Lesson-7: Off-page SEO – What are Backlinks? (My working strategies revealed) | Ankur Aggarwal

Hey guys, I hope you have written your firstarticle and also forged all the on pages SEO points.

So today we talk about backlinks, the coreof SEO.

So let’s start with the video.

Hey guys, welcome back to the digital marketingmastery course.

We are already done with the on page SEO, and today we will be learning about the off page SEO.

And this will conclude our SEO segment.

So SEO has evolved a lot.

It has continuously evolving.

Earlier, it is very easy to fool Google.

So black hat were used to rank your websiteto the top search results.

So what people used to do is, to make quickmoney, they used to rank some articles which has monetary intent.

And they use to do it by calling the blackhat ways.

So some of the black hat ways is like makingcomment backlinks, forum backlinks, VPN or the private blog network.

So these are all the ways to fool the Googlealgorithm and get your website ranked.

All these used to work earlier in 2010… 11 and all.

But after the latest algorithm updates, Googlehas become really smarter.

Now only the white hat ways of SEO works.

So it is extremely difficult to rank yourwebsite if you’re following the black hat ways.

You really need to provide quality content, add value to the user who is searching for the keyword, only then will your website beranking.

Now with various algorithm updates, Googlehas become smarter.

That’s the gist.

So here is a snapshot of various Google algorithmicupdates.

The major ones were Panda and Penguin.

Google rolls out these algorithmic updatesto remove all the irrelevant results on the search engines and to only keep the high qualityresults for their users.

Now Google rolls up algorithmic updates quitefrequently.

Why? Because they really want to provide the bestexperience to the people who are searching on their platform.

The ultimate goal of Google is to be highlyrelevant and to provide the answer as quickly as possible.

So logically speaking, the results that answerthe query the fastest and comprehensively should be ranked number one.

But what people do, is that they follow theblack hat procedure and they rank their websites above the high quality results.

These algorithmic updates help remove allthese irrelevant links, and to put only the high-quality links into the search results.

So we are already done with the on page SEOpart.

How to find the right keywords, how to structureyour content, how to make your article really comprehensive.

So we are already done with the on page SEOpart, and now let’s talk about off page SEO.

So what is off page SEO? It refers to action taken outside your websiteto impact your ranking within the search engine results page.

So on page SEO was all about taking actionon your website, and off page SEO is all about actions outside your website.

So the primary off page SEO element is backlinks.

Backlink is the most important metric whenwe talk about off page SEO.

So we are not talking about any kind of backlink.

So there’s a strategy behind the backlinks.

So these are the four key parameters you haveto look at when building backlinks to your website.

So follow vs no follow backlinks, anchor text, link juice and relevancy.

Don’t worry we will be explaining all ofthese one by one.

So let’s start with backlinks.

What is a backlink? So a backlink is created when one websitelinks to another.

The link between the two websites is the backlink.

Let me show you, through an example.

Here’s another website, Moneytap.

com.

So here I got an opportunity of adding a guestpost on their website.

When you click this link, it opens my website, Ankuraggarwal.

in, best credit cards in India.

So this is a backlink made to my website.

For this article, this is a backlink.

Since this article is linked to my article, this becomes a backlink to my article.

The rule of convention is the more backlinksyou have, the better ranking you will get.

But that is not the correct definition, becausethere is so much more to a backlink.

There are various parameters like whetherthe backlink is a follow backlink or no-follow backlink.

Whether the backlink is coming from a relevantwebsite or an irrelevant website.

Those are the quality of the backlinks.

We’ll be talking more about it now.

So let’s start with the difference betweena follow and no-follow backlink.

Let me explain follow and no-follow backlinksthrough an example.

Let’s take the same example of my article“best credit cards in India”.

Now here this article is linked to my article“best credit cards in India”.

Here I have added an extension called “nofollow” in my chrome browser, so whenever it finds a no-follow backlink it just putteda red-dotted square around that backlink.

So here you can see that in my article, Ihave link to “Standard Chartered” credit card through a no-follow backlink.

And how to check that? You can do that by checking the source codeof this article.

Here you can see that the tag “rel” isequal to no-follow is applied to this link.

So the power of my website, won’t be transferredto the website I am linking to.

So let’s talk about this link from MoneyTaplinked to my article “best credit cards in India”.

Here when you check the page source code.

Search for the anchor text, here there isno tag of “rel=nofollow”.

That means the link is follow in nature.

That means that Google crawler will pass onthe power of this website towards my article.

I know it might sound complicated, but it’sa simple concept.

All you have to understand is for follow backlinks, the power of the website is transferred to the website you are linking to.

And for the no-follow backlinks, Google doesnot consider the power.

Now let’s talk about the internal and externallinks.

So internal links are all the links that arepointing to the internal links of the website.

And an external link is a link that pointsto any external domain.

So here in my article of best credit cardin India, here you can see that I’ve linked to another article to my website called “checkEPF balance”.

So this is an internal link to the website.

For any link that is going outside of my website, like the quick application link here of this credit card, this is an external link.

Now let’s talk about the anchor text.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable textin a hyperlink.

In modern browsers, it is usually blue andunderlined.

So anchor text is the exact keyword, phraseused to create the backlink.

So here this keyword phrase of which creditcard is the best, becomes the anchor text for the backlink that is created for my article.

Now this is a very, very important part whenwe talk about backlinks.

But honestly people, just literally ignorethis part.

As I mentioned, SEO has involve a lot.

So Google has become much more smarter.

So they are not only looking at the quantityof backlinks, but also at the quality of the backlinks.

So link juice is more of a measurement ofthe quality of a backlink.

So if a link is a no-follow like in our article, so no link juice is passed to the linked website.

Also the relevancy of the backlink mattersa lot.

So if our article is best credit card in India, so a backlink coming from a credit card related article will be much more powerful than abacklink coming from a guitar-based website.

So a backlink coming from a treasury website, which has been functioning for let’s say over 10 years, and write specifically aboutcredit cards, then that backlink is gonna be a hundred times more powerful than a backlinkcoming from a new credit card based website.

So why should you even create the backlinks? It’s simple, you need more organic freetraffic.

More the high-quality backlinks, the betterranking you will get in the Google search results and more traffic you’ll be drivingfor your website.

So when you are building backlinks you arealso getting extra traffics from the websites that are linking to you.

A backlink also help in brand building andalso in building relationships with various other webmasters.

So let’s talk about the black hat versusthe white hat SEO now.

Black hat SEO involves all the wrong waysto get your website ranked.

I don’t use it, I don’t recommend it sokindly please stay away from black hat SEO.

White hat SEO refers to the use of techniquesand strategies that target a human audience.

It looks more natural and it is the preferredway.

So backlink building is not easy.

It is a time-consuming process and you willdefinitely need some tools to make this process simpler.

So all the tools mentioned here, I personallyuse and these are the same tools recommended by internet marketers all over the world.

So let’s start with ahrefs.

If you don’t have a very big budget andyou just have enough money to invest on one SEO tool then I highly recommend ahrefs.

I’ve been using ahrefs for almost 3 yearsnow.

It’s the absolute best tool when you talkabout SEO.

So for example let’s take Scoopwoop.

comand here is an overview of Scoopwoop.

com at ahrefs.

As you can see they have almost 7.

7k referringdomains, 145k backlinks and they are driving approximately 1.

8 million organic traffic.

Again I’ll mention that these are not absolutenumbers, these are just estimates.

I used ranking pages as well.

You can even check the top pages to find thehighest ranked pages of this website.

You can see that this article “interestingIndia” on Scoopwoop is driving approximately 31, 000 people per month.

Here you can see that 11 domains are linkingto this article.

And also you can find the right keywords forwhich it is ranking.

So if you searched “facts about India”.

Let’s search for “facts about India”.

Then you can see Scoopwoop in the number oneposition.

Isn’t it amazing, guys? This tool is the absolute best SEO tool outthere.

The overview section also shows you the numberof do-follow backlinks, number of no-follow backlinks.

And the text and the redirection and how manyimage backlinks it has.

Also the growth of referring domains monthover month.

You can also find the various anchor textsthat were used in creating the backlinks.

You can also use Moz or SEMrush for doingthe same, but I highly recommend Ahrefs.

The other important tool is Buzzstream.

Buzzstream is the best outreach managementand white hat link building software out there.

We use BuzzStream for all our outreach efforts.

So we are sending 100 to almost 200 emailsper day through BuzzStream for all our websites combined.

It makes it super easy to manage the emails.

It tells you how many people have replied, how many people have seen the message but have not replied.

And also categorizes all your emails in “buckets”, in folders to make it easy for you to manage.

Managing responses or replies using Gmailalone is extremely difficult.

This is where BuzzStream comes into play.

It tells you how many people have seen themessage but have not replied, how many people have actually replied.

And you can also categorize your emails infolder structure.

So I highly recommend using BuzzsStream foryour outreach management.

To send the emails you also need the emailIDs, right? To find the right email IDs we use a browserextension named “email-hunter”.

It is an extremely efficient browser extensionand it will give you all the email IDs associated with the website.

In my experience, I have seen that 6 out of10 times, I have received the right email ID from email-hunter.

So another highly-recommended tool.

So “check my links” is another browserextension.

It helps in finding the broken links of yourwebpage.

So let’s say if you are writing an articleand the article has around 15 links and somehow few of the links has broken.

So you can just click on this browser extensionand it will give you all the links which are not functioning properly.

Lastly but not the least, SimilarWeb.

SimilarWeb definitely uses dark magic to displaytraffic of websites, the traffic sources and much more extremely useful info.

So here we are in the SimilarWeb website, and I’ve already searched for Scoopwoop.

com.

You can check that the global rank here is9, 960.

In India the rank is 704.

And ScoopWoop is driving approximately 11million people to its website on a monthly basis.

It also gives you a timeline on how the trafficincreased or decreased.

Definitely the data is not accurate but theapproximation is quite good.

As expected the majority of the traffic iscoming from India.

It also gives you a basic overview of thetraffic sources.

What percentage of people are direct visitors? How many of them are coming from search engines.

It also tells you about the referring websites.

And the different keywords for which the websiteis ranking.

Social media, in terms of social media, Facebookis the biggest component.

YouTube the second part.

And also they are using “display advertising”.

It will also show you the percentage breakupof various networks they are advertising on.

Although there are hundreds of techniquesout there to build backlinks, but the one that has given me the best return are guestposting, link reclamation and link worthy content.

So guest posting is all about adding high-qualitycontent in someone else’s website.

You do this by first outreaching by usingthe BuzzStream software, communicating with them and showing your intent on adding a high-qualitycontent on their website.

And through that content you can link backto that article.

Secondly you can use link reclamation.

So once you get big, many people will startmentioning your website name in many articles.

So you can set up a lot.

So whenever someone mentions your websitename, you can get in a lot.

And then you can email and outreach them andtell them “will you please link back to our website”? And setup just the name.

And the most important part is creating linkworthy content.

Just please write content that is actuallyworth linking to.

Give people a reason to link into your content.

So if you are writing a 500 or 600 word articleon a topic like “best credit card in India”.

Definitely no one will link to you.

So make sure your content is the absolutebest.

It should cover all points and questions thata person might have while searching for the target keyword.

So this was it about SEO.

I hope you enjoyed this whole on page andoff page SEO segments.

For any doubts comment on the video belowand you can also use the hashtag “#asankur”.

Guys backlinks are extremely important forthe search engine rankings.

So make sure you actively build them and pleasedo not use any black hat techniques.

Apart from them we also have a checklist foryou.

A 3-month SEO blueprint checklist.

Just follow for your website, and very soonyou’ll have the organic search engine rankings.

And tomorrow we’ll talk about Google Analyticsand Google ReMaster tools.

So I’d see you later.

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