Social Media Backlinks: 26 Ways You Can Leverage to Increase Organic Search Traffic
Anyone that’s ever tried their hands at SEO knows how important backlinks are in boosting search engine rankings on SERP. There are several ways to build backlinks to improve search traffic, and social media is one – most people aren’t given a try. Because they’re nofollow. But, don’t get fooled by people carrying misconceptions about social media backlinks. Let’s get it right… Social media works great for link building. And search engines now turn to social signals – although this is not yet a part of ranking factors on Google… it’s a strong ranking signal on Bing. Now, let’s face it! How many of those email pitches you sent got a response and a link back to your site – the last time? Nada…, Few? Ok …If you got 2 out of 10, you’re lucky. The reason is that there are too many requests that people just stop reading pitches. Plus, it gets boring when you open 3 out of 5 and discover they all use the same email templates. But relax! Here’s an opportunity for you to cut through the pitch noise and still build 25 authority backlinks with; Plus, if you hate being turned down… Just follow the steps I’m going to show you now. You’ll learn how and where to place links in your social media profiles without looking spammy. So, let’s start with the largest of them all… Facebook Link Building Facebook is an open opportunity for everyone to start building links through: Every step we’ll discuss here is basic. But do not underestimate the basics. Backlink #1: Your Personal Profile’s About Tab Start with your personal profile’s “Contact and Basic info.” The first thing experts do when optimising their social media accounts is to place a link back to their website from under the About Tab. To do this, head to Contact and Basic Info on the About Tab; in the website field, put your site link. Note: remember to mark this field as public, so it’s visible to anyone on Facebook. Since you work at your company and your Facebook page represents your company’s page, you can add your Facebook page link as your current employer on your Facebook personal profile. That way, visitors can connect to your website and your business page. Backlink #2: Your Page’s About Tab In your page’s About tab, you can add up to two different links or even more. First, you can include a link to your About Me page on your website in the company overview field. And secondly, you can add a link back to your homepage. You can see here that I make sure that my domain name appears in my about me section and an additional link to my about me page in the company overview field. Backlink #3: Your Profile And Cover Photo Descriptions Many people don’t pay attention to this area. Do you know you can place a link right underneath the cover photo area of both your profile and the page’s cover photo? If you don’t, now you know. Facebook designed these cover photos with a lightbox option such that when anyone clicks on it, it shows the lightbox of your photo and if you notice by the right side of the photo, are text displays. Now to the right of your image, present an awesome opportunity to add a link to your website. Take a look at this… Backlink #4: Your Page Buttons Facebook allows you to customize your page’s button as a call-to-action for your followers. You can see this button under your cover photo, and you can edit it by clicking on the button, this will show you a drop-down item. Select “Edit Button” and place a link back to your website. Now when anyone clicks to learn more, it brings the person to your website. All these including the one mentioned below, serve as social signals to search engines and should not be ignored just because they’re nofollow. Backlink #5: All Your Personal Profile And Page Posts With your Facebook posts (page and profile post), you can expose your website URL to millions of viewers by including your domain.com in every post. For example, whenever you want to post anything on your wall and share it with your friends, add your website URL to it. Backlink #6: Your Group Description If you have a Facebook group, here’s another opportunity to utilise. Within your description – preferably at the beginning – you should place your website URL so that when anyone joins the group and reads through the description, it’ll be the first thing they see. Backlink #7: Facebook Group Pinned Posts Another way to maximise Facebook group opportunities and add links is through your pinned posts. If you have a group, especially where members are free to add new members, you can create a pinned post on your group and include a link to your website URL so that when people join the group, it’ll be the first thing they see. Now let’s look at LinkedIn link building. LinkedIn Link Building Although LinkedIn is no near Facebook in terms of audience. But being a professional and business social site, there are lots of backlinks you can harness ranging from personal profiles to pages, groups and posts. Backlink #8: Your Profile’s Contact Info On your contact info tab, you can add up to three links. And these links will be shown to your connections and anyone with a LinkedIn account. One advantage LinkedIn has over Facebook is that you can customise your link’s anchor text when it comes to adding links. Here’s how I include three different links to my website with my preferred anchor text. You can track clicks from these links by configuring UTM parameters (more on this – as we move on). Backlink #9: Your Profile’s Projects Section You can track clicks from these links with UTM parameters too! You can include a link to direct people to a specific page on your site,
How To Build High-Quality Backlinks Using Awario Tool
Link building is time-consuming, energy-sapping. And can be expensive sometimes. But what if I told you, you could save all of that including money and still build quality links to your site? Yes… high-quality links – ones Google will love. With Awario, you’re one step away from building tons of backlinks to your site. And I’m going to show you just how to do that. But first, let me introduce you to this tool – Awario. The web does the talking. Awario does the Listening. You do the linking… Semola Digital Sidenote: This article assumes that you are already familiar with link building and backlinks. What is Awario? Awario is a social listening tool where you can build a social listening portal for your personal brand and business brand including monitoring your competitors. There are so many reasons you might want to listen online to your audience. One critical reason is reputation management. Another is delivering better service to customers. But, do you know you can turn this tool into a link building tool? I’m not kidding… I no longer call it a social listening tool… but a tool behind my backlink-ing strategy. Here’s why! Awario allows you to create notifications on any keyword you enter for your brand or that of your competitors. So, when anyone mentions your brand either on social media platforms, blogs or news articles, you’ll receive a notification (alert) of the mentions and what that means? A link opportunity …at no cost! From social listening to link building… here’s how you can start building backlinks with Awario Ok, let’s do this step by step so you can start getting some backlinks to your site. So first, I want you to go here. There you’ll see a screen that looks like this (make sure you sign in at the top right). Let’s go for the links… Once you sign up, Awario will open your personalized dashboard where you can set up your alert. To set up an alert, click the + sign at the front of “Mention” and a new page that looks like the one below will open. For the purpose of this tutorial, I will be creating a new account on Awario. In the screenshot above, I have selected my brand name Semola Digital as the keyword and set the location to Nigeria and also exclude the term “Semolina” By clicking “Create” any mention of Semola Digital, I will receive a notification after which I can take some steps, which I’m going to show you below to convert that mention to link. Don’t forget to connect your social media accounts. Keep in mind that when you receive an alert for mentions, someone could have already linked to you. So, not every alert for a mention will be a link building opportunity. But most will definitely be. As you can see, within a few minutes after creating my account and setting an alert for Semola Digital, Awario has gone to fetch data from the web and reported it on my dashboard. Depending on the type of mentions, here’s how you can convert opportunity into a link. Turn brand/Products/Services Mentions into Backlinks Using Awario Brand name mentions When it comes to brand name mentions, it is 50/50. Roughly half of the people who mentioned your brand will link to you while the other half won’t. So, for the ones that didn’t, send this email to them: Subject: You forgot to do add this: Hey [insert first name], I really appreciate that. Thank you for mentioning [insert your brand name] in your article on [insert the title of their article]. [insert the URL of their article] That was such a nice thing to do. And you really made my day with that. Taking time to mention us means a lot to us, but we’ll be more than happy… if you could link our name to our website. Would you mind doing that? [insert your name] PS: Let me know if I can do anything for you. Domain mentions Most times when content writers mention domains in their articles, they usually include a link back to your site. That’s a link already. But for the ones who haven’t linked to you, use the template below to send an email to the webmaster. Did you forget to include this? Hey [insert first name], First off, I just wanted to say thanks for mentioning [insert your domain] in this article [insert a link to the URL that mentions your domain]. Thanks a bunch! I know you are busy. But, would you mind hotlinking my domain to my website? I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but that extra traffic really helps to keep small sites like mine growing. Cheers, [insert your name] PS: Let me know if I can do anything for you. Products name mentions Most people will usually link to you when they mention your products. In fact, about 80% of websites will. But, for the ones that don’t, use this template to send them an email: Subject: Only a few people will do this Hey [insert their first name], I just wanted to take a moment to tell you how much I appreciate that you mentioned [insert your brand name] here [insert the URL of the webpage that mentions your product]. Thanks a lot! Now, I feel bad doing this, but would you mind hotlinking [insert your product name] to this page on our website where your visitors can find the product [insert the URL on your site that covers the product]? Sorry to bug you. And again, thank you for the mention. This means a lot to us at [insert your company name]. [insert your name PS: Let me know if I can do anything for you. Now, you’ve got the mentions and the email format. But how do you get their email? Industry terms In almost all cases, alerts that contain industry terms won’t be linking to you. And this group will also
SEO Internal Link Building Best Practices
Internal link building is an indispensable part of SEO strategy that no one is telling you about but can strengthen the overall SEO of your website. Good internal linking provides: In SEO, it’s not uncommon to see people thinking only about backlinks or external links once they hear the term link building. What if I told you – getting backlinks is just the beginning of your link-building strategy. Well, in this post, I will show you what internal link building is and why you should start leveraging the power of internal linking on your website. What Are Internal Links? Internal links are links on your website from one page to the other relevant pages on your site. Note, there are two types of links: In an internal link-building process, the source domain and the target domain remain the same. Internal link building is a strategy – site owners have used to – successfully build their businesses. Here’s a case study of how Ninja outreach increased their traffic by 40% and not only that, from position #33 to #5, all by doing internal link building. How internal link complements external links When you acquire a backlink to one of your web pages, how do you ensure that any link juice that accompanied that link is passed across to other pages on your website? What if the page that received the link is not as relevant as your sales page, but you want your sales page to benefit? What about your less linkable links? You wouldn’t want them to remain ophan. That’s why you need Internal link building to promote other pages and make them visible on search engines. Internal links play an essential role in delivering a return on investment (ROI) from external link acquisitions. How Link Building Can Help Your Website Rank Better On Search Engines While backlinks focus on gaining signals and boosting PageRank on search engines, internal links benefit both users and search engines. And in fact, you can only convert the traffic boost by backlinks to returning customers with the power of internal link building. Benefits of Internal Linking: Why You Should Care About Internal Link Building 1. Internal links spread Link Equity throughout your website One of the significant benefits is internal links can directly pass link equity throughout your entire site. The page that is linked to – takes all of the link equity (link juice), but it shouldn’t be the only one to enjoy it. So through internal link building, you can direct part of the juice for other pages to benefit. And this way, your less linkable pages – such as “money pages” – also benefit from the link equity value you get from blog content. 2. Internal linking Helps Google to Find Your New Content Internal links are a great way for search engines to find and index your new content or web pages easily. Search engines regularly crawl and re-crawl web pages to find new content. Because they’re aware that web admins update their web pages or publish new blog posts from time to time. And as such, you must link your newly published page(s) to an existing page – ones that have been indexed. So that, when next Google crawls your website, they can quickly discover the new content and add it to the index. Most times, when people publish a new post, they go out looking for external links to the posting page – forgetting that they can actually give the page a boost on SERP by just linking to it from a relevant page within the site. Don’t act like them! When you’re publishing new content, first, link it internally and then pitch for backlinks. 3. Internal Linking Signals Your Most Important Pages to search engines Google uses internal links as a measure of how vital one page is to the other. Here’s what Google says about internal linking… “The number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that page.” The more links that point to a particular page of your site, the more important that page is to Google and the better its chances of ranking well above other pages. 4. Internal link helps with Canonicalization You can use internal linking to canonical a page by hinting to Google that a particular page on your site should be given more preference – do this to avoid diluting ranking signals. An internal link is one of the methods to canonical a page. Although not as effective as when you use a rel=canonical tag, it works. When you have multiple pages with similar content on your site, the one that’s most linked to internally will be considered the canonical page by Google, and Google should rank it above the others. 5. Internal link building makes it easy for users to find and navigate your site. Users’ experience (UX) is something to consider here because it’s an important ranking signal to Google. Good internal linking will ensure that users can find what they want on time and spend more time on your site. Thereby reducing the bounce rate on your site. 6. Internal link building makes you more MONEY Surprised? Yes, it does! The navigation menu helps funnel visitors to the most critical pages on your website, so also are internal links. You can use internal links to map out customers’ journeys, helping users determine the next step of action to take until they get to the final destination – where they convert or make a purchase. 7. With proper internal linking, you can get Google to crawl your site by submitting only the homepage URL most especially if you’ve pages less than 1,000 on your site, provided links are connecting the pages, Google will discover and index them. Best Practices and Strategy: How to Use Internal Links to Boost Web Pages I know you must be asking… How does this internal link-building strategy work? Tactical inner linking
What is Link Building and Why is it Important in SEO?
For about 20 years now, Google has been using links to determine the quality of websites, making link building one of the longest and best SEO tactics to ranking websites on its search engine. Google uses links to your site as signals to determine the AUTHORITY, which in turn determines the relevancy of your site. If you’re looking to learn about link building and its strategies, you’re in the right place! In this post, you’ll learn what link building is, and if you follow my link building tutorials step-by-step, you’ll understand the strategies – including how to acquire links to rank your websites. What is Link Building? Link building is simply a process of acquiring a hyperlink from another website to your site. When someone agrees to link back to your site from his website, you build a link to your site. That link to your site is called backlinks or inbound links. Link building also includes links within your pages that point to other relevant pages on the site. In this case, we refer to it as an internal link building, which we’ll discuss later on. This backlink serves as a vote of trust and improves your site’s visibility on search engines. Think of this vote as an endorsement. Suppose a high-authority site endorses your website by linking to one of your web pages. In that case, you’re likely going to see a boost in organic traffic compared to when a low-authority website endorses you. Why Link Building is Important for Your Website For a robot to discover your website – and crawl, you’ll need at least a hyperlink from an already indexed website to your site because links are what search engines follow. Although, without a link, search engines can still discover and index your site by submitting a sitemap. An On-page SEO can give you good SEO scores, but itself alone cannot give you a competitive edge in the search engine results page (SERP). This is why you need to include link building in your SEO strategy. When you combine on-page SEO with quality link building to your site, the result can 4X your traffic in less than a month. How? Link building improves the authority and relevance of your pages and the entire website. Strong links improve the rankings and thus attracts more relevant traffic to your site. Link building helps index your ophan pages or isolated pages and less link-able pages on your site. Link building helps increase your site exposure on search engines. The quality of resources you link to from your site helps search engines determine your content’s quality. Link building is a referral strategy that can help bring more people to your site. Backlinks improve the rankings for relevant keywords you have on your web pages. Link building helps build a solid relationship with other businesses when you reach out to them for links back to your site. Internal Link vs. External Link Building Link building is not restricted to only inbound links. There is also internal link building which is also a signal to how search engines perceive the content and how important one page is to the other on your website. Internal Links: are links that you build within your site; they’re links that point from one page to the other relevant page of your site. External Links: These are links pointing from your website to another website. Note, in this case, the link is pointing to another domain. Source domain and link-target domain are different. If you have two or more websites personally, and you link from one domain to another, that link is external. Likewise, if you’re linking to another domain that’s not yours, it’s still an external link, and the process is external link building. An external link is still a backlink because a third-party website is linking to your site. Link Quality vs. Quantity In 1998, Google introduced the concept of backlinks as a means to determine quality content. The idea, which still holds today, is that quality content will always attract links to itself. When people find the content useful, they link to it by citing it as a reference in their article posts. That link quality was more of using numbers – the number of links to a particular website. But, as time went on, Google advanced and updated its algorithm with better quality-measuring signals other than the number of links. This development brought a change such that… It’s no longer the higher number of links you have – but the quality of links you’ve got. And when the Penguin algorithm was released in 2012 to combat low-quality links, many websites were flagged. Saying all links are equal – and that it doesn’t matter where the link is coming from (just get one anywhere) is a MYTh. Some links are worth more than others and give different ‘weight’ of votes. For instance, 10 links from a high authority website within my niche are worth more than 100 links from low authority sites. Here’s what I mean… If SEMrush or searchenginejournal.com finds this article useful and decides to link to it, that’ll give this web page a much more vote of trust than when a site with no direct content relationship links to me. This is because: SEMrush and SEJ are high-profile websites Publish only quality content They’re authority sites Google and trust them They’re within my niche – SEO/digital marketing. This also means that a link from CNN or BBC to your site is way higher in terms of the vote of trust than a link from my blog to you. But, since my site is spam-free and contains quality content, it’s worth adding to your link profile. Now, getting links from these highly-coveted, authority websites is a lot difficult, but you can get them with the right strategy in place. What you need to know at this point is that 100 high-quality links are better than 10,000 low-quality links. Factors that Determine
6 Simple Tips For Successful “Link Building” Outreach In 2022
You have spent so much time and energy finding link opportunity within your niche and analysing your competitors. And now, you have a spreadsheet – full of potential link building opportunities. With so much time and energy you’ve put in, you rolled out your messages, but no one is reading and replying to them. You’ve got some fantastic content to offer in return for the links. But, no matter how valuable your content is, your outreach email is the key to earning that link. That’s because no one is going to read through poorly-formatted email outreach. While there are many link building email outreach templates out there, these tips are about helping you avoid some common mistakes that might make your out-reach looks like a “spam-reach” leaving your prospects to ignoring them. 6 Tips For Successful “Link Building” Outreach If you follow these simple tips, you’ll have a successful link building campaign. 1. Reach Out To The Right Person You need to make sure that your message is hitting the right addresses. Don’t just scrape emails of prospects and then hit send. Here’s why… Not every email address that’s returned will make the right outreach. Many organisations have people who are in charge of managing, creating and publishing content for the site. And reaching out to the company’s founder would make no sense and amount to a waste of time. 2. Don’t Rely Too Much On Templates Every day, webmasters receive one email or the other from people asking for a link back to their websites. And many of these link requests usually turn out to be dead on – or even before arrival. Because, they often sound the same. People take templates and hit send without adding elements of personalisation. You don’t want your request to look exactly like others. And so, you should always try to customise (add your own) every template you see out there. So, avoid using a general template for your link building outreach if you want your email stand out and your request granted. With an email template, you can easily fall into: Auto-fill errors such as “Hello [Name].” Sending request to the wrong person. Sending the wrong template to the wrong address. Sending a sequential email all at once because all are included in a single template. Templates can be an effective way to reach out quickly to prospects, but that doesn’t mean you should do what other people are doing; taking templates and then, hit send. Templates are there to provide a framework, and so you should add your own. Someone sat and put it together; you can come up with your idea and then turn it to a template. 3. Avoid Using Generic Name Nothing fails as fast as an email with a generic name. People ignore an email from someone who hasn’t taken some times out to figure who they are and address them by name. If by chance I opened such an email, I quickly find the back button or swipe back my screen when I’m on mobile. If you want your email to be read at all – don’t make it appears like this one: Hello, sir/ma, Before you send your link request, take some time to figure out who might be responsible for the site maintenance and content publishing. And even after you know this person, you should do a little research – you never can tell, you might find something that may compel him or her to granting your request. For Instance, if your link outreach prospect attended a conference and tweet about the event alongside his photo. You can easily start from thereby offering a compliment. That way, he now knows that you must be one of his valuable followers. 4. Go Straight To The Point, Make It Short (Not Wordy) And Sweet Remember the person you’re pitching doesn’t have that time to read through a long piece of content. As a matter of fact, he has tens of emails to read, and he wouldn’t waste his time on one email. Whatever thing you want to say should be put into – at most, four paragraphs. With each paragraph not longer than two short sentences. And should always include the following: Recipient name (don’t use the generic name) The broken link Where the link is Your suggested replacement and Why it’ll be a suitable replacement (in one sentence). 5. Don’t Be Pushy No one likes being told what to do! Never persuade someone into granting your request by all means. Words like: “Please, could you replace this broken link by this link?” You don’t want to go overboard… the person you’re sending a request is not your friend – he doesn’t know you. And you don’t want to force him; hence he sees you as spam. What’s important in your email is… The email should simply call the person to the *broken link* and then, suggest a replacement. 6. Send 1-2 follow-up emails If you’re reaching out for the first time and you aren’t getting a reply, send a follow-up to remind the person. But, don’t be pushy in your request. Always follow up an initial email because It’s a sure way to successful link building outreach. Your first-ever email may get in between important emails and is possible the person gets too busy or even opens it and gets distracted. It makes sense to keep your follow-up simple, and if no reply after the second follows up, just move on to new prospects; there are many gold-link opportunities you could mine. You wouldn’t want your email to be reported as spam, which can lead to your email being blacklisted. Summing “Simple Tips For Successful “Link Building” Outreach” Up… Using templates without customising and adding your ideas, can lead to a poor result. To earn a link, you need to get it right with link outreaching. Because, no matter how great your content is, no matter how befitting the replacement link is (in the