Link Building: How To Build Back Links To Dominate Google

1. What You'll Know (And Be Able To Do) By The End Of This Course: Welcome to this link building course. If you've ever been uncertain about the link building process or looking for ways to build more back wings, you're in the right place. Link building is one of those essential ranking factors for top search engines like Google . The goal of this course is to take you from beginner to expert link builder. By the end of this course, you will be able to establish a link building strategy for any website you're working to. Rink. Not only will you know how to develop a link building strategy will talk about how to implement that strategy correctly. So you're back. Links appeared natural and will ultimately dramatically help increase your ranking. Inside will discuss all the common questions that surrounding building today exactly where you can go to build quality links, an overview of the tools you may want to use. And I'm also available to answer questions and provide feedback as you develop your own link building campaign. This is also a very realistic course. You won't find any overnight ranking schemes here or any black hat methods, as some call it. The strategies we cover in this course aimed to provide you with long term, high quality results. So if that's what you're after, let's get to it 2. What Is Link Building?: before we get into how to build back Ling's, I want to take a minute to talk about exactly what Link building is. So we're on the same page. Link building certainly isn't difficult to Dio. It doesn't require you have any special skills or tools, but it does require time and effort. And if you can commit to those two things, you will see results. Essentially, link building is simply an ongoing process of gaining a link from another website to your own. Many say a back link is like a vote of confidence. It shows Google you are a worthy website. There are so many techniques that are used to obtain links, and some are easier than others. This is often the most time consuming part of S E O, but it is essential to high rankings, but we're going to break down all aspects of it, so it is a simple as possible for you 3. Why Build Links To Your Website?: so why should you build links to your website in the first place? Google uses links for two reasons. First, to find new Web pages and second, to help determine where they should rank webpages in their search results. Link Building is one of Google's major algorithm factors for ranking websites today. Google themselves has even said, and I quote, in general, Web masters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high quality sites that link to their pages. Links have been important part of the ranking process for years, and they likely will for years to come. And top representatives like Matt Cutts have gone on record multiple times stating Link building will be around for a while. So if you are not familiar with the link voting process, this is crucial two Nes Seo campaign that you are working on into your success in achieving high rankings and search results. 4. Section 2: What We're Going to Cover: in the upcoming sections. We're going to discuss the top questions I commonly hear about link building, such as how Maney back Ling's do I need and how quickly should I build back links. Then we'll dive right into how to actually go about finding link building opportunities, which I know is a big reason for why you are taking this course in the first place before you jump right into building links, I want to make sure you are informed about a number of things you should take into consideration. So in this section, I'm going to make sure you know how to properly evaluate each back ling opportunity. Where to avoid getting back ling. So you don't end up with a penalty, why others will consider linking to you and a number of other important topics for you to consider. After this section, you'll feel better prepared for moving forward with your link building campaign 5. Two Questions To Ask Yourself About Every Link You Build: before we even look at how to determine just how valuable a back link is, I want you to know this. Not all back links are created equal with that being said, when I am working to obtain a back link, there are a couple of things I like to keep in the back of my mind before even take the next step in analyzing the quality of a potential back link. First, if it's hard to get the back link, it's probably worth it. Typically, speaking back Ling's that aren't super easy to get aren't going to have much impact. Valuable wings are often harder to get. This is what can keep me motivated towards going after links I really want instead of just giving up or settling on another link. That isn't going to help boost my rankings as much. And you understand more why when we talk about how Maney back Ling's, you should go for the second thing. I like to keep in mind. I actually picked up from Eric Ward, who has been linked building since the early nineties and is one of the top experts on the subject. He asked the question What I want this link. If Google didn't exist without wasting time measuring any domain metrics, this question alone will help tell you if the link is worth getting. It's important to consider what a link can do for you outside of just helping your business rank. Of course, some links were going to be better than others. Some will do nothing for you. Some will do a lot and you'll go after a mix of links. But these are a couple of tips to keep in mind. 6. Ultimate Criteria For Determining The Value of a Backlink: If a link passes your own value test, it's important to look at a number of metrics to see just how valuable a back link would be . If you were able to get it from a particular source to do this, it's important to have a set of criteria for determining which back links will be valuable for you. So let's look at those now. We're going to get into the specifics of where to find these sources, but let's make sure you know what you're looking for. First, the first point you want to look for is relevance. How relevant is the link source to your website snitch or content? If you're Gardner and other gardening websites linked to you, dot link will be more powerful than a link from a plumber, even if the plumber site has a high domain authority and other metrics going for it. Relevance is important, so always go for links that are related to the website topic. Now that we have a relevant website, is that relevant website a trusted source? Trustworthy sites are typically high quality sites, and they often get linked to from some popular, authoritative sites. If you're not sure if it's a trusted site, domain authority is a good way to determine this. Domain authority is a number that's looked at more these days than pay. Drink as domain authority is more frequently updated, and it takes into consideration some of Google's algorithm. And it looks at metrics like how many domains are linking two of the website the total number of links that they have and other trust scores. And this creates the domain authority score. You definitely want to stay away from websites with domain authorities under 10. However, if you can get links from websites even as Lois, 20 and 30 those are considered trustworthy sites and are okay to get back links from assuming that they passed the other criteria that we're going to talk about. So this relevant, trusted site could give a back link. But will this back link result in any traffic? This is one of the reasons link directories aren't that powerful. The purpose of linking from one site to another is toe add value to the readers and to provide them with additional resource is that will be worth their while. This not only has to do with the amount of traffic, but also where the link is placed on the website. A contextual link that is placed within a relevant article on the website is going to drive more traffic than a link from the sites Resource Is or links Page, thus making it more valuable. So this is really two things to look for. Traffic and link position. Let's talk about how these sites linked to you because the anchor text the referring site will use is also important. An anchor text is simply the words that the website will use and then hyper link to your website. So if you are trying to rank for auto insurance quotes, for example, you want to have the same keywords as well as related keywords. So, for instance, in addition, toe auto insurance quotes, another anchor text could be quotes for auto insurance or car insurance. Quote having the exact same anchor text everywhere doesn't look natural, so you want to make sure you get varied anchor text. This could even include the name of your company or the earl of your website. Remember, we're going after quality here, so when selecting the back links you're going after, make sure you're looking for sites at this criteria 7. Additional Tips for Selecting Quality Back Links: I want to mention a few other things to look for that are important for selecting quality back links. The most important tip I have here is to get your website listed with no more than a few other links. The more links on the page, the less value the link will have for you. That's why an in content linked with only a few other sites mentioned if that will hold more value for you than getting listed on a resource is page where there are many other links. What happens here is the trust and authority end up getting divided up between all of those links. And speaking of getting mentioned with others, if you are able to get listed alongside some authoritative sites, that can really do wonders for your link building as well as Google will start to align your website with those authoritative sites. If you even looked at a link directory, I'm sure you've seen some that require you to link to their website in exchange for limb to link to you. This is not the best idea. Google was certainly smart enough to figure this out and doesn't value these links as much always do what you can to get a one way link, remember, the easier the link is to get, the less value it probably has. 8. The Best Positioning Of A Link: as I briefly highlighted in a previous lecture. The position of your link on another site can make a difference in how much that link does for you. I previously gave the example of an in content link versus a resource page link. If you're not sure which one is more valuable, ask yourself regardless of ranking, which one is going to bring UME, or traffic? And, of course, more targeted visitors? The in content link right. These links encourage more people to click on them, which means they are more useful for searchers. More valuable for searchers means link is going to be more valuable for you and your website. So always keep in mind that getting an in content link saying an article, for example, is going to be more valuable than a link on a page with a list of links on a side bar or footer 9. Places To Avoid Getting Links From: getting back Ling's from certain low quality sources will do your website more harm than good, so obviously you want to avoid them. But I want to talk about where you should avoid getting back links. But before I do, I want to mention that if you are working with an established website, you want to download a list of back wings from your Google search consul on Google Webmaster Tools. This list will show you which websites are linking to you. What anchor text is being used and which pages are being linked to. You want to review this information to check for any low quality links as having too many can get you penalized. Some people go after these low quality link sources to get what I like to call quick wins. They may see some short term results, but those are, of course, short lift. Personally, I don't want to put all this effort in for a short return. I want my effort toe last, so let's talk about some places you'll want to avoid giving rent first. If you look for the website and you determine that it is not indexed in Google, stay away from it. There could be a very valuable reason that is not indexed in Google unless it is a brand new site which there might not be much value in getting a link from that website anyway. If you look at the websites domain and trust, flow score and you see that it is below 10 that is also a key indication of a potential spam website or a website that's been penalized, so you want to stay away from those going through the website. If you see anywhere that indicates that the site sells links on their website, stay away from it. If you can find that information, so can Google and they're going to discredit those links now for the most part, you're going to be able to pull up a site and you'll see if it looks ban me and if it looks so quality, so if it has thin content, it's not well written or there's no clear focus on the website. You see a lot of different topics going on. That's not a website. You want to align your website with directories or pages with lots of links are others that you want to appear with this few other links as possible. Now there are some directory exceptions as well. Talk about but for the most part, just General Spammy directories. You do not want to get Lincoln and, again the use of unnatural anchor text, as I've already hinted about. If you look at the anchor text that the other links on the Web site are receiving and they sound really spammy or they have some of those spammy keyword, you're going to want to avoid that site. Obviously, another obvious one can be Spammy Web comments. High quality sites dont want spam comments, But if you go through this, the comment section and you see that the people who are responding don't really have really names or they're using those keywords again, like Viagra or iPad. Some of those popular ones people want to rank for stay away. Another key indicator is if you can not find contact information on the website, you don't see a phone number. You don't see an email adjust. You don't see a contact form. That's no good. That is an indication that this is not a real site. If you don't see phone number, you don't see an email address. But you do see a contact form. That's okay. They're still giving you a way to contact them, so that may not be a bad site. You don't always want to judge website just on the way it looks. But if you find the website has even one of these issues that I just mentioned, you'll want to look elsewhere for a back ling to make sure that you're protecting your own website. 10. International Links: I want to give a quick tip about working with international websites. If you want to rank in Google UK, for example, your first step should be in obtaining back links from other UK based sites. Those air typically going toe hold the most value for you, assuming, of course, that you're looking for sites that meet the other criteria we've discussed in Google's eyes . If you're offering a UK service product or information, other websites within the UK are most likely going to link to you naturally. So those air why you're going to want to go after those links. With that being said, You can certainly build links from other sites and other countries like the U. S or Australia and so on, and those will be valuable to you. But just always keep relevancy and trust in mind, and you'll be fine 11. 5 Reasons Other Websites Will Link To You: when you're going through all of the effort of acquiring back Ling's, it could be easier for you if you keep in mind why someone else may even bother linking to you. Everyone has to have a reason, and knowing these potential reasons will help you in your presentation to these different website owners. So let's have a look at what some of these main reasons are that someone is going to give you a back link first. If your site is very high quality, it's interesting or keeps the visitor engage. It's going to be beneficial to their readers. So they're going toe. Want toe link to your site because it's going to give their visitors and their readers their followers something very beneficial, and their readers will be thankful to them for sharing such high quality information. Next, you may have an existing relationship with the website owner, so they'll be happy to give you a back link. But if you don't have one, you may have taken the time to build that relationship before asking for that back link. So, after being a valuable partner to them or someone that they can look to for help, they come to respect, they will be more likely to give you a back link. Next. You've heard of guest posting. You may write great content for their website. That means they don't have to. They don't have toe take the time to do that and they still have high quality content to promote to their followers. This is a win win situation for everybody. Next you could pay for the link and we'll talk about that a bit later about whether that's something that's worth doing or not, but financial incentives or something that surely can get you back links. And if you have promoted their website previously and this may not just be a one time deal , but if they see you, let's say promoting your website on their website, you have tweeted or shared their website to your following. If you've been commenting on their blawg and they've started to take notice, they're going to be more likely to promote your content because you're actively engaged with what they're doing. And although these are the most common reason someone will give you a back ling, there really has to be something in it for them. So whether you're writing a guest post on their site so they don't have to spend the time writing or you're providing an immensely valuable content for their readers. So the website owner looks good. There has to be something in it for them, so always keep that in mind. Link building does take time, and the reason good quality back linking can take so much time is because you have to create valuable content so others will want to link to you when you ask. And you have to spend the time acquiring the back link, which could actually mean you may have to build a relationship in order to get that link. The good news is, the harder it can be to get a link usually means it's really worth it, and it can really do wonders for your ranking. But I recommend before you asked for back link first, ask yourself what's in it for the other person. That way, you'll make sure you present this as an opportunity for them in the right way, and you'll have a much better chance of getting the back link 12. Understand Your Back Link Profile Before Getting Started: If you're starting a link building campaign for a brand new website, you likely have no back links to speak of. On the other hand, if your website has been up for a while, it's possible you may have generated some back Ling's without even realizing it. Before you start building new back links, you should start by seeing what length you already have, so you can plan accordingly. If you have Google Webmaster tools set up, you can start there to see a list of back links pointing to your website. Otherwise, in an upcoming section will be looking at some back link analysis tools, which you will be able to use as well to see your back wings. So make sure as we cover those tools before you even bother looking at your competition that you take a moment to search for your own website to see what links do you have. Are they high quality links Are that expand the links? Are they links from directories? Are they in content links? Are they posted on resource is pages and footers and that will help you determine what types of links you've already acquired. The quality of those links so you can diversify your link building campaign. So make sure that you take note of these back links so you can incorporate it into your plan as you build it. 13. What We're Going to Cover: in this section, I'm going to cover a number of common back linking questions. I want to address these out front so you have the answers and can turn your focus towards obtaining links as well discuss in the upcoming sections. Some of the topics will discuss in this section. Include, when is the best time to start building back links? How maney back links. You should go after how quickly you should build back links. How many pages you should link Teoh which back? Linking strategies you should use and how long it will take for you to actually see results from all of your efforts. So if that sounds good, let's get right to it. 14. When Should You Start Link Building?: At one point in the S E o process, you should actually start Link Building is a very common question. And although link building is very important to your ranking success, it is not the first step you'll want to take in the S e o process before you can begin your lengthening campaign There two steps you should take first. The first is keyword research. You need to know which keywords you're going to go after so you can target the right sites in anchor text. You also need to know your top keywords so you can optimize your website correctly. Which brings me to Point number two on site optimization on site optimization is making sure your website is prepared to rank and search engines. This is a crucial step to take before starting to build links. This is an entire topic itself, so I'm not going to cover that all here. But this is where you'll make adjustments to different aspects of your site, including the title tags, meta description, your content header tags. Your you are l's formatting of your content, your internal site structure as well talk about and others. Essentially, you need to make sure you've done proper keyword research that your website architecture is properly set up and you've put strong content in place. Then you'll be running to begin the link building process. 15. How Many Backlinks Do I Need?: As you start your link building campaign, you may be wondering how maney back links you actually need. Here comes the Superfund. It depends. Answer. How many links you'll need does depend on a number of factors, so the answer will be different for every single website. But before you get discouraged, let's look at how you can determine how many back links you'll want to aim for. Depending on the website you're working with before we look at how to determine your number , there are a few factors to keep in mind. How many back links you'll need will depend on how maney Heward you're going after how competitive those keywords are and the quality of back wings that you go after these are all mostly within your controls. Do you could determine how hard you want to work at this point. Now, remember, if you didn't optimize your website, this won't matter as much. You need to give yourself a good foundation toe work with. When you take the time to optimize your website, you're going to need less links, as you probably figured out by now. It's not a he who has the most links winds type of game. Google wants to provide value to their users, so their focus is on quality. So your should be, too, in an upcoming lecture will walk step by step through how to analyze your competitors back Ling's, which will give you a much better idea of how many you need to go after when we look at this. You want to not just look for the number of back links they have, but the quality of back wings they have. So if you have five quality back Ling's let's say and your competitors has 50 low quality back Ling's, your website can be more valuable in the eyes of Google, so keep that in mind. Lastly, it's not just the number of links, but also the number of sources. If a competitor has 100 links from five sources, that's not necessarily better than 10 links from 10 different sources in an upcoming sexual look at exactly how to analyze your competition so you can get a better idea of how maney back links you will need. After you see how to do that, you'll have a better idea of what number you should aim for 16. How Quickly Should I Build Backlinks?: how quickly you should build links to your site is always a big question for many people. Let's think about this from Google's perspective again, Google wants to rank useful sites that are valuable to searchers. Since Google can't manually check every single website that gets published, they created an algorithm toe. Help them determine which are the best sites to rank. You know by now that back lings are a large part of Google's algorithm and you also know the Google light. See things happen naturally. It would not be natural for a website to suddenly go from 0 to 100 links in a matter of days. On the other hand, if you were relying on others, define your valuable content and linked to it, This would happen naturally over time. Of course, we also know that just because we have a valuable website in front of us does not mean that others will find her site. So we give them a little help in contact websites to submit our website to help others find us. This means we need to stay away from front loading back Ling's Everyone wants to see immediate results, and that's why getting as many back Ling's as you can right away could be tempting. But if you also want to see long term results, you need to slow down. Link building should be a continuous process that you are always working on because that is what would happen naturally for a high quality site. They would always be acquiring good quality links. I recommend starting with maybe just 2 to 3 links per week and continuing toe a build additional links over time. 17. How Many Back Linking Methods Should I Use?: When you think about the types of back wings you should build for your site, you don't want to just rely on one type of back. Like why simple? It's not natural. Let's say you wanted to get a bunch of back links from directories. The problem with that outside, of course, it just being directories is that it's just one type of back link. And that isn't natural. As we begin to cover how and where you can get back links, take note of the ones you feel could apply for your website and jot those down. You want a very link profile, and as you continually build links, you'll want to switch it up a bit. Doing so will also help maintain your rankings in the future, despite any algorithm updates. And again, that's what we're after. We're not after just these short term results. We want to make sure that the back linking methods that we use are going toe have long term results, so our efforts could be seen for a long time to come. 18. Which Pages Should I Build Links To?: as you begin to build back Ling's, it's very common to feel like you should always link back to your home page. After all, you've likely built your home page to be a good starting point for any site visitor to come . Teoh and you might even just link back to your home page without even thinking about it, because why would you linked to other pages? But even if you were just relying on back clings to happen naturally, with no effort on your part, your home page would naturally received the most back wings. But that doesn't mean other pages wouldn't get link to ever. First you want to get back, clings to the specific webpage we're trying to rank. So, for example, if your website is about dog trading and you want to run for the word dog chew toys, you want to build some back links to your product pages for that particular keyword. So the page you linked to can also depend on the page that you're trying to rank. You're not always just trying to rank your home page, so don't forget to link to your internal pages like your product and your service pages, as well as your home page. 19. How Long Does Link Building Take?: back, linking, coming, draining that times mostly because you're not going to see instantaneous results. It can take weeks for you to see any results from a new back ling, because Google needs time, discover that new link and update their search results. So this will require a bit of patients on your end. Once Google crawls the page, your link is on Onley. Then will it discover this new link so you won't receive any ranking credit as I'll call it until this happens. If the page your link is on doesn't typically get updated very often, it can take longer for this page to get crawled. But more popular or regularly updated pages are likely to be crawled more often because Google has come to know those sites have regular content being added. This means you could be looking at anywhere from a few days to even a few months, depending on where that back link is located. And the last time that Google crawled the site. Now on a Sino if you're providing SDO services and are trying to answer the question of how long will it take for you to rank my site? This is something you may want to explain to your claim, so they better understand that it's not you. Necessarily. It's a search engine process for discovering new links and working them into of their algorithm. 20. Section 4: What We're Going to Cover: in this sexual, we're going to look at how to analyze your competition so you can get a better idea of their link building strategy. Taking the time to do this will help you to figure out what your link building strategy should look like so you can outrank your competition. Once you know where your competition is getting links, you can go after the same links higher quality links and use other sources that will discuss in the future section of this course. This is where we're actually going to start looking at some realty tactics and techniques for generating high quality back wings. 21. Analyzing Your Competition Before Starting Your Link Building Campaign: I mentioned earlier that we were going to take a look at your competition because the easiest way to figure out not only where to start getting links but how many links you're actually going to need is to start by analysing your competition. The good news is there are tools that can help you do this, and we're going to take a look at some of those in a minute. Before we look at some of these tools, I want to make sure that you're aware of a couple of things. First, you're likely never going to see 100% of the websites back links using any tool, no matter how good the tool. And second, we talked about how long it can take for Google to find a new link saying goes for these tools. A newly acquired link may take weeks to shop in one of these tools as well. For this reason, I like to do a quick search on a few different tools to see if I can pull up different results. It's a good idea to note down what you find for each competitors as you should periodically go back and check what your competitors are doing so you can see any new links they have received, if any, and make sure you stay ahead of your competition. Keep in mind that you can use these tools to see your own back ling profile as well. So that should be your very first step. Is looking at what back links your website may have already acquired that you don't even know about so that you have diversified back? Ling's going to your website, and so they also know the anchor text that is being used. And so the your overall strategy is set up correctly and diversified. Okay, let's look at some of these back link analysis tools next. 22. Back Linking Tools Worth Using: There are many good back link analysis tools out there, and I'm gonna walk through just a few of the ones that I think are really good. Let's start with a refs. You can use the free version of this tool to get a lot of great back link information for your competitors and also for your own website, too. In a Herath site Explorer, you can throw in your competitors name and do a quick search. There are several bits of useful information here. Here you'll see the total number of back Ling's that they have, and you'll see how many referring domains are sending those back Ling's. So although this particular website, the Huffington Post, which is obviously huge, has 222 million back wings. But that is not coming from 222 million sources. That's coming from 512,000 sources. So the number of back Ling's versus how many domains actually sending are actually providing those back. Ling's is Something is a metric that you definitely want to pay attention to scrolling down on the left hand side. Here, you can look at the exact number of domains as we looked at above, but you can see how they're broken down. Are there any government referring domains in the educational referring domains Hominy or dot com dot net dot org's. So that gives you more information about their link profile. If you are able to get any government, our educational back lings, those do hold a lot of weight so you can see if your competitors has been able to acquire any of those particular back Ling's, and you can go after some of those as well. Also scrolling down. You can look at the types of back Ling's. So here, How many of these Back Ling's our text links? How many of these back links come? Inform of images because don't forget back wings don't just have to be from text. They can be from images or videos as well. Something else I like to look at is the competitors, but we'll come back to that in a second. But scrolling down. You can see what is some of their top content, and you can see how many times it gets shared. So this could be helpful because this can be information you can use when you go to create your own content and determine what you should title your post. What you should write about, what kind of content you can ask others to link to what people are interested in linking to . So this is really good information for that sort of thing. Scrolling down even further, you can take a look at what anchor text they're actually using. What are the most popular terms that are being used to? You can see the variety that is being used, but going back up to the competitors for a second when you can see what the top competitors are, you can also copy the URL, throw it back in tow, a giraffes or the other tools that we look at and see what back Ling's those competitors are getting because you may find some other link opportunities that this particular competitors didn't have, so that could be very helpful. And now from this page you will be able to see the page title and the page URL that the back link is on. You'll be able to see how many followers that particular page has, and you'll be able to see the anchor text that was used on that page in the oil that they were referring to. Because again, this might not be the home page. In this case. This is an internal page, as I am. Russia's another good competitors tool that you can use, and again they have a free version that you can use. You can go in again. You can see how many links say they are reporting. You can see that it's different than the last tool. But again, you're gonna be able to see the number of back links. You're gonna be able to see the number of referring domains. This will show you the top organic keywords that the website is ranking for, and you'll be able to see some of their competitors as well. And these are the competitors that are that can potentially outrank them, depending on the content, organically scrolling all the way down. This is going to give you the specific back links, and you can click to get a full report of all of the back Ling's so you'll be able to see which particular page has the back link on it. You'll be able to see what anchor Texas being used and what particular page. That link is going to on your site or on your competitors site. And then below, you'll be able to see the top anchor text that is being used so you can see if the site has all the same anchor text or if they're trying to diversify it a bit again. This is just going to give you more information about how much effort your competition is putting in tow CEO and put it into link building. Lastly, open site Explorer by Mas is a good one. You can throw in the domain there. You'll be able to see the domain authority here, the page authority here. Huffington Post is obviously huge. That's normal. You're normally not going to see a domain authority of 98 especially if you're working with local businesses. But you'll be able to see here again the link metrics, how Maney links that they actually have that they're reporting and you can scroll down and you can see the number of inbound links. Here. You can see the title that they're using. You can see what page that they're linking to again and what mas does our open side explores. They give this spam score here, So it will tell you if the website that is linking to them is very spammy. I still recommend that you do a manual check, but this is just a good indication. Here is well. You can also see the page authority and domain authority for the site that is linking to them, which is very helpful because, obviously, the higher the page authority, the higher the domain authority, the better. So you can continue to scroll down if you're logged in for free and you'll see a list of you the additional information for all of the results. But you can still go ahead and grab these lings, and you can analyze them on your own as well. So doing this for your competitors and even your competitors, competitors can really give you a great list of places to start looking for back links. If your top competitors have a relatively low number of links, you'll likely be able to outrank them relatively easily by building a few high quality links. But if you're dealing with a more competitive niche, you'll see how many links you'll need to beat your competition. But remember, a lower number of quality links will outrank a higher number of spammy or low quality links any day 23. Analyzing Your Back Link Profile Before Starting a Link Building Campaign: If you're starting a link building campaign for a brand new website, you likely have no back links to speak of. On the other hand, if your website has been up for a while, it's possible you may have generated some back Ling's without even realizing it. Before you start building new back links, you should start by seeing what length you already have, so you can plan accordingly. If you have Google Webmaster tools set up, you can start there to see a list of back links pointing to your website. Otherwise, in an upcoming section will be looking at some back link analysis tools, which you will be able to use as well to see your back wings. So make sure as we cover those tools before you even bother looking at your competition that you take a moment to search for your own website to see what links do you have. Are they high quality links Are that expand the links? Are they links from directories? Are they in content links? Are they posted on resource is pages and footers and that will help you determine what types of links you've already acquired. The quality of those links so you can diversify your link building campaign. So make sure that you take note of these back links so you can incorporate it into your plan as you build it. 24. Internal Linking Structure: before exploring new tactics for finding potential back Ling's. You should be starting with your own site. I'm talking about creating an internal linking structure. An internal link is when you link from one page on your website toe another page on your website. These links are valuable to your site visitors and to search engine. So it's a good idea to incorporate this into your lengthening strategy as we talked briefly about earlier on page optimization is extremely important in your overhauling building success and an internal linking structure is definitely part of that on site optimization, and you'll want to start with that. Internal ings are not going to be a valuable as external ings because, well, you can't vote for yourself telling Google. Hey, I think I'm great, so you should, too. That doesn't build as much confidence as when 1/3 unrelated party tells Google your great. The idea here is that internal links can help pass authority from page to page, so in external ing toe, one page can also help rank another. They also shall how relevant the pages are on your website and you know by now that relevance is very important. So if you're thinking OK, but should I just go after external back links and not worry about an internal link in structure? I'd say no, because having a good internal linking structure can mean you'll need less external back clings to achieve the rankings you're after. So why would you want to work harder than you actually need? Teoh. Another thing here is that you have absolute control of what happens on your site. You can select the position of your link, which page the link goes to and what anchor text issues. When you are dealing with third party sites, you're going to lose a lot if not all, of that control. Earlier, we talked about the importance of the position of a link that also applies to your internal linking structure. So do what you can tow linked to your other pages within the content of your site and not just from the footer. If you want your internal ing toe, hold the most week, you should place it in one of these locations the navigation in content, such as on a page or a post, this sign bar or the footer of the website. The navigation will be the most valuable, and the footer will be the least. Linking new pages you create from other pages also helps them get crawled by search engines who may not otherwise find those pages if they are not linked to from somewhere within your sight. As always, though, make the links natural. Ask yourself if Google didn't exist, would you create that link Link pages to be helpful to your site? Visitors first. So what does an internal in his structure look like? There's no exact model here that you should be falling, but let's look at a typical internal linking structure. Typically, you're going to see this pyramid architecture. You'll start with your home page, and each home page is going to link to the main categories of your site. Then the categories will each have pages underneath of them that they willing Teoh, And in turn, those pages will link to sub pages so your main category will be broken down into different pages. Or this could be different, post about the main category or topic, and the page can then have another sub page that leads to some more niche information. You can also have pages or sub pages within your first category. For example, link back to other pages or your main category or your second mean category. This helps link your full site together. Okay, I think you understand the importance of internal links structure and see how to implement it. Before I move on. I want to give you a few final tips to keep in mind. First, make sure every single page is linked to from at least one other page on your site. If you don't have any internal or external links pointing to a Web page, Google can't find it, which means they can't rank it. You also want to use good anchor texts of visitors and Serge engines, Of course, understand what the webpage will be about. This is where you can use the key words you want to rank for. But remember, keep it varied. Look natural. You don't want to over optimize. If you have an existing site, find out what your top pages are meaning the ones that are linked to the most and start by adding internal ings on those pages because the length juice that you already have from those pages can be passed to your newer pages. If you want to rank two different pages for the same keyword, link them together, so building links toe one page will also help with the other page. Other than that, when you add a new page to your website, always keep your internal linking structure in mind. 25. Easy Ways to Search For Other Link Building Opportunities In Your Space: Sometimes we have to do a little bit of digging to find really great link building opportunities. And there's a really neat trick for doing this within Google. What we can do is we can open up Google and we can type in some keywords around the topics that are related to our keywords. We can start with a broad keywords. So, for example, dentist, lawyer, painter, those air not necessarily keywords that we would be going after, but those air the broad generic terms that are related to our topic. From there we can apply the technique them about to talk about, and then we can narrow down, using some longer term keywords to see what results we can also get from those searches. So, for example, if we go to Google and we throw in our keyword, I'm gonna use Helm painting tips as an example. But if I go down, I'm not gonna look for anything here on the first page. Why? Because someone who is ranking on the first page may actually be going after this key word , and so they're not gonna want to link to me if I'm doing the same. But I'm gonna go to, let's say Page four so you can start 345 whatever you would like to dio, and I'm going to start looking for websites that potentially may be willing to link to me so I can look at the title the u R L Some of the content that showing already to see if any of these look like potential options so you can go through. You can see if any of these articles that come up this looks like a non profit organization . So here we have some exterior home painting tips. So let's say I'm a painter and I want to get linked. Teoh. So I can potentially contact this organization with an awesome article that would add a lot of value to their following or to their members and see if they can link to my resource or if I can have my article posted on their site. I can also go through here and see if they have any resource lists, and I can post an article on that as well. So this may be an option so I can note that down and then I can go right back to the results and I can keep going through, and I can see what else there is out there. So if I see something that somebody else's service, they may not want to link to my service if I'm providing the same service. But if it's in a different area, there are some creative workarounds that will talk about a little bit later as well. But I will go through each and every single page upto, maybe page nine or 10 or so. Even if you end up with five or 10 possibilities and you contact them and you end up with one or two links, those could be some really powerful links for you, so you don't want to discount them. So don't worry necessarily about the quantity that you're getting here. Focus on the quality of these links that you can get now. The next thing I like to do to take this a step farther. Once I've looked for my broad keywords or broad topic, and I've narrowed it down to some longer term keywords as well as I like to do the same with the related searches. So if you score all the way down once you have typed in a queue word at the very bottom. You'll have these related searches here, so I have home painting ideas, home interior painting tips. Whichever one jumps out to me is the most relevant. I can go ahead and click on that, and then I can do the same thing. I can go down. I'll click on Page four, which is where I want to start. I'll go through all of these articles here, all of these sites, and I'll see which one of these I may be able to get a link to here. There's one for Cora that might be a possibility. I see pop sugar that I might be able to leave a comment or get a get added into one of their resource lists right there. So there's some potential options. This is where we want to start noting these down so that we can reach out to each of these articles. Now if you want to get listed on a particular type of site, another trick that you can do is you can search for AH website, a directory, a blawg resource list, whatever it may be for your particular keyword. So to do this I would type in Blawg plus entitle. And here is where I would put my key word. So if I wanted my keyword is home painter Aiken, Type that in and doing a search for this is going to pull up Blog's that in the title of the Blawg is the key word home painter. And this is going to pull up a list of all the potential blog's and again, same thing. I can go through all of these and see which one of these jump out to me as a possibility for getting a link from So I'm going to include in the resource is section of this course all of the different keywords that you can use. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna include a list of all of the different words that you can use to find different types of content. So, blawg resource website, things like that a whole long list. You can replace the word blawg and you can go through, see what type of link opportunities you can build. Now, another thing. If you are a local business, you can also replace the key word here with your actual location. So If you are looking for a local blawg who might want to pick up your service or pick up your product or talk about blogged that you have, this is a great way to find local blog's local websites, local resource list, whatever it may be. If you are local, that is an excellent way to build some potential back wings. So try that out. Take note of those. Keep a running list of the places that you would like to reach out to grab their contact information and then start determining what would be the best way to reach out to them and start building either your relationship first or trying to get that back link. 26. Backlinks from Traffic Generation Sources: Oftentimes, the tactics we can use to generate traffic outside of S E O will help bring CA website as well. The's traffic generation sources are good places to start with link building because you'll be increasing your search engine rankings while seeing your traffic numbers start to jump. And who wouldn't like that? So what generates traffic content does, but not any content, high quality, useful, valuable content. And since we know that just writing this awesome content isn't going to instantly have us ranking on page one or seeing floods of traffic, we need to promote it a bit. So there are a few things to address here. First, what types of content generate traffic? How can you figure out what topics will be best to create for your industry? And Leslie, how can you then promote that content that you just created? These are all great questions, So let's tackle these one at a time. Let's start with the different types of content you can create. What was the first thing that came to mind when I mentioned content creation? I'm going to guess you thought about writing an article. If that was the case, you're right. But there's a lot more you can dio on top of just writing blawg posts, which don't get me wrong or great to write and promote. You can also switch things up a bit and create things like infographics videos and other interactive content images. Pdf downloads, guide slide shows and the list goes on. A great tactic, for this is Decree one piece of content and then repurpose that piece into another form of content. For example, if I write a block post on how to do X y Z, I can then also create a video tutorial on that same topic. I can create an infographic from that topic and the slide show all from that same post. By doing that, I now have four pieces of content to promote instead of just one. And it didn't take me as much time as just the first article did, because I already did the research. I already did the writing, so it was much easier to create those last three pieces of content. Some sites may find one piece of content more attractive than another, and may choose to give you a back ling for your Infographic rather than an article, for example. Oftentimes, images of videos are easier for people to link to because they're just more fun than more attractive. It's what people want to see, so it really depends on where you're promoting your content. So now that you have an idea of some different types of content to promote, let's look at how to know what's worth writing about. To do this, I like to use a couple of tools. Let's start with Buzz Sumo. Here. All we need to do is typing your keyword into the search box and you can see the most shared content. So here you can see the articles you can see what website was linked to. You can see the type of content so you can see her on the left hand side. You have article infographic, guest post giveaway, etcetera. Here it shows that these are articles and you can see the total number of shares it received and which platforms the content was most shared on. If you have a pro version, you can also click on view back lings, and it's going to show you the back links that the particular piece of content has been able to pick up, so it's going to give you some ideas for that as well. But you can use some of the other tools we discuss in this course to see that, too. Let's move on to a higher EFS, just like with Buzz Sumo. Here, you can throw in your keyword and see what content has been shared the most. You can also grab the first few back lings for free. You can also click here to see for a particular article how maney back links that has picked up How many domains is back links air coming from. You can see what anger Texas using. So again, this is just going to give you the first few for free, and then you'll be able to get a pro version to be able to see all of the back links as well. Now, autopsy is another one again. You'll throw in your keyword here, and you can see the top tweets videos, photos, etcetera for a different keywords. So it's going to give you a little bit different content than the previous tool, so you can see with these tools you can not only figure out some great ideas for what to write about. But you can also grab lots of sources of potential back links as well. The idea here is to create compelling content that people will want to reference and linked to and then let people know about. So when you're looking at these existing articles and resource is, think about how you can take what they've done and expand on it, so yours is even better. Your article can also be in the form of a guide tutorial, how to and a frequently asked questions page, etcetera. So really, give it some thought about what's gonna work best for your business now that you know the type of content you can create, from articles to infographics and how to keep and how to find great topics to write about. Let's take a look at where you can now promote all of this content. You have 27. Promoting Content to Drive Traffic & Boost Rankings: Let's take a look at each piece of content, and let's determine what are the best ways to promote each of them. Now they're articles, those air fairly obvious. You can do some of the techniques that we are talking about in this course, from how to search for different blog's that can either give you a link to the article that is posted on your own site. Or you can also write for other blog's or websites. And you can promote your content and get him back ling that way as well. One of the easiest ways to do that is to type in your keyword into Google and in quotes Adan right for us, or contribute guest post and words like that that will help pull up some opportunities for you, and then you can follow up with those websites, make sure that they are good match for you, and then you can reach out to them with a potential article for them. Now infographics images, videos. We can do a little bit more with those articles. We don't want to really submit those to the article directories like they did years ago. Those don't have the same impact that they used to. And so we're after there was high quality back link, so that's what we want to focus on now. When we move into images, videos, infographics, there's a bit more that we can dio now. These aren't going to be as valuable as some of the other article post that you dio, but they can still drive a good amount of traffic to you, and they certainly can still help booster rankings. So let's look at some of those right off the bat with images, videos, infographics. Those could be easier to get back links to than written content. So that's a good reason right there. Why? To pay attention to some of these options if you create a great looking infographic and then you allow others to embed it directly on their site so long is that they give you a back link. That is a really great option. It's really easy to do these days. There are so many free tools online that you can use to generate an infographic for free. There's really no reason why you should be creating an infographic. You can also, then, like I mentioned, created embed code and included on your website, or give it out to these other websites so that they can easily in bed your infographic on their site. And I'll include a resource for exactly how to do that. I'll give you the code, so it's not something you ever even have to worry about. Another option is you can actually go out and share these infographics on some of the top infographic sites. These sites have, ah, high page rank, and so they're very valuable. But you'll notice on some of these infographic sites like this one. They have tons of infographics here that they're listing, and there was actually one that I saw. That was a great example. I believe it was this one here that they also have a high resolution version as a Pdf download. They have also put in parts of it into a slide share presentation. So you see, this is how they are repurpose ing this content. But you can reach out to this particular website, for example, and you can submit your infographic to them. And if it fits in with the type of infographics that they promote, they can add it to their website and you got a nice high PR link there. If you want to find infographic sites or just AH site in general, that has a history of embedding infographics related to your industry, you can go back to Google, and you can type in your keyword and then in quotes, add the word infographic. First, you can see examples of what's already out there, so it gives you idea of what to create or what you can do that's different or better, and you can go through and you can see if there's any sites that are already linking Teoh infographics. So you know there's there's some good options for potentially getting a back ling for your own infographic. All right, Videos, videos. You know you likely already know that these are huge these days. People love watching videos, so there's all types of websites out there. You can go out and post your video on YouTube. You can generate a back ling that way, and obviously Google loves YouTube since they own them. But there are a lot of other video sites, like Daily Motion and Vimeo, so there are other options for where you can share your video as well. Just make sure that you were obviously including a back link to your site. Audio can be a good way to promote your website, and there are many options for where you can upload audio online. A lot of these have high paying drink. They're very good sites, and I'll include those in the resource is as well. Now we mentioned is well, slide shows. There are several good high quality websites where you can upload your slides. And if you've already written an article, you've created an infographic thes air really easy to break down into slides and you can throw them up on slide share, for example, and especially if you are in certain niches that tend to get promoted a bit more on slide share. You may really see a lot of views, and that can really help your rankings as well. Now images. Of course, there are tons of websites out there that will take your images. You go to flicker instagram, Pinterest. They're all out there for your taking, and I'm gonna include a whole list of those as well. So again, you can sign up for these sites you can fully create your profile on these, and you can upload your images along with the back link to your website. So as you can see, you can really do a lot with repurpose ing your content. And there are so many different places that you can submit it so you may lose a little bit of control. With some of these, you may not be able to control where content is posted on somebody else's site, but remember, this is part of an overall strategy, and we want these back links to look as natural as possible. So you're gonna have some super high quality links that you're going to be able to achieve , and you're gonna have some that may come from directories a little bit as well talk about. You'll have some that will come from some of these other sources from images and videos. But you are getting a very well rounded back link profile, and that's what we're after. So these air, definitely some of the things that you want to take into consideration when developing your back link profile. You don't have to use all of the ones that we just talked about, but I do think about at least a few of them that would work for the industry that you're in 28. Using Embeds for Non-Written Content: I want to talk about using sample in bed code on your website. If you are going to be offering infographics, for example, and you want others to be able to linked back to you, giving your visitors an embed code that they could just copy and paste and put on their own site really can increase the number of back links that you can get, and creating this embed code for them really only takes a few minutes. So it's really going to be worth your time to do, especially if you've taken all the time to create these awesome infographics. So I will include the code to do this in the resource section of this course so you can just download it and use it on your own site. But I want to show you how this actually looks, so you know what you'll be doing when you look at this code, even if you don't know how to code, don't worry. I'm gonna break this down. It's really not that much code. The reason you will also want to do this is because this is going to allow you to control the page that the person is going to be linking to and the anchor text that is going to be used, and that's very important. So if you're gonna be creating a new post and you are going to share your infographic here , there's a couple of things that you want to do. The first is you want to insert the image at the very top so that your actual image will display next. You want to create the box that somebody can just highlight and copy the code for. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna paste in my text here. This is going to be the actual box that the embed code will appear in. So here we have the text area. Now the rose in the columns, that is how large the boxes, who you can adjust these numbers to be bigger or smaller, depending on the size that you would like it to be on click equals Select. That simply means when somebody clicks into the box, it is going to select all of the text for them. So then they can just copy it and paste it onto their site. Now a giraffe here, this is what is actually going to be the link I m g. That stands for your image. And SRC is the source. This is where the link to your actual image file is going to be. So this will create a link to that particular image. Then down below, you'll see we have a couple more a harass, and this is where you'll be able to enter your anchor text and your name here, your business name here that will go back to your website. So I'm just going to go ahead and grab this infographic from kiss metrics. I'm just gonna pretend that I had made this and of course, you don't want to take somebody else's. This is just for an example, since I don't have an infographic that's created at the moment. But I can insert the euro that I just copied of where the image is located on the website. So when somebody clicks on this link is going to take them to that page. I'm not going to go back, and I'm going to grab the image your L. Now, if this is on your own website, you'll have the or AL you can copy. If you're using WordPress, you can go into your media manager and grab the image file. You are all there now. The all tag. This is where you can also place your keywords. Your anchor text. This is how you tell search engines what the image is actually about, since they can't read an image. So that's a good place to put your anchor texture, keyword Right there. Now down below. This is where you want to put your anchor text here. You can put the name of the infographic if you would like. So I I'm just kind of making up the name here and I can put that it was by my website. If that was the case, and I'm gonna go ahead and paste in the u R l to my website and then I can also go back and copy the URL of where the of where the infographic is actually hosted and I can save this now this again, Anything that appears between this opening text area tag and the closing text area tag is the actual box with your embed code. But remember, we're going toe. Want to insert the actual image itself, which is going to be this one here. Now, if I put the image code up here above that is going to make the image display with the text box below. So now what? I can do them gonna save this as a draft and I'm just going to preview it. Of course you would publish it if you're ready for this to go live, But I just want to use this as an example. Now, here you can see the actual image has appeared. And then down below were you down below. You see, there is the box and now somebody can click in here All the Texas highlighted. They can simply copy this now and they can go to their website and paste it in. So it's that easy. So as you can see, this only takes a couple of minutes to Dio again. I'll include this code in the resource section. So you can simply just copy your URL and replace the girl in the sample code. 29. Backlinks from Reputation Management Sources: S E O. Is no longer this standalone marketing tool. It really is coming full circle, so there is more to consider now than there was in the previous years. That's why I think it's important to talk about reputation management first, because you don't want to put all this effort into ranking your site if you are not properly managing your brand online. But you also want to take advantage of the traffic and back links you can acquire from these reputation management sources. Looking at reputation building is really about delivering the whole package. We want to know what's going on with your brand. Which social media sites you are on, what's being said about you, whether this is on social media. Ah, through third party review sites on other blog's and so on. Do you have press releases out there? Are you on forums or blog's? All of this is managing your brand, so there's two things that we can really do here. First, we can join in on the existing conversation when others are talking about you again. Whether they are mentioning you on social media, on review sites or just on blog's, you want to be there to join in the conversation that can really add a lot to your brand. The second thing that you can dio is to join in on relevant conversations and add value. So in this instance, you're not necessarily being mentioned specifically, but you have value and knowledge that you can add or that you can contribute to the conversation. This, in turn, is a way for you to put your back link on to the website where you're talking and others will be in to notice you. So there's a few things that we can do here. First, we can use a service like Google Alerts, which is free, and we can create an alert for specific keywords for our business name for our personal name. Whatever we think, maybe mentioned, that is going to be relevant to our website so we can type that in, and we can get an idea of what's being set out there for particular topics. Of course, you can start with some broad key words, but you may want to really niche down here and use some longer term keywords. So you're not getting lurks just about everything that may not be too relevant to your particular business, but when you're signed in, you can create alert. Or you can insert your email address here, and you can create multiple alerts. You can also do this. If you are serving in a particular location, you can add in on alert for anything that's going on in your locations of you. Want to contribute to the news If you want to be able to find potential back links, If a new website is mentioned, your area, you could do that. And this is also going to allow you to decide how often you want to be notified what type of sources you are actually looking for. So you don't have toe be notified of every type of source. If you're only interested in video or blog's, for example, the next thing you can do is use a service like social mention as well. Again. You can type in your keyword, and you can see what's being talked about. You can also choose if you only want to see blog's, for example, so if you're not interested in images, you can go here and you can see what actual blog's are talking about. The topic at hand. If you prefer, you can actually put in. Let's say your brand names. Someone's going to use Apple as an example, we can go and see which blog's air actually talking about apple. So if I was Apple, I can go to these different sites. I can make sure that the information is relevant. If I see people commenting or asking questions, I can either produce content around that topic to enter their question and linked back to it. Or I can just jump in the conversation and help answer questions. That's really does a lot for your brand, a lot for traffic and a lot for back links as well. Now there are some other sites that are more question answer type sites where you can participate. My advice here is to pick one, maybe two, and really provide a lot of value and really fully contribute to the conversations here. It's tempting to do this across multiple platforms, but often times it's not really realistic. So we can you look at some of the top question sites like Quora, where you can go in. You can post questions, but you can also do a search for your particular industry, and you can see what types of questions are coming up with all of these question answer sites you want. Teoh. Make sure that you fully set up both your profile in your email signature. That way, whenever you post, someone will be able to see the link to your site. They'll be able to get in touch with you and that conservative back link as well. LinkedIn is another example. They have a lot of groups, so you surely confined groups that are related to the industry that you are in. And you can sign up to be a part of these groups and can begin contributing to the conversation again. This is another social media profile that you need to fully complete, so that is fully optimized so you can benefit as much as possible. Yahoo answers is another one again. They have, ah whole list here on the left hand side of all the different categories, so you can select which one is pertinent to your particular business and find discussions that you feel you can add value to. If none of these air really jumping out or you want to make sure or you really want to target a blawg or a form that is very specific to your industry. You can go to Google, and you can type form plus your keyword, and that will pull up websites that actually have a form or where you'll be able to answer questions like here. You say. You see, this has form community. Here, you can discuss legal issues. So this way, if you want to be able to contribute advice to people who are looking for it, here's another one. Ask a lawyer, so there's a free advice form. So you see, there are a lot of forms where you could go and you can really stand out. If you are able to contribute value, just make sure again, like I said, to fully complete your profile and make sure that you are completing your signature as well , so that you can get the back links from that and start generating traffic and give your rankings a little boost. A swell 30. How Social Media Impacts SERP: social media is having more and more of an impact on search engine rankings. Thes days and social media is still relatively new in the grand scheme of things. So there's not a whole lot known about exactly how social media impacts rankings, but it has definitely been found to help. This is an area that you may want to take into consideration when trying to boost your rankings. Now don't get me wrong. Social media alone is not going to rank your site, but it can certainly help give you a boost. So staying active on social media, getting reviews that that's applicable to your particular business and properly optimizing all of your profile pages is going to be very important. And that is what is going to help you increase your rankings. We talked a little bit about content creation already and that content that is very popular . If you are able to create that type of content, you are going to generate more tweets and you're going to generate more Facebook posts and shares, and that can trigger a boost in your traffic and a boost in your rankings as well. Tweets, for example, can help a Post perform better in search results and that has been founded, so that is definitely something to take into consideration. But like I said, you want to be applying a lot of the other techniques that we talk about in this course. In addition to using Social Media to promote your content. Because Google likes content that people like Google is going to follow people, they're going to go where they go because they believe that is the best content and they want to actively promote that content that people like. Another thing to consider, especially if you are dealing with a newer site or newer content, is that social media action of really enough of it can actually help you to get that page index faster than if you are just waiting on search engines to discover it Otherwise. But like I mentioned early on, this is a topic that is still being explored, and we're still coming up with techniques that are working. So this is a technique that you want to use with your other link building tactics simultaneously so that you can really get the best results from your efforts. So what I'm trying to say is, this is not a method you should use to replace your rescue efforts, but to help it to enhance it. If you want long term rankings, you need to continue with your normal S you link building campaign. But there's nothing wrong with a little short term social media boost. 31. Using Profile Links To Your Advantage: Of course, there are hundreds of social media sites you can get on, but in the beginning you can set up a few profiles. If you're just getting started, I would start with at least 23 of the following, either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus or Lincoln really think about your business here and which one makes the most sense for you. If you do a lot with images, you may want to throw in a Pinterest or a flicker account. For example, if you can create some video tutorials, you might want to sign up for YouTube and so on. It doesn't hurt to reserve profile names, either, for other sites, in case you want to take advantage of other platforms in the future, No one dot com is a great site that will allow you to see if the user name you'd like to use is available on all the platforms you would like to use. So that's definitely something worth checking out. So you again you can have brand consistency through your website and the social media sites that you use now. I mentioned optimizing your profile pages. This is very important. The word optimize can make this process sound fancier or harder than it really is and what you want to do here. Simply complete your profile fully and keep it consistent across the networks that you use . So let's look at Facebook, for example. With Facebook, you want to do things like set up a timeline cover and a profile image that is going to be consistent with the other networks that you use and also on your website. So someone flipping from your website to your Facebook page is going to instantly be able to recognize that it's you. You also want a fully completed a description and think about the keywords that you're using here. This is your opportunity to tell search engines what you're all about, and this is where you'll be able to add in some of your keywords and related keywords as well. And, of course, obviously this should go without saying you want to link back to your website. In addition to your website there, you can also link back to other profiles that you have. So if you've set up that YouTube channel, if you have a sales page on your website, you have a blawg twitter etcetera. Any of the profiles that allow you to link to your other profiles? Go ahead and do so. Go ahead and connect them, especially for local businesses. If you have a phone number, you have your address. You have business hours. Add that income fully complete. That information photos is something that can also help your profile look complete. So make sure that you upload a good number of photos, you know, 5 10 You don't have to get crazy with the amount of photos, but just make it look complete. Depending on the business that you have, you can upload pictures of the work that you've done a little bit of a gallery product, photos, staff photos, Whatever the case may be. If you have a business that can have reviews, you want to make those as prominent as possible for the networks that allow you to do that . So, for instance, Facebook allows you to get reviews. Make sure that you are taken advantage of that. If that works for your business, Facebook also allows you to have a call to action. So depending on the business that you have uses as a way to generate some traffic as well and connect it back to your site. This could be your home page, but this could also linked back to a specific sales page or specific call to action page that's located on your site as well. So this Facebook page or your Pinterest page of Google plus Page whatever you've signed up for is also a great way to promote some of the other strategies that we've covered here, especially as we talked about content and repurposing content. Here. You can also post about some competitions, or you can offer deals for repeat visitors who follow you again. You want to start building up some of that continuous traffic and start making a buzz where you can so make sure that you make your content informational. Make it valuable. And don't just be promoting your business constantly. That's not going to generate that ongoing traffic that's very important. So again, go back and optimize or, in other words, fully complete all of your profiles and where possible, link them together 32. 4 Easier Methods for Getting .Gov and .Edu Back Links: you may have noticed that when you look at the back links the website has in one of the tools we've looked at, such a Z a giraffes. The Back ling's A site has are broken down into government links, educational links dot com dot net and dot org's So the dock of and dot EU links are very powerful back links. And, as you may be able to guess, they can be harder to get but can do wonders for your rankings with even a very limited number. Part of the reason these back links air so powerful is because many E D. U and government sites have domain, age, domain authority and trust because they have been around for a while and been able to establish themselves, and that could make it such an amazing back. Ling Tau have. I'd like to talk about how to find potential govern either you back Ling's, but before I do, I want to be realistic with you about getting these links. As I mentioned, these types of links are harder to get, so you're going to want to try several options. The response rate is typically much lower than a lot of other tactics. But as I mentioned, it really doesn't take much, so it's still worth it. Depending on your business, even getting 12 or three can be huge for you. So do keep that in mind. Now that you know what to expect. Let's look at how to find these potential back ling opportunities. Let's start with the easiest way to get back Ling from these sites, and then we'll build up to some harder methods first. Are you an alumni of a college or university? If so, there are two possibilities here. As you have an existing relationship with them. You can reach out to share with them what you have done with your education, such as starting your own business, and they may be open to featuring your business that you started. This is a win win for both parties, and it can give you a great back link. Additionally, some colleges or universities may already support alumni businesses with the listing, so those air definitely worth looking into. You can also comment on 80 you and Gove websites. You can search for opportunities using the drop Link website. You can throw in your niche and you can look at what opportunities present themselves. You can check the page authority or the pay drink to see if a particular page is going to pass enough juice, and it is going to be worth it to you. Remember, we don't want to look at the domain as the whole. We want to look on the particular page where you will be commenting. So go ahead and do a search for both Edie you and Gove sites to see what comes up. And just as with everything else you're doing, your comments should be of high quality. After all, you want your link to pass moderation first. And if it's not moderated, you don't want a bad comment to be removed down the road, thus losing your back link. So find as many of these opportunities as you can. Just remember to check the authority of the page before spending time writing a thoughtful comment. The next thing you can do a search for websites that are related to your industry but that have a dot either you or dot gov domain Again, you're gonna want to check the page authority to see if the particular page is going to pass enough juice. But you can search Google for types of content, such as site semicolon, Deputy you and you can include your keyword or your keyword plus resource is or links or whatever you're trying to find. But I'll include a list of some of these options for you in the resource is section as well . When you do these searches, you can start searching with your keywords. But if that turns up little to no results, brought in your niche a bit to see what you can turn up. If you're a personal trainer, for example, you may also want to search for health, weight loss, fitness, nutrition. This will, of course, yield many more opportunities for you than if you just search for a personal training or personal trainer, for example, here you want to get in touch with these website owners to see if you can get listed on their page, especially if you have a very valuable post that could serve as a resource. The next option you have is educational blog's there, so many students and faculty that create blog's from the actual university site so they have the dye EU domain and that opens up another opportunity for you. You want to think about your industry and how you can tie this in. But get creative, how you can feature How can you feature particular student or faculty? Or better yet, ah group of students or faculty. You could write about them being the top accounting and student blogger, for example, or the top accounting teachers in Texas. Then you can reach out to these bloggers toe. Let them know about your post in their achievement, of course, and this will likely result in a back link. But just as with any link, you want to make sure all of your effort is going to pay off. So make sure the blawg is active. You'll be able to get in touch with the blogger, search for some contact information and that their current links are do follow. So these air pretty easy to find from just doing us a quick search, even just using some of the search tactics. I talked about the beginning of this lecture using site semi colon dot eu. You can throw in your keyword plus block posts or post comment staff, blog's student blog's etcetera, all include some of those options as well. So these were some of the easier ways that you can go about getting high quality back links from dot gov and dot edu you links. 33. Section 6: What We're Going to Cover: using Web directories to build Ling says someone of a debate among CEOs. I'm not going to give you a blanket statements such as all Web directories, air Great. So submit your link to the mall or stay away from every Web directory or you'll get penalized. The truth is, like everything else there is some good and some bad in this section of the course. I'm going to help you identify the good versus the bad Web directories because there actually are some you should consider using, and you also walk away with several link opportunities you can use. 34. Web Directories: using Web directories to acquire a lot of back Ling's quickly is really a thing of the past . At this point, this is mostly a complete waste of your time that could be better spent elsewhere. But I bring up Web directories here for two reasons. First, I want to make sure you know, to stay away from directories for the most part. And second, there are still some directories that are valued highly by Google, and they will be worth your time to get back links from. There are several business directories and even local business directories that are definitely worth getting back Ling's from. So if you have a local business and you want to rank your website in the Google local pack , for example, you'll need to get your business listed and many of these citation directories that's a whole other topic, but these directories are okay to get listed in. So I want to make sure that you know that, but always stick with the ones that have the highest domain authority because those are going to be the ones that passed the most link juice to you and will be most value by search engines. I'm going to include a full list of the directories you may want to consider like de mas, or best of the Web in Yahoo Directory and so on in the resource is section. But when you take a look at thes, there are two things that I want you to carefully consider. First, I want you to carefully consider the category that is most relevant to your industry, even if that means going a few levels down. You don't want to just select the main category and and submit your business. If you want to get as much value from the back link as possible, you want to hone in on the category that is going to be Aziz relevant as possible. Now, the second thing I want you to take into consideration goes off of my first point. You want to look for the category that is relevant but also has the highest authority. If you're debating between two or three categories, you want to select the one that has the most authority, even if it's maybe your second or third choice for being the most relevant. So to do this, you can fire up Mas bar, which is a free chrome extension or Firefox extension that you can install. And let's say I'm working with a local business and I can narrow down to my particular industry. And let's say I'm gonna debate between these three categories here. If I click on this one, I can see that this has a page authority of 48. Now the domain authority is referring to de mas, which has a score of 96 on a scale of 100. So that is why they're so valued. But this particular page, if I can get listed here, has a page authority of 48 which is great. I would love to be listed on a site or on a Web page rather that has a page of authority of 30 or above. So 48 is excellent. I can go back to the next one, and car sharing has a 52. Even better go down to transportation in general, and this one has a 53. So I may want to go with one that has the 53 but really 48 to 53. Those air so close, I'm probably picked the one that is the most relevant to what I'm actually doing that way. I have a relevant category and I have a high page authority. However, if my categories had one of them had a page authority of 15 and another one had a page authority of 50 I'm gonna want to go with the one that has a 50. So make sure that you do select the appropriate category and you take a look at the page authority as well so that you get the most bang for your buck when you are using some of these top notch directories. 35. Directory Exceptions: most general directories that serve no real purpose and simply look like a way just to build links should be avoided. But there are some exceptions to that when directories might be worth getting a link from. For example, de mas is a great one and as high valued by search engines as many sites get manually reviewed. And best of the Web is another large link directory. But thes two big link directories are valued in the eyes of Google, so these can actually help improve your rankings, where some back links from other directories can actually hurt you. Also, if you're working with the local business and are submitting the business to sites to get local citations generally for the purpose of ranking and Google's local pack, those were going to be fine as well. 36. Image Directories: We've talked about promoting images a bit to help generate some back Ling's. But here's another quick tactic you can use. Let's say you are a home painter. If you have great pictures of your work or houses, you can offer these images for free or even for paid. If they're good enough in exchange for a back link on a stock image site, depending on the license you assigned to the images as well, others may link back to you. This is one of the easier ways to get back links to your site through images. The downside here is you won't have a lot of control over where your images placed and how it is back link, but nonetheless it is an option. If you are looking for some quick wins here. What you can do is, if you would like to use an option like this, is to stick with some of the higher quality websites that have a higher pay drink and that are more authoritative in the eyes of Google's. While and again, I will include a list of some of the options that you can use whether you want to sell your stock photos If you want to give away clip art or if you want to create icons, this is really a great way to generate traffic on also a great way to get your back ling out there. If you post some of your work on some of these free sites, you can allow others to post your image on their site, and it will generate another back link for you. So you have the potential to not only get one really high, authoritative back link, but you can also get several other back Ling's as well. 37. Section Intro: What We're Going to Cover: If you are local business or you are working with local business clients, you have a few additional link building opportunities that you can take advantage of because you are dealing locally. It could be easier to acquire some of these links, and they're being be less overall competition as well. So let's take a look at what some of these strategies are, so you can begin implementing them right away. 38. Lecture 40: Creative Trick For Acquiring Back Links From Similar Businesses: I want to bring up images again because there's another thing that you can do with images. And this is actually one of my favorite techniques, especially for small businesses, because excellent and free images are really hard to come by. And certainly businesses can turn to stock photos. But sometimes it does look like, you know, stock, so businesses don't always want those, and that really can get expensive as well. But you can use this as an opportunity to generate some back Ling's from a relevant source , which just maybe another business like yours. So let's use the house painter example again. If you're a house painter in Washington, D. C, let's say and you take some great images that are relevant to your business as a house painter, and then you offer those great images to a house painter in, Let's say, New York City, and you let them post those images on their websites as long as they give you a back link to your website just giving you credit for that particular image. And then they get to use your awesome image and you're not really a competitor. Because although you do provide the same service because they're in New York City and you're in Washington, D. C. Those are hours and hours apart. So nobody who's looking for a house painter in New York. It's also going to be looking for one in D. C. So they're not gonna lose any business to you. And this can just be a small link underneath the image. It doesn't really need to stand out. So if you can take good quality photos of anything related to your business, and then contact similar businesses to yours that operate in different non competing locations and then say that they can use your images on their site as long as they give you a credit via back link, of course, as the source of those images. That way they don't have to pay for images. They don't have to have these generic stock looking images. They don't have to spend the time searching all these websites to try to find a great image . They just have it handed to them. It's a much easier way to get a back link. They're not really gonna want your article, for example, but they are going to be much more likely to take your image. So of course, you can also use thes same images on some of the other websites that we talked about. But this is a great way to generate some back links from those same images. 39. What We're Going to Cover: If you are local business or you are working with local business clients, you have a few additional link building opportunities that you can take advantage of because you are dealing locally. It could be easier to acquire some of these links, and they're being be less overall competition as well. So let's take a look at what some of these strategies are, so you can begin implementing them right away.