always make a difference + being honest about your intentions is valued more #rankwatchchat
— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) May 24, 2016
A4: Take time to know them.Keep email about them & their audience. Keep email short & to the point. #rankwatchchat https://t.co/CGL2UXTEnP
— Amel Mehenaoui (@amelm) May 24, 2016
A4: Pay attention to the Subject line!
Personalise greeting for every email
Be Brief and State just one goal! #rankwatchchat— Vishwas Bishnoi (@dadlusG) May 24, 2016
A4 Be nice. Introduce yourself. Tell them what do you want. Be nice again. No brainer. #RankWatchChat
— Devanshu Arora (@devanshuarora) May 24, 2016
Q5: What are your favorite automation tools for organic link building?
We asked our participants to open their link building toolbox and share with us some amazing resources that could help automate this process.
Everybody shared their favourite tools. Ahrefs and RankWatch received most mentions.
Here were the other favourites:
- Buzzsumo
- Google Webmaster tools
- Scrapebox
- SEONuke
- CrowdSearch
- Search Metrics
- Majestic SEO
- Open Site Explorer
- SEMRush
Guest speaker’s Insights:
“Ahrefs, SEMRush, Excel/Google Spreadsheet formulas”.
From our community:
A5: ScrapeBox, SEONuke, CrowdSearch #rankwatchchat
— Vishwas Bishnoi (@dadlusG) May 24, 2016
A5: ahrerf, majestic seo, open site explorer #rankwatchchat
— danish usmani (@danishwanish) May 24, 2016
With this, we approached our last question.
Q6: What are the most underrated methods of link building?
This was personally my favourite question! The answers pointed out some great tips. From posting explainer or tutorial videos to broken link building or going offline to acquire links, the answers were insightful.
Guest speaker’s Insights:
“Link reclamation, relationship building (offline events), proper competitor link analysis”.
From our community:
A6: the explainer/tutorials/promotional videos these days are good way to promote and can be a good channel in the future. #rankwatchchat
— danish usmani (@danishwanish) May 24, 2016
A6. Resource page link building #RankWatchChat
— Shivangi Shrivastava (@shivangi1507) May 24, 2016
@RankWatch A6 offline, offline, offline. actually calling people, meeting them IRL, sending them a gift, etc. #rankwatchchat
— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) May 24, 2016
Having discussed all these points, we can say that it’s better to “earn links” than “build links”. Reach out to influencers, leverage existing relationships, build long term relations and, create awesome content.
I hope these strategies and tools help you in boosting your website’s performance.
Do you have more insights to share on the topic? We’d love to hear from you. Simply tweet your thoughts with #RankWatchChat
Subscribe to our upcoming events to get a notification of our next twitter chat 😉
See you there!
Share Your Thoughts