Link Outreach – Your Ultimate Weapon for High Competition Keyword Ranking
It’s been a long now since I am doing SEO, almost 7 years. I saw the days when Google had yet to ponder how to grade sites. I also saw the days where link wheels and automated scraped links could give you an instant push in your ranking. And then, I also saw the SEO nightmare in mid 2012 and early 2013 with all those Panda, Penguin updates where a lot of sites fell off the ladder because of using blog networks like BMR, or automated low quality links using tools like article submitter and spinners.
In my professional SEO life, I have ranked several sites in the toughest niches like payday loans, insurance, mobile apps, auto transportation and a bunch of other highly competitive keywords. Though i never used automation in my link building, not all the links we acquired can be labelled as “white” links. In Google’s language, any link that you get due to your intended effort to get it by asking, mutual exchange, paying, using a link builder etc, is an unnatural link. High quality links only come if you really have a great product, a great service of a great content that people would want to talk about and would love to link back to you. Something that people will like to share on Facebook or reTweet about. In the real world, it doesn’t happen all the time with 99% of the website on the internet.
After the recent Google updates, all the efforts that we used in the past to label our link building effort as “grey hat” started losing their affect. What I mean by these efforts is having good combination of keywords, variety of linking domains, proper link velocity, getting links from quality sites, doing social bookmarking and all that usual stuff. It does still work for the keywords that are not highly competent, but it didn’t affect much when it came to high competition keyword ranking. So here is a one-word strategy that I learnt from practically during the last several months “LINK OUTREACH”.
Link outreach is not as simple as it sounds, but it might be the only way after recent updates in 2012 and 2013 that still works when it comes to high competition keyword ranking. The trend in SEO however is changing from link building to more public relation and link outreach is part of your public relationship strategy. Today, thousands of low quality links, social bookmarking, creating web 2.0 properties and submitting to article and PR directories can all be equivalent to one good quality natural looking link. I must confess that even the link outreach is not a 100% white hat strategy, but at least it’s something that is more compatible with Google thinking. You have made an effort to introduce your site through outreaching, maintaining public relationship and in return you successfully acquired a link (what happens in between stays in Green MilesJ)
So what exactly is Link outreach and public relationship? Well, it’s talking to webmaster who own the similar sites like yours, or the blog owners that are maintaining their professional blogs in the similar niche. You need to research all this thoroughly, shortlist quality site, check their Domain Authority, Page Rank and other site metrics to make sure they are non-malignant. You then need to thoroughly explore each site to see what link opportunities you might have. This could be a broken link, a recommended reading list, an opportunity for your well-developed infographic, or just an opportunity for a quality guest post. Remember, getting a link in the post body is a technique that doesn’t work anymore. Getting a link with exact anchor text doesn’t work either (in most cases). Just concentrate getting a raw URL link in the author bio or a link to your Google Plus profile etc. Build links this way, ask for references from the site whom you already established rapport and “linkationship” (relationship). You will be quite disappointed with the number of links you are going to get at the end of the month. If you were used to scoring thousands before, you might get only 10 or 20 links a month. But I tell you seriously, these 10 are the ones that are going to work now.
Try it and let me know your thoughts. If you are interested, I have prepared a sheet to maintain your link outreach. Just shoot me an email and I will be happy to share it with you. Happy outreaching!!!
