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!
In my last post I explained why free stuff is link building gold, and in this update I'm giving you 99 actionable ways to gain links by giving stuff away. By the end you'll have a ton of link building ideas, some of which I hope will be new to you. This is a springboard for new ideas, so I hope this 99 can become many m...
When you start out in link building, almost everyone recommends to check out your competitors. And I agree: it is very important to know who you're dealing with in the SERPs. Many people additionally recommend to "get" all those links your competitors have built so far. However, this can be a potentially dangerous and rather inefficient approach to link building...
We're all a little tired of hearing 'content is king'. And it's increasingly difficult to make content stand out online. But a few companies are leading the way with their innovative use of data. There's the Guardian Datablog, Information is Beautiful and the ubiquitous OK Trends to name but a few. But sites like these are still in the minority. So there’s ample opportunity...
Training someone who doesn't know anything about SEO to link build, can be very challenging even for someone who is quite advanced in the industry. You have to know how to dumb things down, while still giving adequate information. You also need to make sure you don't overwhelm the person you are training. I've taken several approaches to this in the past and I wanted to go through a step-by-step of what works for me.
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
Guest blogging is a great way to build relevant links to your website from authoritative websites within your niche. Bloggers are always in need of content, and many will jump on an opportunity to add great content to their blog that their readers will enjoy. The most difficult part of using guest blogging as a link development strategy is the very first step - identifying guest post opportunities. From the head-smackingly simple to some lesser-known gems, below is a breakdown of the best strategies to find these opportunities.
Howdy Mozzers, I've been spending a couple of weeks this summer in the Distilled office looking at the way they do linkbait in order to write up a guide on it. Whilst researching and reading around what people had posted before, it became clear there were a handful of problems which kept cropping up why people were failing at linkbait. In this post, I hope to address some of the...
While link bait is frequently seen as more "fun", and it's definitely more creative, than doing things like guest blogging or or emailing people asking for links, it has its challenges. I wanted to share a few things I've learned about creating link bait from my experiences.
I find link prospecting to be one of the most time-consuming and challenging parts of link building. In order to build and maintain a natural link profile for your website, your prospecting activity needs to cover a wide range of opportunities and generate the right targets and leads for your project/campaign. So prospecting is usually pretty easy to start off with - run a few Google searches a...
I'm sitting on an air mattress in my new unfurnished Brooklyn apartment listening to the sounds of the city out of the window after a long day of client meetings. At one point I was thinking "Man I wish I bought that ugly sofa from Ikea so I'd have something to sit on" and next thing I knew I was considering the Tao of Outreach Link Building.
There are a number of posts over the last few years that are described as "head smacking tips" or "so easy it should be illegal." Okay I made the second one up, but I know there was a post like that on SEOmoz at some point, I just can't find it right now. My head smacking tip to start this week ...
While search volume data can help you make more informed decisions when choosing keywords for link building campaigns, it is important to be driving traffic through terms that not only bring in more traffic but convert well. Targeting anchor text phrases that have above average conversion rates will provide a higher ROI on your link building efforts than focusing only on search volume. Further,...
I see a lot of people talking about how link building is difficult and the truth is, it really is. It's time consuming, tedious, frustrating, and several other negative words. To make things worse it can also get very pricey, no matter whether you're outsourcing it or doing it in-house. I've also seen several posts about free ways to get links and they're a...
As you may have heard, Google recently launched a new feature called Search by Image. While experimenting with the feature, I identified three scenarios where search by image has a distinct advantage over traditional approaches for finding link opportunities. First, some background. To explain it simply, you can now use images (either a URL of an image, or one you upload) as you...
Within 18 days of Google indexing this 1 new high Page Authority | Domain Authority link, my client's 1-year old website had rankings significantly increase across all of his SEOd pages and for multiple keywords on each page. For that reason, I describe this link as "the best link your clients may be missing". If you stick with me for the next few minutes, I ...