Kerry Jones says, “I was in Peru earlier this year for a digital marketing conference, and I overwhelmingly heard the same frustration: “It’s really hard to use outreach to earn links or PR coverage in our country.” This wasn’t for lack of trying. As I continued to hear this sentiment during my visit, I learned there simply weren’t a lot of opportunities. For one thing, in Peru, there aren’t nearly as many publishers as in more populous countries. Most publishers expected payment for mentioning a brand. Furthermore, journalists did a lot of job-hopping, so maintaining relationships... [...]

Andrew Dennis says, “The principles that apply to good marketing are the same principles that apply to good link building. The process to secure links might be unique, but the guiding philosophy should be grounded in traditional marketing. Some think that link building is a magic bullet for SEO, or some sort of “traffic faucet” they can turn on and off as needed. In reality, link building is the manual promotion of an asset to a targeted audience — also known as marketing. The same fundamental philosophies that drive effective marketing drive effective link building: Audience development: Research... [...]

Sonia Simone says, ““Help! No one is reading my content!” We have some thoughts … Whether your site is big or small, we all want more engaged visitors who are reading, watching, and listening to our content. In this 23-minute episode, Sonia talks about: The smartest place (usually) to send paid traffic How to generate the “signals of quality” that search engines use to rank good content The keys to making content more shareable Connecting your content with someone else’s audience Why I’m not a fan of purging non-buyers from your email list”. Getting More Traffic, Links,... [...]

Julie Joyce says, “Countless articles about links are written every day. Many of them are excellent, filled with some really good tips to help you do well. Some of them are awful, full of bad advice. However, the biggest thing that bugs me about link-building advice is this: a lot of it pretends to offer guarantees. People talk about how to Penguin-proof sites, how to avoid being manually penalized and so on. As an extremely paranoid link builder who has seen many examples of unfairness online, I don’t believe there are any guarantees, and below you’ll see why that is. 1. No link is... [...]

David Groom says, “Regardless of the niche or industry you operate in, it’s possible to avoid wasted time and effort by heeding the following five tips to practically guarantee that your website’s inbound link strategy will start moving forward immediately: 1. Create shareworthy content Publishing fresh content that readers will be inclined to share is perhaps the fastest way to see an influx of inbound links [literally] overnight. When a reader encounters a piece of content that they’re tempted to share, they’re not going to put it off until the next day – they... [...]

Matt Vazquez says, “I stood up from my office chair, stepped behind it and leaned on its back with both hands so I could stare at the email from a new angle. I was silenced by the response of the blogger: “We’ve had a recent policy change here, and we no longer offer followed links. It’s hurting our reputation and being flagged by Google.” In that moment, the game changed for me. I’ve received some interesting responses from editors and bloggers about links before, but never as adamant and uninformed as this. I realized that I needed to develop a communication strategy for my... [...]

Eric Siu says, “Understanding and using the difference between external and internal links strategically as part of your overall digital marketing plan is an important part of SEO. Each type of link has its place in a strategic SEO plan aimed at boosting your position on the search engine results page. External or internal links: What’s the difference? External links point from one domain to an entirely separate domain. They may be links from your website to another website to provide additional information for readers, or they may be links from your website to an affiliate program.... [...]

Jim Yu says, “Prior to the recent arrival of Penguin 4.0, it had been nearly two years since Penguin was last updated. It was expected to roll out at the end of 2015, which then became early 2016. By the summer, some in the industry had given up on Google ever releasing Penguin 4.0. But why did it take so long? I’d argue that criticism directed at Google is in many cases unjustified, as people often take too simplistic a view of the task at hand for the search engine. Detecting and dealing with paid links is a lot harder than many people think, and there are likely good reasons why... [...]

Marcus Miller says, “So it happened. Google finally released Penguin 4.0 — the last Penguin update of its kind, as it now processes in real time as a part of Google’s core ranking algorithm. In this post, I want to take a look at what Penguin is, how this update affects the SEO community as a whole and how the brave and the bold can continue to safely improve their organic visibility without fear of repercussions from punitive search engine algorithms. The announcement After a few weeks of turbulence in the SERPs, the announcement that many had predicted was finally made. The Penguin 4.0 announcement had... [...]

Thomas Caulton says, “We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign. However, I believe there is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors’ broken pages that have been linked to by external sources. Allow me to elaborate. Finding the perfect backlink often takes hours, and it can can take days, weeks, or even longer to acquire. That’s where the link building method I’ve outlined below comes in. I use it on a regular basis to build relevant backlinks from competitors’... [...]