How to turn a good blog into link bait
-
Hello,
I don't really believe in spending a lot of time link building (and maybe that's a limitation of mine). I believe, at least for the small businesses I've been running, that producing targeted, thorough, very very helpful, useful, unique, authority based, knowledgable, transparent content is what most of the time should go into. I'm sure there are many exceptions in industry and company size.
We use a blog and feature it really big and solid on the home page.
So we're making a blog that has the qualities above (useful, unique ... transparent). How, while we're doing the writing, can we make the content also be good link bait? We need an awesome link profile. Also, what free easy afterward social or email outreach am I not including to maximize exposure (The only content marketing I do is posting blog posts right now on Facebook and Google+)? What would you do with the first $100 in this context? The first $300? (We're low budget always)
Thanks,
Bob
-
Incredibly useful information here.
-
Hi there
I took this from another Q+A thread that I answered. While it's about starting a blog, I do believe that it rings true for what you're attempting to do...
-
Create the blog on your site
-
Do some research
-
What information is missing in your industry?
-
What are users actively searching for?
-
Where are they currently participating in conversation?
-
What language do they use in search and those discussions?
-
How do they digest their content?
-
Here's a quick resource on content gap analysis from Edge Multimedia
-
Take advantage of great tools like Open Site Explorer and SEMRush to get a handle on your competition and what's working / not working for them
-
Build out content on the site based on your research
-
Mind your obvious onsite SEO fundamentals (titles / meta descriptions / schema / content length and language / etc.) (resource)
-
Lay your site architecture out in an easy to use / understand fashion (Information Architecture for SEO)
-
Repurpose content through video / images / guides / e-books / how-tos / etc
-
Take advantage of internal site search functionality
-
What are users searching for on your site?
-
Distribute that content through social platforms / industry blogs / email marketing
-
Participate in the discussions that are happening in your industry
-
Social
-
You could take advantage of features like Twitter's Advanced Search and start fielding questions
-
News sites
-
Industry forums
-
Q&As
-
You can also read these resources about headlines and CTR
-
A Scientific Guide to Writing Great Headlines on Twitter, Facebook, and Your Blog
Now, while I believe this is less science than it is just knowing more about your audience, there are some good points.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
-
Headlines are you first opportunity to catch someone's eye. There are some great headline testing tools out there, but they're not a whole lot of help unless you manage to attract enough audience to get a meaningful sample size. Might not work for you.
I'd use tools like Buzzsumo to find the most popular headlines for my subject area and then try to adopt similar techniques. I'd look for syndication and guest posting opportunities on publications that you know your audience visits. Great headlines and syndicated / guest posts will get you exposure. Quality content will earn you the links.
Oh, and Grammarly is another good tool to help improve your writing. I like that it's a browser extension that integrates seamlessly with common writing tools like Wordpress and MS Office.
-
This will come from awesome work.
There is your answer. It is not "what you do", instead, it is "how well you do it".
-
There will be lots of opinions on this one Bob (wait for EGOL!) but you could do a lot worse than have a read over here. You will find a wealth of information. This is another good one.
There is no secret recipe to writing exceptional articles - you just have to make sure you do you homework, research and fact-check everything and don't write about something that has been covered a thousand times before. Find new opinions and views - be controversial and don't feel you must agree with the status quo. If you have a different viewpoint on something, say this and explain why.
Grammar & spell check everything, don't just write a page full off waffle, don't skim over anything that needs a good explanation and write for the reader.
I find a nice way to check my writing is by using Hemmingway (Thanks EGOL) as it will pull you up on many errors.
We need an awesome link profile.
This will come from awesome work.
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I submit the same blog post on Linkedin as an article with permalink?
Hello All, I just want to know that is it the right way in SEO to submit the same blog post as an article on Linkedin or other social sites or article sites.
Branding | | DenorL0 -
Blog SEO strategy
Hi Moz community, we are looking for some advice on our blog/SEO strategy. I hope to find some people who faced similar challenges in the past. Wishlist currently has one blog (http://blog.enjoywishlist.com/), which has two main focus points. One main focus is to portray and encourage a lifestyle that is conducive with our product offering. The main driver behind the content we post is for SEO optimization for our B2C clients. The other focus for our blog is to target current and potential clients on the B2B side of things. That content is much more driven by a target audience and different topics. It is hard to address two audience in one blog and we are working with the idea of separating the blog into two different host domains. Along with the blogs we will also move the landing pages for B2C and B2B into different domains and link these as appropriate. The challenge we face is understanding if it would benefit us to host these two blogs on different domains. We are also wondering if it would help our hurt our SEO to take the content related to our corporate blog and move it to the new domain? Advice appreciated! Thanks Andreas
Branding | | AndreasD1 -
Renaming of Link within Site Links - Brand Issues
Hi, We welcome your thoughts on the current problem we are experiencing: When searching for our client's brand name, their previous sponsors name is shown within the Site Links to a very important page. We are keen to change this reference within the Site Link but keep the link itself. We have untaken the following without any change to the words used within this particular Site Link: 1) Removal of previous-sponsors name sitewide: Title tags Alt attribute Anchors Page names Image names 2) Removal of sponsors name from 200+ sister sites: Title tags Alt attribute Anchors Page names Image names 3) Modification of [previous-sponsor + client] within Wikipedia:
Branding | | PhilYarrow
There were 250+ mentions of the sponsor + client within Wikipedia. References have either been deleted or changed to past tense. (Google has been extremely slow at indexing these changes.) 4) Removal of off-site mentions:
After using Advanced Filters within OSE, we extracted all links that included the previous-sponsors name. We filtered these by DA and approached these sites and requested they update their links/on-site content to include the up-to-date name. This included large news organisations and reference sources. We also used Google operators (inurl, inanchor, intitle) to search for references mentions of [previous-sponsor + client]. We used Buzzstream to collate this data and contacted hundreds of sites sorted by DA. 5) We have twice requested demotion of the Site Link via GWT without success. Google clearly see's the Site Link as too important to remove it. The following is useful background information:
The [client + previous-sponsor] worked together for 5+ years. Our client is known by it's own brand, but it was also called in certain arenas as [client + previous-sponsor].
Fresh mentions of [client + previous-sponsor] are frequent. Examples of this are from collectors merchandise and videos that are posted frequently. The page being shown within the Site Links is essential. It cannot be moved. With a PA of mid-70's.
We have changed the Title of the page multiple times, without any change to the Site Link. Thanks
Phil0 -
Linking new domain to existing domain or....
We have a client's domain that has been live for 8 years. truthbook.com. With the new changes to Google, no matter what we do, we cannot get the words Urantia Book to connect with the website and lift it's search engine returns to the first page where it was for the past 4 years.. It is clear, that no matter what Google may say, the most important factor is having the actual words urantiabook in the domain is imperative. We know it was that way before Google changes (they were always on the first page) but now the client cannot get back on the front page. The mission and theme of the site is Jesus in The Urantia Book. So it is not a stretch to acquire urantiabookandjesus.com and forward it to truthbook.com The question is, "will they get any bang for the change? If they considered changing the actual main domain to urantiabookandjesus.com or .org and forward truthbook.com to it, will they be hurt by that strategy? " Thanks, Jim
Branding | | jimmyzig0 -
Backlink Badges - Good or Bad
One of my free tools for creating web pages automatically inserts a back-link to my home page as a footer, or 'badge' from the free web pages it creates. Hence there are tens of thousands of low quality sites out there linking back to my home page. While this was great ten years ago, Google looks on things differently these days. So the question is, will Google penalize me for this? Does the negative outweigh the positive - should I remove the insertion of back-link badges from the product? Thanks, Peter
Branding | | virtualmechanics2 -
Best way to structure a new company blog with multiple existing individual country sites?
Hi, we have a client who have multiple business websites .co.nz, .com.au, .co.uk, .com which all have unique content intending to rank in each country. These sites are on a CMS that has a blog function capability. Should we set up the blog on one of these country sites then link to other sites when appropriate? OR Is it best to set up a new blog on something like Wordpress (or what?) that takes all blog posts from all countries and then links out to the relevant sites when appropriate. So the new blog becomes the content hub and creates its own Google power to then pass when appropriate to the various country sites? Any suggestions welcome especially from people who are currently doing either of these methods, and have experienced the results both positive and negative of the different approaches. NB: there will be about 20 staff creating a blog post on a topic relevant to them per month each once blog is live.
Branding | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
Guest Posts/Blogs/Articles Link Building
Is it me or are the usual places you used to go for to find quality blogs to guest post to seem to be full of low quality spammy blogs. And doing a search brings up loads of poor quality sites/blogs too. I was thinking of creating a high quality content site for link bait. Any suggestions on "refreshing" a tired link strategy. Where do you find your guest blog/posts?
Branding | | JohnW-UK0 -
Links from paid submissions to FWA, awwwards etc.
I'm thinkink about submitting my company website and some of our clients websites to contest sites like FWA and Awwwards. They offer paid submissions and they claim that for 50€, more or less, my site will be manualy submited to 50 web galleries. What do you think?
Branding | | Jbla0