Hey guys, You may or may not know me, but my name is Nathan Gotch. I write about all types of SEO strategies over on Gotch SEO. But who cares about me... this post is all about the links I've been using to achieve first page rankings across local and national niches for over three years. This isn't guru theory or BS that doesn't actually work. I'm giving you guys this advice because I see so many people struggling and saying that ranking in Google is "hard". It's not. As long as you follow some basic rules. 8 Types of Backlinks You Need to Be Using in 2015 The key to link building in 2015 is change your mindset from "link, link, link" to "TRUST, TRUST, TRUST". Everything I'm going to show you is to build trust and authority for your brand while flying under the radar, and using the most powerful links that will actually drive results up in the SERPS. 1. Business Citations If you aren't building citations for your business, then you're missing out on a huge opportunity to send a ton of trust to your site. It doesn't matter whether you're building an affiliate site, have a local business, or even working in a national industry. Citations are the ultimate foundational link building technique. The most important elements of strong business listings are accuracy, detailed information, and indexation. Accuracy If you're trying to rank in the local pack, it's critical that your business information is ACCURATE. Be a sociopath when it comes to keeping your business information accurate. If you're not in a local industry, then the same rule applies. More trust is given to BRANDS with accurate information. Detailed Information Don't just toss up your address and link back to your site. Take time to build these citations. The more information you provide about your business the better. Link out to your social profiles, and when possible, share your best content. Don't forget... the business listing is ABOUT your business. Share as much information as humanly possible without spamming. Just make sure you delicately place some of your keywords in the description to get the maximum power out of co-occurrence since 99% of business listings will have naked links. Indexation Creating awesome listings is great, but they're useless if they aren't indexed. The best way to get them indexed is to increase the level of "activity" on the listing by taking the steps I listed above. IF this isn't enough to get them indexed, then you should consider building some light tier two links. I create a pretty helpful article on link indexation here. If you don't want to build these citations manually, then you should use BrightLocal since it's affordable or Yext if you can afford it. 2. Social Profiles Are you still seriously not using social? I certainly hope you're not still on this "social doesn't work for SEO" train because you're going to be left in the dust. Social matters. Plain and simple. I've mentioned this many times in my writing on Gotch SEO, but social signals alone will generally not be enough to rank in competitive industries. HOWEVER, social signals do act as a verifier of your links. Let me explain. Do you think it's easier to get a Facebook like or a backlink on a new article? The answer is obvious, but getting a social share is WAY easier than getting a real backlink. So, why would you think it's okay to get 1,000 backlinks to your site without having a single social share? Don't forget what a link actually is. It's a VOTE. So, you're telling me in 2015 that you were able to get 1,000 of the most difficult votes for your website without having a single social share? Sorry for the angry rant, but I want you to see how ridiculous this is. The point is, social matters. So, the easiest way to start sending social "trust" to your site is to secure all social profiles under your brand name, use accurate information, and increase the activity levels. The process is similar to the business citations, except you can obviously be much more active on the social platforms. Since I don't want to waste my time creating social profiles, I use Lock My Brand. If their service is too expensive, then get on Elance to find a freelancer to do it. 3. Relevant "NoFollow" Blog Comments Yes, that's right. "NOFOLLOW" blog comments. These blog comments are a critical component to any link profile because they show that you're a legitimate part of industry's community. Secondly, if you actually take the time to write intelligent comments, you will slowly establish yourself as an authority in the industry and also in the eyes of Google. A couple important points to keep in mind: always comment on relevant authoritative websites, take the time to write valuable comments, make sure your grammar and spelling is accurate, and ALWAYS use your actual name in the blog comment. Use these search strings: Keyword + site:wordpress.com Keyword + site:blogspot.com Keyword + site:typepad.com Keyword + site:edublogs.org Keyword + site:livejournal.com Keyword + intext:”powered by wordpress” Keyword + intext:”powered by typepad” 4. Help a Reporter Out (HARO) You may or may not know, but HARO is a free service you can sign up for and you'll get emails everyday with sources looking for contributions. All you have to do is respond to whatever source is most relevant to you through email and wait for a response. The key to actually getting published is to provide an amazing contribution. Spend a lot time developing the response and you will get published. If you get published, you will get a link back to your site. No, it won't be an exact match anchor or anything keyword-rich, but it doesn't matter. It's the authority of the link that's going to increase the power of your site overall. 5. Modern Day Link Wheel Let me introduce you to the modern day link wheel. Essentially all you'll be doing is creating a piece of super valuable content, publishing it on an authority site, and then leveraging it in future pieces of content. The key is to publish as yourself or brand because the purpose of the "modern day link wheel" is expand your authority within your industry across multiple platforms. The formula is simple, the more value you provide on different platforms, the stronger your authority will become. This will make ranking your actual site a breeze. Some free-signup platforms to build your authority include Medium, Newsvine, LiveJournal, and 500px. Don't forget, you can build your authority through other forms of media such as videos, infographics, podcasts, and even PDFs / Powerpoint slideshows. The more the merrier. 6. Guest Posts Don't worry, guest posts still work despite Matt Cutt's propaganda. You just need to be smart. I'm not going to get deep into this, but just produce super valuable guest posts on relevant authority websites and avoid using excessive keyword-rich anchor text 7. Highly Relevant Private Blog Network Poorly developed and managed PBNs took a hit in 2014, but well-developed PBNs are still alive and kicking. In fact, out of the hundreds of PBNs in my network, we only had a couple deindexed during the big raid. Since then, we've refined our strategies and haven't had a single domain deindexed. Once again, I'm not going to get too deep on this because it's a topic within itself, but I'll give you some important points to keep in mind: Use Majestic SEO for expired domain research: TrustFlow is an incredibly accurate metric for determining the quality of a domain. Yes, it can manipulated like most other metrics, but it's super accurate. BUT it's not necessarily the TrustFlow metric that I love about Majestic, it's the "Topical Relevancy" metric they provide. I've tested this metric across thousands of expired domains and it's right probably 99% of the time. The point is, you should make a diligent effort to win expired domains that are relevant to your money site. Retheming isn't a enough to keep your PBNs from getting deindexed because Google can still see that the link profile of the expired domain is irrelevant. Consider linking to tier one properties (not your money site): this is self-explanatory and it's purely risk mitigation. It's much safer to link to a tier one property that already has authority than to your money site. If you need more help with PBN development, I created a free ebook right here (no opt-in required). 8. Link Fortification (Tier Two) Increasing the authority of your tier one properties is still very important, but it has definitely changed. The only tier two links that seem to be working at this point are contextual links from authoritative sources (PBNs). Keep super spammy links on tier three. As time goes on, the need for quality links across all tiers will continue to increase. So you might as well make the change now. Anchor Text I'm not going to get deep into anchor text, but here are the basic percentages you should follow if you want to keep your site from getting penalized: 50% branded anchors 25% naked links 20% generic anchors 1-5% LSI, partial match anchors Less than 1% exact match anchor text That's it guys. In all honesty, link building in 2015 is a matter of going back to the basics. Work on your brand first, build the links that actually work, and always think about risk mitigation. Hope this helped and thanks for reading. - Gotch
Most of the people overlooked the influence of social sites and I'm not surprised because their concern is only backlinks. Google will consider this as as a vote or trust for your site because your targeted audience appreciated your interesting content.
These are a bit gimmicky looking for a quick fix. Yes you need to promote, but if your content isn't good then nobody will be interested anyway. Better to aim first for the best possible webpage in the world on your particular subject and worry about promotion afterwards.
If "gimmicky" is using what works, then I guess it is. This wasn't a post about content because that's a topic within itself and it's a given that content needs to be high-quality. Even the best content "practitioners" like Brian Dean and Neil Patel will say that content alone isn't enough. You have to market it. If it's keyword-targeted content, building these types of links will work. Anyway, thanks for the comment. - Gotch