How to earn links for SEO?

February 23, 2015

SEO ,

0

Link building is the hardest part of seo and to make it even harder John Mueller from Google announced on the 13th February “in general I’d avoid it.” So how do companies perform search engine optimisation without links? Is it possible? John admits links are part of the seo algorithm, but they are just one part.

If you want to see Mueller talk about this you can watch the Google+ live Hangout here.

At Harvest our SEO experts have a far more content marketing and social media approach to performing well in organic search. This makes the process more natural. Take a look at the infographic below which shows how we go about earning links for seo.

How to earn quality links

The first step to earning links is to think about who your target audience are and start to brainstorm some good ideas that are likely to appeal to them. Let’s look at a worked example. One of the target audiences for Harvest is people who are interested in organic search. We know people interested in this subject want to know how to perform link building so we had an idea to create a really simple infographic which explains the best way to earn links naturally. We created an infographic and are sharing this on our blog.

The next step after creating our content is to share this on social media we will tweet it to our twitter followers, we will post onto Google+ and share with our LinkedIn contacts this will alert our connections to the content. We are hoping that people will like our infographic enough to share with their followers. Once our content has been published and shared with our social connections we will monitor it and if necessary we will put some paid for media behind the promotion of the content.

Organic reach of content on social media can be short lived here some stats of how much content is created every minute.

  • Facebook users share nearly 2.5 million pieces of content.
  • Twitter users tweet nearly 300,000 times.
  • Instagram users post nearly 220,000 new photos.
  • YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video content.
  • Apple users download nearly 50,000 apps.
  • Email users send over 200 million messages.

With this in mind using paid for media to promote content can help to get in front of your audience for a few pennies per click. We use content discovery networks such as Taboola and Outbrain or native advertising platforms such as Sharethrough or Nativo.

SEO_LinkBuilding_V3

What type of content earns links?

So now our content is getting some visibility the quality of the information and the way it is presented should be enough to get people to hit the share buttons and earn those all-important links. Here are some things you can do to help make this happen:

  • Create a How To piece of content with a step by step guide
  • Write something that shocks your audience and provokes a response
  • Make something which is visually stunning, images work particularly well on social sites
  • Get your camera (or just grab your phone) and create a video
  • Write something that appeals to die-hard fans
  • List content still works and can get really good click through rates
  • Interactive applications are novel and can get people sharing if they are pretty cool
    Optimisation

Optimisation

Once your content has been created and shared your job doesn’t end here. Keep a note of how your content has performed. Is there anything you can do to make it better or more engaging? Check your analytics statistics to see if the content has a high bounce rate and how long people spend on the page, what actions people take after consuming the content.

Are there certain influencers you can alert to your content by reaching out on social media to give the content you have invested in further reach? If you have invested in a great piece of content there are going to be many opportunities for promoting the content.

The end result of all this activity should result in your content earning the links and social shares it deserves which will result in more visits to your site which is our goal.

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