SEO Link Building Is Dead. Long Live SEO Link Building

I'm sure you're aware that Google have been cracking down on link building for SEO. If you've heard of Pandas and Penguins - it's the Penguin updates that have been picking away at unscrupulous link building. At the same time you've probably also heard that links are one of the most important aspects in successful search engine rankings. Confused about what you should be doing? In this article we'll explore how you can safely navigate link building minefield to grow your search engine traffic.

Organic search engine traffic is an important goal in most content marketing and inbound marketing strategies. 

However getting it right is often a fine line. Go too far and you start pushing out crappy content loaded with keywords - which isn't going to have the desired effect. On the flip side to this - focusing on quality without identifying and making the most of SEO is a missed opportunity. 

At a high level our marketing goals and therefore content marketing goals should fall into one of the following categories: 

• Brand awareness or reinforcement
• Lead conversion and nurturing
• Customer conversion
• Customer service
• Customer loyalty/retention
• Customer upsell
• Engaging fans

Whichever high level goal our content is assigned to we should also be assigning it more granular goals:

• Ranked by search engines
• Found by users
• Read by users
• Shared by users
• Useful to users

Neil Patel the prolific content marketer has explored this in detail in his article for the Content Marketing Institute. I'm going to review his article here. Looking at how you can put it into day-to-day action for your content marketing campaigns.

Links Are Essential To Your Inbound Marketing Success

The big caveat to the heading above is that the right links are essential to your content marketing success. Poor link building practices are more likely to get your site penalised than to boost rankings. It's a really bad idea to buy links or attempt to get lots of links from poor quality sites. 

To rank your content needs to have links into it, have links from it and ideally continue to get links on an ongoing basis.

Remember if your content doesn't get ranked:

- it doesn't get found

- it doesn't get read

- if it doesn't get read - there's no point in creating it in the first place

I completely agree with Neil's message that as content marketers:

"We have to think about links. We have to do something about links. We have to be informed, proactive, and strategic when it comes to linking technique in content marketing."

In his article Neil gives 6 link building techniques that you can safely use in your inbound marketing activities. I'm going to look at each of these to give you some tips on how you can use them.

Neil's Link Building Tip 1 - Use Co-citation 

Simply this is mentioning a brand or source for your information without actually linking to it.

What a link without a link - how does that work?

Firstly there are times when you shouldn't be using links. Links to your own site can be a bad idea in guest blog posts, forums, blog comments and other user-generated comments. Instead you can just mention your brand name and Google will do the rest. It looks for brand mentions, especially on trusted sites and uses this as a trust measure. Which is all-good for your SEO.

Secondly you want to cite the sources of your information. Google takes a dim view of plagiarised content. So just as in research papers or university essays it's much better to cite the source of your information than to try to pass it off as your own. This will benefit your content as you've done things properly and it will be much less likely to be considered as duplicate content. You may also get some benefit of being associated with the source article - especially if it’s from a high profile site. Neil gives a great example of this in his article.

The third benefit is that you can make the source author or site aware of your article on social media. There's a chance they may share it out or interact with you. If they do you'll benefit by getting it in front of more people. It'll also help build social activity from trusted sources, which will give your post a boost of trust with Google. 

So remember to cites your sources and cite your brand where you can't directly link to it.

Neil's Link Building Tip 2 - Forget About Keywords

This is a contentious one for me - so let's explore what he's getting at in a bit more detail.

His argument is that Google has got a lot more intelligent. They've gone way past keyword density in an article. Now they're looking at things like:

- Search intent

- The actual key phrase a user is using - which is more likely to be a long tail phrase than the keywords you've thought up or researched

- Semantic relevance - which includes things like the context of the content, as well as the context of the user like their search history and where they're searching from

- Schematic mark-up - micro data in your post and site

- Trust

- Quality

He argues that back in the day content was more often than not written around keywords with pretty much the sole aim of ranking for that keyword. Now you have to focus on creating great content - or in his words "insanely good content".

His experience is that keywords actually come as a byproduct of the content rather than being the root of it.

He has given another great example of what he means in his article. So instead of focusing on keywords Neil recommends the following approach.

"Write for users not search engines. Forget about your keywords, and dive into your subject with the best possible content you can create."

To create an article that is a:

"...well-written article with plenty of semantic relevance... lengthy, well-cited, effectively linked to other sites, carefully analyzed, and it appears on an authoritative site."

It’s worth noting that he's also practicing what he preaches.

So he's killed links and keywords what's next...

Neil's Link Building Tip 3 - Stay focused on your niche

This is one of the simpler tips. Stay focused on your niche and you'll attract links and social share from sites and accounts that are highly relevant to your site and subject area. Ultimately relevant sites will pass your site more authority from Google than getting links from unrelated sites. 

Taking it one step further if you aim to publish some of the best content in your niche you'll give yourself the best chance of attracting the highest quality links and social shares. 

So get out there and create some remarkable content.

Neil's link Building Tip 4 - Don't Optimise Your Anchor Text

Anchor text is the actual text used in the link - click here - is classic anchor text.

This is another tip. It is also one that flies in the face of old school 'conventional' SEO thinking. Only a couple of years ago a link wasn't worth much if it didn't directly contain the key phrase you were targeting. 

Google used to look at the text used in the link as an indicator of the relevance of the page it was linking too.

It doesn't anymore. 

In fact if you use the key phrase as the anchor text to link back to your page - you're at more risk of getting your page penalised and dropping rankings than you are of increasing rankings.

More often than not selecting a key phrase as anchor text takes a conscious decision. So link naturally rather than thinking of SEO.

If you're still stuck in old school ways, consciously choose innocuous words or brand terms as the link text - not key phrases.

Neil's Link Building Tip Number 5 - Interact With Other Websites and Blogs

This is a great bit of advice. In his post he linked to 5 different sites! Not bad going. Admittedly two of the sites he has a personal interest in - so he's practicing what he preaches. 

His point is that if you mention and link to other sites you're likely to get noticed by them. This'll increase the chance that you'll get a link back at some point - but only if you put the time and effort into creating great content. 

Also in just the same way as way as using co-citation in tip 1 above - linking to quality sites to strengthen the point you are making will lend credibility to your argument for the user and Google. 

One of the best ways of attracting links is by creating unique content that give others a strong reason to link to you. 

Neil uses the examples of Social Bakers and Buffer. 

Socials Bakers are great at publishing research and unique stats - both of which are fantastic unique content that will attract links and citations. Many businesses sit on unique data opportunities - so have a think about the data in your business that you could use to create a unique insight. 

The content team at Buffer are masters of creating a unique views of existing information. Lists of tools, methods of doing things that have worked well for them. Effectively they have repackaged internal company research and processes to create unique content. Their blog is well worth a read to keep up to date with the latest content marketing techniques. 

Can you find these opportunities in your business and create content and link attraction opportunities from them? 

Sometimes your link opportunities may be to a competitor. You can still link to a competitor relatively safely by using the no-follow attribute.  

Why is this important to know? When a site links to you it is effectively a positive vote for your content from that site. Google uses this to assign trust to the linked site. The more trusted the linking site e.g BBC the more trust will be assigned to the linked site.  

Using the no-follow attribute means that none of this trust is passed from the linking site to the linked site. This trust is commonly referred to as link juice in the SEO world - using a no-follow link means the link juice isn't passed. 

Remember though that the co-citation benefit should still be considered, you might also lose a bit of traffic to your competitor. These shouldn't be make-or-break, but you'll want to bear them in mind.


Neil's Link Building Tip Number 6 - Link Internally

If you are writing and posting regularly look for opportunities to link from the post you are writing to other posts you have written. 

These links should be at relevant points in the article you are writing. At the beginning of this article I mentioned Google Panda and Penguin updates and linked to a post that we wrote on this a while ago.  

If you were interested in learning more about either, you could click on the link to read more. It is these links that the Internet is built on. 

Why's this an important strategy? Here's Neil's explanation: 

• Helps users access additional content
• Improves dwell time (the time users spend on your site - a metric that Google may be using to determine site relevancy)
• Reduces bounce rate (users just visiting one page of your site, then leaving)
• Distributes page authority throughout the site
• Enhances the crawlability of the site. (Makes it easier for the Google Bot spider to find its way around your site)
• Increases the indexation of all pages, including deep internal pages  (For the same reasons as the point above)
• Increases overall page views across the site 

All of these things are good for your site visitors and therefore good indicators of quality to Google.  

So remember for every post you write, look for relevant opportunities to link to other posts on your site. 

To Sum Up

Firstly thanks to Neil for his great post that provided the basis for this post. Please read it here. Hopefully my take on it has provided a different explanation of the important concepts he's explored.

To get started with these tips today - I recommend you create a simple checklist of these points that you can reference for each post you write.

Remember don't use these tips in a formulaic way. Write for your reader and use these tips to provide benefit to them.

Do your best for your readers and users, it’s the surest way to success firstly for them and secondly for SEO.

If you found this post useful remember to share it and let us know if these tips help you boost your readers.