Mastering the Art of Link Building (Part 2) Ep. 600

howdy welcome to the unknown secrets of internet marketing my name is matt bertram hope you're all doing well out there i'm going to do the part two of the art of link building or mastering the art of link building i've gotten a number of requests to kind of finish that out really want to go deep with some of those things i actually have found a number of articles that i can share with you uh as it relates to link building but you know one of the things that i think i don't know i i don't believe i'm the only one out there but there's a lack of substance in a lot of articles that are being written that give you like the very top line kind of bullet points but they don't go into the details uh certainly i've seen that a lot with people um spending a lot of time with shorts right versus uh long form podcasts uh to really go into those concepts deep uh i know i'm not speaking to everyone out there if you're listening to this podcast um but i've had a lot of conversations with a number of people and a lot of people are kind of getting stuck in the short loops as well as skimming articles online uh so at the end of this i'm also going to recommend a book to you um that i've found extremely beneficial from a link building standpoint and really the theme of this podcast is going to be about how you need to go deep um when you're looking at link building now before i want to get in i wanted to share a few things uh first is i do have two new books out um no like trust uh podcasts uh a podcast marketing guide for small business owners um and so i talked to a lot of people that want to build a brand i know i have some other books out there related to this but i really do believe that a podcast is the

greatest kind of container to fit uh everything you're trying to do from storytelling brand building um social media marketing etc etc uh content creation podcast is a great way to do it and so i i love to when i learn something just kind of encapsulate it in a book that other people can use or in information other people can use because if not i believe it's waste so um you know go check this out is on amazon i think it's like a couple bucks i don't know but if you get a book please leave me a review uh so i'd really really appreciate that uh do have audio version as well and then my other book out there uh search do i really need seo the enterprise level playbook to grow your business with search engine optimization uh that's really kind of when i was learning seo it was just so much to comprehend uh there were so many different components and so while i don't go into everything um of how to do it all i mean that would be just a massive massive book i do really lay out um the foundation and i try to set the table for you of what you need to be looking for uh with seo and it is fairly recent so i talk about ai and some other things in there and again uh just appreciate your support please leave a review um not trying to make any money off the book uh just want to put good information out there so hopefully you find it helpful um all right second thing is uh i just got back from a innovation conference in denver awesome conference met some fantastic people reconnected with some other awesome people i mean i'm talking like forbes 30 under 30 um people that are uh starting uh well multi-million dollar billion dollar businesses uh from nothing so like growth hacking growing this is a lot in the cryptocurrency space i was actually with like a 22 year old 25 year old

something else and they um and some of these people i'm going to bring on the podcast uh do do marketing in that space um they were given uh allocation of this coin that um well made them all millionaires when i was with them it's pretty pretty cool stuff uh i know i talk about that it's just really exciting i believe that the future's moving towards tokenization and uh if you've been listening to my podcast uh i did say this a while ago is going to get crazy i think we're now um starting to get into that season but anyways um some of these people that i met uh we may even i'm going to bring some of them on the podcast but we had like some five hour discussions um some of these people are at the very forefront of culture out in la um they're shaping kind of the world as it relates to me it's kind of corporate social responsibility sustainability um but but some of these people are just world changing like if you understand uh the human experience and culture so i've learned a lot i've been educated a lot we've had some great conversations again i'm talking like five hour conversations with no rules in it and some of the things we talked about we actually felt that we wanted to share those and so uh we are discussing a format to have a group style podcast it's going to be outside of this podcast because i know people are here and are like trying to hit fast forward they just want the value of uh seo i get it um but if you are interested in that sort of thing stay tuned um and then uh let's let's go ahead and get into it i would just say hey uh if you do listen this podcast and you are getting value please um like it share it comment wherever you're listening to it uh i will leave a place to to leave reviews as well um it you know

we also love to connect with you so you know i do have office hours you can set up a free consultation um also uh doing a lot of great consulting a lot of consulting so if if you need help also have been doing coaching we've tried out a pilot program for the last six months i'm gonna get some testimonials there and that might be something to roll into if you're looking at uh growing your digital agency if you're looking at improving uh the seo you're offering for your clients i think we could really help out a lot and um you know i'll get those testimonials and let those people share uh how that's going so uh with no further ado that's just was on my head i will try to jump in here so i'm gonna pull over uh some of these articles and to kind of lay it out for you link building is the art of sending signals to google from a machine learning standpoint for it to understand what you're trying to say and when you talk to a lot of people that are deep into link building certainly there are services out there that will just give you a bunch of links and that's not what i'm talking about i'm talking about building thoughtful connections and building connective nodes to information to people to topics um and you're building roads and and highways a lot of uh maybe you've heard me talk about in the past uh different neighborhoods one of the big things that i want to say and it's important to know is the machine learning can understand um what's going on and can see stuff so if there's something that you're getting a link that's not in your kind of general universe it sends a big red flag so it's like imagine like a huge universe and then there's a link coming in from the other side of the universe it's like oh what is this right um this is unnatural um so there there is a strategy

when you're building a link building campaign um to to create that to craft it in a way that um really communicates in google language or search engine language what you're trying to say and what you're trying to do also you know a lot of times you see people building a bunch of well spammy links or even directory links if they're not specific to what you're saying they really water down the signals that you're trying to create and google came out recently and said hey don't say more than you want to say just say what you need to say in whatever concise uh like topic or or or container you want to put that in but say it concisely all these other signals um if you don't feel like they're necessary and you're doing it for search engines just don't do it that's from a content creation standpoint but also same thing with links like if you don't know what you're doing with interlinking or external linking or building kind of the web to network outside of what you're doing less is more because if you create signals that you don't know what you're sending you're just going to confuse it because what the search engines and the spiders are trying to give you is well the best possible search for the people looking for it so it's really understanding the art of crafting these things and some of the best link building strategies are strategies that will never get shared um and and it's what you're doing under the surface to build these nodes and to build these connections of information to position in a way to then redirect the seo juice where it goes and so you know these big like link building services say um don't in my opinion uh provide a ton of value i think it's like through brute force it kind of happens but uh in these neighborhoods like i was saying before if someone is doing something nefarious or are buying or selling links and you're even one i

believe it's for sure one it may be even more touches away from it so a website that you're connected to that's linking to you that's doing this it kind of uh creates toxicity to you right because you're in in that neighborhood and certainly you don't want direct links from that sort of thing to you um and so you want to stay away from that right you want to build genuine connections you want to put out things that people generally want to link to right um and so i have a couple articles here that will will go through some ideas and i'll provide like my two cents on right so this is a search engine journal i haven't been writing as much for them recently because i've been working on my own stuff um but uh seven creative ways to earn or build links to your site this is by jeff riddle he's a vip contributor i'm going to kind of breeze through this but he kind of sets the table produce unique research respond to a popular trend trending article certainly um google trends is a great way to capture that um there's a number of podcasts that do that as well as to kind of ride um where social attention is update or elaborate on links in relevant posts absolutely offer free tools create unique images or graphics certainly anything that unique um here's a tip if your site has a bunch of stock imagery yes or no do you think you're getting credit for those images well the person that created those images and posted them first on google are getting credit so um unique infographics unique images um those are those are things that you want to do and certainly ai uh in the form of graphics or videos i was living listening to a webmaster podcast by google and they didn't come out and say it say it but they said it um you know that is considered unique content and so i would encourage you to check it out we've

been doing a lot of that for uh some of our clients all right review the serps okay um building trusting relationships so he goes into more detail he's talking about producing unique research certainly if you have data that no one else has and you can put this together and uh study or um write a paper on it uh and put it out there um certainly it's unique content that's going to get indexed because google's not indexing stuff as much as they used to so you can't be guaranteed that if you're just putting out a mediocre blog that it's going to get indexed i would tell you a lot of people that are coming to us that some of the problem is uh even pages are getting undig indexed because they're just not original enough to be in the top 100 searches in google um and so we've been a huge fan of unique uh organic images or videos stock photography is useful to enhance the common complimentary compliment oh sorry compliment the website and blog post but unique creative images extend the content they accompany with much more authenticity and authority looking to incorporate original images and photos into your content wherever possible is practical in both b2c and b2b using authorized photos of actual people and products in action is more likely to result in human connection and engagement engagement which will increase shares and links all right so this is super basic right like you've heard this before um you know create infographics uh getting those indexed in google google images yeah uh respond to popular trending articles so okay so when you're looking at blogs when you're looking at what people are searching for i would look at the first page of google maybe as uh the public conversation the public forum kind of like twitter on social media i guess uh but more like in the search engines what people are talking about what is important and so there's something called diversity of query and so uh differencing opinions based on

the algorithm um what people are saying what's popular what people are searching for you know really interesting to look at the top search results and see if if there's something you can add to the conversation and you adding a unique opinion to that conversation you know even if you add it on social media channels sometimes it even gets indexed in google i'm seeing a lot of stuff uh get indexed uh in google like say from youtube uh from linkedin also they added a new update called like hidden gems which is showing a lot of reddit uh forums and that sort of thing to again provide that diversity uh a thought um update or elaborate on can be on post so going and re-optimizing existing content absolutely free tools has been a great way to uh get engagement in the past um look for opportunities to build links from directories industry publications that's big associations um ads links or directories partner affiliate sites local business sites that's important if you're geographically located not e-commerce nationally um comments on blog posts and certainly do not spam um we actually have part of our checklist internally just turn off comments especially if it's a small business it's typically just people trying to um get a default link um so you know unless it's like a really uh like bigger forum um you know and you're and you're really on there to add value i would encourage you not to to do it um blog posts art art updates video comments you know i think video comments um you know and also i'll give you this this is a little pro tip uh this is specifically to linkedin but uh there's different there's a different point system and i believe that this uh extends across all social media platforms um you know a like is worth okay on linkedin one point let's say and then a short comment or even an emoji okay even an emoji just put an emoji it's worth three points okay and then a long

thoughtful post this is worth five and then if you can get additional engagement from it you can you can rack up those points and also uh it's being looked at in a shorter time frame uh there's kind of this magic window of a quote-unquote audition period where uh the value of the engagement is higher right um but a lot of this comes down to building trusted relationships and trying to mirror what's happening in the real world online like if you know somebody well you connect with them on social media right you might comment on their stuff same thing with websites and websites should really be viewed as we move through digital transformation as more uh of a interactive platform versus just a display brochure of what you do again i've said this many times like 85 90 percent of the customer journey is happening online before they pick up the phone and call you so you want to provide more of that customer journey and answering those questions and and who you're speaking to in the personalization on the website which you can control and then certainly you can extend it to the i call it web 2.0 is but like social media other platforms um you know that sort of thing you can um write on on different and connect with different communities right like substack or medium linkedin stuff like that so it's a way to kind of tap into an existing community um but again that journal article while i did not read at all really basic things i think things that most of us know then uh so let me close oh i shouldn't close these because well i got to find them again to put them in the show notes but okay so i have another article here that's on linkedin pulse linkedin pulse super powerful uh check it out if you haven't um building a newsletter on linkedin uh will will really uh boost your reach we built some uh newsletters for clients that in three days have gotten

to like 60 000 followers um you know and so it's a one-time push out notify everybody you've started something i have one on decentralized marketing uh on linkedin because i i really do believe the future is in web 3 um but there might be something that uh you're passionate about that you want to talk about um i encourage you to do that based on on your connections it's a great way to uh well utilize uh linkedin from a email distribution standpoint as well as a blog posting standpoint and garner additional views uh visibility expertise traffic or authority sorry and traffic all in the linkedin platform super super easy to do all right this is a 23 link building ideas by omar malik i'm not sure if i'm saying his name right uh but you know again he just you know um listed a bunch of things so illicit and then he only provides like a pair not even a paragraph like a sentence about each thing but i think since we're talking about this we want to cover as much stuff as we can uh ask people if they know if you know for links now okay if the person is not in your industry and it's not related to what you say and it's just a random link again like i talked about before it creates random noise all right submit your sites to local listings again um there's kind of top tier listings he talks about google my business or google business profile yelp yellow pages there's a few others um there's top tier listings they're in industry specific listings there's geo specific listings but then there's just a bunch of random stuff and you want to look at the domain of you know use these different towards domain authority or like uh majestic you know trust flow citation for this sort of thing to see if these are even relevant maybe look to see if there's even any traffic coming to these if they're low quality links you're just spinning your wheels

they're a waste of time these high quality um citations are 10 times 100 times more powerful uh and you got to think about is it going to get indexed so if you're just building a bunch of citations for the sake of building citations and they're not even relevant um and no one's using the sites google's not going to look at it or the different search engines are not going to look at as valuable so something to think about uh these roundup posts he says uh contribute crowdsource posts so that's kind of um you know these are called hub pages okay this is like review sites or you get a bunch of experts to talk about something in particular um these are still effective um but they should be useful and that is one of the posts i'm going to get to here in a minute that um i think has tremendous value so if you do it right they're fantastic this would be just considered a roundup maybe of different ideas right or or maybe a listing post which has some value but again i'm going to keep moving up the chain of high quality value creation um all right so contribute to okay those give someone a testimonial testimonials i've seen people do this and even uh uh uh what's his name um sell like crazy or whatever his name is king kong he he i don't i have never met him um but uh he was trying to build a presence over here he left me a review and and the reason he needed a review is he connected to me sent the signal that hey i'm like this person i communicate with this person like be better if you like reached out to me or uh he he wrote something more specific it was kind of spammy but um i understood why he was doing it and he was building a bridge between me and him and um there's a benefit kind of both ways when you're doing outbound links there's kind

of that same thing but certainly if you leave a genuine testimonial and you connect with product or businesses um you're you're building that kind of ecosystem that community that neighborhood and and certainly um people are looking for positive or negative sentiment in those testimonials so so that's quite important too but yeah i think testimonials are underutilized way of connecting out with people so if there's people not directly in your industry but in like adjacent industries um that would be fantastic if you can get people in your industry to leave your review those are fantastic um times two i guess uh because um they're they're kind of your peers are looking to you and it creates a sense of uh authority in the space right guest posts been way overdone um getting them to link back to you but look like this if you're pitching it and you're adding real value to content and it's not uh like this kind of uh very thinly veiled kind of strategy i think that they're fantastic um i think that there's like just like bringing a guest on the podcast um and i'm going to bring some like social social agencies that are working with like designer brands at the cutting edge uh of culture right that guest post uh which we could turn into a guest post but a guest podcast is bringing really high value thing and they're not paying to come on it um it's just something i think would be valuable for the audience to hear they want to provide it and again we have a relationship and a connection and so that is something that google's looking for that's positive all right recovering your dead backlinks this is huge this is so underutilized because it's so boring but it's so important there's a lot of degradation i don't know if that's the right word but there's a lot of uh decay uh on the internet of websites going down links getting broken redirects not happening uh so broken links are are there there's a

lot of um well high quality ranking sites that are linking to broken links whether it be on the page out to other people etc etc etc um you know kind of replacing those links uh with other links is is great and helpful if you reach out to somebody and say hey this link is broken uh here is another article that does the same thing um you know that works probably i don't know 15 20 of the time i mean it's certainly uh and and if you get one really high quality link it's totally worth it uh think about companies that um go under right and and there's been let's say let's just use crypto for example there's a bunch of big companies that exchanges that went under uh they spent millions of dollars on pr right and so um people probably don't want to link to to that side anymore to be associated with maybe something negative that happened that's a great target to go through and harvest those links um and and redirect those um certainly uh just broken links in general there's different tools you can use to find those things that is a what is that that is a um positive uh positive offering to the community i don't know i'm not saying this right i'm trying to think of that something but it's it's a it's a positive thing to do to be someone that's helping to clean up like a positive service or a a community service to to go around and clean up those links and then you know how you're getting paid for it is in link equity you know and link juice and so so i i believe this is so underrated but but i think it's a a fantastic thing to be doing and it is something that we do and we do offer for clients um you know that have a brand so you kind of there's there's like a strategy and there's like different layers that you want to do but for a big

site to link out to you for example uh with broken link building or other you might not have to be at that level uh of them but you need to be at some level um where uh the there's some s some i don't even know what the word is notoriety associated with with your brand um unless again it's like local companies and you're working in a local ecosystem but it's kind of like you don't jump from the junior leagues to the you know the pros like immediately right there's other layers there's other kind of steps to build up to that okay launch a contest this is the best way i've ever seen to to get engagement on social media again all those shares likes that sort of thing are considered links create an infographic i love infographics people uh comprehend information through visuals i i just am a big fan of infographics publish lists just like this one um post product comparisons product comparisons that's been happening for a long time great uh quizzes and tests if you have a good audience and you can get engagement um certainly twitter is is great for that i think i think twitter x sorry um is is certainly being underutilized you might want to revisit that um as as a way to reach people i see a lot more engagement uh on that and and there's a lot of positive things happen there even long-form content that you can publish etc etc um printables so templates worksheets uh again value creation uh emailing people that you mentioned in your post to kind of engage them or tag them on linkedin absolutely find and turn uh mentions into links yes um brand mentions are important there's different tools out there you can also set up like free like google alerts on your company name yourself um whatever and and that's a great way to see what people are saying out there and as you grow um it becomes really important to build a brand across mediums and having

positive sentiment and people talking about you post on quora and other sites like that um okay it talks about broken link building again uh take part in interviews okay we're kind of stretching here um uh wikipedia pages be careful um there's a a lot that people can say about wikipedia um but yeah wikipedia is quite powerful there's other wikis out there as well uh add links to videos and youtube i would tell you uh optimizing your youtube is huge um you know videos youtube's second biggest search engine on the web um also random fact like duck duck goes top 10 uh so um super interesting uh you know that's that's something we're looking into more i i was surprised when when i read that um now uh so youtube optimizing for youtube really helps um google's kind of bringing all that together under universal search uh so you know again second biggest search engine most more people are watching videos than not so consider that publish high quality images okay 4k images make a difference for sure um and and we've been doing that too is going through and kind of replacing low quality images stock images as we can okay this is buying expired domains with backlinks and you know um you know if you're affiliate uh you're trying to rank really quickly um this is not more of a long-term strategy um this is not something i would totally recommend uh research competitors for backlinks and see what they do i think that's a great strategy but again it's got to make sense for your geographic location and and your industry all right moving on backlinko's got a big list here um how are we doing on time let me see we are at 30 minutes all right so i'm going to do about 10 more minutes of this um and i may skip through this and and get to kind of what i want to show you so he talks about well better business bureau um good recommendation if you're a local

business that's a high quality link also chamber of commerce absolutely so i agree with a lot of ways saying he's talking about crowdsourcing i'm going fast here uh charities and non-profits and you know uh kids organizations and all those links uh that are local to the community i think that there is some value there even if their websites aren't built correctly google kind of gives them grace in a sense so i wouldn't um check all the box as you would in in other in other kind of areas but certainly getting involved with non-profits is a fantastic way to go broken link building guest posting job posting so again job posting there's kind of some unique strategies in there but also google knows what's for jobs and what's not so um again you got to think about your broader strategies so let's read this if you have any job or internships you can get a fast easy edu links for example if you work um in anthropology and you're looking for an intern here's an easy link if you run an agency compile as many of these opportunities as you can in a spreadsheet uh categorize them by category travel hospitality etc uh they will come in handy whenever you need uh need to land a client in that niche right so um diversity of links is important that's definitely an advanced strategy and something to consider um scholarship uh strategies i i think we'll talk about that in the next one uh link out yeah i think linking out uh links from shopping mall websites if you're located in a shopping mall okay see that's kind of different right um i'm gonna keep going fast here local listings mentions uh niche directories and i'll slow down on anyone that i think good uh offline marketing i think offline marketing and even radio and stuff like that where you bring in people that you don't know where they're coming from has this kind of underlying what is it called dark uh dark social i forget what

the buzz term was a while ago but essentially this is just what is happening but you're not seeing happening online i i mean i i think offline to online online to offline the customer journey is so so unique when you're talking multi-channel touches um this is really like grassroots right um and and i've seen this like putting a sticker of it says your url on your car i would even say add a qr code to that um it creates band awareness traffic etc uh retailer pages paid directories you know and and there are some some valuable paid directories they're recommending like joe ant and w-o-t-w might want to check that out and bbb of course is kind of like a a real staple i think there's additional value there i am on the marketing committee for the houston chapter so um i certainly believe in that uh printable resources faq sites profile links this is another thing building a bunch of well uh profile links on platforms that you're going to actually use if if you want to build a syndication like iftt network and push this stuff out that works too but you don't just having a profile link is not very valuable unless you're going to actually use that platform right um and uh what does it say if you do build links to profiles make sure you focus on niche specific profiles that way your links don't look spammy right so again you're creating more noise if if you're just randomly building a profile and everything you build profile on you kind of dilute what you're trying to say um faq sites reciprocal linking uh let's see what he says here yep i included reciprocal even though i don't recommend it this list wouldn't be complete without it that said if you're going to exchange links with the website be picky on who you exchange links with make sure they're relevant trustworthy site um uh the most relevant trustworthy website you've ever seen your wife yeah so i mean these are people

you know like you can link to people you know that's not bad um it really isn't um i have seen algorithms though like if you're leaving reciprocal reviews and stuff like that if you leave uh two reciprocal reviews uh sometimes well they'll disappear so um you know you want to be thoughtful about uh how you do this but i believe it is okay to do reclining 404 is a big deal um you don't want errors uh at all um scoop it i i don't use scoop it i probably should um i learned something too uh from going through these lists social coupons we don't do that but i have seen uh value there uh sponsor venues that's good um text interviews so converting a video interview to text uh video submissions good um there are sites that you can syndicate out those videos like there's also stuff like slideshare that used to be part of linkedin i'm not sure if they broke away or not but um that you know that's a great way to get information out there get it indexed um and if it's not indexed it's not pushing any link juice work with niche specific link builders write testimonials there you go alumni spotlight ask customers association organizations badges oh my gosh this list is long um blogger reviews best tools i'm going to link to this this is uh backlinko's link building strategies i mean this is very comprehensive case studies charts graphs i mean he goes on right um anything you can think of so there's you know some of these kind of master lists of everything you think of debunked myths um but it's all about trying to help you think about what is valuable to something else and and what you're trying to do is put something out there that people will link to or link to something that's valuable or to to you know be part of the conversation of something that's valuable right like that's kind of what this is and he goes into all these

like details you know finding influencers on bus sumo you know so finding influencers but you got to build a relationship finding people to use your images forum posting local newspapers podcasts i mean glossary terms haro haro is awesome i encourage haro uh hire industry veterans host people's pot or events okay linkable maps discounts press releases press releases are are great uh the only value is when people share them okay so just pushing it out there you got to have something valuable that people are gonna repost and then that's where the where the value comes in product comparisons see so some of the similar things he goes a lot of these you know he's got start a petition you know so um creating stories um web tools widgets twitter followers co-branded content co-branded content that is really something you should think about um that's a great way to team up and cross pollinate audiences uh webinars mobile apps um i mean this just goes on and on all right so what i really want to get into let's see how much time i really have here not much maybe i'll do a part three who knows um but uh i i do i do want to get into this this this is by um what do they offer here this is a great little company uh seo brain it trick uh services well they're they're a digital agency good job um uh so i am gonna have to actually do this in a part three because there's just so much good stuff in there um but and i'll do it back to back here so i'm gonna have this other one and then i'll release it the following week um but for all you that stuck around through all that this book uh which i'll put the link it's an entrepreneurial link ultimate guide to link building by entrepreneur like entrepreneur puts out these books i really like the books they put out they get some of the top experts um this says it's by eric

ward but i think that there's uh a lot of other people that contribute to this uh garrett french too it's called the ultimate guide to link building and how to build backlinks authorities credibility for your website and increase click traffic and search rankings this book i let someone borrow it and i need to buy it again because well you let people borrow things and um well they disappear um but i i'm gonna buy this book look i i see a used version for six bucks so i i think it's worth significantly more than that um one of the best books i've ever read on link building i'll put a link to it in the show notes i encourage you to go check this out uh and then uh next episode i'm gonna go into like a really well done roundup that goes into a ton of details on how to do link building i think um y'all really appreciate it and again this is by another digital agency but certainly uh i don't discriminate against anybody doing super high quality work i also uh believe in collaboration um i think that uh there's a ton of business out there um there's uh a lot of ways that you can work together and help people and iron sharpens iron iron sharpens iron so i think that's fantastic so um uh i'm gonna go into that here next uh until the next time uh until the next time my name is bat bertram bye bye for now