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!
"Reference worthy content" is a phrase you'll hear a lot in the SEO realm. The intent behind the statement is simple - build content that people will be likely to cite when they create works on the web. Parsing the motivations that inspire those citations, however, is anything but obvious. Tonight, I thought I'd try to list features that make content "reference worthy&q...
Getting your website listed in the DMOZ directory in anything less than geologic time frames is next to impossible. Most SEOs submit their sites and then forget about ever getting listed. However, there is a way to guarantee that your site will be included in the DMOZ directory quickly: become a DMOZ editor for the category in which you have applied to have your website listed.
It seems every web developer's biggest concern, excluding keyword density/research, is finding new and innovative ways to create quality inbound links back to your website. While there is no easy-button to begin generating inbound links, there are certainly many abstract approaches and techniques a developer can utilize to make inbound link generation a bit less tedious.
I still have my first ever email account, a Hotmail account that's older than most of the kids on Digg nowadays. Today I logged in to retrieve a lost password and saw that I had over 600 new emails. All of them are spam, newsletters, shopping deals, etc--I rarely get "legit" emails sent to that account since the vast majority of my contacts know to reach me at my Gmail or SEOmoz email address. So it was with great amusement that I saw an email from 1/29/09 titled "Link Exchange Request" from some dude named Scott (not our Scott, don't worry). I've shared the email below:
Complete courses to master SEO basics
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As my Dad always says, "It's better to be on page 2 in the editorial than on page 7 as an advertisement." This advice has been the guiding principle when it comes to the public relations strategy at Voices.com. In fact, I've proven this to be so effective in public relations that I've applied it to SEO as well. How does the advice translate?
When it comes to finding links, since the dawn of SEO one constant piece of advice has been to look at your competitors links for opportunities. Unfortunately, this means wading through the muck in order to find the gems. How do you gather, organize and prioritize all of those links? Wouldn't it be nice to take a power-hose to all that mud and grime to more easily uncover the best prospects? It's not that difficult. Here's a step-by-step guide for doing just that!
There's a lot of debate in the web world, particularly in the SEO & marketing departments of mid-size and larger organizations, about whether or not to link out to other websites from their own. People are scared for a number of reasons; they worry that linking out could: Harm their reputation Damage their search engine rankings Cost them Pag...
Whenever outbound links are mentioned in an SEO environment, the response is usually negative. I have read recently on some blogs that it even casts a very negative shadow over outbound links, stating they could "harm your site's PageRank." I know this is simply referring to the old "bad neighbourhood," but I have wondered for a while now what the effect of outbound links are.
I wanted to establish if external links from Twitter hold any weighting. It is a well-known fact that Twitter uses rel = “no follow” on all external links, but do the search engines still cache these and consider them a vote?
Link baiting has been around for a fair while now, and we all know the basic concept is essentially driven by self interest, i.e., increasing website traffic for financial or personal gain.
One small step in any linkbuilding process that has been written about many times before is to ensure that you (/ your client) has links from all appropriate businesses that they actually have a real relationship with. In the SEO world, it'd be unthinkable to enter into a partnership without a few links between your sites, but in many industries, this happens. Beyond partnerships, what about all your suppliers and customers? This has been written about many times before - along with techniques for getting links from those suppliers (such as offering testimonials). What is harder to find is an easy reference list for who all the suppliers you should approach are.
Just What the Heck is Indirect Marketing, Anyway? Indirect marketing is a way for a business to market their product, idea, or service without having to use the methods of SPAM or direct advertising and marketing.The idea behind indirect marketing is instead of sending a message out to your target market directly, just send them something like a friend request, or a vote, or a digg, or anything to get their attention.
As a black-hat SEO tool, link farming has been around since approximately the morning after Brin & Page submitted their seminal thesis. It was a bad idea to begin with—demonstrating a poor appreciation of the math behind the PageRank algorithm—and it's become an even worse idea since Google et al started actively pursuing and penalizing link farmers.
A very short tip, but one that has been proving incredibly valuable to all of our clients of late. When you think about attracting links organically, the process goes something like this: 1. What content can I create that will naturally attract links? 2. What format should I put it in for maximum share-ability? 3. How can I promote it to reach the largest possible relevant audience?