Best place to start link building
-
I am new to SEO and want to start doing some link building using SEO moz to help. I am looking for pointers on where to start. Our business is www.hairbowcenter.com and we sell ribbon and hairbow supplies. We are lacking a lot of good links and I wanted to start focusing getting more. What tools should I use and where do I begin. I noticed our Pagerank is only 1 for our site and I want to get that up as well.
-
Are directories still a relevant way to start with link building after the latest google changes?
-
I usually don't use shortcuts when I research Mommy Blogs. The quality ones get a ton of requests for reviews and giveaways. You have to find a way to stick out from the bunch. I usually read a handful of posts and the "About Me" page before sending an email. That way I can personalize it, and possibly even find a good pitch (ie - if they do a product of the week, etc). Most good Mommy Blogs have a page devoted to PR or you can just use their contact form.
I haven't used them so I can't vouch personally, but http://momsparkmedia.com/ might be a good option for you. Looks like they act as a liaison between bloggers and companies.
I hope that helps!
-
Can you recommend some sites that you contract mommy bloggers from? It seems like from sites like this http://goo.gl/tJFSG, you cant easily find the contact info to ask for a review, and also seems inefficient to keep asking one by one.
Is there something like payperpost.com, specifically more for mommy bloggers, that has good quality blogs?
Thanks for your help
-
As mentioned above spreadsheets are the way forward or a simple word processor page. Adding all the information such as email contacts etc
Another good one is to check out whois information on sites and be like "a dog with a bone" be persistent day in day out and make sure you get in touch with the webmasters. Skype is a good tool to initiate conversations also.
-
I agree with the Twitter follow suggestion, but don't consider it even "a little grey hat."
My team and I have been able to get about one in five people we follow to follow us back. And we've seen more than a few convert into valued customers.
The best strategy is to be both selective and transparent. Don't go on a blitz where you follow hundreds of people from a few sources on a single day. Be very targeted. Follow people slowly and incrementally, after first providing something of value on your own Twitter feed....and jumping into discussions where you can provide expertise.
Too many people go on fishing expeditions in which they randomly follow people from targeted Twitter feeds. The targets may click over to your Twitter feed out of curiosity, but be turned off by one marketing message after another, but no real content. Or they may follow you -- and then have nothing more to do with you ever again.
-
As has been mentioned - links pointing to you need to be relevant and related. The place to start is look in depth at your competitors. Ascertain who they are - and see who links to them. If you can gain links from the same places that are relevant and regarded as authorities, and leave out their spammy links it will give you a good start.
Once you have found your competitors - read this post on using googles custom search engine for potential link mining here on SEOmoz, and delve into the world of search parameters to get your search for potential links on target.
When you are seeking links - avoid specifically going for just links to your home page - link diversity is key. If you are approaching an authority site about a specific product and you have a guide on how to use it or positive reviews on it, ask for a link to the deep page to ensure the relevancy is there.
-
You've received some good advice above and there's only one suggestion I would make. Although, I'm not a huge social networking fan I do think that Twitter can be a very useful tool. Although a little grey hat, the strategy is to follow users who you would like to follow you. A fair percentage will follow back. Then, mention them in your tweets, which they usually appreciate, followed by any other means of building a relationship. Once you have some sort of rapport opportunities can arise for back links.
-
I have a feeling you would do well with Mommy bloggers. Offer a giveaway to their readers or send them product for review. It's an excellent way to get exposure and links back.
Not sure where to start? I suggest finding those sites that rank well for the keywords you want and see who links to them. You may find a lot of great opportunities there.
-
Before you even start on trying to get links for the website, just ask yourself why others would link to you. You are an e-commerce website and it makes it even more difficult to get quality natural links - so being creative is important here - think of different strategies you can pursue so it makes your content more "linkable".
Could you provide any free tools or widgets that your readers might find useful? For a real estate guy, a free mortgage calculator might work well.
You could run a contest targeted towards women audience - have viral impact by social sharing - this usually ends up with several links from "mom blogs" and other portals.
As James suggested, go for Directories - those are easy links - but make sure they are thematic and relevant. There are very few general directories of value.
-
A good way to go about this is to create a spreadsheet, find niche related resources that you could possibly get a link on. Directories, Blogs, Related Websites, Guest Post Areas, etc. Organize them, than once you have a good list built, go after the links using common practices, calling, emails, social areas like Facebook and Twitter.
Once you've gone through the list you've created, target a new area in your link building campaign, and start the process over. Just keeps things a bit more organized
-
Dont worry about PageRank is is not a solid measurement of ranking anymore. In the first place you need to do up a plan of what you want to rank for as though you say you are looking for good links you are not clear as to what exact keywords you want to rank for. Look in the SEOMoz training under keyword research for some good tools on how to do this. Then I would as James suggest below start some organic and slow link building building over time.
Along with the tools here the simplest of tools is an excel spreadsheet where you build up a list of those keywords (start with the long tail ones mentioned on the page). Then go out an research what sites are speaking about this blogs, business sites. Build real relationships, work your social media strategy and over time you will get links - not lots of links but good links -
Your aim should be to be the authority in this area but in the first place work on above and even read the rest of this training page.
-
Hi,
Here are some ideas to get you started
1. Look for related directories online where you can submit your business.
2. Type in your related business keywords, then look at which competitors are ranking for these terms then go to OSE and research the links the competitors have built, you can pull a report.
3. Possibly start a blog and get fresh content related to the business on the blog each week, then syndicate the content via social media.
4. If you have social media channels for the business, start link building via them you can build links via Twitter, Stumble upon, Delicious and a host of other social website.
5. Think to yourself do you have any suppliers who you currently use, ask if they want to link to you or want to add a badge to their website which is for your business for example a partner of your website.
For further ideas here is a fantastic post:
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
-
A mass of spammy links pointing to our domain from dynu.net
Hi MOZ community! Need some help with some strange activity on the link profile of a website I manage... I have noticed since the 4th of August a mass of links pointing to one of our domains. It looks like some kind of attack from dynu.net. I am seeing 100s of different subdomains from this website in the Discovered and Lost area, with DA 1. They are linking to us from very low quality pages with no CSS, that includes just random text. Anybody seeing anything similar or from the same website? Our links report example: https://imgur.com/a/y7pAopJ Also, what is the correct process to deal with such instances? We have used Google's disavow in the past, but I have read that Google are quite proactive at recognizing spammy links, and webmasters don't really need to use that tool. Much appreciated! y7pAopJ
Moz Pro | | dqmedia0 -
What are Spammy Back Links
My site was hit by Penguin 2, where I lost 40% of traffic. People keep talking about spammy links but I've made none of those for my site. So how can I analyse my site and find out which links are hurting me. Can it be done with SEOMOZ software? What do I look for? I used Site Explorer and most of my links are to relevant websites. Is there a penalty for being in somebody else's blogroll even if I was added naturally and their site is a high ranking (PR4) and relevant site? All the links to my site coming from forums are no-follow. Could it be my own website? How do I check that? I have no clue what to look for. Thanks
Moz Pro | | uesat0 -
Open Site Explorer and link numbers
I know this question has been asked many times in this forum but I still can't work it out. Why does this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.bookpal.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0 Which is showing all links, external, to pages "on this sub domain" show 1,935 external links but this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.bookpal.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=follow&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0 which is exactly the same but this time shoing followed + 301 links, says "showing 1 - 50 external links) but won't show the total links (and I know the mouse-over on the question mark says it's won't show the total links, but I don't understand why it can't show the total links when it could show the total links when I requested to see "all links" instead of just "followed+301" links.) but it actually lists 700 links (14 pages, 50 results each page). I know the link list is limited to 25 links per domain but then it means you can NEVER know the total link count unless you download the full report. This makes using OSE to know numbers of links (internal, external, or otherwise) impossible. And if anyone uses the API, why the API (external+follow) returns 1,451 links? I'm sure it's an ongoing issue with people trying to get their head around all of this and I've never really been able to. Any insight would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | eatyourveggies0 -
Best Keyword Difficulty Tool?
Hi All, I'm a bit frustrated with the fact that I can only enter 5 words at a time into SEOmoz's keyword difficulty tool. Does anyone know of a better way (or tool) to analyze keyword difficulty for hundreds of keywords?
Moz Pro | | nicole.healthline0 -
Advanced Link Report Different Link # than Total Links??
Hi, I've downloaded a csv report for links in "advanced reports" section. At the very top in blue OSE lists overall metrics, i.e. Domain Auth, Page Auth, Linking Root Domains, and then it lists "Total Links" at 1,769. When I download the advanced report in csv I have 505 total links in Excel. Why is there a difference between Total Links and what I have downloaded? What makes up the Total Links? The report I created included, "inbound links/linking pages, Types of Links: any; Links that come from: Any Page, Any IP; Links that link to: any page on subdomain; links with properties: any; Thanks!
Moz Pro | | toby-020 -
What are followed vs non-followed links in Domain Analyis report?
I'm new to SEOMoz and wondering if some nice person can put this into plain English for me? 🙂 On the Competitive Domain Analysis report there are green follow / no-follow links and blue followed / non-followed linking root domains? what is the context of the green & blue circles? is there a better or worse visual representation that I should aim for - more dark green, more light green or about half & half. thanks in advance
Moz Pro | | seanuk0 -
Is canonical link enough?
Hi SEOmozers! I have a question. SEOmoz analysis report me some duplicate that I thought I had fix. I can give a concrete example. This page: http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/events/dec2011training-boston/moreinfo is reported as having 6 duplicated URL in the tool. When I click on 6, SEOMOZ tells me "Our crawl bots are getting their joints greased to fetch you even better data. Sorry for the delay!" And on the page itself, I placed a canonical link to follow recommandation. rel="canonical" href="http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/events/apr2012training-boston" /> As a result I am curious why I would have this reported as duplicate by SEOmoz. Is this a bug? Thanks for feedback!
Moz Pro | | nuxeo0 -
Link from Dr. Oz web site not being seen, what are we doing wrong?
Newbie so this may be SEO 101... Quick back story: My wife Lauri is a Dream Expert who has been on over 5,000 radio shows, TV shows like Good Morning America, the Today show, the View, in major magazines and newspapers, the list goes on and on, I'm not bragging actually the opposite. Lauri barely exists online and to top it off we don't seem to be getting any "link juice" from some big sites that have linked to us. Here is just one example of many: Our site: theDreamZone.com Here is a page on Dr Oz site that links to us, anchor text at top right "Click here": When you use On site Explorer this link isn't there, what are we doing wrong? Our plan is to build a new site (LauriTheDreamExpert.com) and get these links and many others pointing to us correctly so she can get the exposure she's earned. Lauri was also on the Dr Oz TV show : Watch it if you like. Thanks for any wisdom, Mike
Moz Pro | | Mike-Dream0