When it comes to ranking and natural links, leaders aren’t spawned overnight and they can’t just buy their spot. Those long-term top ranking sites get there by working smart. That’s the right price when it comes to achieving that goal. We’re here to talk to you about manual link building and where Google might draw the line between natural and unnatural and how feasible is this link building strategy in 2014.

Below we are going to list the top manual link building strategies that will work in 2017 and should work in the future as well. The truth is that the SEO landscape has changed a lot in the past years. The ranking factors have changed along with the type of links; content marketing is becoming increasingly important, quality link building is a must and earned links are on the wave now.
With no further introduction, I invite you to take a look at the best quality link building techniques that should be a part of your digital marketing and should be of interest for any link builder interested in his website’s ranking and traffic.

Why Is Manual Link Building Important

By now you might be asking yourself what exactly is link building, how to do manual link building or you are already looking for link building tutorials; or maybe you already know what all of these mean and you are just looking for some automated link building services. And you wouldn’t be the only one. Creating links nowadays is harder than ever. Yet, is not impossible. Google keeps on flipping the coin and link building techniques that look Google approved today might be spammy strategies tomorrow. And yet, links are still important. They are still the main driving force that can take your search traffic and ranks up to the sky or back to the 99 position.

Google has its share of “blame” on this matter but business owners, webmasters or SEO pros need to be aware of their position as well. Take a look at the screenshot below. How many results are made on “build links” and how many are made on “buy links”? I have to admit that I thought things

would be the other way around.

The truth is that links are among the most important ranking signals. Link building and SEO go hand in hand and for any successful digital marketing campaign, natural link building is a must. Forget paid links, forget selling links, link request spam, negative SEO or any other black hat manual effort. We are now on the new edge of search engine optimization.

Manual Link Building Strategies That Should Always Work

For a long time, any kind of manual link building was a blooming link building strategy. When Google started penalizing sites for unnatural link profiles it was clear that manual link building, as it was known, is not going to work anymore.We might call it the fall of low quality links era and the rise of quality link acquisition.

Even so there will always be manual link building techniques that do not try to directly influence the rankings of a search engine and Google may always work in your favor. That is only if you respect their guidelines.

1. Relevant Blog Comments

Comments still harness a lot of power and value as a way of gaining links, as long as you place them on sites which have high authority. Your blog comment has to be pertinent and relevant to the content on that certain blog. If you’re just going on a site that doesn’t curate it’s comment section and has lots of links pointing to lots of random sites it is just not going to work . Low quality links from sites with low domain authority is not something that you want.

Google won’t have any issues with your link if the comment is done manually, has proper grammar and spelling and it’s relevant to the content of the page. Your aim is to provide value to the reader of that blog.

Google’s concept of link schemes includes forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature. No matter what you do keep in mind that natural links and quality content are a must not an option

2. Authority Guest Blogging

Another form of manual link building that will always to work if done properly is guest blogging. It’s been a hot topic for a while now given the fact that it transformed over time into a spammy strategy of creating links.  Matt Cutts, former head of the web-spam department at Google, gave a public statement disapproving guest blogging abuse, and said that this tactic will be a violation against the guidelines and will be punished.

We are now talking about authoritative guest blogging, quality content creation as part of a solid content marketing strategy and not just short paragraphs of text which have no other intent than influencing search engines ranking page. There might be many manual link building services out there who would suggest to create content and post it anywhere you can, with the sole purpose of getting links. When you relate to guest blogging in these terms, your strategy might not be very different than the black hat ones based on links exchanges or link buying. If you focus on the quality of the content, if you write having the reader in mind, if you count comments and social shares to measure the content’s success and not just links, then you can use guest blogging as a safe manual link building technique to attract links.

After lots of talks and confusion, people became afraid of using guest posting as a way of developing links.

Guest Blogging will always be a successful strategy if applied smartly. Use guest blogging as a mean of increasing your awareness in your niche. Obviously being relevant to the site’s topic and readers is a must. There is no such thing of 100% proof guide on how to do guest posting as there is no such thing of a guide for how to do link building. But if you keep in mind relevancy and you create content and links as if search engines wouldn’t exist, your digital marketing strategy should be on the right track.

Links are becoming a by-product of any growth hacking strategy that you might use in order to increase the awareness of your product!

3. Worthwhile Press Releases

Press releases can be both good and bad link building strategy for your search engine ranking.

It’s OK to create press releases only with the purpose of announcing something important or newsworthy about your brand.

If you abuse this strategy by including commercial anchor text and do-follow links it will finally be condemned by Google, and you’ll get penalized.

This strategy can be a great example of manual link building strategy that still works in 2017. Only if used wisely, of course. The world’s largest search engine called links in press releases “unnatural” and is mandating nofollowing them.  Just like in any other case, this can be a link building strategy that can cause you troubles only if you abuse it.

As Joe Laratro, SEO expert and PubCon lead moderator said , “in 2006 online press releases were amazing for SEO. Online press releases have had very little value in terms of links and content over the past few years – I would say it had been steadily declining. However, I still thought it was a good part of a large organic link building strategy until the new guideline changes.” 

We need to keep in mind that press releases are not meant to be an SEO tactic or a link building strategy.

The purpose of press releases is to help writers, journalists, influencers, and readers to discover something new. Here is where press releases add value, in driving messages into audiences. And the clicks, visibility, reads, social shares or links will naturally follow.

Link Earning as an Organic Link Building Strategy

Organic link building seems to be the current path you should be interested on walking, if you want to have a long-term rankings site.

It’s important to keep in mind that this shift in strategy comes from a change in mentality – you don’t have to work to place those links where you want them to appear, they have to appear organically as a result of your actions. Your actions have to be as natural as possible when trying to develop links. Actually, you need to make an effort and create something to earn those links and not “build” them. We’ve written an interesting piece of content on link earning where we’ve put together a list of 21 creatively techniques of earning links.

Simply put it is called Link Earning.

Are there link building tools out there? You bet! Are there link building services ready to automate the process for you? Yes, they are. Yet, your aim is to know how to do link building and not get penalized. There are fewer and fewer ways of manually creating links that are solid and won’t be susceptible to being marked as unnatural in the near future:

• One way would be to offer your knowledge to the community by creating “how to’s” and guides where you’ll share insights and shed some light on some topics that are relevant to the your target audience.
• Engaging in discussions and answering people’s questions. On forum platforms you can easily treat users as patients and attend to their problems. If your answers will be remotely helpful, it will most certainly generate some kind of positive reaction from the online crowd.
• Focus on building a community – this is a long time commitment that creates a lot of rewards not only from a SEO point of view. It’s a lot of work but it has the power to attract a lot of links from all kinds of users in the form of comments, forum topics and blog posts.

300: Rise of an Organic Link Empire

The truth is that most manual link building strategies have become a way of manipulating Google’s search results and as a consequence, they aren’t viable anymore. The internet is full of meaningless junk links that don’t serve anybody any good. And when we’re talking about shady manual link building we’re talking about time and effort put into creating those link profiles, which can go down the drain in an instant.

Long story short, manual link building is becoming more of an ancient way of massively altering a site’s rank in Google. It’s not an easy job, creating meaningful content and nitpicking everything to be at a high qualitative level without regarding any link building strategy. But at the end of the day, that’s what separates you from the others. From now on it’s all about working smart and creating meaningful relationships, voided by SEO intent.

A handful of quality organic links will beat any shady manual link built profile.

What are your thoughts on the future of manual link building?

The post Is Manual Link Building Becoming Obsolete? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Genuine Guest Posting works by engaging with audiences that are interested in your content.

Guest posting is still widely used as a “link building tool”, for generating contextually relevant links. When it is mostly used  as a “link building tool”, it will eventually blow up in your face with a Google Penalty.

Penalties for mass scale and shady guest blogging will surely come in the near future.  As Matt Cutts says in the following video:

There’s definitely a lot of abuse and growing spam that we see in the guest blogging space.

Regardless of the spam technique people are using from month to month we’re always looking at what sort of things are started to be more and more abused. We’re always willing to respond to that and take the appropriate action to make sure the users get the best set of search results.

The first thing that would trigger a guest blogging penalty will surely be a high amount of guest blog do-follow links pointing to your site.

In order to be prepared for any future penalties related to Guest Blogging we added to cognitiveSEO, a new detection pattern that we named:

“Author Signature”

Good Author Signature Example.

Spammy Author Signature Example

Now, when we crawl your entire link profile we will also search for footprints that are found in the signature that is usually found on Guest Posts.

Here is a research that I have done on some random sites that I picked up.

Qudos-animations.co.uk

This site has a mixed link acquisition strategy. It is mostly related to blog commenting, widgets and guest posts. As you can see 14% of the links are coming from guest posts.  This includes both do-follow and no-follow links.

Here is low quality guest post that has commercial anchor text also. It is clear the intent of this post and it is from any point of view an unnatural link.

Another guest post from this site is this one.

The intent of this guest post was not only to get a link but it is contextually relevant post about using video in the pharma markets.

I would rate this as a great post, except the fact that the link is a do-follow link, which puts it in the list of links that might raise a red-flag to Google.

But maybe this site has the majority of the guest post links coming from No-Follow links. Let’s see:

It’s not the case. They have 19% of the all the do-follow links coming from Guest-Posts. So it is clear that this is a used with high priority as a “link building tool”.

Manifestconnection.com

This is another site that uses the “guest posting” as a “link building strategy” only.

To understand this we need to look at the following charts:

All Live Links

We see a big chunk of backlinks are coming from author signatures. We filter by Do-Follow and we get this:

Live + Do-Follow Links Only

We see an even bigger majority of links coming from guest posts and they are posted on both blogs and article directories.

To quickly get an idea about the quality of these posts I just browse around and here are some examples:

and

We can easily see the link building intent on these guest posts with commercial anchor text. The quality of both the sites that these are posted on and of the actual content is quite low.

These kind of strategies will surely be penalized, if they are not already.

In order to best manage your Guest Blogging Risk, that of being penalized in the future for the shady guest blogging stuff that you did in the past, you should be aware of the following:

• How much of my link profile is made out of Guest Blog links?
• How many are No-follow/Do-follow?
• How many use Commercial anchor text?

Once you know this you can protect your site by taking action prior to a future penalty:

• Start diluting your link profile with high quality natural links, in order to minimize the impact of the shady Guest Blog links in your link profile.
• Change some of the Commercial Guest Post links in your link profile. Switch the links to No-Follow or change the Commercial Anchor Text used. These are potential major triggers to a future guest blogging penalty. Dilute them!

If you want to stay on the safe side, I would recommend following these principles:

• Do not use Guest Blogging as a mass scale “link building tool”.
• If you often link to your site form Guest Posts use no-follow links as much as you can. (you need to remember that the purpose of your guest post is to build awareness & engagement … not juicy ranking links)
• Rarely use Commercial Anchor Text in you Guest Post links that are pointing to your site.
• Do not guest blog the same article on different sites.
• Do not piss people off with “blind guest blog” request.

And don’t forget this one:

Guest Post on relevant sites mostly.

So now that you know all this stuff, you should analyze your site and understand your “Guest Blogging” link profile risk.

By the way, you can check your competitors also and be informed if they are in a safe or risky situation.

You could do this manually, but it would take ages.

We specially created this feature for you, so that you could easily understand the risk you or your competitors are facing when the Guest Post Google Update will come.

14 day Free Trial!

To be able to test the system we give free 14 day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post How to manage your “Guest Blogging” Risk – Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

There is a lot more benefits a brand could gain once it has a continuous flow of traffic. But the methods on how to actually do it are more important than the theories.

In this post, I’ll share to you a few ways to improve your blog’s traffic that are scalable and could be performed in any type of niche you’re working in.

Let’s get started…

1. Target social influencers when promoting your content

You already know that it’s not enough to create a content that is tailored to your target audience. Content promotion is a must right after your crafted your content and should be done twice the effort and time you exerted in your content creation.

One of the key ways to amplify the reach of your content is to get in touch with social influencers who could be your brand followers and could make your content promotion easier than the usual tactic (given that they have existing followers who might be interested to read/consume your content).

Type in your industry in the Followerwonk’s search Twitter bio and sort the results by social authority. Social authority is not only based on the number of followers a person gains but also on how he actually engages with his social followers. The higher the social authority of the influencer, the higher is the person’s engagement with his followers.

You can also use CircleCount to look for influencers who are active on Google+. Why do you need Google+ industry influencers? Simply because Google is now favoring brands with engaging Google+ pages and posts that have high Google+ shares are more likely to rank higher on search results.

Type in your keyword/niche in CircleCount and you’ll be able to see influencers who have a lot of followers on Google+. Reach out to them and offer your content. Remember that you don’t need to be pushy in your outreach. Just give them a heads up of your content and they’ll be the one to decide whether or not your content deserves a share.

You can use this email template to reach out to social influencers:

And boom! You could give a boost to your content’s reach with just a few minutes of outreach.

2. Use commonly-searched keywords on your guest posts

As I have mentioned in my guest post on FindMyBlogWay, creating high quality content assets should be done inside and outside your blog. The more you provide good content assets on other sites, the more brand signals you’re sending to search engines. These brand signals could be acquired when people search for your brand-related terms (brand name, offerings, etc..). This actually happens if you could get people remember your brand by providing content that is unique, comprehensive and could be a good resource/reference for blog posts.

Given that the authority site where your will contribute your content have high domain rank, it becomes easy for the blog posts hosted on that site to rank for targeted keywords. The reason is that authority of the main page can be passed to its internal pages.

Take advantage of this by targeting easy-to-rank keywords on your guest posts. If your guest post ranks high on SERPs, it will receive continuous traffic depending on the search volume and seasonality of the keyword used. And the more visitors landed on that guest post, the chance of getting referred traffic through the site is higher.

Referred traffic doesn’t come automatically when visitors landed on your guest post. The content should entice users to visit your site by linking to your site’s deeper pages and adding a call to action to your guest post.

3. Use freshness for your content assets

Freshness had been released by Google to serve users with updated content pieces. This would help small brands to dominate the search results with updated and high quality content.

You can actually use freshness for your content to maximize its potential to rank on top spots of organic results given that it’s actually what the search engines and users are looking for in a content (fresh!).

To determine if your preferred keyword favors fresh content in the search results, type that keyword in Google search. And look at the publishing date of each of the post. Just by looking at the dates, you can already determine if freshness greatly impacts ranking results in your niche.

4. Automate alerts for unlinked/linked brand mentions

If you truly provide utility for your target audience, getting mentions from various web places is nearly possible for your brand. There are several reasons why webmasters would want to link to you. One reason would be the comprehensiveness of your content that it is deserved to be referenced by bloggers for their content.

Bloggers are not always perfect when they link to external sources. Some of them would just link to your homepage though it should be linked to your internal page(s). Others mentioned your brand name or your name but don’t actually linked to your site or even to your social profile.

These instances are common to every brand and you just have to monitor every mentions of your brand to get the most value of them.

Unlinked or linked brand mentions can be easily identified when you use alert tools. The most common among those tools is Google Alerts. You need to setup search queries using the tool to receive emails that list pages where you had been mentioned in. Otherwise, you’ll receive plenty of junk emails in your inbox.

 Here are a few advanced search queries you can use to setup in your Google Alerts (I’ll use my site name as my example):

• Digital Philippines” –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “digitalphilippines” –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “Venchito Tampon” Founder –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “Venchito Tampon” content marketing –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “”Venchito Tampon” link building –site: digitalphilippines.net

Once you received an email, check if the site correctly linked to your page. If not, reach out to the webmaster and ask him if he could link to the right page.

Regularly outreaching to bloggers who haven’t linked properly to your page would help your blog increased its referral traffic (especially if the page that linked to you is of high quality and ranks on SERPs for a certain keyword).

5. Target bloggers’ or peers’ email lists for content placement

If you already started a good relationship building with influencers who have newsletters in their websites, this technique would be easy for you. If not, you still need to reach out to a few of them to get in touch with your brand.

The method is simple. You have to get those webmasters with large number of subscribers in their newsletters to connect with you. You can incentivize them just to have your content placed in their regular newsletters or start to have a good conversation with them.

The higher the number of subscribers in the email list, the higher is your chance to get referred traffic (through email). This tactic still varies as you need to have a good headline so email subscribers would click on your content when they see it in their inbox.

Conclusion:

The main key to obtaining continuous flow of referral traffic is to create high quality linkable assets for your own site and these branded content pieces should be well distributed on different web places.

 Guest post : Venchito Tampon is a content strategist and link builder based in Manila, Philippines. He is the sole author of the content marketing blog, DigitalPhilippines.net. If you have any questions, get in touch with me @venchito14 or venchitotampon [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll be happy to connect with you!

The post 5 Effective Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Let’s face it: you’ve heard enough about guest posting, press releases, and article directories.

If you’re looking for some fresh, actionable tips you can apply to your link building campaigns today, then this post is for you.

Today I’m unveiling seven advanced link building strategies that I use to complement the bread and butter techniques we all know and love.

#1: Siphon PageRank From Pinterest

Remember the good ol’ days when Pinterest links were dofollow…

…and you could get link juice from pinning and repinning images?

Just because those days are long gone doesn’t mean Pinterest has lost its SEO punch.

Why?

Because the links to your website in your Pinterest profile is still dofollow:

Usually these profiles wind up as PR0 or PR n/a.

But you can quickly turn these pages into authorities by siphoning PR (which Pinterest has a lot of).

Here’s how:

1. Find authority pages on Pinterest with the most siphoning potential. You can use Open Site Explorer to find

pages with the most PA:

2. When you find an authority page, comment or like a pin:

And it will send PR towards your Pinterest profile page…and onto your site!

#2: Audio Sharing Link Building

You probably already know that you can leverage podcasts to nab links from dofollow podcast directories like Podcastdirectory.com and Podcast411.com.

But you may not know that there are plenty of authoritative audio sharing sites that you can grab quality links from with a few minutes of work.

Here’s how:

1. Create your .mp3: Use the free Vocaroo.com to create an audio file from your browser window. It doesn’t have to be the next White Album…just talk or sing into your computer mic.

2. Create a profile (with a backlink) at these high PR audio sharing sites:

http://yourlisten.com/

http://reverbnation.com/

http://8tracks.com/

http://sharemyplaylists.com/

http://sutros.com/

3. Upload your audio file: Most audio sharing sites will give you a link whether or not you upload any audio. But the audio file builds internal links to your artist page…making it more powerful.

#3: Knowem.com

Knowem is a treasure trove of link building opportunities. Knowm is a site that

helps you claim your “brand real estate”, like social media profiles and blog platforms.

However, it’s also used by white hat SEO agencies to build quality links to their client’s sites. If you dig enough you can find

dozens of authority sites that offer dofollow links to their users.

In fact, I’ve found completely new link building strategies using this site.

First, head to Knowem.com and put any keyword:

Then sort through the list of social networks.

In my personal experience, the “Design” and “Entertainment” sections have the highest concentration of dofollow targets.

#4: Site Evaluation Websites

Did you know that there are sites out there to get real-world feedback on your site’s design?

Pretty cool, huh?

Well, I don’t usually pay much attention to the advice I get from these sites…

…but I DO pay attention to the links I get by submitting my site to them!

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a page that I built at BounceApp.com in literally 30-seconds, rocks a dofollow link:

And is PR2:

Here are a few more to consider submitting to:

ConceptFeedback.com

SuggestionBox.com

ABTests.com

Obviously, you need a family-friendly site for your link to stick and accumulate feedback. But as long as you have that down, you should be able to get a handful of authoritative links with a few minutes of work.

#5: Host a Scholarship

If you run a legit site, you can turn $1000 into fistfuls of top-quality .edu links by creating a scholarship.

I discovered this idea by accident one night when I was reverse engineering on of my client’s competitors.

I noticed that they had an insane number of .edu links…which is weird considering that the site was about investing.

When I dug deeper I realized that they ran dozens of scholarships for schools in their area.

And you can easily do the same thing.

Here’s how:

1. First, grab a list of all the schools near you (this adds an extra layer of legitimacy to your scholarship).

If you don’t want to make a school-specific scholarship you can make yours specific to an industry related to your niche, like physical therapy or accounting.

2. Create your scholarship page. Make sure to list your criteria (age, essay length etc.) and your award amount.

If you have a lot of ads on your site consider making a custom ad-free page just for your scholarship. This will increase the chances that you people actually link to your scholarship page.

A good scholarship page to use as a template:

This particular page has attracted 60+ .edu links…not too shabby!

3. Look for lists of scholarships with dofollow links using these search strings:

site:.edu “scholarships”

site:.edu “scholarship information”

4. Email the people that run that section of the site to let them know about your new scholarship (be sure to remind them to link to your scholarship page!).

#6: Lists of Terms

One of the best shortcuts to establish yourself as an authority in your niche is to start coming up with your own terms or coming up with solid definitions for terms in your niche.

And if you list these out, they’re likely to get linked to all day long.

Just look at the link profile from this “Glossary of Internet Terms” page:

DA: 68

PA: 73

LRD: 1,382

Amazing, right?

I’d be willing to bet that there’s already a glossary of terms in your niche.

However, I’d also bet that it’s incomplete, outdated and in need of improvement.

If you can swoop in like a superhero and create something better — and email the people that link to the now-obsolete glossary to change their links to your page — you can get some insanely authoritative links.

#7: .edu Link Bait

I’m sure you already know about link bait: where you create a piece of content that (hopefully) attracts attention, social shares and links.

But you don’t need to post something controversial just to get links…even from authoritative .edu sites.

Skeptical?

Check out this page from a commercial site in the nursing school niche:

It’s simply a list of 100 online libraries. Not the least bit controversial or attention-grabbing.

But what makes this page such a link magnet is that it’s a great resource of nursing students.

And when I say “link magnet”, I really mean it.

This particular sites has attracted a dozen top-notch .edu links by creating pages like this.

Think about how you can list 50 or even 100 resources for the community that your site serves. It could be 100 best DIY home improvement Google+ profiles, 100 of the most helpful search strings to find niche-specific information, or a list of 100 of the best bloggers in your niche.

Once you do, reach out to .edu webmasters to let them know about your killer resource.

The post 7 Link Building Techniques that might still work in 2013 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.