Articles Tagged with Link Building

5 Ways That Bloggers Can Get Links Back To Their Blogs

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This post is a repurposed HARO request – to find out more about this process, check out my post on State Of Digital all about it.

Linking diagramAs bloggers, we often get very fixated and carried away with our blogs: making sure that the content that we produce, the blog’s design, etc. are all absolutely perfect. SEO often enters the mix as well (in a do-it-yourself capacity), but it’s not simply a case of adding the WordPress SEO plugin – which is, admittedly, great – to your blog and thinking that that’s all you need to do on the SEO front…

On the contrary… On the link building (a.k.a. off-site SEO) side of things, the possibilities are endless and the fun never ends. It’s not a quantity game, but the more high quality, relevant and natural links that you get pointing to your website (or your blog, as is the case here), the better that it’ll perform from an SEO standpoint, resulting in a likely increase in visibility from organic search – i.e. when people are Googling content relevant to your blog, they might stand more of a chance of finding it, resulting in more traffic to it. So while you can tinker and tweak your site’s internal workings to improve its on-site SEO, you can also improve its off-site SEO by acquiring inbound links.

But how do you go about getting links? Where do you start?

As an SEO who’s also a keen blogger, here are a few ways of getting links back to your blog that have worked for me:

1) Guest blogging

StOD guest posting bio screenshot
Although this tactic has lost some of its impact due to people spamming it too much (although it’s not all bad – you can read my views here), there might still be some good opportunities to guest blog on other bloggers’ websites in your niche, so it’s worth looking into. In addition to the link back to your blog, the hosting blogger is likely to promote it via their social media profiles, too.

It’s worked for me. Beyond recently becoming a regular contributor on State Of Digital, I have also written posts for Moz, SEMrush and other industry blogs. In addition to getting some good industry exposure, getting links from such high profile websites to my blog has helped with its SEO.

2) Attending blogger meet-ups

Going to local blogger meet-ups simply to get to know other local bloggers and to offer advice can be a good way to get links. I’ve seen people get links because someone’s published a write-up of the event and they’ve included links to all the bloggers that they met there. I’ve even been added to a few bloggers’ blogrolls simply due to taking the time to get to know them.

Cardiff Blogs used to be the big player a few years back, but they run less events now than they used to. Despite this, there are a few blogging-related events that seem to crop up every now and again in the South Wales area – so it’s worth keeping an eye out.

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CR 25 Revisited – My SEMrush Webinar

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In late May I was approached by the team at SEMrush about hosting a webinar, going into more detail about the CR 25 campaign that I ran in January. I’d already given a talk about it at BrightonSEO, but with only 20 minutes available, I left out a lot of useful information surrounding the ‘content blitz’ campaign, where we published 25 blog posts in one month (pretty much one each day during the month). I had toyed with the idea of creating a YouMoz post (and had in fact started to draft one), but when SEMrush approached me about the webinar, I thought that it would be a better way to get across all the info.

The webinar took place in early June. In addition to relying on PowerPoint slides, I jumped out of the slides, jumped into my browser (all while the audience were still watching) and quickly ran through all 25 posts as live examples. I thought that this was a good way to demonstrate the many different types of content – especially those with an interactive or particularly visual element to them (such as the custom Google Map, the 25-year timeline, the multiple-choice quiz and one post that featured an embedded tweet containing an autoplaying Vine video).

The video of the webinar is below, with a transcript below that.

Video Transcript (including slide stills)

Slide1-560
Hi, thank you very much for the introduction. I’m Steve Morgan, @steviephil on Twitter, and today I’ll be talking you through a big campaign I ran back in January earlier this year. I actually talked about this campaign at BrightonSEO in April, but I was only given about 20 minutes to talk on-stage and I was only able to talk about a couple of examples of content we did – we had 25 blog posts in one month – and just talk about how much it all cost, so it’s great to have the opportunity… a big thank you to SEMrush for having me. And it’s great to be able to talk about the campaign in more detail and run through more examples than I did when I presented at the conference.

Slide2-560
The webinar is split into three sections. I’m going to jump out of the slides a third of the way through and show you real examples of content, because I thought: “why bother showing you slides of examples when I can actually show you the examples on Firefox?” But before that, I’ll talk you through a bit of an introduction to the campaign and how we prepared for it. And then after I’ve shown you examples, I’ll give you some insights into what performed well, what didn’t, what worked well on certain social media networks, and talk you through how much everything cost, which – even though we had 25 posts created and we tried to avoid just having bog-standard, 400-word advice articles – we did lots of varying types of content and we tried to have interactive content as well. We managed to keep the budget very low by sourcing guest blog posts, by using free or cheap WordPress plugins – things like that really. I’ll tell you more as we go along.

Slide3-560
First, some background for Computer Recruiter.

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PRs Make Damn Good Link Builders – My Social Shorts Cymru Talk

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Newspaper and laptop imageYesterday evening I spoke at Social Shorts Cymru, an event run by CIPR Wales (the Chartered Institute of Public Relations) that was held at Golley Slater’s Cardiff office. You can see CIPR Wales’ past and future events here.

The full talk title was: PRs make damn good link builders – Integrating SEO into PR campaigns. I explained that PRs have the ability to create campaigns that boost their clients’ SEO efforts as well as helping them to get brand mentions in the press and across the Web. Creating certain types of campaigns may increase the chances of getting links, but given the press’ reluctance to link out, there are certain ways that you go about it.

Here are the slides, which I’ve uploaded onto Speaker Deck instead of SlideShare, as the latter destroyed the formatting of the slide deck’s text for some reason. (Please note: As you can’t click on the links in the below slide deck, here’s a link to the deck as a PDF, where the hyperlinks – such as the list of ‘Handy tools’ near the end – will work.)

I have a few more speaking and webinar gigs in the pipeline, which I’m looking forward to – you can see some confirmed talks on my Speaking page. If you’d like me to speak at your event then please get in touch!

[Newspaper & laptop image credit: Gregor Fischer]

Tweet To Win! 3 Lessons From Running My First Twitter Competition

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I loved running CR 25 back in January. Beyond SEO, it gave me the chance to properly flex my content marketing muscles. From guest blog posts to crowdsourced content; from Google Calendar embeds to Google Map embeds; from interactive timelines to infographics; we did a little bit of everything.

We even did a bloody quiz.

We finished off CR 25 with an ‘IT Acronym Quiz’ – a 10-question multiple-choice quiz created using SlickQuiz.

CR 25 quiz screenshot
We decided to make the most of the opportunity and also gave away three £25 iTunes vouchers if people posted their results on Twitter.

It was my first attempt at a competition. It went well. Not quite how I’d hoped (as I’ll explain below) but we had a good number of entries and a good, positive response overall.

Here are the three lessons that I learnt.

1) Make sure that your competition’s terms are air-tight

As I said above, I’d never run a competition before – but I knew that you had to have some good set of terms & conditions behind it. I’m sure there are some decent templates out there, but I decided to draw inspiration from real-life examples. I can’t remember all of them, but I do remember that one of them was an iPad giveaway on The Guardian‘s website.

CR 25's competition terms (full screenshot)
(Click to enlarge)

It contained the usual suspects: participants must be UK residents over 18-years-old; it specified the closing date; in order to be eligible, they had to tweet a few particulars, including a link to the quiz and the hashtag; etc. etc. It had a total of 19 clauses.

I even thought that I was being extra-clever: I put in one clause that said that their tweet had to be live by the end of the closing date – just in case they deleted it a couple of days after tweeting it.

…And yet I missed out one (or maybe two) that was hugely important and should’ve been obvious.

A few days into the competition, a friend of mine entered. He asked: “how many times can I enter?”

…

Aww crap.

We didn’t have a clause that said ‘one entry per Twitter user.’ We also didn’t have a clause that said that a person could only enter once, full-stop. In other words, if someone managed more than one Twitter account, technically they could’ve entered more than once – even if we had that previous clause. It wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if we only had one prize to give away (aside from the fact that they would’ve increased their chances of winning that one prize), but we had three prizes – meaning that one person could’ve won two or all three prizes, and we couldn’t really do anything about it as our terms didn’t cover it. Whoops.

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The Golden Rule for Leveraging SEO from your PR Activities

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Over the past few years, SEO and PR have become more and more entwined. Links from good, high quality websites are important for SEO, and PR can really help to get those links, especially in the form of press mentions. I often say to clients that they should treat the likes of the BBC and the Guardian as the ‘holy grail’ of link building – getting links from sites like those can be like SEO gold-dust.

While SEOs have become more PR-savvy, we haven’t necessarily seen the same thing with PRs becoming more SEO-savvy. When I worked for Confused.com way back in 2010, I worked with some great colleagues in the PR team who truly ‘got’ SEO (shout-out to @KellysDavies and @PRVix!), and I was excited to see how other PR folk would progress in a similar way over the years – but to be honest, I’ve personally not seen as much movement as I’d hoped or expected… Econsultancy have written a few articles about the phenomenon over the years, who – even as recently as a year ago – are still seeing the same thing.

So if I were to give one bit of crucial advice to PRs who want to help their clients’ SEO with their PR efforts, it is this: when coming up with a campaign, try to create something that people (and the press) have no choice but to link to.

PR image
Now I know what you’re thinking… “But that’s obvious!”

…Not necessarily though. I’ve seen some PR campaigns that do not seem to keep this in consideration, as I will explain in more detail (while providing an example to the contrary) below…

The notoriousness of the press

The problem with press websites is that some of the major press websites are notorious for avoiding linking out if they can help it. I worked at Confused.com – whose name is a URL itself, for goodness sake – and they still wouldn’t get linked. Here are some recent examples. And while some speculate that brand name ‘citations’ (i.e. non-hyperlinking mentions) may still hold some SEO weight, it can’t be that much – and even so, for businesses that have a commonly-used name (e.g. “Horizon Solutions”), it may be difficult for Google to ascertain whether the citation refers to the Horizon Solutions in the UK, the Horizon Solutions in the US, or the Horizon Solutions in Canada, for example…

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