Links on the Internet form a relationship between pages and sites that are hugely important to both search engines and marketers. Search engines, like Google, use links to crawl the web, discover new pages, calculate the popularity of those pages, and also determine the relevancy of results to a searcher's query.
If you are new to link building, we highly recommend starting out with our Beginner’s Guide to SEO with Growing Popularity and Links.
While link building can be hugely beneficial for SEO, it's important to stay up-to-date on the latest practices. Below you'll find the most recent posts from the Moz Blog. In addition, we've selected a few quality resources that deserve particular attention.
The Beginner's Guide to Link Building : Everything you need to get started with link building.
The Professional’s Guide to SEO : Professional’s guide to link building and link earning tactics written by SEO expert Paddy Moogan.
Link Building Tactics : There are lots of ways to get links. This guide shows you tactics applicable to almost all websites.
The Rules of Link Building : You need links, but building bad ones can mean trouble. You need to know the rules!
Link Building: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Learn the basics of link building for absolute beginners, all in 10 minutes!
It's 9:30am and you've just started a pitch for a new SEO client. They're the curious type - wanting to know how search engines rank pages, why the changes you'll recommend will make an impact, where you learned to do SEO, and who you can list as good examples of your work. As you dive deeper into the requirements for the project, you arrive at the link building section. The client wants to kno...
We all like links from big sites right? Whether it's in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it's great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it's on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it's strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it's unlikely to have a great crawl rate.
Although you can easily find lists with 21, 66, 69, 75, 101 or even 131 link building strategies, numbered (link building) tip lists remain very popular. Not because these articles provide shocking new insights - most of the aforementioned mentioned lists mention pretty much the same tactics - but because they remind people of how work intensive the ongoing process of link building can be, and because they make people think due to their in-depth nature. "How can I use these tactics for our website?" "Which of the listed tactics are relevant for our company?" Or, even better, "What strategies would I have added to this list?"
"Reference worthy content" is a phrase you'll hear a lot in the SEO realm. The intent behind the statement is simple - build content that people will be likely to cite when they create works on the web. Parsing the motivations that inspire those citations, however, is anything but obvious. Tonight, I thought I'd try to list features that make content "reference worthy&q...
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Getting your website listed in the DMOZ directory in anything less than geologic time frames is next to impossible. Most SEOs submit their sites and then forget about ever getting listed. However, there is a way to guarantee that your site will be included in the DMOZ directory quickly: become a DMOZ editor for the category in which you have applied to have your website listed.
It seems every web developer's biggest concern, excluding keyword density/research, is finding new and innovative ways to create quality inbound links back to your website. While there is no easy-button to begin generating inbound links, there are certainly many abstract approaches and techniques a developer can utilize to make inbound link generation a bit less tedious.
I still have my first ever email account, a Hotmail account that's older than most of the kids on Digg nowadays. Today I logged in to retrieve a lost password and saw that I had over 600 new emails. All of them are spam, newsletters, shopping deals, etc--I rarely get "legit" emails sent to that account since the vast majority of my contacts know to reach me at my Gmail or SEOmoz email address. So it was with great amusement that I saw an email from 1/29/09 titled "Link Exchange Request" from some dude named Scott (not our Scott, don't worry). I've shared the email below:
As my Dad always says, "It's better to be on page 2 in the editorial than on page 7 as an advertisement." This advice has been the guiding principle when it comes to the public relations strategy at Voices.com. In fact, I've proven this to be so effective in public relations that I've applied it to SEO as well. How does the advice translate?
When it comes to finding links, since the dawn of SEO one constant piece of advice has been to look at your competitors links for opportunities. Unfortunately, this means wading through the muck in order to find the gems. How do you gather, organize and prioritize all of those links? Wouldn't it be nice to take a power-hose to all that mud and grime to more easily uncover the best prospects? It's not that difficult. Here's a step-by-step guide for doing just that!
There's a lot of debate in the web world, particularly in the SEO & marketing departments of mid-size and larger organizations, about whether or not to link out to other websites from their own. People are scared for a number of reasons; they worry that linking out could: Harm their reputation Damage their search engine rankings Cost them Pag...
Whenever outbound links are mentioned in an SEO environment, the response is usually negative. I have read recently on some blogs that it even casts a very negative shadow over outbound links, stating they could "harm your site's PageRank." I know this is simply referring to the old "bad neighbourhood," but I have wondered for a while now what the effect of outbound links are.
I wanted to establish if external links from Twitter hold any weighting. It is a well-known fact that Twitter uses rel = “no follow” on all external links, but do the search engines still cache these and consider them a vote?
Link baiting has been around for a fair while now, and we all know the basic concept is essentially driven by self interest, i.e., increasing website traffic for financial or personal gain.
One small step in any linkbuilding process that has been written about many times before is to ensure that you (/ your client) has links from all appropriate businesses that they actually have a real relationship with. In the SEO world, it'd be unthinkable to enter into a partnership without a few links between your sites, but in many industries, this happens. Beyond partnerships, what about all your suppliers and customers? This has been written about many times before - along with techniques for getting links from those suppliers (such as offering testimonials). What is harder to find is an easy reference list for who all the suppliers you should approach are.