Since it becomes clear that the future of SEO relies on organic links, natural links, high quality links or any other term you know them by, we’ve decided to compile a comprehensive list with some amazing organic link building articles. Personally, they’ve added value to my knowledge and some have a different perspective from what I’ve written about organic link building.

1. 15 Types of Content That Will Drive You More Traffic

2. The Complete Guide To Building Your Blog Audience

3. How Content Marketing Affects Search Engine Rankings

4. White Hat SEO Case Study: 348% More Organic Traffic in 7 Days

5. 7 Ways to Protect Your Site Against Google’s Next Update

6. Turning Keywords Into SEO Content

7. Link Building Case Study: How I Increased My Search Traffic by 110% in 14 Days

8. The Art of Link Earning

9. Creating Authoritative Content Without Client Input

10. Evolve Or Die – Why SEO & Tiered Link Building Has Changed In 2014

11. How To Steal Your Competitors Best Content & Use It Against Them

12. How I Built A Top 100 Blog In 12 Months & How You Can Do It Too!

12. The Power of Authors and Content for Link Building

13. 12 Scalable Link-Building Tactics

14. The End of Link Building as we Know It

15. The Blueprint to Content Marketing Success

16. Remarketing: How to Make Your Content Marketing and SEO up to 7x More Awesome

17. Link Building Resolutions for 2014

18. What is a Natural Backlink Portfolio? | Understanding Natural Links

19. Six Explosive Organic & Paid Link Building Tips

20. After Guest Blogging…What’s Left for “Safe” Link Building?

21. 5 Creative Link Building Techniques for 2014

22. How to Leverage Your Content to Build Links Without Gaming Google

23. SEO is Dead: Long Live OC/DC

24. What to Do If Your Great Content Isn’t Getting Found

25. Building Relationships (and Links) from Natural Content

26. From Link Building to Link Earning: 3 Ways to Transition

27. Top 8 Google Analytics Reports for Managing Organic SEO Campaigns

28. The Future of Link Building: 5 Important Messages

29. Creative Link Building Ideas For Really Boring Webistes

30. Link Building at The Speed of Natural

31. How to Analyze a Link: Link Building Basics

32. Link Building Fundamentals To Future-Proof Your Online Business

33. 14 Link Resolutions For 2014

34. Referring Links: An Untapped Treasure Trove of Visitor Intent Data

35. Top Search Marketing Trends of 2014

36. Using Social Media to Earn Links

37. Building Relationships, Not Links: Why Guest Blogging Will Never Die

38. How to be Creative in Link Building

39. What People and Data Have to do with Link Building

40. How Relationships Work in Link Building

41. Is this the End of Guest Blogging?… Not for Me!

42. How to write Better Blog Comments

43. Alternative Outreach Methods for Link Building: Thinking Creatively

44. Google’s Love/Hate Relationship with Links

45. I’m Not a Link Builder, I’m a Link Artist!

46. 3 Ways to Inadvertently Sabotage Your SEO

47. Blog SEO for the Modern Marketer: How to Optimize Your Posts

48. Learning SEO From The Experts

49. How to Guest Blog Effectively (Without Angering the SEO Gods)

50. Easy (and Ethical) Strategies for Link Earning

51. How to Improve Your Website’s Rank through Organic Link Building – Not available anymore

52.How Links Impact Authority And Build The Highways To Your Content – Not available anymore

53. Google SEO Best Practices – How to Keep Google Happy

54. How to Grow Your Website Traffic Without Building Links

55. Get Organic Links in Three Simple Steps

56. 3 Examples of Content Marketing Earning Awesome Links

57. 5 Best Practices for Effective Organic Link Building

58. Adjusting Your SEO Strategy For A Post-Hummingbird World

59. SEO for Start-Ups: 3 Powerful Tips for Driving SEO Traffic Early On

Do you have any other articles that you would like to include in this list? Please share them in the comments 😉

Photo credits: 1

The post 59 Amazing Organic Link Building Articles appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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.

A natural/organic link is not necessarily “the opposite of the unnatural link”. It is much more than that.

And although unnatural links are in fashion, maybe its time to put the spotlight on the organic links.

What is a Natural Link?

Natural links refer to those links that are put on websites without a direct intention of influencing the rankings of Google (at least from the POV of Google). These are called natural links because they haven’t been elicited in any way. As mentioned in the Webmaster Tools Help, Google considers to be a vote of confidence a link that page A makes to page B. These “votes”, usually,  help your site rank higher in the search engine. The thing is that this vote, the link, has to be made naturally, meaning that you don’t have to influence in any way someone’s decision to link to you. Shortly, natural link building means that no explicit agreement to exchange or place links was done.

Natural Links are an investment that will pay dividends on the long term!

You might be stuffed with it, but let me illustrate the natural/unnatural dilemma with an example from politics. Elections are in full swing and you, the citizen, have to decide which mayor would be the best for your city. Your vote will be considered sincere and also legal only if your choice will be made solely because you agree with someone’s political agenda or you think that a certain person fits best the role of the mayor of your city. If a candidate or someone from his staff try to “buy” your vote with money or by offering you goods or services, that vote won’t be based on that candidate’s political qualities anymore, will it? That vote will not be relevant and might also bring some legal consequences. The same things apply when it comes to natural links. They need to be obtained organically, without anyone trying to manipulate the situation.

Natural Link Synonyms

Natural links may be found “in the wild” under the following names:

• organic links
• good links
• ok links
• high quality links
• Google friendly links

Why “Natural” & “Link” in the same phrase?

Talking about a “natural” link building strategy might sound like an oxymoron. As they first appear, links were all natural and even now, links are supposed to be natural, right? Yes, I feel the hand of reality slapping me, so allow me to rephrase that.

As the digital world got bigger and bigger, webmasters began to feel smaller and smaller. Site owners started to feel insignificant if not lost in the incredibly large web. The need to create link strategies that will speed up the process and put webmasters in their dream place, the search engines’ first page, increased proportionally with the digital world.

For someone to naturally click on the most relevant site for his search query would mean that he would know all the content from all the sites that exist.

Pretty utopian, isn’t it? How the “natural” process really goes is that users link to the most relevant sites they find from a predefined list of webpages. They don’t really give their vote of confidence to the site with the best content that there is but to the one that is most relevant to him from “the short list” of webpages which is available. With almost 80% of users clicking on links that they find on the very first page of a search engine’s responses, everybody wants to be on that list. Who designs those “short lists”? Algorithms do. The people behind those algorithms are continually seeking to improve their ability in identifying which sites are to be trusted and which not. The sites that appear on the “short list” may be the ones that know how to “dance” along with the ranking factors and not necessary the ones with the most relevant content for a certain matter.

Google’s algorithm job is to spot signals of naturalness. The webmaster’s job is to act as natural as possible. But what happens when the algorithm changes? An action that was considered natural until then can pass as unnatural now. Huge amounts of money are being lost or won based on the algorithm’s rules. It’s a cycle that repeats every day, week, month, year. I think the Ralph Tegtmeier (aka @fantomaster) puts the finger on the problem in the following video:

Link Earning

The concept of link earning puts together all the qualitative efforts that a webmaster does in order to gain organic links. The key to this strategy might be crafting your content for your readership and not for Google. The new SEO context might oblige us to forget about link building and start focusing more and more on link earning.

Here are some methods of earning links:

• Generate original information

A good place where you can put your effort into is original analysis and research. Netizens are more than glad to find out new, interesting things. If you really dig in to find something and you generate interesting facts, you are more likely to get links. We’re doing this a lot at cognitiveSEO, so, let the links come to us! 🙂 The good part with generating original research is that it is not just about linking, it is about sticking in someone’s mind or making a really big difference in a specific area.

You must create content that you yourself would go out of your way and read.

• Be active in social media

Think of where people spend most of their time. That’s right; on Facebook, Tweeter, Google+, etc. If your users spend 4 hours a day on facebook, maybe you should start spending some time there too. You don’t have to just wait for your possible customers to come to you, you may need to pay them a visit. Being active in social media can pay off in lots of ways, not just links. You get to know your target and you can also find new opportunities for your business.

• Share your knowledge

Yes, “how to’s” and tutorials is what I am talking about. If you’ve managed to do something or you discovered how to make something faster or easier, you could help other people by making a tutorial about it. It will be highly appreciated in the online world. Even if you don’t get the pile of links you were hoping for, but you will bring exposure to your brand.

Content for the “Long tail ” only needs a couple of link to rank high.

As I mentioned before, sometimes it’s not just about the links; it’s about having a resource that no one else has. In the long run it will pay off.

• Community Building

Community building is a long term investment that will pay off on the long term.

You can obtain natural links from creating content that is not only relevant and useful but that will have the power to attract links from bloggers, people from forums, blog comments, etc.

• Answer Questions Online

I am talking about answering the many questions people have in the online world. On a forum, for instance, you can answer to a question about how to get rid of some spyware. If your answer will bring the solution or any added value, the community will appreciate. It is likely that they remember that you “saved” them in some situation and most likely they will reword you with a link. So, helping other people can be a big way to do it. Don’t expect to win the Nobel Peace Prize but you may expect an investment that will pay dividends on the long term.

• Offer a Free Service to Your Community

Run a service that people find really useful or something that improves others’ experience in the digital world. For instance, you can create a browser extension. I am sure that you are familiar with the AdBlock extension. This extension is an open source that generated millions of downloads and a pretty nice amount of money made from donations. As you can see, people are grateful and willing to pay off as long as their experience as a user is improved. What is great about offering a service is that you can do the work once and on the long term lots of people will pay you off in links.

Techniques that Don’t Involve Great Content

It is hard to say that there are techniques that won’t rely great content. Let’s see, though, what we can find in this field:

• Controversy

You don’t have to be a tabloid to obtain buzz and links. You don’t have to make a profession out of gossiping or hating everybody either but some controversy might give you a boost of traffic now and then.

Done with measure, some controversy generates a lot of links but is not a long term strategy.

There will be a boost in the beginning but at some point, people will pay less and less attention to you. You don’t want to be like the boy that cried “wolf” and afterwards, no one believed him anymore. If you always get busy with saying “look at me, I am being loud, you have to pay a lot of attention to me”, you may irreparably lose your authority and credibility.

• Site Architecture

I know it may sound common but sometimes we tend to take for granted the little things. You have to make sure that your site has a good site architecture. What is the easiest way to find out? Answer to these questions: Can your site be crawled? Can your site be bookmarked? Can Google or the user get to all the pages on your site? If the answer to these questions is “no” or “I don’t know for sure”, you need to take a look at your site before doing anything else. If your site is broken your changes of being linked at are almost Zero.

• Offline Activities and Branding

Being hooked in the online world we often forget about the great opportunities that the offline world brings. If you forgot about outdoor and smart unconventional advertising and brand building, it’s a good time you bring them back into your playground.

• Newsletters

Another way in which you can drive traffic, conversions and ultimately links are  Newsletters. They might look a bit out of fashion but they still work. This way you make it easier for your public to have your information show up in their inbox and, therefore, easier to click on it.

Common Mistakes

You did everything by the book, but the results don’t look as you expected. So, what could have possible happened? I’ll list three common mistakes that may occur in the “link zone”.

1. You were too busy creating a link building strategy

Your job is not just creating a link building strategy. If your main activity will be focused on building links for search engines, you are cutting off a lot of avenues.

Before being preoccupied with how to get links, you have to build something really attractive, a reason why people would want to link to you.

After you managed that, don’t forget that there is more than the online world. There is a broader area of offline marketing out there that can bring you the links you wish for. You need to get rid of the tunnel vision focused on just links and start marketing your website without thinking about search engines but about your consumer instead.

You use the wrong keywords on your site.

For instance, you’ve just opened a great sushi restaurant in Manhattan. You don’t want to just say “sushi” but you want to include words like “where do I find the best sushi in Manhattan” etc, because it is very likely for people to search for “sushi manhattan”. Think about what the user is going to type and include those words on your page. You need to do a proper keyword research for your own site. Also, let’s say you have a car service shop. Post a list with all the services you have to offer on your site but not in a jpg or pdf format, but in plain text. Put your business hours on your page. It is very likely for people to look for a car service open till late and you might be the one who offers this service;

That piece of information can generate a link and, further on, a client.

You’ve messed up the title or the description of your page

You want to have something that people will actually click on when they see it on the search results.

What is your home page title? If, for instance, I am going to bookmark it, will I easily understand later what was really about or is the title not very suggestive? Also, your description will show up in the snippet and that synopsis can be a link generator or, on the contrary, a turn off for the user.

Conclusion

It is hard to tell whether a 100% natural link building strategy will get you on the first pages of the search engine in a favorable period of time. But one thing is for sure: while techniques and strategies come and go, organic links will always remain.

Everything you are doing is first of all for the audience and not for the search engines.

There is no (or shouldn’t be) such a thing as a manual on how to build links organically, or how to create the exact type of content that results in valuable links. There are some guidelines you need to follow and some directions you can track that can help you have a natural, worry- free link profile.

Photo credits: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The post Organic Links – What they are and How to get them? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.