When it comes to getting your site rankedon Google searches, the trendy advice you hear a lot is always just to create greatcontent.
Which is good and you should be creating greatcontent, but just having great content in and of itself is only going to get you sofar.
So do you know what the number one factoris after creating, excellent, relevant content for your target audience, when it comes tosearch engine rankings is? It's links.
Rand from SparkToro recently did a study;he interviewed more than 1500 SEO professionals.
And they all agreed on this as it was thenumber two answer they gave.
But links are really hard to build.
So how are you going to build them? Hey, everyone, I'm Hans van Gent of User Growth, and if you're not subscribed to the channel yet.
It's THE way we can hang out on a regularbasis, and how we can teach you everything we know to make your online marketing as performantas possible.
So go ahead, click the subscribe button andthe little bell icon next to it, so you never miss another lesson you need to succeed onlinewith your business.
And now, let's move on to today's lesson.
The reason why having people linking to yourcontent is such a huge ranking factor for Google, and all the other search engine outthere, is basically that it shows your website, your content is good enough to warrant sharing.
When you start to look at the history of backlinking, there were a lot of really spammy things that people used to do.
With things like private blog networks andal of this other shady stuff, Google just started really devaluing all those kind ofbacklinks.
And over time they've gotten better and betterat this, to a place where now everything is much more earned.
Google is looking at all these different signalsthat go with backlinks.
So you really want to focus on white hat techniques, or techniques that are done by the book, no shady stuff, and the way Google wants youto do it so that you never end up getting penalized by Google, which of course can reallysuck and it can take you a long time to recover from.
So all the tips that we'll be giving today, are fully legit and it will keep you rising through the ranks hopefully.
One final remark before we dive into the differenttips, at the beginning of this video I was talking about good quality content and thatis really a prerequisite because a lot of times it's much harder to get people to linkto your content if your content is of terrible quality.
People are a lot more likely to link to agreat article, allow you to write a guest post etc.
if they see that you can producegood quality content.
So today I'm going to show you five of ourfavourite ways to get these backlinks and tell Google and other search engines thatyour business is the one they should be pushing to the top of your customer's searches.
I will be saving my favourite for last, sobe sure to stick around for that.
So my first tip might not be that surprising, and I already dropped a little hint about it.
The first tip is about guest posting.
If you've never heard of guest posting before, it is basically you producing content for other people's blogs, and then they are linkingback to your site in the author bio.
The way this usually works is that you findrelevant blogs that are in your niche, and then you reach out to the blog owners, andyou pitch them your idea.
So how can you identify existing websitesthat are open to guest postings? Well, you can either use social media, forexample, searching for “guest post”, “guest article” or “guest author” on Twitter searchwill show you publications that accept guest posts.
A better way is to use special terms on Googlecombined with the keywords that you want to rank for.
Things like: “your keyword(s) + inurl:write-for-us””your keyword(s) + become a contributor” or “your keyword(s) + guest post by” Are great ways to find sites in your nicheaccepting guest posts.
One final tip on doing outreach to these publications, it always works better when you warm up your audience a bit before just reaching out.
Start commenting on articles on the website, start sharing their content on Twitter and including their Twitter handle etc.
This way, when you do send an outreach email, they recognize your name, and it makes it easier to get accepted.
On to tip number two.
Tip number two is about this excellent websitecalled Help A Reporter Out.
It's a website that journalists go to whenthey need help writing an article.
Journalists go to Help A Reporter Out (HARO)to post questions for the articles they are writing.
If you can help them answer the questionsthey have, you can get some free press.
There are lots of big international websiteslike entrepreneur.
com, inc.
com, etc.
that are using HARO.
This makes HARO a great place to get somehigh-quality backlinks to your website.
It won't result in tons of backlinks to yourwebsite, but the links that you do get will help you drive traffic because these are highprofiled and authoritative sites.
Tip number threeAli Mese wrote a brilliant piece some time ago on Medium called “Side Project MarketingIs The New King”.
He writes about how one small side project(Unsplash) saved the startup Crew from going down under.
So why if you're good at the building stuff, why not use your HTML or programming skills (or that of your founders) to create a smalltool that can be helpful and can earn you tons of organic backlinks? Coschedule did this great as well, for example, creating a tool that analyses headline called “Headline Analyser.
” This kind of tools on your website can helpto get links back when authors write about a related topic.
Tip number fourIn another video, we already talked about broken links and how you should fix them foryour website.
But why stop there? Over the years, websites come and go.
As a webmaster, it can become a challengingtask to keep on checking on your pages to see if all the links you ever included inyour articles are still working and up-2-date.
This tip involves you contacting the webmasterof a website to report broken links on his or her website.
At the same time, you can recommend otherwebsites to replace the broken links.
(see what we are doing here?) Of course, when you suggest a replacement, this will be a link to your website.
Since you're helping out this webmaster, mosttimes they are more than happy to replace the broken link with the one you supplied, because you're doing them a great favour.
You can use Google to find broken links.
Just find interesting pieces of content inyour niche, then use a plugin called “Check My Link” for Chrome or “Link Analyzer” forFirefox to find any broken links on a website.
Then find the contact details of the websiteowner using Find That Lead and reach out to the webmaster with a friendly email.
Tip number five10x content.
If you create something epic, something sogood that it is at least ten times better than your competitor that is currently rankingon number one of the search results page.
People are inclined to change the links theyhave in their current articles to updated with a better resource for their listeners.
Brian Dean coined this the Skyscraper Technique.
What you do, is you find a piece of contentin your industry that is ranking well and you create a better version, and I'm not talkingabout any better version.
If something has a piece of content aboutthe ten best ways to train your dog, you create a piece of content of talks about the 100best ways to train your dog.
After that, you use BuzzSumo to find anybodythat shared the original piece of content, and you start reaching out to them tellingabout your piece of content.
A great template to use is telling them howmuch you loved their piece of content, that you loved the resource they originally sharedand in fact, you loved it so much, you wrote a similar more in-depth article around it.
I will be leaving this example in full inthe description below, so you can just copy-paste it for yourself.
So that's it.
Now I want to hear from you, which of thesetactics are you excited to start using to start building up some really high-qualitybacklinks to your website.
I want to know which one or if you have anyother tips that I've missed, please leave those in the comment section below as well.
And if you're not subscribed to the channelyet, you're not going to want to miss out on any future videos so just click the circleicon right over here to subscribe and don't forget to share this video with your colleaguesif you think this might be helpful to them as well.
That's it, I'm Hans van Gent of User Growth, and I will see you in the next video.
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