Things in the digital market can change quite fast. In the last year, Many things in SEO have evolved dramatically. With the release of Penguin and Penguin 2.0, this should be evident that that you need to be careful with your link building strategy.
Although it’s important to focus your link building campaign with authoritative sites like magazines and blogs within your niche, it can still prove useful accompany those powerful links with other, smaller, healthy links.
Quality over quantity is key.
Here, we will help provide some different techniques to assist your link building efforts. Many of these won’t lead to instant links, since they will still require a bit of work on your part. There are several ways you can go about finding links that will help build your website, and if done right, won’t come back to bite you in the rear when the next Google update comes around.
MyBlogGuest
MyBlogGuest does something quite different from other blog related sites. It reverses the blog outreach process and has bloggers coming to you. This tool is a great way to get your content published quickly. If you can do what you need to do, it’s possible to get your content posted on some decent sites. There are a lot of blogs that will want to post your content, but many of them are crap micro sites, which have no real communities. These are the sort of sites you want to avoid. Look for the ones that have social shares and comments.
Infographics
A great infographic can take quite a while to design. But, if you have a great designer or an entire team, take advantage of that! Focusing on making a nice infographic can take valuable money away from your budget, and if you can’t afford one, or just can’t afford the time to have it made, you can use Piktochart. Using the service is free, as it lets you select from a variety of infographic templates. All you need to do is plug in the data you want, do some tweaking, and boom, you have an infographic! This is a super quick way to get some unique content. With this new infographic, you can post it to your blogs, social networks, and heck, you can even upload it to MyBlogGuest and have them post it for you!
Tagxedo
Using Tagxedo allows you to upload any logo and make a tag cloud out of it. By picking some sites within your industry, you can turn their logos into tag clouds and then hit up their social networks. By doing this, they will love what you did, and post it on their website with a linkback, but possibly even sending you some free stuff. Here is a study on the 97th Floor’s blog about how it works.
Twitter API
This tool, written by @ethanlyon is a Google Spreadsheet that allows you to type in a keyword relevant to your website/industry. It then searches Twitter for any tweets using that keyword along words like “guest post” or “guest author.” There are quite a few blogs that will push out their most recent guest posts via Twitter, so using Twitter API is a great way to see who is active in taking guest posts.
Stalk Pen Names
Due to the growing trend of Google Authorship, there are more and more link building done under a consistent pen name. First, find a website that would be relevant to where you want your content published. Next, look through the various guest posts on the site and see who all the authors are. Many of the competitors are going to be using a pen name, followed by a link back to their site. By copy and pasting their pen name, along with a common keyword associate with them into Google, you will probably find a list of your competitors’ guest posts. The point of this is to find easy leads to sites that your competition is already on.
Search Query Generator
This tool allows you to take a keyword and put it into the spreadsheet, and it will generate a Google search result that includes all of the popular search terms for finding guest posts. You can find the sheet at http://www.brandonhassler.com/guest-post-search-generator/. A pre-made search query that uses various guest posting terms like, “write for us,” “contribute,” and “submit guest post” are insert into the URL automatically with your keyword. This allows for easier and quicker searching for individual queries.
Asking For Referrals
Although not used very much, asking for referrals is hugely successful in landing a great site to contribute to. You can go through all the trouble to build relationships with somebody until they become a contributor, but did you know that the blog owner/editor has other blogger friends in the same niche? By bringing up that you’re interested in increasing your exposure, and are looking for more blogs to write for, you can help build relationships and increase your presence.
User Followerwonk
I’ve posted this before in a previous blog post, but Followerwonk is a great tool to use to help build links. It can be used to compare metrics that you didn’t even know existed among Twitter profiles. It is also a powerful tool for outreach. There are two ways you can use Followerwonk when it comes to outreach.
First, you can look for contributor/editors for a specific website. IF there is a specific place you want to contribute to, you can go to the “Search Twitter bios” tab, search for the name of the magazine or website along with other info like write, writer, editor, etc. This will search all of Twitter for the bios that mention people from the blog being a writer. By doing this, you can get a direct way of getting a hold of the person, rather than writing a generic email to the company you want to contribute to.
Secondly, you only need to know the niche you want to contribute to. But, rather than the name of the blog you will search for, you will search for the name of the industry. Anybody who blogs about something will write something like, “Love to write about movies” in their Twitter bio. Search the word “movies” along with those various keywords about movies.
Set Up Alerts
People will be talking about your brand online, assuming you did a good job at marketing yourself and your brand. You need to be sure that you are on top of every conversation that happens. Set up an alert using tools such as Google Alerts or IFTTT to notify you every time your brand or name gets mentioned on the internet.
One of the best places that people will be talking about your brand is on Twitter. Although Twitter will notify you when somebody tags you in their tweets, but chances are, people will not tag you, but just type out your company name. You can use applications like TweetDeck to help search for terms you apply to it, and it’ll notify you the second someone mentions you.