Is your SEO company using digital public relations in your overall strategy? If not, you’re missing out on a valuable SEO tool for you and your clients.

Public relations isn’t just pitching and traditional media relations anymore and that mindset is outdated. The truth is, the internet has changed just about every industry an that includes public relations.

80 percent of the U.S. is online nearly every day, and in 1995 only one percent of the world had access to the internet. Things have changed in the world, and in public relations, so it’s time your SEO agency do the same.

Why Do I Need Digital Public Relations?

Back in the twentieth century, public relations and marketing had very little, if any, crossover. Public relations professionals focused almost solely on media relations and earned media, while marketers had different goals.

This has all changed since the rise of the internet, online media and social media. Now it’s crucial that marketing and communications efforts be fully integrated. If you’re an SEO agency, this means using public relations as a way to boost a client’s website and drive more traffic. After all, the goal of public relations is to generate positive attention around a brand, so why shouldn’t this be used to gain website traffic?

Here are three benefits of including digital public relations strategies in your SEO business:

1. Press Releases

Digital press releases are a gold mine of backlinks that will send people right to your website. Have your client’s PR professionals work with an SEO team to link to appropriate pages throughout the press release. This contributes to your network of links on the web, boosts SEO and sends more people directly to the client’s website, even if the press release is posted on an external site.

2. Pitch Key Words

Pitching isn’t just reserved for traditional media anymore and it still has a valuable place in a digital PR strategy.

Again, this only works if your SEO, marketing and PR teams are working together. Have this new team craft media pitches together. The PR professional will know how to get the reporters attention, and the SEO team can help insert keywords into the pitch that you want the reporter to use in the article. These keywords will ideally end up in your article later on and help drive more traffic.

3. Dive Into Influencers

Bloggers and influencers now have a major impact on public relations, even more so than some of the most famous news outlets.

Use your PR professional’s pitching skills to reach all kinds of new media on the internet, including bloggers, social media influencers and more. When a blogger mentions your site online, it’s helping to create the valuable web of links to your site that can give your client’s SEO a boost. Again, some bloggers generate more traffic than the nations biggest news sites, so pitching to them help you build brand recognition much faster.

4. Use Key Personnel

Using key personnel in a company as experts is a great PR strategy, and it’s one that’s easy to combine with an SEO strategy. There are tons of reputable outlines online (such as Forbes) that accept contributor posts from experts in nearly every field.

Use these opportunities to have C-level executives write (or ghostwrite for them) helpful pieces that can be pitched and shared with top media. These articles are a great opportunity to include backlinks and keywords that will help SEO strategy, while making your company and staff look like experts.

Hopefully by now you’ve realized the benefits of digital public relations. While there are tons of benefits, business people know it’s not always easy to shake up the way things are done at businesses and agencies.

Here’s How to Integrate

Integrating your PR, marketing and SEO strategies doesn’t have to be a long and painful process. Here are three steps to take to integrate digital public relations into your SEO and marketing team:

1. Blur the Department Lines

If your client has extreme department lines, encourage them to try and blend their marketing and communications team into one. This is easier said than done, but removing specific “marketing” and “communications” titles can help employees understand that they need to work together.

2. Switch up Seating

This one might seem obvious, but it’s hard for marketing and PR teams to work together if they’re not sitting close by. Switch up seating to help encourage more collaboration and communication. These are both key when you’re trying to integrate departments.

It’ll be difficult to integrate different digital strategies if the employees feel they can’t bring up ideas or issues to other departments.

3. Encourage Team Bonding

When you’re switching things up on employees, morale can sometimes drop. It’s crucial to keep employees happy by encouraging team bonding.

Host events outside of work to help employees get to know one another outside of the work setting. These settings are more casual and less pressured, so they can develop good communication skills that will transfer to the office.

4. Do Cross-Disciplinary Training

PR, Marketing, and SEO are similar in the sense that they’re all industries that are constantly training. Because of that, the professionals in each field might not be up-to-date on the latest trends in each, and may not fully understand how they can work together.

Encourage your clients to host occasional training events or lunch-and-learns educate everyone on how the industries can work together to boost the bottom line. As an agency, you can even do this for them by hosting webinars or other virtual educational tools.

Want More Information?

Digital PR and SEO both bring in great benefits for companies, but they work better together. As we mentioned earlier, there are a lot of great PR strategies like press releases and pitching that can bring businesses an even bigger ROI when SEO and marketing pros have a voice.

But there are tons of ways to improve website ranking with quality links. Learn more about buying links here.

The Internet is full of terms the average person is definitely not familiar with. And it totally makes sense! What are backlinks? What is SEO? What about CTR or CTA?

Someone who doesn’t really know about the online marketing strategies or technology, in general, can get really lost. Luckily, we are here to help once again!

Today we are talking about backlinks, their SEO value, and how you can make them work to your advantage. Keep reading for their definition, all the tips you need to know, and how you can start creating your web empire today!

First of All What Are Backlinks?

We hate to break it to you, but the backlink definition is much simpler than you think it is. Backlinks are just incoming links to your website. Literally, that’s all.

Think it this way. You have published an article on your website and someone finds it interesting. So far so good. However, since they believe that you are a reliable source of useful information, they decide to put a link on their website so more people can read what you’ve written.

This is a backlink.

Backlinks have been around for many years and they were a huge Google ranking factor. Today, although the list of the things that Google takes into consideration when ranking a website has grown, backlinks are still important.

So, in case you wondered, yes, you still need them.

Backlinks Terminology

Now that we have covered what backlinks are, it’s time to move on to the glossary associated with them.

After all, every digital trend that has been around for quite some time, comes with a slang language we need to get the handle on. Here are the backlinks terms you are going to come across when you start using them:

Link Juice

When people refer to “link juice” they basically mean that a webpage is linking to another webpage without any special tags that we are about to cover in a minute. With that being told, a simple link passes “link juice” from one website to another.

This happens because, by default, all the links that someone adds to their blog, are do-follow links.

If someone doesn’t want to pass that “link juice” and link to a website without giving them the ability to climb up that Google search results, they just add a special tag to do it. This tag is called “No-Follow.”

No-Follow Tag

There are cases when a website is linking to a webpage and they do not want to pass that link juice we mentioned above. It may sound disappointing, but many bloggers want to give credit to a competitor but not help them rank well in Google search results at the same time.

This is when they use the no-follow tag.

However, the good news is that no-follow links can prove quite helpful too. Use the tag when you are linking to an unreliable website. For example, enable it when someone posts a link as a comment at the end of your post.

In other words, a no-follow link will tell Google that it should not rank the website you are linking to because you simply do not trust it.

Click here for more information on no-follow links!

Low-Quality Backlinks

Low-quality backlinks usually come from automated, spam websites that are not considered trustworthy. And yes, porn websites are included.

If you get many low-quality backlinks, Google can penalize you and, sooner or later, associate you with those spam web pages. And you definitely not want that!

Anchor Text

This one is so simple that we are going to need a simple sentence to explain. An anchor text is just the text that is used for hyperlinks.

Something like “Click here” or “Read more” can definitely be considered an anchor text, but if you want to rank for particular keywords, you can ask a website to link you using an anchor text that you have provided.

Click here for a great post about getting the best anchor text!

Internal Links

This one is pretty simple. These are links within the same online directory, such as an article linking to another article in the same website. Interlinking is, again, great for SEO purposes, it can grow your pageviews, and it is also a piece of cake.

Backlinks and SEO Value

Now that you know the types of backlinks you can work with and the full backlink glossary, you need to know why you should actually bother.

Keep reading to find out!

1. Search Engine Ranking

We’re sure you already know that backlinks will help you get much better search engine rankings. However, since this is a full guide, we had to include this one too.

Think it this way: The more someone links to a specific page of yours, the higher this page will naturally rank with search engines. So, do not only try to promote just your homepage, but also great content that you have produced.

2. Faster Crawling

Search engines need some time to scan your website and determine whether it deserves to appear among the very first results or not. With backlinks, however, this process is accelerated.

When Website A links to a webpage of Website B, for example, search engines immediately crawl Website B to take a look at what it is all about. Without backlinks, this can take some more time –especially if we are talking about a new website.

3. You Want Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is a great way to grow. When a website links to another, there is a chance that it also gives away a part of their fans. After all, there is a reason why referral traffic has a low bounce rate.

How To Get Backlinks

So, now you know exactly what backlinks are and you have all the information someone needs about them. The only thing missing is how you can get them so you can rank better.

No need to worry! Just keep reading:

1. Write Great Content

It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

If you have a static website without any content, people will just not find anything that they can actually link to. On the other hand, if you generate good content, people will naturally link to them.

Pose as an authority. Do some research before you publish anything and make your content valuable and up-to-date. If you want to cover a topic that has been covered before, make sure you add something that has not been mentioned in the past.

Valuable content is always shareable and “link-able.”

2. Use Your Community

When you are working online, you are part of a great community that you can actually use in order to make your blog bigger!

Join forums, communities, and comment on other blogs that do not have the “no-follow” tag enabled. You will both reach new audiences and take your Google ranking to the next level at the same time.

3. Form Relationships

This community that we are talking about is made of real people. Try and create some bonds with other, fellow bloggers and talk about things that you have in common.

Ask them about a topic idea you might have, ask for a guest post you can publish on their platform and include a link at the end of it, and create a relationship in general.

Sooner or later, you will start helping each other!

Extra Tip: Use Us!

Now, it is easy to answer when someone asks you “What are backlinks?” You can even give them some advice on how they can get them. But it’s just when you actually do it when you realize it takes a lot of work.

This is where we come in to save the day!

If you are looking to build an amazing backlink network, we are here to help.

Content marketing is an amazing tool in 2018. With Google accounting for over 79% of all global search traffic and content marketing being one of the best ways to show up in search results, marketers everywhere are onboard with content marketing.

It’s not just bloggers or YouTube stars who are using content marketing in their business strategies either. 76% of B2B marketers use blogging as part of their marketing strategies.

With content marketing being such a great way to build content, the question is how do you get that content to rank higher in Google?

Organic link building is one of the best ways to improve your search rankings, and in this article, we will share why organic link building is important, and how you can get started implementing it.

What is Organic Link Building?

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks or backlinks from other websites to your own. A link is a way for another user to reach your site from another page on the internet.

Search engines use these links to explore the web, they ‘crawl’ the links between all of the different individual pages of a website and the external links to other websites.

There are a lot of different techniques for building links, and organic link building is the process of gaining backlinks to your website without paying or using any black-hat methods.

Black hat link building methods refer to methods that don’t comply with Google’s guidelines for building links. While white hat link building methods comply with Google’s guidelines and are usually the preferred method of building organic links.

How Are Links Created?

Links are an integral part of an organic link building campaign, so it’s important to understand the different elements of a link.

You place links on a website using HTML code, or by using an inbuilt interface like WordPress. Your links can be either plain links, such as www.backlinks.com or you can place them inside of anchor text.

Not All Links Are Equal

It’s important to understand that when you are building an organic backlinking campaign that you aren’t aiming just for the highest quantity of links. There are other important aspects to a link that determines how useful Google considers it.

Link Juice

One of the first factors of a backlink to considering is the amount of link juice a website has. Link juice is a phrase used across the industry to describe the amount of influence a website carries when recommending other websites through backlinks.

Google considers websites with high domain authority, or DA to be a trustworthy source. When a high authority site recommends another site through a backlink, it’s sharing some of its link juice with that website.

This means that as the Google bots crawl that link, they can see it’s a strong recommendation, based on the authority of the website.

The Authority Of a Website

To gain as much authority within the eyes of Google, you should try to receive backlinks from high authority websites. This can be easier said than done. A backlink from a highly credible site like Forbes or The Wall Street Journal isn’t something they give out at county fairs.

The process of an organic link building campaign is to try and gain backlinks to your site naturally, through creating amazing content that these high-authority pages will create backlinks to naturally.

This is usually because the content you create is useful. By solving a problem website, visitors can see it as valuable.

It’s important to consider the authority of websites when building links. A lot of links from low authority sites Google can consider being spam. This can sometimes lead to Google negatively impacting your website.

The Relevance Of a Website

Another important factor to consider is the relevance of a website. Google wants to link it’s users to the best quality and most relevant content it can.

This means that if your website is about gardening, it’d be strange for you to have links from a car repair website or a law firm. Instead, it’s also important for you to gain backlinks from relevant sites related to the content you are sharing.

Instead, a gardening website might look to gain backlinks from sites like lawn mower review websites, landscapers, home decor sites, etc.

The relevance of a website is an important signal for Google to how useful the content is and how relevant it is to the target keyword or topic.

Why Is Link Building Important for SEO

Link building is a huge aspect of SEO because, without backlinks, Google isn’t going to rank your website highly. Backlinks are Google’s way of knowing whether they can trust your website.

Think of it as a recommendation. If you are considering a business and the president of the United Nations gives it his approval, you can be sure it’s a solid business.

Alternatively, if the only person vouching for the business is the mailman at the end of the road who’s got a DUI, you’ll be less likely to trust that recommendation.

Organically growing your links allows your website to grow over time, through recommendations from trusted authority sites. This can impact your site hugely and help it to soar to the top of the Google results.

How Can Link Building Benefit Your Business

As we’ve outlined above, links are a very important signal for Google to push your results higher up in the search rankings. That means the more high-quality backlinks that are pointing to your site, the better your website will rank.

It’s why many people see the benefits of working with a link-building company. As a business, this can mean you can get more traffic which is more potential leads for your business.

Backlinks are also a direct way that relevant sites can send traffic directly to your website. If you gain a backlink on a website that has a lot of traffic, you can expect to receive a lot of traffic from that website through your backlink directly.

How Will You Start Your Organic Link Building Campaign?

The benefits of organic link building for your website can be huge. If you can gain high authority backlinks alongside great content, you can dominate the search rankings and gain a lot of traffic.

Google is one of the most lucrative brands in the world. As of Feb. 2017, it was worth $109 billion.

So why are we sharing this information with you?

Because the company’s search engine processes billions of queries per day. And you want to drive as much traffic from those queries to your website as possible.

How, though, can you optimize your site to capture the traffic you’re looking for?

Here are 11 organic SEO tips you can try today to generate traffic:

1. Use Header Tags

There are two major reasons to use header tags when writing online content:

1. Readability
2. Scannability

Readability is one of the most important features of any piece of online content. When people type their queries into search engines, they’re looking for fast answers. For this reason, they prefer content they can easily digest.

Scannability is closely related to readability. It describes a piece of content’s ability to be scanned by its readers.

And how do header tags improve readability and scannability?

They break the content into neat sections that are easy on the eyes. As an added bonus, search engines recognize keywords in header tags and use these keywords to help rank your site.

2. Prioritize Readability

Here’s another tip about readability:

Stop writing blog posts as if they’re dissertations.

Yes, great writing and analytical skills are important if you want to produce amazing copy. Even so, few people will read your content if it’s just a wall of text.

That said, try breaking your content into small paragraphs and using more header tags to break up the content.

3. Optimize Your Graphic Content

There’s more to SEO-friendly content than high-quality images. The off-page elements of your graphic content matter as well.

But what are these off-page elements?

The file sizes and format are just a couple of examples of off-page aspects of images. If your images are too large or are poorly formatted, your pages’ load times will increase.

You should also use keywords in your images’ titles, descriptions, and captions. Even the files’ names should include the keywords you’re targeting.

4. Try Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique

The skyscraper technique is SEO expert Brian Dean’s brainchild. The idea behind the technique is curating content and elevating it.

Imagine, for instance, that there are tons of blog posts about how to choose the best cable provider out there already. Now ask yourself:

How can I add to that conversation? How can I write about choosing a cable provider while providing additional information that no one else has thought to add?

We also recommend putting together “ultimate guides” that touch on every possible aspect of a subject. These comprehensive guides tend to perform well.

5. Check Out the SERPs

Before you create something new, you should always find out what already exists.

So if you want to create better content, head to the SERPs to see what good content is already out there. Once you’ve located this content, figure out why it ranks so well and implement some of the strategies you uncover.

6. Don’t Neglect Keyword Research

We all know that keywords are important. But some people underestimate the power of keyword research.

Keyword research’s usefulness extends beyond unearthing the terms people are using to describe your product or service. Keyword research also alerts you to new trends and allows you to think about how you’re branding your service.

7. Use Secondary Keywords

Let’s say that you sell custom-made sports caps. Because you sell these sports caps, you decide that you want to target the following keyword: custom-made sports caps.

But here’s the problem:

Your target audience uses more than one keyword to search for your product. Further still, there might be other, related keywords they usually use in conjunction with your target keyword.

Some customers, for example, might also search for “custom-made sports caps New Jersey.” Others might search for “custom-made sports gear.”

Both keywords are related to your primary keyword. As a result, you can use them as secondary keywords (if they apply) and enjoy some of the web traffic those keywords provide as well.

8. Increase Your Site’s Speed

Have you ever visited a site that took forever to load? If so, how did you respond?

Our guess is that you didn’t stick around for long.

You should expect each customer to behave just as you do when they encounter slow pages. Consequently, prioritize increasing your site’s speed. Doing so will help you decrease your website’s bounce rate.

Here are a couple of tips for increasing your site’s speed:

• Optimize your images. Large images, for instance, can take forever to load.
• Have someone take a look at your web pages’ code. Clunky code can increase your pages’ loading times.

9. Avoid Duplicate Content

Let’s be clear:

Taking inspiration from another website isn’t a crime. In fact, some of the best work is inspired by other work.

But duplicating content isn’t equivalent to taking inspiration. Search engines regard it as plagiarism, which is why they punish sites for posting duplicate content.

Of course, sometimes duplicate content accidentally makes its way onto sites. Some of us forget to deindex obsolete pages. Others forget to use quotation marks where they’re needed.

In any case, always make sure that you’re producing original content. And if you need to, run your copy through an online plagiarism checker.

10. Link to High-Quality Websites

Bloomberg. CNN. The Hill.

All of these online publications have at least one thing in common: authority.

People generally trust the information they find on these websites. And search engines recognize this.

But they also recognize sites users don’t trust. So if you link to one of these sites, you’re going to hurt your sites’ reputation in the process. In the world of Google, a bad reputation means less web traffic for you.

11. Build Organic Backlinks

Listen carefully:

Please refrain from buying links. As a grey hat technique, purchasing links isn’t as bad as most black hat techniques, but you can still get in serious trouble for doing so.

And here’s another tip:

Don’t buy web traffic. Doing so will only temporarily inflate your traffic. And you’ll receive a penalty if you get caught.

Our best advice to you?

Try building organic backlinks by doing outreach and producing great content.

Want More Organic SEO Tips?

Well, those are our best organic SEO tips for you at the moment. They’re actionable and can be put to good use today by any company.

Did you know that without backlinks, you have very little – as little as 0.8% – chance to rank in Google?

According to Moz, one of the leading marketing SAAS (software as a service) providers, it is!

This means that if you don’t use inbound links, you may not see your website (or webpages) appear in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) at all.

At the same time, it doesn’t mean that all links back to your content, such as from random sources, will do your marketing campaign good. This would endanger your SEO campaign, not to mention put your site at risk of penalties.

But what exactly are backlinks in the first place? What value do they have?

All these questions are most likely running through your mind now. Don’t worry. That’s why we’re here.

Let us show you the correct steps on how to hyperlink with this ultimate guide!

Google and Inbound Links: The Strong Link Between the Two

You may have noticed in the intro how we put the emphasis on Google. Don’t get us wrong. High quality, relevant links are as important a ranking factor to other search engines.

Why concentrate on making Google happy then?

Here’s something to put things in perspective:

If we were to ask you how much of the Internet does Google make up, what would you answer?

1. 10%
2. 20%
3. 30%

If you gave an answer from any of the multiple choices above, then surprise, surprise. The right answer isn’t there.

Because Google makes up 40% of the Internet!

The search engine giant processes – at the very least – a shocking 2 trillion search queries every year.

All these numbers already tell you that your SEO campaign, powerful and effective link building included, should revolve primarily around Google. Because if you don’t, you stand to miss out on nearly half of your potential target market using this search engine for their consumer-related activities.

Where to Start

First things first: You need to have a basic understanding of what internal links, hyperlinks, or backlinks are all about.

Let’s break that down further with this links definition from Searchmetrics:

Backlinks are links external domains (websites other than yours) use to point to your domain’s web pages. Basically, they hyperlink keywords or key phrases relevant to the web page on your domain they point back to.

A good example is the link we used (above) to link back to Searchmetrics. See how the words “from Searchmetrics” are in blue and clickable? When you do click on it, you’ll find yourself looking at the company’s definition of links.

In this case, we, as the external domain, act as the “referring domain.” It’s important that your own backlinks come from trustworthy and reliable referring domains since this plays a crucial role in strengthening your backlink profile.

Here’s an easier-to-digest example:

Say your business is all about pet supplies, toys, etc. You have great content that talks about taking care of them in more detail.

Now, Forbes Magazine decides to create a post about how dogs really benefit humans. At one point, the post will feature a section about how people should take off their furry family members.

If they see that your content is really of top-notch quality and can help readers who want to take better care of their dogs, then they may link back to one of your web pages.

See where we’re getting at?

Basically, Forbes here is the referring domain, since they linked back to your site. Seeing that Forbes is a high-ranking, well-trusted domain, then Google (along with other search engines), will take that as a sign you’re credible too.

Thus, your SERP ranking increases. More people will see your site. And the more visitors you get, the higher your chances of generating leads and transforming them into paying customers.

Where to Start?

Before you can start building your backlink portfolio, you first need to curate outstanding content. For the simple reason that it’s your content you’ll link to!

Whether you’re link building for an eCommerce site or creating a backlink portfolio for scholarship sites, your backlinks have three primary criteria to meet:

• Strength
• Relevance
• Diversity

So, strength here refers to the overall credibility of the external domain hyperlinked to. Relevance, as the term suggests, pertains to the relationship between an anchor text (the hyperlinked keywords) and what that external page contains. The more diverse the backlink portfolio, the greater the number of places (referring domains) linking back to a website.

All these said, the key to developing a strong, relevant, and diverse backlink portfolio is first having content that other websites can link back to you.

Curating Content Consumers Crave

The more links pointing back to you, the higher chances you have of ranking better in SERPs.

The thing is, Google is so powerful it can easily figure out which links are bad and which ones are excellent.

Simply put, you want your backlinks to come from not only various but authoritative referring domains.

That’s why the first step to getting those inbound links is coming up with top-of-the-line content. Content that consumers need and they constantly look for. But, it should remain aligned with what your brand is all about (remember the above example of the pet business).

The more satisfying your content, the more people will want to come back for more. The more authoritative websites (again, like Forbes), will link back to you.

From here, Google will consider the link’s anchor text, and if meets the criteria, award your content with higher relevance. This then leads to higher chances of better SERP ranking.

Start Getting Those Backlinks Now

In a nutshell, inbound links, or backlinks, remain an important factor to rank in SERPs. Believing otherwise can really do a number on your web traffic and ultimately, your revenues.

So, if you haven’t started your backlink building campaign yet, there’s no other better time than now to do it. And we can help you with this.

In the ever-changing world of SEO, many strategies that were once impactful are now obsolete. But link building, even though it has been around since the very beginning of SEO, remains one of the most important SEO strategies there is.

Of course, link building itself has gone through some changes since the beginning. It’s possible your link building knowledge isn’t up to date.

That’s why we’ve come up with this link building 2018 guide. Read the tips below to learn how to link build like a pro.

Ask Your Friends

Chances are, you already know some people who have websites.

If the websites of your friends and family members are relevant to your niche, see if they will link to your site. They could post a review of your site or use you as a source in an article.

Reach Out to Influencers

“Influencer” is fancy SEO-speak for an authority in your niche. Building relationships with influencers will get the people who trust them to also trust you. So get your schmooze on.

You can contact influencers to ask if they will post a review of your product or service. “Unboxing” videos and product comparison videos are popular review types you can pitch to them. But the easiest way to get an influencer backlink is with a guest post.

Guest Post

Guest posting is one of the best link building tools you can use. It’s easy, it’s legitimate, and Google won’t get mad at you for doing it.

Guest posting for backlinks means writing a post on someone else’s site and including a link back to your website. However, as easy as it is, there are still rules. Follow these tips for maximum backlink effectiveness/not getting rejected by the website or Google.

First, be sure your post is high-quality. Second, use ONLY ONE link back to your site. Stuffing your post with several backlinks will make the host site, the readers, and Google hate you.

Third, choose your anchor text wisely. You’ll need to do some keyword research for this. You want your backlink/anchor text to:

• sound natural
• be relevant
• use highly-rated keywords

Backlinks with proper anchor text are like rocket fuel for your search rankings.

You can easily contact certain websites in your niche to find out if they’ll let you write a guest post. Or, even more easily, guest post on sites that actively invite guest bloggers. Huffington Post and Lifehacker.com are good examples of guest-post-friendly sites.

Write Awesome, Shareable Listicles

One way to get tons of backlinks is creating awesome content that people will want to link to. List-style articles are great for this purpose.

For one thing, listicles are hugely in right now. People are addicted to listicles and click/share them like crazy.

That’s because listicles always give people the best of whatever they’re talking about. They have titles like, “The 5 Best Ways to Whiten Your Teeth,” and, “The Top 10 Marketing Strategies of 2018.” Readers are promised only the most important content on the subject matter.

They are also great for listing facts that people would want to share. Example: “The 10 Most Viewed YouTube Videos of 2017.”

Use listicles to write fresh, irresistible content that people will want to link to. Use facts so people will link to you as a source.

Infographics

Everything we just said about listicles is doubly true of infographics. If listicles are like internet crack, then infographics are like internet heroin… mixed with crack.

People link to infographics even more than listicles because they are even more informative. Infographics are pure, concentrated truth. They take all the top facts of the subject matter, cut out everything else, and make them even easier to read.

Repurposed Content

Here’s an even better idea: Make listicles and infographics! Who says you have to do one or the other? And then, make it a video!

The best way to maximize your backlinks is to maximize your content. And the easiest way to do that is to make your content in multiple formats. Also, you can repurpose any content you have already made into other formats.

Repair Dead Links on Other Sites

Often, a webpage will have a number of links that don’t work anymore. Using specialized software or browsing manually, you can find these broken links. Then, ask the site owner if you can help them out

Let them know their link is broken and that you have an article on the same subject they can link to instead. This is an older strategy, but it works even today.

Reach Out to Your Audience

Don’t underestimate the power of subscribers, as so many companies do. Digital marketing software and YouTube make it so incredibly easy to market to subscribers that there’s no reason not to.

It takes almost no time or money to make a 30-second YouTube video and say, “Click to subscribe.” And marketing software makes sending newsletters a breeze. And yet, keeping up with these super-easy subscriber marketing tactics will spread brand awareness like wildfire.

Subscriber marketing gives your brand a permanent address in your public’s brains. Then, every once in a while, those subscribers will give you a shoutout on their own website.

Don’t Forget About Internal Links

This has a smaller effect on your search rankings than external backlinks. But internal links are still a good (read: easy, necessary) way to boost SEO.

When linking internally, be careful to follow the same rules you did for guest post links. Post high-quality content, sound natural, use relevant, highly-rated keywords for anchor text.

The one exception is that you are fine to use more than one internal link on the same post. But you still shouldn’t overstuff your post with links or it will hurt your search ranking.

Knowing How to Link Build Makes You Number 1

Now you know how to link build the right way. Use these tips to make your website shoot to the top of the search rankings!

Want to make link building even easier?

Sign up here to buy text links to your website. To learn more about link building, check out our link building blog.

On any given day, Google receives 63,000 searches per second.

Some of those are people looking for you and your products and services!

How can you get yourself in front of them? With inbound marketing… Also known as quality SEO services. Hiring a trustworthy SEO company can be a game changer for your business growth.

But it can also be scary making sure you find the perfect fit for your business and goals…

And not some bunk agency that won’t get you results.

Here is the Webmaster’s Guide to finding the perfect, trustworthy SEO company for your business.

Get Case Studies

A trustworthy SEO company will be able to show you their proof is in the pudding.

Review their case studies. Many SEO companies will have these on their website.

If not, you can always reach out and ask for them.

Things you’ll want to look for include:

• How long it took to get results
• What the results were
• If the results helped the company achieve their goals

You’ll have a better idea of if it’s the right SEO company for you after reviewing these points.

You can also check out how the company is doing now. This will give you an idea of how well the SEO strategy set them up for long-term success.

Check Out Their Reputation

So you saw the case study. But what about their reviews?

This is a great time to take to a search engine yourself. Check out what other people are saying about this SEO company.

Bonus points if it’s other companies in your industry!

Look for:

• Their star rating
• If their customers become repeat customers
• Specific results
• Customer service comments
• Any negative feedback

And don’t write off a company simply because of one negative comment. See if they replied to the feedback and look at it objectively.

Not every SEO company is right for everyone. Your only job is to find the one that’s right for you.

Ask These Questions

1. Can I have a list of your current and past clients?

A trustworthy SEO company will have no problem providing you with this list.

It can give you a great idea of how effective their strategy is. Ask yourself: “How are each of these companies ranking in search engines?”

If you’ve seen some of their content in your own search results, that’s a great sign.

2. What techniques do you use to improve my search engine ranking?

According to the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, high-quality content and backlinks are the two most important factors considered by their search engine.

A trustworthy SEO company will buy backlinks and have a strategy to help your company rank using them.

They’ll also have a plan to provide you with quality content.

3. Can you guarantee a number one rank in a search engine?

The most trustworthy SEO company will guarantee specific results.

So ask them: “Have you ever helped a company rank number one in search engines? What were the results? Can you guarantee me the same?”

They’ll stand behind their strategy 100% if they know it works.

4. How do you measure the success of your campaigns?

This is important because it’s easy to say vague terms like “We helped them improve their ranking in search engines!”

This could mean they took them to number one… or moved them from the 26th page to the 24th page of the search results. You want to know what metrics will be used to measure the success of your campaigns.

Understand these metrics, how they work, why they were chosen, and how you can monitor them.

5. How do you keep clients up-to-date?

You can’t do ‘all-the-things’ in your business. But you also want to have an understanding of what’s going on.

Ask the SEO company how they’ll report their results. It’s also good to know how often and in what way the communication will take place.

This will keep you tuned in and aware of your ROI for the SEO strategy.

Have Good Goals

This is step one before you hire a trustworthy SEO company.

Think you’ve found the one? Make sure you have objectives for one or more of the following so you and they can be on the same page.

Traffic from Specific Groups

Who are you trying to get more traffic from?

More traffic means nothing if it doesn’t increase conversions. Understand your target audience so the SEO company can do the best job possible in getting you more clients.

This will also help your SEO company do practical things like keyword research, finding guest post opportunities, and building the right backlinks.

Boost Revenue

What are your revenue goals? How much traffic, and in turn conversions, will you need to reach these goals?

Set specific smart goals in order to drive growth with your SEO strategy.

This will help your team create a plan that will get you the profits you want. That’s what it’s all about, after all!

Get More Downloads or Free Trials

Maybe you already have a killer sales funnel that you know converts. Your problem is you need top-of-the-funnel traffic.

Set a specific goal for freebies, opt-ins, or trials if this is the case.

And voice it to your SEO company. This is where you’ll want them to be driving your organic traffic.

Increase Brand Awareness and Sentiment

When you’re first starting out in business, sometimes it’s just getting your name out there that counts.

If this is your goal make sure you and your SEO company are on the same page. Choose KPIs and a strategy that will measure the success of your brand awareness campaign.

Next Steps to Find a Trustworthy SEO Company

The majority of marketers, in fact over 60%, say improving their SEO and inbound marketing are their top priorities.

You’re not alone if you’re looking for a trustworthy SEO company to help you do the same.

Organic traffic is a critical metric of digital marketing. It plays a role in your lead generation and conversion tactics.

Organic leads are valuable because they have an implied interest in your business since they already searched for your keywords on Google.

In order to increase your organic traffic, you need to practice SEO.

By getting better organic SEO tips, you’ll attract more users and leads to your site.

SEO is an inherently flexible practice. You can always adapt it to your given industry by adjusting certain aspects of the strategy. In other words, every business in any industry needs to practice SEO.

The good news is you can tailor a strategy to fit your exact needs based on your goals and target audience.

Here are 3 organic SEO strategies you could implement in your business.

1. Write Content Using Long-Tail Keyword Phrases

Everyone knows at this point that blogging can be essential to growing your online presence and getting recognized in your industry.

Blogging expands your website’s topic coverage and gives your audience more ways to find your content and discover your brand.

Content can be very general, or it can be highly targeted. One of the best ways to drive traffic through SEO is through writing posts that engage your audience and are focused on long-tail keyword phrases.

What Is a Long-Tail Keyword Phrase?

Any word or phrase that’s an extended version of your target keywords.

For instance, if “generating website traffic” was your website’s primary keyword phrase, a long-tail version of this keyword phrase would be “using long-tail keywords for generating website traffic.”

Why Use Long-Tail Phrases for Content?

It targets your content toward a very specific question, or search, that your audience will be performing.

When they have a specific query like this, the results that show at the top are the ones that provide a specific answer.

Long-Tail Keywords Are Easy to Research

Keyword research is often misjudged as a difficult and time-consuming process, partially because Google has made the Keyword scanner accessible only to Adwords users with an active account.

However, there are plenty of alternative tools and even the Keyword Planner is still great for long-tail research if you have an Adwords account with a dummy campaign loaded.

To find long-tail phrases, you first have to use a keyword research tool to locate commonly searched target phrases. Once you have, simply search these phrases in Google and scroll to the bottom of the page, where you will find a “Searches Related To” section.

Here, you can often find long-tail phrases as recommended searches.

2. Do Customer Reviews Affect SEO?

As a small business owner, there are many questions you must ask yourself. One important question is, “Do customer reviews affect SEO?”

The answer is a definite yes. Here’s what customer reviews are beneficial for.

Google Maps

This is perhaps one of the most important reasons for businesses to have positive customer reviews.

Although Google takes many factors into account for its map rankings, positive reviews that rate the business highly greatly improve its ranking.

Business Search Results

When people search Google for information about a certain industry, a number of local businesses will appear next to the search results.

Again, which businesses will appear depends on a number of factors, such as the proximity to the searcher, but customer reviews play an important role as to which businesses will come up.

Yelp

When people search for businesses on Yelp, they often choose to filter the results so that the highest rated businesses appear first.

Organic Search

Customers leaving reviews on your website can greatly improve its page rank. This is because Google highly values websites that receive comments or reviews from readers because it shows Google that the site is active, up-to-date, and authoritative.

It’s not for nothing that websites such as the BBB and other review sites have a very high Page Rank.

3. You Need To Optimize For Voice Search

Most SEO strategies focus only on text-based searches. But in 2016, 20 percent of mobile queries were vocal.

Google is even emphasizing giving customers better results when they use vocal features. If you’re not optimized for voice search, that means missing out on a huge chunk of your customers. Don’t fall behind the competition.

Instead, understand why vocal optimization is important, and what you can do about it.

Voice Matters

Voice is changing the face of SEO. The majority of past competition has been over text results. Vocal searches will be a new battleground for digital marketers in 2018.

You need to start now to win.

This is most important for small businesses. Over one-fifth of voice searches are for local results. This makes sense when you consider that most of them are coming from mobile devices.

People want fast information about nearby services.

Voice Search Optimization Tips

There are a few things you can do to boost your vocal performance. If you follow these tips, you’ll be sure to jump to the top of voice rankings.

The most important thing is using conversational keywords. That means using long keywords based on the way people ask about your business. Voice searches tend to be full sentences, so expect to use long, natural phrases.

To find them, keep track of what people ask when they call your business, and how they phrase it.

It’s also a good idea to build a strong FAQ page. This is both an opportunity to turn search terms into questions and a place to inform your visitors.

If you’re a local business, you want to make sure to claim your Google My Business listing. People use voice search to find your name, address, and phone number.

Implement These Organic SEO Tips

Customers reviews, voice search, and long-tail keyword phrases are a must when it comes to the organic SEO of your business.

The amount of business you receive from online sources depends greatly on your organic SEO.

While organic SEO may seem difficult at first, the right keyword tools can take you a long way and make your journey to success a lot easier. Are you struggling to get your small business off the ground? Let us help you with organic SEO tips.

When you’re trying to rank your website in Google, most businesses want the fastest and most efficient way to get to number one, and often the cheapest way.

It’s already been confirmed by Google that the most important signals to help rank in Google search results are:

• High-quality content
• Link building

These two factors are the most important in the eyes of Google to understanding the quality of your content. When deciding how to rank in Google then, you can face a decision of using black hat vs white hat SEO.

The trouble for most people is they have no idea what the difference is between white hat and black hat SEO. The difference can be huge, and it’s important before you begin your link building campaign to understand what those differences are.

This article will help you understand the difference between white-hat and black-hat SEO.

Why is Black Hat Vs White Hat SEO Important?

Google is a huge search engine, they receive over 63,000 searches every second, on any given day. With such a huge amount of traffic coming through Google, it’s the perfect place to expose your business to a fresh audience.

Coming up in the search results in Google is easy enough, the challenge is finishing first in the search rankings. The first page of the results is a holy grail for marketers, as it receives as much as 75% of click-throughs.

Ranking first in the search engine results can give you some serious traffic to your profile, but there are two different ways in which you can try to improve your Google ranking. White hat SEO and Black hat SEO.

If you want to work with a link-building company, it’s a good idea to know the difference.

What is White Hat SEO?

White-hat SEO are techniques that follow Googles guidelines for SEO. They also are very low-risk to carry out and will usually fall well within the guidelines of Google and other search engines.

Using these techniques means you are very low-risk of running into problems with the search engines.

White hat SEO is good as you don’t have to worry about penalties or spam issues. But you do have to focus on the long-term results, rather than short-term gains.

This means white hat SEO can sometimes take longer to have a big effect.

Examples of White Hat SEO

To help you have a better understanding of the different types of white hat SEO, we’ve outlined some examples below.

Quality Content

One of the best ways to gain amazing SEO over time is through creating quality content. Google is aiming to rank websites higher who give valuable content to their readers.

This means if you can create amazing resources which answer questions for users, Google will reward you.

The general process is to create great content and then organically have high-authority websites backlink to that piece of content. This shows Google the content is valuable and they then choose to rank it higher because of this.

Titles and Meta Data

Providing your pages with proper titles and metadata is crucial. This helps Google to understand what your website is all about.

Titles carry a lot of weight with the search engines when you’re ranking your content.

Keyword Research and Effective Keyword Use

You want to be producing content for your website with keywords in mind. Doing proper keyword research allows you to identify keywords with low competition and high search volumes.

You want to use the keywords and key phrases throughout your website then. Assign each page 2-3 keywords you’ve identified that you would like to rank for.

Quality Inbound Links

Gaining high-value inbound links is crucial to your ranking success. It’s essentially a vote of confidence from a higher authority website that your content is useful or valuable.

The amount of quality links you have to your website is a huge factor to how well your website performs in ranking.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat is originally a term coined for computer hackers, black-hat has become synonymous with techniques that violate Googles search engine guidelines.

These techniques aim to exploit loopholes in the algorithms of the search engines and will usually rank websites higher than they deserve.

These tactics never seem to work in the long-run because the search engines are always looking to learn more over time and stop them. This means that traffic and rankings can plummet pretty much overnight if you’re caught using these tactics.

Examples of Black Hat SEO

Here are some examples of how you can use black hat SEO.

Hidden Content

Hidden content is one of the oldest black hat SEO methods. The idea is that within your code you stuff content with keywords. This content isn’t visible to the user of your website.

Search engines frown upon all of these techniques, and if they find out your website is using them, they will penalize you because of it.

Meta Keyword Stuffing

You have a few meta tags that help the search engines figure out the content of a page. They are between the tag of a page, and when used incorrectly it’ll alert the search engine that your site is using spam techniques.

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are a short list of words that inform the search engine of the main focus of the page. Meta keywords have been so abused in the past that search engines rarely see them anymore, and if they do they will no doubt punish you for it.

Link Farming

Link farms are free for all web pages that have only one purpose, to list links to unrelated websites. They don’t provide you with traffic, and you run the risk of having your site banned for getting involved.

Don’t do it.

Which Technique Will You Use?

If it isn’t already clear, black hat vs white hat SEO is a pretty clear argument. White hat SEO is far superior and especially as Google becomes more intelligent and it’s algorithms develop, you’ll easily get caught out.

Trying to get a page to rank high on Google? Ever thought of using a shortcut, rather than following the traditional, analytical process to succeed in organic searches?

On-page content, link-building, and keyword research count as the most effective SEO tactics today. That said, there are ways to work around the traditional, organic methods to get quick and dirty results.

These are black and grey hat techniques. Some are only frowned upon by the community while others are downright discredited by search engine giants like Google and Bing.

Which SEO strategies will end up hurting your rankings instead of helping? Here is a quick dive into 9 shady tactics you should avoid.

Buying Backlinks

Purchasing a backlink is among the most common grey hat techniques out there. It’s not as bad as some of the other methods listed here but it can lead to severe penalties once discovered by the Google Penguin algorithm.

The issue here is that you didn’t earn rank points by providing good content. You paid someone so they would feature a link to your landing pages on their site.

On the same note, selling backlinks is also a grey hat method. Don’t offer to feature links to other sites only if they bribe you with cash payment or a “free” product.

Spam Content

SEO spamming is arguably one of the worst techniques to utilize. Every now and then you’ll spot it in the comments sections of a video on YouTube or Facebook.

These are comments that have nothing to do with the video. They’re nothing but links to a landing page and more often than not it’s quite obvious that they’re copy-pasted content.

In the worst occasions, bots and other black hat SEO apps post these instead of people. This reduces the manual labor and makes them even less related to the original content.

Duplicate Content

Plagiarizing the content of one site and then posting it on yours is a quick ticket to getting more penalties. Google’s algorithm updates constantly work on identifying plagiarized content. The search engine giant won’t rank you higher because you’re trying to leech off the hard work of someone else.

The Google Panda update will identify plagiarized content and flag them down. Search engine crawlers will ignore these pages and your overall ranking will decrease.

Invisible Keywords

Another black hat template is to hide keywords in plain sight.

Most web pages are white and if you make your keywords white too, they become invisible. Users won’t see them but search engine crawlers will. At first, those crawlers will think the keywords relate to the content in a natural, organic way and this means the page will rank high for a bit.

However, always remember that Google can and will spot these instances. It won’t take long for Google to notice people aren’t clicking those keywords and that they may have nothing to do with the rest of the site’s content.

Article Spinning

This method often creates unintelligible content. The original article may have been amazing but spun articles twist those words and phrases in an attempt to seem fresh and new. More often than not, however, the end result is a mixed garble of words.

Article spinning becomes even worse when people use programs to automate the process. Not only is the creativity gone but so is the cohesion that binds the idea of the article together.

Even well-spun articles can lead to penalties. If Google recognizes the concept is similar to another site or page, you’ll get flagged for plagiarism. This is why tools like Copyscape exist.

Keyword Stuffing

Gone are the days where you can stuff a keyword 20 times in a 500-word article for it to rank high. The Google Panda update and subsequent algorithm changes made sure that content creators don’t abuse keyword placement for better SEO results.

Instead, identify which areas search engine crawlers look into and place a few, select keywords in those spots. These include the title tag, meta description for the page, a few headers, and the introduction of your content. This makes it read more naturally compared to spamming the word repeatedly throughout the piece.

Link Spamming

The practice of abusing link directories faded away a few years ago but some black hat SEO experts still do this. They’ll use third-party link directories or link farms – even Twitter sometimes – to do nothing but spam links to landing pages.

Without context, engagement with the audience, or timing these posts do nothing but float on the Internet. They exist solely for search engine crawlers to find them and index them as doorways to a page.

Using a shady link generator also ties into this practice. These tools shorten your URL and change the words to bait people into thinking they’re entering a page only to discover it’s not related to their needs. Avoid this and instead, rely on a reputable link building agency to work on your backlink profile.

Cloaking

Of the different black and grey hat techniques listed here, this counts as one of the nastiest due how it tricks not only search engine crawlers but users as well. Cloaking is when the SEO expert presents a version of a web page to the crawlers but a different version to users.

This means Google and users don’t see the page in the exact same way. The page could rank high for a keyword like “free kittens” but in reality, it only shows pictures and blogs of cheap e-cigarettes to visitors.

Doorway Pages

Got a website that sells shirts for men but you notice the keywords you want to rank high on are too expensive or tight competition? A black hat technique is to create doorway pages and this is another horrible tactic that can lead to severe penalties.

For the example given above, this means creating a landing page that uses a keyword like “cheap kittens” instead of anything related to men’s shirts.

A doorway page is a site designed solely to bring in traffic. This means it’s over-optimized, using low-competition keywords that are easy to rank for, but the page itself has nothing useful for visitors.

Avoid Black and Grey Hat Techniques, Rank High the Right Way

Don’t resort to these black and grey hat techniques. If you want to succeed in organic searches, take time and use widely-approved methods like guest posting, reaching out to influencers, and improving site speed.

Need help building a strong backlink profile and better organic SEO results? We’ve got you covered at Backlinks!