- Every so often we like refreshing
our link building for beginners video.
That's what this video is gonna be today.
You probably already saw that in the description though
so I don't know why I'm wasting your time,
let's get started with that.
If you don't remember from last time
or in case you missed it, I'm new to this channel,
my name's Danny.
I'm working with Julian over at Goldie Agency.
So if you were to work with us
and wanted to schedule a call,
I would most likely be the first one you'd be talking with.
And also just as a reminder,
we do have a free book called Link Building Mastery.
It's linked in the comments below.
It does go over a lot
of what we're gonna talk about today,
but also it really goes more
in depth with nine different techniques
on how to improve your link building
and apply that to your site.
So, first things first let's actually talk
about what link building even is.
It really is as simple as it sounds,
you're building a link from somebody else's site
or some other company's site or a news site or a blog
or what have you, to your site, essentially meaning
there's a hyperlink on somebody else's site external
from yours, that when you click it, it goes to something
on your site, whether it's your homepage, a product page,
a blog, an article, another type of piece of content.
That's really what we're doing.
We're building as many of those links
from as many different sites as possible
and that's essentially what link building is.
So why is link building important?
That's a great question.
So essentially, the reason link building is important
is because whenever you're on any kind of a search engine,
that search engine needs to factor
in a bunch of different aspects
and a bunch of different metrics
to figure out what's gonna be the most valuable piece
of content or what's gonna be the most valuable site
that we can send our users to for any given keyword.
If you search for cat photos,
it's not just randomly coming up with cat photos.
There's a reason that when you go
into a Google image search, some of the funniest
and most recognizable cat photos are gonna be in there.
And that's because a lot of those have a lot
of links to them, whether it's from other blogs
or Reddit posts or from other forms of social media.
And the reason for that is
because the more those links are produced,
the more valuable Google thinks
that that piece of content or that site actually is.
And the same goes for anything.
It can go for cat photos, government contractors,
construction sites.
It can go for any of those.
So that's why it's important
that no matter what your niche or no matter what your brand
or no matter what your industry is,
if you have a web presence,
you wanna make sure that you're signaling to Google
that what you provide is actually valuable and signal it
in a way that you're gonna be growing
in the rankings and climbing higher in the rankings
and pulling in more of that user base
and pulling in more of the people searching
for those keywords.
So you might be asking me though, why does Google,
why do they care so much about these links?
The answer is really simple.
The reason they care about those links
is because there's plenty of competitors to Google.
Yes, Google is obviously the most popular
and most people are gonna be using it.
But every single search engine has their own algorithm
and their own methods for ranking different sites.
Google makes this a very important aspect
because this, like I said before, it signals to them
what is the community at large?
What is everybody searching?
What do they feel is the most valuable site to go to?
If you're searching for camera equipment,
it's not gonna send you to just Joe Nobody
who set up a blog five days ago
and posted one article about camera equipment.
No, it's gonna send you to like an Amazon link
or a B&H photo link.
It's gonna send you to one
of those that have been accessed and searched
and linked thousands of times, clicked on hundreds
of thousands or millions of times in some cases,
depending on what the site is.
And they need to do that, Google,
because their ultimate goal for the user
is to keep the user coming back.
And if the user feels like they're getting the results
that they need
and they're being pointed in valuable directions,
they're going to come back
and they're gonna use Google again.
If for whatever reason
Google starts valuing less important sites
or starts pointing you
in the direction of these really weird sites,
you're probably not gonna be using Google much longer
and you might move on to Bing
or some other type of search engine that might be out there.
So one of the best ways to get links
is to write link building content.
Now, basically, that's gonna be like a top five reasons
why you need to do X, Y and Z
or top five best products for accomplishing certain goals.
You've all seen those types of articles,
we've all seen those types of blogs,
we've all seen those YouTube videos.
So, leveraging those pieces of content,
whether it's an infographic, a blog post, an article,
a video, what have you, you've got to have something
of high quality that people
are actually gonna want to link to.
With this method, generally you're gonna be talking
to human beings and interacting with human beings,
whether it's through email
or you might even do a phone call,
most of it's through email in our experience.
but you have to remember that you're speaking with humans
and those humans need to actually see the value
of what you're bringing to the table.
They're not gonna just link
to anything you bring up to them.
You're not going to be able to just send an email saying
"Hey, my name's Danny,
I work with Goldie agency.
Can you post this link that I just dropped in the email?"
No, of course not,
they're definitely not going to do that,
especially if the content is super poor.
You need to make sure that you put a lot of thought into it,
put a lot of effort into it.
Make sure that you're actually an expert
on what you're doing
because that's gonna show through.
You can't just formulate some kind
of a blog article out of thin air
and hope that you're gonna get traction with it.
It has to be good, high quality.
That is the most important factor in all of this.
So the second half of the content piece
is the prospecting piece.
This is the piece that scares most people off
or drives most people to just go to an agency
because this part is difficult.
You get a lot more nos than you get yeses
and you're gonna have to be okay with rejection
and you're gonna have to be okay with people saying
that they don't see value in what you're doing.
Now, when you're in the prospecting phase,
one of the most important parts is
to do the research ahead of time.
We use HREFs for that research
and what we're doing is we're going in
and we're looking at our keyword competitors.
So whatever that keyword or search phrase
that you want to rank for,
you need to see who's already in the top 10 for that.
How many links is it gonna take to get into the top 10?
What are your competitors link building profiles?
What do they actually look like?
Where are they getting their links?
How many links do they have?
There's so many factors that go into that.
But once you start researching that
and building up a prospecting list from there,
you can actually have websites to go after.
You can have certain articles to target
from your keyword competitors
and you can start building and formulating
an outreach prospecting list from that information
and that's gonna be your biggest tool.
Now, you're gonna have to figure out
how much time you're gonna have to set aside
in order to go after this.
And depending on the quality of the content,
sometimes it'll take a little less time
and sometimes it'll take a little more time.
It also depends on how much competition you have.
If you're in a highly competitive environment,
you better make sure that your content is top quality
and that you have a huge prospecting list
because you're gonna get way more nos than you get yeses.
On the flip side though,
if you're in a not so competitive keyword
or if you have a product or a service
that's not as competitive, maybe in your region
or in your state or in your city, or what have you,
it might actually be easier to get those links
and it might take fewer touches when it comes
to outreach in order to get a yes.
And so that's gonna be how you start building
up those back links
and start adding that to your backlink arsenal.
So there's a number of things you really
do have to be careful of.
And this is where I'm going to come back to paid backlinks.
Now, there's a lot of services out there
that offer tit for tat back linking,
so basically an exchange.
So I backlink to your product, you backlink to mine.
This can get a little bit sketchy
but the most sketchy is gonna be paid backlinks
and we highly recommend not doing paid backlinks.
And what I mean for that is going
to a site like a private blog network
which we have videos on that as well.
But you can go to a private blog network or a PBM
and they'll say, yeah, we'll give you as many backlinks
as you, as you can afford.
And what they do is they just have a bunch
of cut and paste content.
They have a bunch of content that doesn't even read well.
There's a lot of red flags when it comes to PBNs
and it's really easy to identify.
If you're having trouble or you wanna see
if you're involved with a PBN,
just click through their site, look at what's on there,
look at the type of content,
look at the quality of the content, read through it.
If it's tough to read
and there's a zillion different categories
and you've got different niches,
and there's not really a trend with the site
or a niche that the site is a part of,
there's a good chance
that's part of a private blog network.
Now, when you pay for these,
it's basically a pay for play system.
You give them $20 and they give you a backlink
or you give them $5 and they give you a backlink.
That sounds great on paper
and it sounds like you're gonna save a lot
of time and a lot of effort in the long run,
and yeah, you probably will.
And you probably will see your domain rating
and your domain authority start to go up
and you'll probably start to see your traffic start
to increase, but Google is always playing a game
of cat and mouse with these PBNs
and they're always finding them and bringing them down.
And when they take them down,
it does not just penalize the PBN site,
it penalizes your site as well.
So you might've put all that money
and you might've put in $5,000 in PBNs
and now all of a sudden your domain rating has crashed
and your traffic has crashed.
So now that $5,000 that you spent backlinking
in the last month has all just been wasted.
So you wanna make sure that you're staying away from that.
So this is where the quality really comes in.
How do you identify a good quality site?
Well, one of the biggest tells for a good quality site
is are you actually speaking with a human being?
Do they have something that they're also doing?
Are they relevant to what you're doing?
If you're in cameras or camera equipment,
is this another person who does photography for a living?
Is this somebody who does street photography,
landscape photography, videography, vlogging,
what do they do?
Can you tell that they actually have industry knowledge
of something?
And if they do, and they're linking to your site,
that's gonna be a lot of link juice going your way.
and that's gonna be a super good high quality backlink.
And Google can recognize the difference
between you just putting a blog comment linking
to your own site versus somebody else actually going in
and editing their site to add a backlink to yours.
So those are some of the things to really look out for.
A low quality backlink, like I said,
would be more like a blog comment.
If you can put a link to your site on your own
without anybody else intervening,
that's gonna be a low-quality backlink.
So stay away from those
because Google will actually penalize you
if you're spamming that as well.
And if you go to somebody's blog
or a bunch of different blogs and you start spanning all
of their blog articles with comments
just linking to your site,
that's a pretty quick way to make some enemies.
And those links are unlikely to stay there,
they might go in and actually remove them
if they feel like you are being spamming.
So finally is link-building hard?
Well, the short answer is, yeah, it's hard.
Otherwise there wouldn't be a zillion videos
and a bunch of blogs and a bunch of tutorials
on how to do it.
Now, the link building itself is not hard.
It's not a hard concept to grasp,
but it is very time-consuming
to actually go through the research,
the prospecting and the content creation.
So just make sure that you spend most
of your time on that aspect of it.
And don't get so wrapped around the axle
on the type of link building that you're gonna do
or making sure that you've optimized the anchor text,
that can all come later.
What you really wanna do is just create
the good quality content, create the good site,
create the good articles,
because we wanna start that cycle of SEO
and we wanna start that link building journey
with good content because the rest
of it can all be applied later
and the prospecting can come at a later time.
But just make sure that you're putting all of your energy
and all of your resources into creating that good content.
That is the hardest part.
The prospecting is just time consuming,
it's not really that difficult.
As always, thanks again for spending your time with me.
I really appreciate it.
If there's anything that we didn't cover
or something that you want me to go into more detail with,
just drop a comment below
and we can get a conversation started there
and we might even make a video of it in the future.
But until then, thanks again
and I'll talk to you next time.