Local search is everything for businesses – 30% of all Google searches are location-related, and 76% of people who search for a local business visit them within the day. Your company not only needs to be visible on local search but rank at the top of the snack pack if you want to capture this market. 

To get there, investing in strategic local link-building is a must. It’s what will set your business profile apart from all of the others on Google’s index. Here, I go over five local link building tips to help you achieve just that.

Webmaster’s Note: If you need help with Local SEO and setting up your Google My Business account, I have other guides you can follow before starting on this step of your SEO strategy.

What is Local SEO Link Building?

Before getting to the nitty-gritty of how to build links for SEO, let’s talk about what link building is. 

Link building is creating backlinks from other websites, pointing back to yours. Think of each link as a vote of confidence, telling search engines like Google that this website thinks your website is credible and authoritative.

Local link building is just that, focusing on creating those backlinks from other websites in your area or community. Local backlinks are proof to Google that your business is trusted in your area, making it crucial if you want to raise your position on local search results. 

Local Link-Building Tips

Now that you know the basics, here are my tried and tested local link building tips to get you rising to the top of the local snack pack: 

Optimize Your Google My Business Profile

The most important part of the local SEO process is your Google My Business (GMB) profile. Ensure that all information is correct and up to date: business name, address, phone number, website. Post regularly regarding promotions, events, and the introduction of new products to your business. This will make you more visible in the local search results and entice local sites to link back to your GMB profile.

Hold Special Events and Promotions to Get PR Links

Events, promotions, and even collaborations with other businesses in your locality are great ways to drum up more opportunities for links. Plus, they give you the opportunity to build relationships with other businesses and build up your brand. Here are some event ideas that can make this happen:

• Sponsor an Event: Community and industry engagements can be done in several ways, such as sponsoring events. The plan will not only increase the visibility of your brand but also acknowledge your business as one standing for local initiatives and the advancement of industries.
• Host Workshops: Organize workshops related to your business. This is an invaluable platform to establish your authority in front of potential clients and to engage with them on a more substantial level with your target market. Workshops can also result in valuable networking.
• Host a Charity Fundraiser: Fundraising events for charity drive in eyeballs and create a lot of good feelings. Such charitable events align your brand to create a positive image, reach out to the local community, and draw in some media coverage; all of these facilitate link-building.

Publicize these through social media channels, blogs, or even in community groups to maximize the impact of such events. This will not only spread your words around but also create multiple avenues for generating backlinks to enhance your online presence. 

Get Listed in Local Business Directories

Probably the best local link-building tip is to implement your business into local directories. About 94% of all customers have scouted a business directory for more details about a company. You can beef up your local SEO campaigns with these directories so that more consumers are directed to your business. Some of these top listings include:

• Google Business Profile
• Yelp
• Business List PH
• Dun & Bradstreet
• Top.org.ph
• Best.org.oh

Not only that but there are more places to get even more exposure when you take into consideration niche or local directories. Run a simple Google search that is aligned with your industry or location for more additional places to list your business.

Getting your business on these platforms is just the first step. The next thing to do is ensure that your listing has complete contact information as well as accurate, well-written descriptions of your business. Optimizing your directory profiles with the proper keywords and descriptions can really help drive more potential customers to you.

Use SEO Tools to Get to and Target Your Competitors’ Backlinks

Very often, knowing what your competition has in their backlink profile will shed some light on an avenue for link building. Here is how to leverage tools like Linkody to get to those competitor backlinks:

• Research the Competition: Identify your local top-ranking competitors who happen to be in the same industry. You will need to have an idea of who your main competitors are as knowing them will help you identify where they get their backlinks or strategies.
• Backlink Analysis: Tools of SEO can be leveraged for the analysis of their backlinks. Using Linkody will give you a well-articulated overview of the sources of their backlinks, the anchor text being used, and the quality of all the links on the whole.
• Engage in Competitive Link Building: While checking their backlink profiles, you might find “broken” links, where your competitors have dead pages or changed URLs without redirects. You could contact the website owners where these backlinks are coming from, tell them that they have a broken link, and suggest your own pages as a replacement. If they go for it, you have successfully stolen their backlink!
• Find Similar Sources: Target the websites that are linking to your competitors, and pursue possible backlinks from those sites. You might email sites, request backlinks, request guest posts, or collaborate on content that would turn out to be mutually useful.

Don’t Forget Internal Links

Although internal links cannot be considered backlinks, internal links do make up an integral part of your overall SEO strategy. Here’s why internal links matter and how they can benefit your site:

• Structuring and Relevance: The internal links explain the structure of your website and the relevance of content to Google. When linking related pages, it guides search engines through your website, pointing at important content—very important for improvement in local search rankings.
• Link Value Flow: Internal linking assists throughout your pages and strengthens the relevance of new or less important content. This can, therefore, help you in ensuring that all of your pages have equal attention from search engines, thus improving their potential to appear and rank.

Incorporating a strong internal linking strategy to build topical authority can enhance your site’s usability, boost SEO performance, and ensure that valuable content is easily accessible to both users and search engines.

Key Takeaway

With more and more users turning to Google, Local SEO is something businesses now have to pay attention to if they want to be found. These five local link building tips are very effective ways of boosting your Local SEO strategy and ensuring your business is visible online.

The post Local Link-Building Tips to Boost Your SEO & Search Rankings appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

When it comes to ranking on Google, the work you do on your website is only half the job — the rest comes down to your off-page SEO strategy. Building your off-site presence can make all the difference in traffic, search engine rankings and revenue.

Searching for an off-page SEO checklist to help your site rank higher in Google? You’re in luck. I have here a simple yet effective list for you to work through — complete with all the best practices as of 2024.

Off-Page SEO Factors

Your biggest competitors have probably perfected their on-page SEO. It’s highly competitive, too. It’s why businesses invest in services like ours, and why others build their own in-house team to optimize their websites. So how do you get a leg up on the competition? The answer is off-page SEO. 

All things equal — content, UI/UX, site speed, all on-page factors — what sets one website apart from the others is how authoritative they are in its niche. To build authority, you need to show Google that other websites and industry leaders trust you. And what do we do when we trust a source of information? We reference it and link back to it in our writing. See where I’m getting at?

Think of each external link as an endorsement for your site, encouraging search engines to boost your position in their rankings. If you want to succeed this 2024, then you have to start investing in your off-page SEO. 

Webmaster’s Note: This is part three of our SEO checklist series. Part one covers our technical SEO checklist and part two covers on-page SEO. Take a look at those if you haven’t seen them yet. 

1. Link Building

The core aspect of off-page SEO. Link building is the process of getting more hyperlinks (also just called a “link”) from other websites to your own. 

Key Strategies of Link Building:

• Content Creation & Promotion: Create high-quality content that people want to link to because it is valuable. Use this to get links organically from other webmasters.
• Backlink Outreach: Contacting relevant, authoritative websites and influencers in your niche to introduce your content and secure backlinks. Here are four ways to successfully pitch your outreach to other webmasters.
• Guest Blogging: Do outreach right, and you’ll get the opportunity to write articles for other reputable websites. This can result in a backlink to your site. Here’s a separate guide on how to effectively guest blog. 
• Broken Link Building: Identifying broken links on other websites and suggesting your content as a replacement. I have a broken link building tutorial for beginners for you to follow for this step.
• Link Intersect Analysis: You can also steal links from the competition. Check your direct competitors, and other websites who often create content to rank for the same keywords as you do. From here, examine how they built and earned their backlinks using a tool like Ahrefs. 

All these steps are needed to start building a robust profile of high-quality backlinks. Over time, this should signal to search engines that your website is an authoritative source worth ranking well.

2. Social Media Presence

I highly recommend being active on social media. Building a strong presence on other platforms can also build your website’s reputation. 

Social media in this case is especially effective because everyone is on it, and there’s a space for everything. Find the right circle to start interacting with, and soon you’ll build an audience you can share your website’s content. And, the more active you are, the more likely you’ll be front of mind when someone looks at your industry.

How to Start Building Your Social Media Presence:

• Create a profile: I suggest making a professional profile either representing you or your business. 
• Find your niche: Know who your industry leaders are, and find and follow their profiles on social media platforms. This is your entry point.
• Interact and engage: Try interacting with their posts, replying to discussions in their comment section, or reposting their content with your insights. This will expose you to others in their circle. 
• Promote your content: If you’re already promoting all of your content across social media, then you’re off to a great start. You can also boost your profile’s engagement by interacting with every mention of your products, services, or business.
• Monitor topics: Keep track of hashtags related to your niche. Make sure to engage with these trends or discussions at every opportunity.

3. Forum Activity

Like social media, forums are also an excellent way to get noticed in your industry. Plus, any link you gain from forum activity can be an excellent source of referral traffic. 

The strategy for forums is more or less the same as that of social media — create a professional account, find relevant forum threads, situate yourself there, and engage in discussions with others. 

For the best results, I recommend only posting or replying when you have something valuable to contribute. Spamming forums for the sake of being active is just a waste of your time.

4. Online Reputation and Reviews

An important but often forgotten part of an off-page SEO checklist. A complete business listing on Google is a must to boost your local SEO. I highly recommend claiming or creating a Google My Business account. 

How to Get More Business Reviews:

• Create a Google My Business Account: this is the first step if you don’t have one yet.
• Provide information: Fill out all the relevant fields for your business information. Don’t forget to link your website and social media profiles to your listing.
• Get verified: Make sure your account is verified so that you can keep all your information up to date, and moderate your account properly. 
• Use your reviews link: From your Google My Business Dashboard, go to your profile. You should see the option to “Ask for Reviews” there. This will provide a link that leads straight to your reviews page — give this to every satisfied customer to grow your reputation on Google!

Key Takeaway

When it comes to optimizing your website for search, you can’t forget about your off-page SEO checklist. It’s invaluable in boosting your site’s authority — which we all know to be a strong ranking factor for Google. Follow my guide to gain some valuable external links, build your reputation, gain referral traffic and engagement, and raise your profile online.

The post The Comprehensive Off-Page Checklist to Boost Your SEO in 2025 appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

No matter how often you work on your website, there will come a time where you’ll see fluctuations with your site’s performance — and worst comes to worst, sudden and drastic drop in Google rankings. 

I personally have seen my website go from sitting at #1 for my keywords for months with no issue, then one morning falling entirely out of the first page results. 

Experiencing this can be a daunting scenario for anyone. And if you can’t recover quick enough, expect to see a lot less organic traffic and conversions. 

However, it’s not the end of the road. With my 8-step recovery plan, you can diagnose, rectify, and bounce back stronger from this setback. 

Understanding Why Keyword Rankings Drop

SEO is a complicated, constantly changing game. You’re not only trying to meet all the requirements Google looks for, but all the content that’s pushed out by competing websites, every day. It’s why even seasoned SEOs still experience drops in their rankings. If you’re seeing it on your website, know that it can be caused by multiple factors:

• Search Algorithm Updates: Search engines like Google constantly update their ranking algorithms to improve search results’ relevance and quality.
• Competitive Landscape: SEO is an ongoing battle. Your competitors might also be optimizing their sites and creating high-quality content. If they outperform your efforts, their rankings might rise while yours could experience a drop.
• Changes in User Behavior and Trends: Trends, seasonality, and shifts in user behavior can affect keyword popularity and therefore search rankings.
• Website Modifications: Any changes you make on your website—like adding or removing content, updating backlinks or images, or restructuring your site—can impact your rankings. Even minor changes can cause temporary fluctuations.
• Technical Issues: Redundant coding, broken links, site downtime, slow loading speed, or mobile unfriendliness can lead to ranking drops.
• Geographical Factors: Search engine rankings also consider the searcher’s location. Different regions might see different rankings for the same keywords, which could translate to fluctuations.

Webmaster’s Note: This post is part of our advanced guides to Keyword Research and Optimization, and Content Strategy, where I cover everything you need to know about picking the right keywords for your website, and ranking for them in Google. I also cover strategies for winning SERP features, building topical authority, using long-tail keywords, and more in this series.

Step #1: Acknowledging the drop

When it comes to keyword ranking, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions at the first sign of a slight change. It’s normal to experience small fluctuations in your rankings due to the ever-changing search algorithm landscape. 

So if your rankings dropped one or two spots, I recommend keeping an eye on it, but not panicking just yet. You might see your page go back to its original spot in a few days.

However, a significant drop — think five or more spots — requires your immediate attention. 

To accurately watch your rankings, you need to use SEO tools that track the performance of your keywords over time. I go over how to track your keyword rankings in a previous post.

With a clear understanding of your situation, you can then move forward with investigating and finding the possible causes for this sudden change.

Step #2: Identifying Webmaster Guidelines Violations

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines lay out the best practices to help Google find, index, and rank your site. Violating these guidelines can negatively impact your site’s ranking in Google search results, or even lead to removal from Google’s search results. 

Below is a breakdown of how I differentiate webmaster guideline violations.

Google’s guidelines cover three main areas — content and design, technical, and quality.

• Content and design guidelines provide recommendations for building a site with a robust information architecture that’s helpful to users.
• Technical guidelines mainly focus on allowing search engines to crawl and index your site.
• Quality guidelines offer advice to prevent manipulative practices, such as duplicating content from other websites, keyword stuffing, or creating tricky redirects – often known as black-hat SEO tactics.

You could use Google Search Console to look for any crawl errors, manual actions, or security issues that might affect Google’s ability to index your site. 

Many of the SEO tools I use also have audit functions, which I often use to identify any issues with my on-page, off-page, and technical SEO factors.

If your self-audit unveils any issues, it’s essential to get them fixed quickly, and following Google’s guidelines.

By aligning your website’s SEO strategy with Google’s Guidelines, you’re doing white-hat SEO, and making sure your strategy will keep from unnecessary drops in ranking in the future.

Step #3: Checking for Algorithm Updates

Google is known to frequently update its search algorithm to improve the quality, relevance, and accuracy of its search results. These updates can range from minor tweaks that go almost unnoticed to significant shake-ups that cause drastic shifts in search rankings. 

The most recent ones to date are the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and the November 2023 Core Update.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how you can stay informed about these important changes:

• Stay updated with SEO news platforms like this blog, Search Engine Journal, and or Search Engine Roundtable. These platforms usually provide immediate news on Google algorithm updates along with expert insights and advice on how to tweak your SEO strategy in line with the changes.
• Follow Google’s Official Communications as it often announces significant changes on its official blog or Twitter accounts. So, regularly follow Google Search Central Blog and notable members of Google’s Search Relation team like Danny Sullivan and John Mueller.
• Use Algorithm Monitoring Tools like SEMRush’s Sensor to track Google’s search results and algorithm changes, interpreting these into easy-to-understand weather-like reports. The “hotter” and “stormier” the forecast, the more significant the changes in Google’s rankings.

Step #4: Audit your Backlinks

Backlinks, which are links from other websites pointing to yours, are a significant ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm. They essentially act like votes of trust and quality, indicating your site’s authority and relevance.

Here’s how to verify and manage lost backlinks:

• Use Backlink Analysis Tools. Several SEO tools offer backlink tracking functionalities. One of the notable examples is Ahrefs. This tool could help in monitoring your backlink profile, keeping track of the websites linking to you, and crucially, any backlinks you’ve recently lost.
• Identify Lost Backlinks using SEO tools that can run regular checks to identify lost backlinks. Lost backlinks can occur for various reasons – the linking page might have been removed, the link might have been deleted, or the site could have gone offline.
• Analyzing Lost Backlinks is also crucial. Once you’ve identified the lost backlinks, it is time for you to analyze the quality and relevance of your referring domains. If they are high-quality, losing these links could have contributed to your rankings drop.

Remember, the goal of any good SEO strategy isn’t just to gain backlinks, but to gain high-quality, relevant ones, and importantly, ensure they stick around. Regularly verifying your backlinks can thus be a crucial part of your SEO health check and recovery plan.

You might have noticed I didn’t include disavowing links to this step. That’s because it’s not a recommended strategy anymore.

If you do notice links coming from very bad sites (such as hacked sites, or sites with malware or porn), then you should disavow those. Otherwise, if your links are coming from low-quality or unrelated sites, then you can ignore them. 

It used to help in the past when negative SEO was a thing. But nowadays, Google’s algorithm enables it to devalue links. In a way, they themselves have a disavow algorithm. 

Step #5: Rebuilding or Replacing Lost Backlinks

Once you’ve identified lost backlinks, especially high-quality ones, you need to mitigate their loss to recover your keyword rankings. I go over how to reclaim backlinks in another guide, but here’s a quick breakdown of that process:

• Reach Out to Website Owners: If a valuable backlink was removed unknowingly or accidentally by a website owner, reaching out to them can be a good starting point. Politely mention the removal of the backlink and request them to consider reinstating it. Be sure to emphasize the mutual benefits the link can bring, such as a better user experience, useful resources for readers, and improved site engagement.
• Repair Broken Pages and Links: If you lost backlinks due to pages on your site not working or moving to a different URL, fix these broken links or implement 301 redirects from your old URLs to the new ones.
• Create High-Quality Content: If your request to reinstate backlinks is unsuccessful or if the website has closed, focus on attracting new high-quality backlinks. The foundation of earning quality backlinks is truly outstanding content—craft resourceful, unique, and engaging content that others can’t help but link to.
• Guest Posting: Guest blogging on respected industry websites can be a great way to gain high-quality, relevant backlinks.
• Monitor Your Backlinks: Lastly, remember to routinely monitor new and existing backlinks to promptly identify any changes. This ensures you can respond quickly to misplaced or lost backlinks in the future.

Step #6: Conduct a Website Audit

A website audit involves a full analysis of factors that could be affecting your website’s visibility in search engines. This comprehensive examination allows you to gain insights about your website, individual pages, and overall traffic, helping you shape a robust SEO strategy.

Here’s how I go about conducting a website audit:

• Identify Technical Issues as these problems can negatively impact your site’s ranking. Check for issues like slow page load times, errors on your robots.txt file, and sitemap errors. Tools like Google’s Search Console and SEMrush Site Audit tool can be particularly useful.
• Check Content Relevance and Quality to ensure that it is engaging, relevant to your audience, and unique. Duplicate or thin content can significantly harm your rankings. There are many copywriting tools to help you identify possible content duplication in your website.
• Ensure Mobile Optimization as Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it primarily considers the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. Therefore, ensuring your website is optimized for mobile users is crucial. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool is free and that can help with this.
• Evaluate Page/URL Structure as these should be SEO-friendly – concise, descriptive, and include keywords. Each page should have a unique URL. Additionally, check that your site structure is understandable and logical, both for users and search engines.
• Review Metadata of your website. Check all titles, meta descriptions, and alt text to ensure they include targeted keywords. They should accurately describe the page’s content.
• Assess Site Navigation as all websites that are easy for all users to navigate not only enhance the user experience but also improve your SEO. Broken or complex navigation can lead to a high bounce rate, which will negatively affect your rankings.

Conducting a comprehensive sweep over your website is a must if you’re seeing widespread, drastic drops in your Google rankings. I have a longer guide on how to perform an SEO audit you can follow for this step. 

Step #7: Cleaning Up Your Content

I always say that “Content is King” as it is a crucial part of SEO. High-quality, relevant, and engaging content attracts users, keeps them on your site longer, and encourages other websites to link back to your site.

Here’s how to effectively clean up and optimize your content:

• Update Out-of-Date Content. The world moves faster than you think, and what was relevant three years ago may no longer be accurate. Regularly review your content and update any of the old or outdated information. This could involve updating facts and figures, adding new sections, or even rewriting entire posts.
• Eliminate ‘Thin’ Content or pages with little relevant content, which can relatively impact your rankings. Enhance such pages by adding more valuable information, or consider consolidating them with similar content, if applicable.
• Improve Content Quality. High-quality, engaging content is rewarded by search engines. Make sure your content provides valuable insights, is well-written, and appeals to your target audience.
• Add or Refresh Internal Links. Updating your content also provides an opportunity to refresh your internal linking strategy. Make sure your content links to other relevant pages on your site to enhance navigation and user experience.

Cleaning up your content not only enhances the value of your existing pages but can also have the added benefit of increasing user engagement. 

Remember, your content is the foundation of your website, and keeping it clean and well-maintained is key to success.

Step #8: Look for Manual Penalties

Checking for manual penalties involves verifying whether your website has been penalized by a human reviewer at Google. Google issues manual penalties when it finds that a site doesn’t comply with its quality guidelines.

Here’s how to check for and deal with such penalties:

• Use Google Search Console to investigate. Under the “Security & Manual Actions” category in the left-side menu, click on “Manual Actions”. If Google has taken any manual action against your site, it will be listed here as the reasons for the action.
• Understand the Type of Penalty given. The manual action report will describe the nature of the penalty. Common examples include “Unnatural links to your site” or “Thin content with little or no added value”. The report will often provide examples or identify pages where the violation occurred.
• Take Corrective Actions once you figure out the penalty – then the next step is to correct violations. If it’s related to unnatural links, you might need to remove or disavow these links. If it’s thin content, improving the quality and uniqueness of the content might be necessary.
• Re-submit Your Site for Indexing. After you have rectified the issues causing the manual penalty, you can file a reconsideration request through Google Search Console. In this request, explain the steps you’ve taken to correct the violations. Google will review your website and the penalty will be lifted if they’re satisfied with the changes made.

Bear in mind that just because your site has experienced a drop in rankings doesn’t necessarily mean it has been hit with a manual penalty. This step should be considered if you have exhausted other possibilities and haven’t seen any improvements or if you directly receive a notification from Google. Manual penalties are generally infrequent, but serious, and quick action is necessary if you receive one.

Key Takeaway

If you’ve seen a sudden drop in your SEO keyword rankings, it’s a call to action. Recovering from a Google rankings drop requires a strategic approach. Through these steps, you can regain (or even improve) your standings in the SERPs, up the quality of your site, and better your SEO strategy for future algorithm updates.

Remember, recovery may take time, but with patience, consistent monitoring, and methodical effort, your rankings can return to their first-page ranking. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, so keep striving for quality and relevance, as these are always rewarded in the long term.

The post Reclaiming Your Google Rankings: An 8-Step Strategy appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

“Link juice” is slang in the search engine optimization (SEO) world for how authority and value we get from any external link (also known as backlinks) pointing to our websites. They are essential to ranking your website since they have an impact on your visibility and reach on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Understanding what affects how much link juice you get from every backlink is crucial—this understanding will help you get the most link juice from the least amount of effort. 

In this article, we’ll go in-depth on how to get high-quality link juice for the most important pages on your website. 

What Determines Link Juice?

A website effectively transfers some of its authority, trustworthiness, and ranking power to the connected page when it connects to another one. Search engines use this flow of link equity, also known as link juice, to evaluate the significance and relevance of a webpage.

In short: the more links your pages get, the more Google thinks your page is valuable and worth promoting.

In simpler terms, Google sees any link-back to your website as a vote of confidence. It’s as if other websites are saying, “Hey, this page is pretty informative and useful. Users will benefit from seeing this page.”

But not all links are made the same. If you want links that provide high-quality juice, then you have to know where it comes from. 

Link Relevance

Link relevance is a key element in assessing links. Backlinks that are coming from websites that are in the same industry as yours (or are in some way related to what your website provides) are considered more valuable than any other random website link. 

The more relevant they are, the more Google is pushed to acknowledge your website’s content is reliable and worthwhile. 

So, it is essential to concentrate on building links from sources that are, in some way, relevant to the pages you want to boost. 

You can determine the link’s relevance by the website’s industry, of course. But aside from that, you should look at their domain authority. 

Link-building efforts reap the most rewards when they come from a website that has a high domain authority. 

We use tools like Mozbar from Moz and Backlink profile from Ahrefs to quickly get the domain and page authority of websites. These also show us other backlink data we need to consider in our link-building strategy.

I highly recommend focusing your efforts on websites that have a domain authority of at least 25. Anything less than that won’t give enough link juice, in my experience. The more authoritative the other website is, the more links built will raise the authority of your website. 

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that’s clickable and highlighted when you create a hyperlink. The anchor text you use for your links gives context regarding the linked page to both users and search engines.

Striking a balance between optimization and naturalness is crucial, too, when it comes to anchor text. You can learn how to do that in my guide on how to effectively use anchor text for SEO.

But to summarize my points from that guide: the anchor text you use needs to give a crystal-clear explanation of what people will find when they click on your link.

Descriptive and keyword-rich anchor text would show search engines that the information is very, very important to the given topic. But of course, the anchor text you use and the page you’re linking to have to be related.

For example, if I wanted to make a guest post on a gardening website, and link back to my page on organic gardening, I can use anchor text like “best organic gardening tips,” or “organic gardening supplies,” depending on what my guest post is about, and what content my page has. 

However, try to avoid over-optimized anchor text. I don’t recommend keyword stuffing, or being repetitive in your anchor text. Otherwise, it raises red flags with Google—and puts you at risk for penalization. 

Instead, put your focus on making anchor text that offers a seamless and user-friendly experience.

Link Quantity & Quality

When it comes to link building, it’s quality over quantity. Just one backlink from a trustworthy, high domain authority site within your industry will give your website more link juice than 10 spammy backlinks from random websites.

Take this backlink one of our recent articles got from SERoundtable, for example. This provides a ton of link juice. 

Start by locating reputable websites in your niche with high domain authority and a proven track record. The next step is outreach. Approach them with collaborative efforts like guest blogging, expert interviews, or featured pieces to build connections from these sites.

That said, the quantity of backlinks does have some significance in the eyes of Google. I just don’t recommend focusing on quantity alone, as it does not always benefit your page rankings. 

But when it comes down to it, you have to consider: would it be more cost-efficient to focus your outreach towards 10 websites with good domain authority, which are more likely to respond positively—or spend weeks trying to contact a high domain authority website just for a slight chance at one or two backlinks?

You need to be smart with how you approach this. Focus on a balance between quantity and quality to get the best possible ROI. If possible, I recommend hitting a varied backlink profile. In my experience, it’s the most natural-looking to Google and still boosts your rankings.

Lastly, you should always maintain regular monitoring and analysis of the links that are pointing toward your website. This is essential in helping you spot any spammy or low-quality links, which you can quickly disavow before they harm your rankings. 

Why is High-Quality Link Juice Essential?

On-page and technical SEO is foundational to your page’s performance—but off-page SEO (a.k.a, your backlinks) is what sets your page apart from the thousands of other similarly-optimized pages out there. That’s why getting high-quality backlinks to gain the most link juice possible for your pages is essential.

Once you get that, it provides a ton of benefits SEO-wise, such as:

Improved Search Engine Rankings 

No matter what industry you’re in, or niche you’re targeting, there will always be other websites competing for the same keywords. 

If every page competing for the same keyword had all things equal in terms of site speed and usability, content, and on-page optimizations, what would make Google consider your page to be better than the rest?

The answer is your backlinks. It’s the one way you can be competitive in your SEO. The more backlinks that give great link juice to your pages, the more likely they’re going to be ranking high on the SERPs. 

Remember that several factors go into your website’s rank—link juice is just one piece of the puzzle. But it is a very important piece you should not forget.

Increased Organic Traffic

With improved rankings, increased organic traffic tends to follow. This is expected because a majority of people only really look at the first page of the SERPs—maybe the second page, sometimes. So higher rankings equals higher chances that people see your stuff.

But aside from that, good backlinks also serve as another funnel for traffic toward your website. For example, if an article on say, Healthline, links to one of your articles, or links your supplements or other health-related products that you sell, you can bet that many of their readers will click on that link. 

High-quality backlinks overall increase the likelihood that visitors will explore your website, read your content, and engage with your business.

Faster Indexing and Crawling

The visibility and availability of your pages in SERPs are determined by the crawling and indexing activities of search engine crawlers (like Google’s Googlebot).

You can improve how quickly your new pages are indexed, and even how frequently your existing pages are crawled by continuously building links from reputable and authoritative websites.

Crawlers look at all of the content on each page, including the links in them, and where they lead to. So if many websites are pointing towards your pages, then these pages are more likely to start appearing in search results substantially faster than if there were no links at all. 

It’s important to keep in mind that crawlers will scan and index your content more frequently if they keep seeing other websites and pages linking back to you.  

How to Get High Quality Link Juice

It all comes down to the quality of the external links your website has. You can get high-quality link juice if you focus on these three things: your content, how your content is presented, and your outreach strategy.

Content is Key

Focus on producing link-worthy content as the cornerstone of your link-building strategy. The better your content is, the more likely people will read it—and reference it in their writing. 

To make this happen, you need to publish educational, worthwhile, and captivating material that appeals to and answers the needs of your audience. 

Google themselves even makes it a point to only reward content that they consider helpful and valuable to users, which I and my team make it a point to do. I covered how to rank for Google’s Helpful Content update in a different guide if you’re interested in the strategy I use for my articles.

Incorporate Different Formats

There are now a bunch of other materials you can use to pad your articles, such as photos, infographics, report snapshots, videos, and more. 

Consider adding these visual elements in your posts when you can to grab your readers’ attention, and make your pages more visually appealing. 

Do what you can to make your content more engaging. The more engaging it is, the more likely users will read through the whole thing, and potentially link your page to their content or posts. 

Build Connections with Webmasters

I mentioned this point earlier, but I have to emphasize how important it is to do your outreach strategies right and build good connections with other webmasters. I have four backlink outreach strategies that my team uses in our work that you can try in your niche. 

Just as getting external links is important for your SEO, it’s important for others’ SEO as well. Google rewards articles and pages that contain external links, they may help search engines understand its topic and niche. Plus, they are valuable to users as they offer more information and resources. 

So reaching out to other industry leaders and reliable websites can result in a win-win relationship for you both. You get external links, they improve their page’s quality and user experience. 

Key Takeaway

For link building to be effective, high-quality link juice is essential. To generate that almighty link juice for your site, keep the strategies I just shared in mind. With the right balance and effort, you can get more and more link equity to boost the performance of your website. 

The post Link Juice 101: What it is, and How to Get High-Quality Link Juice appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

“Here is how to get 100% email open rate with a 100% response rate for your link building outreach email” – said no one ever. That’s because it is getting more and more difficult to even have webmasters open your outreach emails.

Here’s the thing – sending link building outreach emails is not just about blasting out to thousands of webmasters with the hope of at least 10% of them awarding your hard work with a link. The game of link building is not just about the numbers. It is also about the individual webmaster you are trying to close a link for.

You might use up the majority of your time prospecting websites and crafting emails when you’re working on outreach campaigns. And although these take a lot of effort to do, they’re not always the key to winning over webmasters.

Here are some mistakes you’re probably making right now:

You’re Not Using a Professional Email Address

This seems like a very basic thing to consider, but many link builders fail to see the importance of using an email address that is trustworthy. It’s crucial to note that when you’re reaching out to webmasters, you’re representing a brand – be it a blog, an organization, a business, or even yourself. 

This is why you have to present yourself in the best way possible. One way to do this is by having a professional email address for your outreach campaign. Don’t forget to switch out of the email address from the sasukeretsu02@gmail.com email address you’re using on gaming apps!

The best practice for doing email outreach campaigns for your brand is by using an official company email address. Alternatively, you can use a simple one that mentions your name if it’s not available for you. Just make sure that it’s accurate or else you’ll end up looking like a fraud.

Here’s an email one of my team members at SEO Hacker got from someone who wanted to guest post for this blog:

The email address is named “Muhammad S.” yet the person introduced his/herself as “Marina”. 

Wait, what?!

I scratched my eyes to try and clear it up but, yes that’s a Muhammad that turned into a Marina.

This is a small detail that largely impacts how webmasters see you and your credibility. Make sure that you have the appropriate and accurate name on your email so that you’re more likely to build solid partnerships with webmasters in return.

You’re Not Disclosing Your Affiliations

When you tap webmasters for the first time for a link building opportunity, it’s expected that you introduce yourself properly, and doing so shouldn’t be limited to stating your name. You have to let the webmasters know who you are, what you do, where you work, and which organization/s you’re affiliated with.

It can also help if you can share a bit of your experience in your industry and what you were able to accomplish. This might sound like a guide on writing a cover letter for a job application, but an email outreach campaign is actually quite similar to it in nature.

First, you have to let them know about you and then make them understand why they should work with you. This, again, adds a level of credibility to your email.

Here’s an email I received a few months back as an example: 

In the email above, he introduced himself, where he works, and what his role is in the company. He also gave a bit of background on the business which is pretty impressive, I might add. 

An email like this one is a good example of how to sell yourself and your brand. The link to their website, LinkedIn profile, and personalized email signature are all great addition. These are all ways for webmasters to know that you’re legit. 

For instance, if you’re someone who wants to guest post for a marketing-related blog, you have to lay down the information that would tell that you’re an expert in your industry. Otherwise, why would a webmaster let a stranger write something their loyal followers will read? 

You’re Not Addressing Webmasters by their First Name

This is what I find to be one of the most common link building email mistakes people make when reaching out to webmasters. I’ve been called “Hey”, “Dear”, and “Dude” way more than when I’m called by my first name. Considering I get a ton of link requests and content contribution requests daily, it gets a bit tiring to be the receiving end of these inconsiderate email blasts

Here’s another odd way someone addressed me in an email:

What can I say? Yep, I’m definitely not giving this bloke a link.

Addressing webmasters by their first name is a small gesture that shows that you did your assignment. That you researched the website and the people who run it. This isn’t even a hard task to manage if you’re reaching out to my blog. You can easily spot my name at the left-side corner of the blog page. 

When you don’t take the time to research thoroughly, it can also imply that you don’t fully understand the website and the content it needs to improve. This also means that you won’t be able to really add value to it which negates the point of forming a good partnership.

You’re Not Using a Creative Subject Line

When it comes to link outreach, you’d want to go for websites with good traffic and readership. Obviously, you won’t be the only one gunning for a backlink from these websites. There would be hundreds, if not thousands, of people reaching out for the same purpose. This makes the task of link outreach extremely competitive. 

When webmasters get dozens of outreach emails on a daily basis, there’s a huge likelihood that they won’t be able to read every single one of them. So, what do you need to do about this? The only option you have is to stand out. You can do this by making your subject line compelling enough to be noticed and clicked.

Webmasters are busy people so you have to be able to get your point across with just a few words. If you think that it’s too long, you’re probably right. So review and re-edit your email content until you are confident that a busy person would read it and understand it within 1 minute.

Oh, and don’t try to make your subject too clickbait-y, or else it’s just going to be misleading.

Here’s a subject line that blew my mind:

Aside from the fact that this person’s profile photo is of a South Korean celebrity, it also addresses two other mistakes: the name is obviously bogus and the subject line is out of this world.

Emails with subject lines like this go straight to my spam folder. I wonder how many people actually give these kinds of emails a link though? Probably zero.

Key Takeaway 

Outreach emails are still one of the best ways to get an in-content link. My team and I have sent many outreach emails to webmasters and have experienced phenomenal success over the years.

The success we have experienced is achieved by us taking the time to study each webmaster and how they communicate and craft the email with a lot of thought and care.

The quality of the emails being sent to webmasters can be affected by the simple things you probably don’t even think about. This could easily be the reason why you get frustrated thinking of what more you can do to make successful outreach campaigns. 

Next time you are about to hit that Send button, try to take a second look – not at the content but at how you package your message to the webmasters. Do you look and sound credible, trustworthy, and knowledgeable? If your answer is yes to all three, then you might just get your hard-earned link.

Have any link building outreach email tips you want to share? Comment down below and see what others think of them!

The post Link Building Email Mistakes You Might Be Sending To Webmasters appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

The past month has created a difference in the digital marketing industry wherein more and more businesses are realizing the importance of going digital because of its availability amidst the crisis. Us, as SEOs now have the responsibility to expand our knowledge of strategies and techniques that help us win the SEO game. 

That being said, link building is one of the foundational strategies that all SEOs must know and do. There are different facets to this strategy, but one is often undervalued or abused that it leads to problems in our SEO. I’m talking about anchor texts – a simple factor that all webmasters and SEOs know. But what is it about anchor texts that make them important to our overall SEO ventures?

What is Anchor Text?

It’s simply the highlighted, clickable text in a hyperlink, usually found inside the body of content of a webpage. You commonly see it as the underlined, blue words such as this one linking to our compilation of the best SEO tools for 2020

Here’s what it looks like in code:

Different Types of Anchor Texts

Anchor texts have different types to them that you must know for you to fully utilize them to help with your SEO

• Branded – This is the anchor text that uses your brand name. So, for us at SEO Hacker, this is what it would look like:
• Exact Match – This includes the target keyword for your page in the anchor text. If your keyword is “link building strategies”, that’s what the anchor text should be.
• Keyword Variations – Unlike exact match anchor texts, you use variations of your keywords as the anchor text. So, if you have a link going to a link building guide page, you might use “link building strategies and techniques” as the anchor text.
• Generic – This includes generic CTAs for anchor texts such as “click here” or “check us out”
• Bare Links – You simply use the URL of the page you’re linking to as the anchor text as well
• No Text – This happens when an image is linking to your page, but there’s no set alt text to serve as the anchor text.
• Alt Text – Unlike the “No text” type, you’ll be using the alt text of the image as the anchor text if the image is linking to a specific page.

Why Anchor Text is Important for SEO

Google and other search engines use the anchor text to understand the context of the linked page. So, through the link I made above regarding the best SEO tools for 2020, you can understand the link as me telling you as the user AND the search engines that the page I linked through will contain information on the best SEO tools for 2020.

It’s that simple yet it’s important as well. Take for example inbound links to your site from other websites. The anchor text helps search engine crawlers understand what your page or site is about and it also signals to them how other websites understand your site as well. Of course, you have limited control over how links to your site are built, most especially if you were not the one who built those links, but what you can control are the internal links on your website. 

SEO Best Practices for Anchor Text

Be Concise and Comprehensive

Your anchor text shouldn’t encompass a whole sentence. The best anchor texts are the ones that can fully express what the linked page is all about in just a few words. Additionally, using a whole sentence as your anchor text is also disruptive for the users that see it. Some questions you should remember when creating a concise and comprehensive anchor text:

• How do I express what the linked page is all about?
• How do I summarize it to a few words?

Keyword Density

We all know about the Penguin update. They cracked down on websites that used spammy link building tactics, one of which is keyword-stuffed anchor texts. So, it’s important for you as a webmaster or SEO to decide on how you can incorporate keywords into the anchor text without it seeming unnatural and spammy.

My recommendation is to just describe the linked page – plain and simple. If the linked page’s content is properly optimized, you won’t have to worry about stuffing keywords in the anchor texts of the links you build since the keyword is already the topic of the linked page. This make it look more natural and safe. This also applies to internal links since the repeated use of the same anchor text inside a website can also look a bit spammy for Google.

Relevance

Lastly, make sure your anchor texts are relevant to the linked page. Don’t use an unrelated anchor text for linking since this could possibly affect your SEO. If you’re linking to a page about SEO, don’t use a random anchor text such as “cars for sale”. Even if the page contains a small part about how SEO can help sell cars online, the anchor text is misleading and irrelevant to the whole context at best.

Link relevancy is also a factor considered by search engines nowadays. HOW related is the linked page to the source page and how does the anchor text express that correlation? An extremely relevant link with a great anchor text can improve your SEO by leaps and bounds. Let’s use the example above. Using “cars for sale” as your link’s anchor text is bad, but changing it to “SEO helps sell cars online” is the better way of manipulating the link. But do remember, this will only work if the link you created is relevant to the source page it’s coming from. So, using “SEO helps sell cars online” as an anchor text, the content where the link is located should be talking about how to sell cars online or any other related topics.

Key Takeaway

Anchor texts seem simple enough, but there are a lot of facets you have to consider to take advantage of its capability to improve your SEO efforts. SEO necessitates constant improvement and innovation – without these, you’ll have a hard time staying on the first page for a long time. Noticing how important small details are is one of the greatest ways for us to come up with innovative ideas to test out. What about you? Do you have experience with the improper or proper optimization of anchor texts? Comment it down below!

The post How to Effectively Use Anchor Texts for Your SEO appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Link building involves different tactics that involve the same thing – acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites to boost your own website’s authority in the eyes of the search engines. However, there’s only one tactic for us to do when we experience lost or broken backlinks – Link Reclamation. It sounds intimidating but it’s one of the most effective tactics we do when we want to improve our backlink profile in the least amount of time. Before we get into the intricacies of link reclamation, what exactly is link reclamation?

What Is Link Reclamation?

Link reclamation is the act of finding lost & broken links and taking steps to fix and reclaim them. Links being lost or broken happens in a variety of ways. Some of them may include:

• The webmaster or author removes the link
• The webmaster removes the page linking to your website (404 error)

Those 2 are the major ways for links to become lost or broken, but there are also semi-common occurrences such as the webmaster redirect the linking page to a different page. 

These reasons are especially directed to external links that we need to reclaim. Meanwhile, internal links are a lot easier to fix and reclaim since we usually have direct access to the site it’s located in.

Our responsibility as SEOs is to properly monitor the status of our hard-earned backlinks and make sure they’re up and running. It’s also important for us to remember that before we even get to fixing the lost and broken links, we first need to understand why they were broken or lost in the first place. If we don’t understand the reason, fixing it will be a lot harder.

Before we get into reclaiming broken and lost links from other websites, let’s start first with internal link reclamation. 

Internal Link Reclamation

Aside from optimizing your website’s internal linking structure, reclaiming broken internal links allows you to better serve the users that enter your website. So you always have to be wary of the changes you make to the sites you handle since they could possibly affect your internal links. 

Looking for Broken Internal Links

Finding broken links is easy enough since there are a variety of tools that have this feature. Our go-to tool for finding broken links inside the site we handle is ScreamingFrog since we’ve already relied on this tool for many years and it’s still one of the best crawling tools we’ve tried. 

Here’s how you can do it:

• Crawl the website
• After the crawl is finished, click on “Client Error (4xx)” on the right sidebar
• Click on a 404 page in the list 
• Click the “Inlinks” tab at the lowest part of the ScreamingFrog client
• You can now see the pages linking to your 404 pages. The “From” contains the linking pages while the “To” contains the 404 page

Fix The Links

You can do one of three things to fix your broken link:

• Update the link
• Replace the link
• Remove the link

It’s up to your discretion which of the three you should do to fix the broken link.

External Link Reclamation

Finding and fixing broken external links is important for your site since you can reclaim the lost link value and consequently improve your backlink profile as well. Much like finding broken internal links, there are also a variety of tools available in the market that have the feature of finding broken and lost backlinks. The best tool we’ve used for this specific task is Ahrefs.

Looking for Broken and Lost Backlinks

Finding these broken backlinks is easy enough since this is one of the primary features of Ahrefs’ site explorer. You can also export it to a CSV file for easier organization and viewing.

Through tools like Ahrefs, you already have a list of lost and broken backlinks. The difficult part here is reaching out to the webmaster and asking them to fix the link. 

Fixing Lost and Broken Backlinks

Since you’ve collated your website’s broken backlinks, you now need to reach out to the webmaster of the specific website and ask them to fix the broken link. Since there’s a possibility that you’ve reached out to this webmaster before for link building purposes, you’ve already established a connection with them which you can use to your advantage. To get you started, here’s an email template I use. 

Hi [Webmaster Name],

I hope you’re doing well.

I’m reaching out again since I noticed that one of the links that you had in this blog post [link to blog post] that pointed to my website disappeared. I really think that my post that you previously linked to can be of immense help to your users, providing them with additional information and better understanding of [topic of the blog post]. 

Awesome blog post! Looking forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,

That’s it. A short and sweet email that effectively communicates the problem and gives the webmaster everything they need. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they’ll reply immediately, but it does get the ball rolling

Reclaiming broken and lost backlinks is one of the best ways for you to improve your website’s backlink profile it also helps you with your SEO and rankings. 

Key Takeaway

Link reclamation is one of the best ways my team provides high-quality links to our clients. This is especially true if the client’s domain age is relatively high already and has a history of having links from different domains. You can never underestimate the effects of link reclamation since it’s one of the easiest and (sometimes) fastest ways to get high-quality backlinks. Do you have any questions? Comment them down below!

The post How to Reclaim Lost Backlinks Easily and Effectively appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

What is HARO, and why should I use it for my SEO?

Quick Answer: Help a Reporter Out or HARO is an online PR platform that is used by journalists and bloggers from popular websites to connect with sources to help out with their content. This, in turn, allows sources to get valuable media coverage from high traffic websites that are great for branding and SEO.

Overview

HARO first started out as a small Facebook group back in 2008 and has now grown to more than 800,000 sources and 55,000 verified journalists and bloggers.

For a journalist or blogger to use HARO, their website must have an Alexa ranking of one million or less. This ensures that all websites are all high-quality which means for us sources, a gold mine of opportunities.

Using HARO to build your authority online is not rocket science, or that’s what you think. The first few steps are fairly easy but it gets a lot more difficult.

• How to Create a HARO Account
• Responding to HARO queries
• How to Write the Perfect HARO pitch
• Sample HARO Pitch Template
• How do you know your answer in HARO is accepted?
• How much does HARO cost?
• SEO Benefits of HARO
• Key Takeaway

How to Create a HARO Account

1. Register as a Source

Creating an account on HARO is easy and can be done in a few steps. All you need to do is go to helpareporter.com and click on the I’m a Source button. It will redirect you to a page where you could see an overview of how HARO works. Click on “Sign Up” on the navigation bar and fill-up the form with the required details. You should receive an email a few minutes after you register to verify your account.

2. Select your HARO preferences

After verifying your account, you can now log-in. HARO’s user interface is really simple and easy to navigate. In the dashboard, you will see your account details and fill up some missing information or update your account.

If you scroll down you will see the HARO Preferences. This is where you select from what industry you want to receive queries from. If you select Master HARO, you will receive all queries from all industries. I usually select Master HARO so I could look for opportunities not only for SEO Hacker but also for our clients.

3. Receive HARO Queries Daily

Once you’ve set up your account, you will start receiving emails from HARO the next day. HARO will send you three emails: one for the morning, afternoon, and evening edition. HARO sends out these emails at 5:35 a.m., 12:35 p.m. and 5:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time respectively. 

Each email contains different queries so be sure to check each of them for opportunities.

A HARO query would look like this:

Responding to HARO Queries

Once you’ve found the perfect HARO query you can answer, here’s what you need to do.

There are two ways to send your answer to a journalist. 

First is through the HARO dashboard under “My Pitches”.

The second is by sending a direct email to the Reporter email.

You can do either way but I prefer sending an email directly. The process is pretty similar. You copy and paste the Reporter’s anonymous email indicated in the query. And send your pitch! Whether you sent your pitch through direct email or the HARO dashboard, you could see all your pass pitches in your account.

How to Write the Perfect HARO Pitch

Now that we got the easy part out of the way, let’s now go to the difficult part: writing the perfect HARO pitch. Here are some tips:

1. Be concise and straight-forward

The reason why reporters and bloggers use this platform is to save time and if you waste their time by fluffing to give a long answer, your pitch will most likely go to the trash.

The key to answering HARO queries is to give as much information in the shortest answer possible. The safest length would be one to three paragraphs per pitch. Answer the question directly.

Journalists don’t have the time to read a 500-word answer. But of course, it would depend on the query. There will be some queries that have a minimum word count for the answer or the other way around. Try to mix and match your style of answering and see what would work best for you.

Here’s another tip: some of the HARO queries will have the website of the reporter shown. So if you want to know what’s the best way to answer a query, you could check out their site first and take a look at the previous posts that may come from HARO. An easy way to find them is by looking for roundup posts.

2. Mind the deadline

A lot of the people I see doing HARO is that they overlook the deadline journalists set. There is not really the best time to answer a query. Some reporters are active while some will check queries after the deadline.I usually send my pitches a few hours before the deadline but as I mentioned, it’s really a mix and match to look for what would work for you.

3. Do your research

If you’re answering HARO queries for the field you are expert in, that’s great and it’s much easier for you. But for others who are doing it for SEO for their clients or PR of their company, you would need to do your research to give a well-thought answer.

4. Make your background short and sweet

When sending a HARO pitch, make sure you give reporters a good idea of who you are and your expertise by providing a brief background of your experience and what you do. You could either add this at the beginning of your pitch or add a short bio at the end.

5. Include personal details and links

This is the reward that we get by helping these journalists and bloggers with their content. Reporters will most likely include a mention of your name, company, and link to your website if your answer is accepted. Make sure that you place your personal details such as your full name, email address, company name, website link, and social media links preferably Linkedin.

6. Include a link to your professional photo

Some websites will require this but some will not. It is always a good idea to include a link to your photo that they could use to display in the article. Take note that adding a photo as an attachment will not work on HARO so you have to use image hosting sites or a google drive link.

7. Don’t Sell

Unless the query is specifically about your story or your company, do not sell. HARO pitches are not sales pitches. Reporters are looking for information, not to hire your company or promote it on their website.

Sample HARO Pitch Template

Here’s a sample of a pitch I sent to a query asking for the best website auditing tools:

To: query-a4vr@helpareporter.net

Subject: Re: Best Website Audit Tool

There are a lot of website audit tools out in the market,  but we’ve consistently used a single website auditing (crawling) tool for a few years now. ScreamingFrog is mainly a crawling tool, but with its capability to display all the missing facets of my site’s pages, it’s at the top of my list of best website auditing tools.

ScreamingFrog’s feature of displaying what all SEOs need to see with regards to their site’s technical and onsite (sometimes off-site). Server status, missing meta tags, duplicate meta tags, missing alt text, and every little detail that we need to see is inside ScreamingFrog. I strongly recommend that SEOs or any webmasters that want to see a more holistic and technical view of their website and its specific points of improvement try out ScreamingFrog since it’s that useful of a tool.

Sean Si

Founder and CEO of SEO Hacker

https://seo-hacker.net/

https://twitter.com/SEO_Hacker

Photo link: https://i.postimg.cc/pV0w6GCb/Sean-Si.png

How do you know your answer in HARO is accepted?

After answering a query, most HARO answers would take weeks or months before it gets published. Some webmasters would send you emails that your answer has been accepted and ask you to promote the post when the post gets live. While some webmasters will not notify you at all. Here are two other ways to track your HARO answers.

1. My Pitches tab in HARO

This is the least reliable one as rarely use this to confirm that an answer will be used. Inside the HARO dashboard, go to the “My Pitches” tab and you will see the list of the previous pitches you’ve sent and their status is indicated beside it.

2. Google Alerts

As mentioned, there will be times you won’t be notified at all and another way to monitor your HARO pitches would be to set up Google Alerts. Journalists will always use your name or company’s name to credit you for the answer. All you have to do is open up Google Alerts and create an alert on your name and company. Google will send you updates once it sees that a website has a mention of your name.

How much does HARO cost?

The basic use of HARO is free for both Journalists and Sources. However, HARO offers three paid plans for additional features:

Free Plan

• Media opportunities sent to inbox three times a day
• Email Support

Standard Plan $19 per month

• Everything in the Basic Plan
• One keyword alert that allows you to filter queries
• One profile to be inserted in the pitches
• Text Alerts
• Online Search

Advanced Plan $49 per month

• Everything in the basic and standard plan
• Three keywords to filter queries
• Three profiles
• Head start: get HARO alerts as soon as they get approved by the HARO editorial team

Premium Plan $149 per month

• Everything in basic, standard, and advanced plan
• Unlimited keywords
• Unlimited profiles
• Phone and email support

SEO Benefits of HARO

Since HARO allows you to connect with webmasters from high-authority websites, this is a gold mine of opportunity for getting high-quality links and referral traffic. This is arguably one of the best ways to get natural backlinks. But do take note that not all websites will give out dofollow links and some won’t even give links and just mention your name.

The sample pitch template that I showed above was my answer to a query by Blurbpoint regarding the Best SEO Auditing Tools. Not only was my name mentioned but I also got a link back to the SEO-Hacker website and Twitter account.

It might take a long time to get your answers published but SEO is a long game anyway. I highly recommend that you take at least 30 minutes a day to sift through HARO emails and look for queries you can answer. While your answers are not guaranteed to be accepted, it is always a win when your answers get approved. You get a link from a website that is ranked at least 1 million in the Alexa Rankings. That’s really the only reward you need. And knowing these websites have good traffic flow, referral traffic is just a bonus.

Key Takeaway

What I love the most about HARO is the thought that instead of reaching out to these high authority websites, they are the ones who lay down the questions for us to answer. You get all these opportunities every day without having to pay. All you have to do is send out the best pitch that you can. But, you have to remember that these journalists and bloggers receive thousands of answers daily so you have to make each answer count.

Needless to say, it is a great way to get online publicity boosting your branding, authority, and of course SEO. It doesn’t matter whether your company is just starting out. The person with the best pitch wins.

The post The Ultimate HARO Guide for Brands and SEO appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

It’s already a well-accepted fact in the SEO industry that link building is one of the best tactics for improving a website’s organic search rankings. Link building as a tactic involves many strategies and executions that often overwhelm beginners. One such strategy that is vital to link building is prospecting. I’ve been building links to SEO Hacker for quite a while now and finding the perfect prospect for guest posting or simple outreach often still eludes me. But that’s not the case anymore.

Among the hundreds of tools available in the market, I’ve just found one of the best to assist in my link prospecting endeavors. Dibz is a tool created by the Four Dots company to help SEOs and webmasters around the world not waste their time looking for the perfect prospect. Here’s how they helped me maximize (and effectively lessen) the time I spend looking for prospects in the world wide web:

Dibz: One of the Best Link Prospecting Tools

Dibz is so easy to use. Even if you’re a beginner, you’ll know how to navigate the ins and outs of this tool in no time. Here’s how to start:

Log in first and you’ll automatically be taken to the New Search dashboard:

Click on the “Create a New Search” button and you’ll start with the specifics of creating your campaign. Fill up the name of your search, client (you should first create a client folder), campaign, and the keywords you wish to find prospects in. 

I used 3 keywords and followed their instructions on looking for guest blogging opportunities for the sake of giving a more accurate example.

After filling out all the campaign details, you need to choose the type of research that Dibz will run. This is one of the best parts of Dibz since they automate one of the link prospecting processes that eat up a lot of our time. Another point is that they have multiple types of research to choose from. To line it up with the keywords I’ve already put in, I’ll choose Guest Blogging. You have to remember that Dibz isn’t just for guest blogging. You have the choice to look for websites that accept blog comments, forums, reviews, donations, giveaways, and many more. This is what it looks like:

So, how does Dibz automate the link prospecting process? They do the searching for you. Historically, almost all SEOs I know that do their own link prospecting resort to the manual act of looking for them. But with Dibz, they do it for you – less hassle, less time wasted, greater prospects.

The last step before Dibz finds the best prospects for you is to specify the scope of your search. Which language do you want Dibz to look for, the Domain Extension (.au, .uk, .es, and many more), depth, and any additional data you need. Do note that the descriptions of the following parameters can be found on the right side of the page.

And there you have it! Dibz will begin displaying potential prospects which you can outreach to for guest blogging (and other opportunities)

How Dibz Helps Your Link Building

Links still remain as one of the top-ranking factors without a doubt. But the thing with link building today is that it takes too much time. You spend half of your time prospecting and half of it doing the content and outreach. And sometimes, I spend so much time filtering the search results in Google that it takes some of the time I need for other tasks. 

I’ve mentioned how Dibz helps make my link prospecting process more efficient and more effective and I’m going to mention it again because Dibz is THAT GREAT. What took me multiple hours just to find the best prospect now takes me around 10-20 mins to find them which enables me to focus more on producing better content and other tasks that I have to do.

I also love that you can spend a few credits and it will show you important metrics about the prospects without having to go to other tools and manually check them one by one. Dibz is simple, it’s fast, and it’s easy to use and in link-building, you’ll need all the automation that you can to run a better and more efficient campaign. 

Key Takeaway

If there’s one thing all SEOs and webmasters can agree on – it’s that we do a lot of strategies and processes that take up too much of our time. Tools like Dibz are important for us since they’re the ones doing the work for us which allows us to allot all our time and effort in other strategies/processes. When I find tools like Dibz, I immediately get excited since the anticipation to do more and create more is an exhilarating and, oftentimes, an enjoyable feeling. So, I recommend you try out Dibz for yourself and experience how great of a tool it is. Do you have any questions? Comment them down below!

The post Dibz Review: Advanced Link Prospecting and Link Building Tool appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

For those who are just starting out in Link Building and Outreach for SEO, I bet you have a world of questions in your mind. Knowing how to gauge the quality of your links is the most difficult part of the job. This is why it is important that you know where to begin in a successful outreach campaign.

The value of your link profile is just as good as its contribution to the strength of your site, if you think that the links you build are not passing on that value then you might as well just stop. Without the proper metrics that can help you make a quality report for your links, you would be hard-pressed to improve your link building tactics to win in SEO and to have a great outreach campaign.

Here are some points you need to consider in order to have a high enough score that can help you boost your efforts for this endeavor:

Relevancy of Links

This is a no-brainer, the links built should hold a form of relevance to the site you are building to. Of course, it is common sense that you should not build a link in sites for automotive parts if the nature of your business is a flower store. However, the relevance of the links runs deeper than this because relevance is determined by how many people treat your link as valuable.

To succeed in measuring link relevancy, you have to make sure that it would be a great representation of your client’s name. More than just the Domain and Page ratings of a site, you have to look at how people engage in it. Users should be as genuine as possible with their engagement and the more they are in number, the site’s relevance is further affirmed.

Clear and Concise Email Outreach

Email outreach is another effort that a Link Builder should master. Building links deal heavily with relationship-building as well, so this is essential when you want to succeed in your outreach campaign.

In fact, this is the most integral part. Some pointers that I will list below are already a given but it doesn’t hurt to have a reminder of it every once and a while, right?

1. Be courteous when sending outreach emails. Always address the webmaster using his/her first name.
2. Create sincere and eye-catching email subjects. As much as possible, craft a personalized email for every person you reach out to. They will appreciate it more when they feel that you want to have a sound collaboration with them, not just use them as a source for building links.
3. Properly negotiate with the webmaster. Aim to have the link placed above the fold.

Anchor Texts

Anchor texts are essential for your Link Building efforts. This should be well-optimized for the target keyword of the landing page. Be as descriptive as you want without it looking like spammy text. When it comes to this element, you would be well-served by this if you always make sure that your anchor text is topically relevant to your keyword and landing page. Also, avoid cannibalizing the keyword. If you have a perfectly placed contextual backlink, then strive to maintain its natural format. Stray away from anchor texts that would make readers do a double-take, thinking that the link is just there because it is a hard-sell advertisement for a product.

Site Authority

Websites you build links in should be authoritative. You can measure authoritativeness by using tracking tools like the Moz Domain and Page Authority browser extension. There is a certain level of influence that you have to detect when searching for sites that can help you in building links. You would know that it is authoritative if it is clean from malicious content.

This is why it is important to build on ethical sites. Low-quality directories, link farms, low-quality bookmarking sites, over-optimized forum comments, or Private Blog Networks (PBNs), should not be included in the list of sites you can build links to. It is also a clear indication that the site is eligible to help you build links when it has a healthy link profile. Avoid PBN links, spammy anchor texts, or dirty backlinks.

Chase New Referring Domains

Always try to get new referring domains. Have a tracker to help you see which sites you have been repeatedly building links in. Twice is already a red flag. Strive to have different domains for your links. Avoid recurring links from the same site to the same site. This will ensure that your links are diverse and therefore valuable enough to be a part of your link quality report.

Key Takeaway

A link quality report can help you achieve a successful outreach campaign.  Doing is the best way to succeed in Link Building since you are actively building relationships with other webmasters as well. Follow these simple steps and the results will be momentous. I wish you good luck in your campaign. Comment down below if you have stories to tell about your outreach campaign.

The post Things to Consider in Starting a Successful Outreach Campaign appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.