Top 10 Link Building Articles of 2016

How many blog posts have you read on link building over the past 12 months? I’ve read hundreds myself, written a couple and bookmarked a few for safekeeping. Today I have produced a list of my favourite 10 link building articles from 2015 that I recommend you read:

1. Why Link Building Matters

All the way back in February Andrea Lehr published a collaborative effort between BuzzStream and Fractl that reviewed the trends in outbound and inbound marketing techniques.

The conclusion: link building should still be an essential strategy in your digital efforts.

2. 11 Link Building Techniques

In March, Shane Barker published an article on 11 link building techniques that are currently working to improve your website in Google and increase traffic to your website.

This article published on SEMRush features broken link building, Brian Dean’s Skyscraper technique and turning mentions into backlinks among other strategies that are working for Shane and others this year, and likely to continue into 2016.

3. We’re Ignoring Google & It’s Working – Here’s Why

Back in May, Samuel Jefferies posted a bold blog on Inbound.org detailing the success he was having in the face of Google’s scaremongering tactics.

In his post, Samuel highlights that a number of the top bloggers within the industry are still succeeding with guest blogging and that authoritative websites still accept guest posts.

4. How to Find 50+ Email Addresses for Your Next Outreach Campaign

Can I sneak this one into a roundup of Link Building blog posts? Well blogger outreach is a big part of link building so I think this post from over the summer by Irma Hunkeler on Blue Grass is well worth the inclusion.

Want 50+ email addresses from your next piece of outreach work? Irma’s post gives great insight into how to accomplish that with a number of tools and strategies mentioned.

5. Getting the BIG Links – using creative campaigns to win in SEO

Back in July, Verve Search’s wonderful CEO and founder, Lisa Myers, published this post on getting creative to earn big links to yours or your clients’ website, after speaking at the Learn Inbound conference in Dublin, Ireland

This blog post includes Lisa’s 56-page slideshare presentation which is well worth clicking through.

6. Is Brand a Google Ranking Factor?

One of Rand Fishkin’s most popular Whiteboard Friday videos in 2015 has been his discussion on whether your brand is a ranking factor in Google. His Moz articles goes on to investigate the importance of branding and social signals when it comes to Google.

This piece of content is available in both video and transcript format, meaning you can listen to it, read it, or do both simultaneously.

7. The 5 Types of Content That Attract the Most Backlinks

A link building roundup post wouldn’t be complete without something from Neil Patel. This piece from August was one of my favourites from 2015 in which Neil explains on his blog, Quicksprout which content attracts the most backlinks.

Fortunately for me, he pointed out that people continue to love list posts, infographics and making an influencer look amazing.

8. Google’s Manual Actions Guide (& How To Fix Them)

Google penalties have been one of the big talking points over the past 12 months and further back. Some websites are still being hit by them and others have either been unsure or slow in recovering from them.

Shane Barker published a great guide on Search Engine People back in August detailing how to revoke and simply prevent your site from becoming the latest victim. This 11-point list includes unnatural links, spam, and thin content.

9. 5 Ways Successful SEOs Are Killing It With Topical Trust Flow

Topical Trust Flow is one of my favourite metrics for determining the quality of a link. If you’re building links on blogs solely for the purpose of ranking in Google, you can ignore this Majestic trust factor at your peril.

Jacob Hagberg wrote this awesome post in August where he gave five examples of SEOs who were doing an excellent job thanks to Trust Flow. This includes finding Twitter profiles of industry influencers and being able to spot the fakes, being able to check that your content marketing strategy is reaching and resonating with the right audience, and helping your website to become an authority in your niche.

10. How Much Do Keywords Still Matter?

Alp Mimaroglu’s blog post on Kissmetrics discussed the topic of keyword heavy anchor text links. A few years ago it used to be all about obtaining these type of links to drive traffic to your website from Google but the game has changed now.
The blog post goes on to talk about authoritative links, keyword placement and longtail keywords.

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How to Increase Domain Authority – Best 5 Methods

Domain authority not only helps you to rank for keywords but also makes your site appear authorities to search bots that mean whatever you write is considered important. And this indirectly means more followers, more sponsored post requests, and more value of your blog.

If you wanted to know how to increase your domain authority, this is where you will get it all.

In this post, I will explain all you need to take care while thinking to improve your DA. But before taking you for an information splash let me explain the core concept of domain authority.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a logarithmic score (ranging from 0-100) by Moz, which predicts how well a domain (web page) will rank in the search engine results. It is based on some other factors like Moz Rank, Moz Trust, social signals, linking root domains, total backlink profile, user experience, site loading time, traffic, etc.

Scoring a DA of 30 from 20 is easier than getting it to 90 from 80. Often authoritative sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and Google itself enjoy the ultimate DA score of 100. But that doesn’t mean sites with DA 50-90 are considered inferior.

It is a comparative value which means your site might see a degradation of domain authority if it is not updated or does not hold the quality signals true.

Domain Authority Vs Page Authority

Domain authority must not be confused with page authority that is a completely different metric. While domain authority gives you the ranking of the site as a whole, page authority is the score of that single page in question.

Domain authority is constant across the whole site, but page authority changes across sub-domains of the same root domain.

Domain Authority Factors

Domain authority shows how strong your site is as compared to others in SERPs rankings. It has nearly dozens of factors that are considered while calculating DA, so it is hard to influence DA with just concentrating on any one factor. Here is a complete guide on how to increase your domain authority. I have explained the factors that are the key players in deciding the DA of a site.

Domain authority is calculated on the basis of so many factors out of which the following play a vital role and is in our control:

Linking root domains: Domain Authority is highly dependent on the number of domains (or sites) linking to you. It means getting a 100 links from one domain in no better than getting 50 links from 50 different domains. It looks for how many sites are linking to your site and that indirectly helps to increase the value of your site.

Moz Rank: Mozrank of a website is based on its link profile and ranges from 0-10; the higher, the better. Mozrank emphasizes quality backlinks meaning a few link backs from high-quality sites is considered better than a large number of backlinks from poor quality sites.

Moz trust: Moztrust is like Moz rank but it focuses on your proximity with authority links. Moztrust checks how well you have connections and networks with trusted websites. If a website linking to you is being linked to any authority site you are benefitted.

Quality content: Quality content is the key to any rankings in the SEO world. When you write quality content, your tends to rank more, which means more people will be linking to it. This indirectly means a rise in your authority and ultimately in your DA.

Social signals: This one is also a factor related to increasing your site’s domain authority. By social signals, it means the total number of shares and likes your articles get on the social platform.

Search engine friendliness: With SEO, your site will appear in the SERP for search queries more frequently. This means more people will read it and thus your authority increases.

How To Increase Your Domain Authority?

Domain authority is essential in terms of having your search engine rankings. If you have a domain authority that is very less, say 10-20 you wouldn’t be ranking well for your focused keywords. In the same way having a better DA score can do well if you are looking for more authority and you rank for more terms. This indirectly means you get better monetization offers through paid posts.

If you want to increase domain authority, you need to keep the following points in mind.

#1. Earn links from more sites:

Link building is always considered wrong, but you can earn links for you. As “the number of root domains linking” is a major factor to boost your domain authority, try to get more and more sites linking to you.

Writing helpful content and case studies that help your audience can get you more backlinks than just writing random stuff. Here are 2 guides to earn organic backlinks to your site, the right way.

#2. Start marketing your content:

Content marketing is the new game in the blogging world. You need to market your content to increase its reach. The more eyes on your content, the more will it help the readers and hence more link backs, more social shares, and more authority. Read below guides to getting started in content marketing.

#3. Not only diversification, but you also need a clean link profile:

While having a variety of sites linking to you might seem lucrative at first, they always are not in good terms with standard search engine optimization practices. You need to put a check on spammy and very low-quality sites linking back to you. This also applies to the forums and community link backs that Google considers improper.

Do not indulge in improper SEO practices like buying links, site wide link ads, or linking from low-quality sites.

If at all you fall prey to negative SEO attack, and too many low-quality sites link to you, disavow them. You need to check regularly your Google Webmaster tool for seeing who is linking to you.

#4. Build a well-planned internal link structure:

Internal links are said to have occurred when a link in an article takes you to another related article on the same site. In other words, interlink all your posts to have better on page SEO and finally an improved domain authority.

Here are certain points to keep in mind while internal linking.

Use a variety of anchor texts. Do not overuse a given anchor text and do not use exact anchor texts.

Set an optimum number of links within a post.

While internal linking an article, beware you don’t interlink too many posts so that the number of links on a given page rises reasonably. Try to maintain a balance between your external links and internal links within a page.

#5. Write epic content and nothing less than that:

When you want to prove your authority, you need epic content that no one can beat. Epic content in the sense; content that provides value to the readers.

You need to write posts after reading that your reader might not wander anywhere else for the same problem. Avoid duplicate content issues. If you have a post that is somewhat similar to an existing one or is an updated version of it, use the rel="canonical" feature to point out search engines to the source of the article.

Use Google trends and Buzzsumo to find topics that are trendy and in demand. Then write a relevant and detailed post on it. If you cannot write on a topic that is new, simply take up any article that has good rankings but has chances of improvement and then apply Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique to rob him of his rankings.

The final say here is to prove your authority no matter what.

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7 Basic On Page SEO Tips For Blogspot Blogs

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most important thing to learn for best blogging experience. Without proper blog optimization, we can’t even dream to get impressive traffic from search engines. From past few days, I am getting too much request of newbie bloggers to share some On-Page SEO Tips. That’s why today I plan to mention all those On Page SEO tips which I already shared on my blog in my earlier posts. I’m sorry if you have read those posts before, but I need to grab attention of newbie bloggers who just start learning SEO for their blog. All those tips are must to know by every blogger.


So, let’s take a look on best On-page SEO Tips for Blogspot Blogs and if you have read them before then don’t ignore this post. May be you learn something new which you missed before because of any reason.

On Page Search Engine Optimization Tips For Blogspot

Below are the tips and tricks that will be beneficial for you to optimize your blog for Google and other search engines. Read them carefully and apply all of them on your blog to make your blog lovable and trust worthy for search engines.

#1 Custom Robots Header Tags

There are some settings for bloggers that they can personally do for their blogs to make their blogs for SEO friendly. Custom Robots Header Tags setting in one of them. It’ll be beneficial for you to use custom robots headers tags correctly. It’s easy to manage these settings.

#2 Custom Robots.txt

Search engine bots like Googlebot (Web Crawling Robot of Google) needs some guidelines on how they have to crawl and index our blog. We can prevent some non-important pages labels pages from indexing in Google to protect our blog from duplicate content issues

#3 Optimize Blog Post Titles

If you just started your blog on blogger’s default template, then definitely you’ll not be aware with this fact that your post titles are not properly optimized for search engines. You need to do some editing in your blog template to make your post titles properly optimized. You will see a noticeable change in organic traffic of your blog after making this change.

#4 Image Optimization

You may definitely notice relevant images between the posts on many blogs. Images not only enhance the look of our content, but it also plays an important role to optimize our blog posts. If we make effective use of images in our blog posts, then we can attain extra traffic from search engines.

#5 Internal Linking SEO

Many bloggers fail to optimize their internal links or even they don’t link their posts to each other internally. This is really a big mistake that we must avoid. Internal linking not only increases our blog page views but also help our posts to rank well in search engines. If you are also doing the same mistake, then you must need some tips to optimize your internal links.

#6 Search Engine Submission

When we are ready with our blog optimization, then we need to submit our blog in Google’s webmaster tool. Verifying and submitting our blog in Google webmaster tool helps it to get indexed in Google super fast. It also tells about our blog issues like broken links, HTML improvements etc that we must try to resolve. We just need to verify our blog ownership and submit a sitemap. That’s it. If you have not added your blog GWT, then I recommend you to read below tutorial.

#7 Improve Your Blog Load Time

If your blog takes lot of time, then visitors will go back and never come back again. It will increase bounce rate of your blog and you’ll lose your valuable traffic. Search engines give more value to fast loading blogs because they want to build best user experience. That’s why it’s very important to optimize blog loading time. I have shared some best tips that can help you to enhance your blog’s loading speed.

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9 Killer Blogspot SEO Tips For bloggers

We already had enough conversation about BlogSpot or WordPress and for one reason I don’t like BlogSpot much is because the limitation of optimizing it for search engine. There are many BlogSpot SEO guides that you will find on Internet, and many of them is related to template editing and all, but in WordPress, plugins make it easier to optimize your blog.

Anyhow, I’m not here to disappoint my BlogSpot friends. Instead, I will be sharing some cool BlogSpot SEO tips which will help you to get better ranking. Blog-Spot being a free Blogging platform, it’s always a preferred platform to start Blogging and learn the basics. If you have not created a Blog, here is a quick guide on How to create a Free blog on BlogSpot.

Google Blogger is free and easy to use web publishing tool. Many bloggers initially use Blogger and then Migrate to WordPress complaining about the lack of official templates, post SEO friendliness , plugins etc., We have already discussed this in our previous post With little effort we can make Blogger posts really SEO friendly and an effective free medium for online business . So here I have collected some search engine optimization (SEO) tips for Blogspot blogs arranged in no order .

BlogSpot SEO: Useful Tips and Tricks

When we talk about SEO, very first thing which you need to keep in mind is: We can control on site and off site SEO. On Page SEO is covered by you which includes article quality, how well it’s optimized for Keyword and meta value for that article. No need, to feel furious or lost with above SEO terminology, as below mentioned guide will help you to learn every basic and make your Blogger blog more search engine friendly.

Format Blogger post URL link

Permalink plays a great role in search engine ranking of your post. There are few rules which everyone should follow for Blogspot permalinks:

Keep the number of characters in post title to 50

Remove Stop words from permalink (Ex: A, an, the)

While writing a blog post, you have an option to edit the permalink. Simply use it to edit your permalink and remove the stop words. A good idea is just to use Keywords in your permalink. (Don’t make it look spammy). While writing the blog post, you get the option in your right panel to keep it automatic permalink or manual permalink. Simply select manual permalink and edit it according to your wish. Check this screenshot for example:

Maintain the keyword density

Keyword density is an important aspect for better ranking. Too less will lead to less ranking and stuffing your Keyword will lead to over optimization. I usually maintain a ratio of 2%/post. Though, you can pick keyword density for your Blogpost SEO, account to one which works for you. Publish articles in relevance to post title and include necessary keywords in the post. Never stuff keywords to manipulate search engines. But after finish you can analyze the whole post to find out suitable locations where the keywords can be safely inserted without distracting readers .

Blogspot proper labels and related posts

Label adds to the keyword density of the post. Labels should be widened rather than putting them into the single narrow category.I will explain this point by an example. Consider a situation when you are posting about Google chrome and putting them into label Windows software’s or browser. Here you will miss keywords like Chrome browser, Google chrome, etc. which would otherwise add to the keyword density of the whole post. Labels also affect related posts widgets in Blogger.And if there are so many posts tagged with similar labels , it would affect the arrangement of articles in related posts.

Format Blogger post title

When we talk about BlogSpot SEO, post title plays a major role. Blogger post title is usually followed by home page title. Have a look at the image shown below.

blogger-post-title Here the post title should be “city of (long-distance ) Love! “. But the title is included in the home page title ” Still in Berlin “, and this would harm the SEO friendliness of the article title. Here is how to fix this. Go to Blogger edit HTML > find out code section

title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title>

and replace it with

<b:if cond= 'data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>

<title><data:blog.title/></title>

<b:else/>

<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>

</b:if>

Now the individual pages will have post title itself.

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