SEO Resource Link Building

Resource Link Building

Resource link building is a strategy where digital marketers find a relevant site that contains a page where their resource would add value and pursue a link there. Sites are considered relevant when placing the resource link there would make sense and would actually provide value to the audience of that site.

 

Resource link building generally involves four steps:

  1. Performing a resource audit. Make sure that you have something worthy to be linked, such as case studies and guides, scientific papers, customer surveys, free tools, calculators, checklists, aggregated lists, FAQ content, and the like.
  2. Finding resource link opportunities. Do a Google search to know what phrases people in your niche or industry are researching/
  3. Prioritizing resource link building opportunities. Check site status (live or dead), external links (less than 100 outbound links is best), site authority metrics, contact information, industry/topic relevance, and broken links on pages.
  4. Emailing opportunities. Contact webmasters or site owners. Use templates to save time and improve outreach accuracy.
    1. Email No. 1 – Compliment the webmaster/owner on the page content and let them know of any broken links. Ask if they are still updating the content with good resources. Don’t ask for a link yet.
    2. Email No. 2 – If the webmaster doesn’t reply, send a follow-up email.
    3. Email No. 3 – Once the webmaster or site owner gives a positive response, email them back with the resource information (broken links and your recommended resource links, your own link included, with an explanation about why these would be helpful or relevant to the webmaster’s site).

Resource Link building as an outreach tactic that involves a content-focused strategy that highlights linking opportunities within an article or blog post. The process includes looking for internal references which the webmaster can use as informational links and add external links to help readers learn more about the topic. Resource Link building is the process of getting your website included as one of the resources within an article or blog post. This type of link building strategy is widely used by Digital Marketers to gather .EDU, .GOV & .ORG domains. Resource link building, in my opinion, is the best white-hat strategy because is appeals to the needs of the users and helps webmaster learn more about internal links as well as the importance of informational links.

 

Definition

Resource link building is a link building strategy that involves contacting webmasters and helping them with a resource or informational links. This gives webmasters a very good opportunity to apply internal links that pass relevance and feature external informational links from authority websites. The intent is to help visitors learn more about a topic by adding as much information as possible. SEO companies struggle with link building so we decided to share some Search Engine Optimization insight to make the web great again!

 

Prospecting:

This step involves finding the right type of websites that match your client’s industry. You will need to have a good understanding of your client’s keywords and goals in order for resource link building to be effective. Let’s say you have a client in the car rental industry and the focus keyword is simply “car rental”. You will need to find the best websites that will give you the most value in terms of traffic and link juice.

 

Search the best websites that we can find on Google using neutral search and Old school Search Operators. (Google.com/ncr)

 

In this test, you will see .EDU domains since the Search Operator indicated we wanted to look for the Keyword: “car rental” and we requested Google to show us domains that contain .EDU within the URLs. This cuts down the prospecting time since the Google Search Engine Results Page showed us EDU domains that already have the word car rental. Collect the URLs and save them in a spreadsheet then move on to the next step.

Link Building Tools

Run each website using your SEO tools. (Nothing new in this section just regular website auditing tools)Here’s a short list of tools we use for link building and checking websites:

Google – Duplicate check by copying parts of the content and pasting them into Google Search using quotes  “content” – which translates to exact match.

 

 

Copyscape and Siteliner quick duplicate check on and off page.

Majestic – Trust and Citation flow, backlink check & link velocity

MOZ – for the ever popular none Google metric Domain Authority / Page Authority – Not a ranking factor but gives us clues how strong a website is according to MOZ.

Ahrefs – For Anchor cloud, backlinks and content ideas.

Screaming Frog – Meta Data, Analytics, Response codes, header and so much more.

Here’s a quick link to Search Operators.

Assuming you already have a list of 10 or more websites we then qualify them further by taking a deeper look at the indexed pages.

Using the site search function via site:domain.com + keyword allows you to look at all pages that have your desired keyword.

 

You can now see linking opportunities but we want to make this better and it really doesn’t make any sense to target a blog post from 2009. Let’s Use Tools to get results according to freshness.

 

Now that you have a very good target page, you will need to appeal to the webmaster or site owner by influencing them to practice internal linking and adding authority links to help their visitors consume content better.

link building

Great! We managed to find resource opportunities. Now it is important to note that you will need to find internal resources first before you position your client’s website. Follow the old school link building rule and include another external but authoritative link. Make sure you execute a Site Search when looking for references internally.

 

Once this stage is complete you can now create your email template for outreach.

 

Outreach

Now the outreach part is simple. I may have touched some points in this post earlier but here it is in a nutshell.

Find contact information via About Us, Contact Us or Google the author names. You may also try viewing the source code and look for email or mailto information.

Template

Create a simple template that tells the recipient exactly what you want to do or tell them you noticed missing information that can be crucial when it comes to research.

Start and Edit this template:

Hello,

I’m a licensed “your title” / student researcher – I recently visited your site while researching for an article I’m working on “niche & geo target”.

This is a note for your webmaster, as I found resources on your site that visitors like me would surely appreciate.

It’s on this page: “target page goes here”

“Content Goes here” (Edited content using Word Processor with the links in place)
And while you’re updating your page, I included some further resources that could help people struggling with similar issues. I also updated the content a bit and made some corrections on misspelled words. <– Go the extra mile!

Thanks for your help and for providing great resources!

Best,
“your name”
Student / Researcher

Make sure you contact the right person and you can add other things you noticed like broken links and images to get more positive replies.

That’s Resource Link Building simplified. If you have any questions, leave a comment or contact us.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Google has always been pushing user experience as a must. You will often hear this from Google’s Webmaster Team Office Hangouts. John Meuller loves the line:”build for the user”. We strongly believe that User Experience is always affected by User Interface. Such is the focus of the Mobile-Friendly updated. Over the years Mobilegeddon had SEOs and Webmasters worry and we all patiently waited for a significant sign to make a move. Well Google made a couple of announcements and now we know that mobile-first index is there.

Google makes it easy for us to apply this new technology by making use of their API.

You may want to go through Search Console via Search Appearance >> AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages

You may also want to try using a Plugin for WordPress.

Google AMP

Going through Google is always the simplest way. Think about Data Highlighter and Tag manager.

Accelerated Mobile Pages allow users to consume content faster by loading only the content related elements. This way the page loads lightning fast and consumers get the best possible experience. This is very popular and you will even see AMP results utilized by popular News and Magazine sites.

seo amp

 

 

Mobile Instant Pages

Baidu Joins Google’s Campaign by Introducing Mobile Instant Pages. Both Companies have the same goal and activating MIP is almost similar. You only need to login to your Baidu Webmaster Tools. Baidu announced their MIP is near 100% completion. This will ensure there are better standards and will force many webmasters to comply.

Baidu MIP

This is a positive thing, I support this idea and will look for opportunities to help improve your experience.

Be the first to convert your website to AMP ready content. By contacting us today.

We noticed trends and confirmed the latest Google updates this year.

Here are the updates that matter in 2017.

  1. Penguin (link types)
  2. Mobile-First Index
  3. Panda (Content)

Let’s start with SERP changes that affected SERPs early this year.

PenguinGoogle Penguin Update

The release caused a lot of buzz in the net since it was so subtle and the announcement to make it a part of the regular update. The impact is always less than 0.3% off all websites every role out. But when something that we always anticipated makes a barely noticeable impact then we have cause to worry. SEOs around the globe have many different theories and stories revolving around Penguin. Here’s the truth based on impact. The Penguin 4 release was a start of the algorithm being absorbed by the core algorithm that updates frequently. The scare here would be the word frequently. Until 2017 all Penguin updates are announced and confirmed afterwards. This time since it will be part of the regular update, no announcements, no confirmation. That my friends is the biggest fear of SEOs.

We all know that Penguin deals with spammy links and this time they targeted Website that have a lot of links from Public Blog Networks. We looked at agencies that use this as their primary link building method and suffered hits. So If the agency only has this link type then that means their clients only have these link types right? Right. The agency and their clients lost positions when this was rolled out. Lawyer sites, Dentist sites, plumbers from the United States and some parts in Asia were affected by this.

 

Focus on different methodologies and make use of diverse links.

To learn more about this please refer to Google Webmaster Guidelines.

John Mueller talks about this all the time. We are all constantly reminded to build for the users and avoid gaming Google.

How do you bounce back? A simple disavow? No! Gary Illyes answered RustyBrick’s question earlier about recovering from this the right way.

Devalue VS Demote

 

Mobile-First Index

Google has always been pushing for user experience and the primary component focus is mobile since mobile already On page seo has more traffic compared to desktop and tablet. For one year we all hear John Mueller talk about this during Office hangouts. He always reminded us to provide the best user experience and focus on it. Google historically wants to make the web great again. The Push for HTML 5, mobilegeddon, HTTPS and they did confirm that Speed is a ranking factor. Interstitials were given a fair warning when it comes to mobile, we all know this and SEO experts from SearchEngineland, SearchEnginejournal as well as SearchEngineRoundtable. There’s even a guide on how to do it right. Here’s what we know based on research and results:

  1. Sitespeed rules mobile – We’ve seen great results in mobile visibility by simply raising the site speed. This makes sense since the intent is to help improve the user experience.
  2. Usage of Rich Cards – since this technology is proprietary to mobile, websites that have this are able to get position zero. The best way to leverage technology to take the lead.
  3. Knowledge graph, Answer box are also affected by recent updates and we’ve seen Google experiment with Paid ads as well. This tells us to improve usage of the right type of Schema markup.

Panda

Content is for Ecommerce now more than ever. There’s a case study showing which ranking factors will help you leverage your products better than the competition all believe it or not content has many different playing fields that SEOs tend to overlook. Here are some insights for 2017 content improvement.

Readability as a metric is intended for users to absorb information better if not faster. You might want to look up different content formatting that includes bulleted formats, enhanced graphics and an old school metric Google’s Eye movement or now simply heat maps. Drop downs, summaries and split testing are all important to help educate your visitors and reduce bounce rate. Let’s not forget keeping content fresh and AMP.

Trust factors, social proof and site badges are the real rising stars of conversion and minimizing bounce rates. Ecommerce websites that show these really rake in the sales since having these present on your ecommerce site helps visitors decide to trust you instead of the cheap competition with no guarantee or identity. Customer reviews are a favorite and is also the secret to Amazon’s success.

Unique Selling or Value Proposition captures attention and brings conversion.

Write more your own product details or reviews, empower your customers to write their reviews and simply add more information on how easy it is to use the product, how it works and why people should buy them. You may also want to do product comparison.

Use high quality images and mark them up for search engines.­

google fred

Say Hello to Fred – Rumors went flying around forums as Google announced Fred.

Barry Schwartz was first to report this and immediately created posts and tweets to get to the bottom of this update.

This Algorithm update was first suspected to have strong significance with immediate drop in rankings based on PBN links. We then found out that this was intended to weed out Made for Adsense type landing pages that have irregular Ad placements or simply Ad heavy pages that don’t really answer queries. I remember declining Made for Adsense Websites back in 2008.

There are plenty of ways to get links, don’t stick with just one methodology.

For more insights about the future of SEO, follow Notimpo.com’s bloggers Jason, Bingo and Michael.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.