CONTENT INTRODUCTION A LINK BUILDING CHECKLIST TO EARN MORE & BETTER LINKS CONTENT CONTENT In 1999, I started this company with the mission statement: “We will work toward bringing in the greatest amount of “ relevant traffic to our clients’ websites using the most ethical methods available.” That mission remains true today. Jim Boykin, CEO & Founder of Internet Marketing Ninjas Growth-Based SEO, Content Marketing, and Link Building Services Customized Search, Content, and Outreach Strategies for each client Natural link earning through high quality content creation Links sourced from trusted websites: schools, media, and subject-matter experts Increase rankings, organic search traffic, and improve your company's trust All work completed by our 50 person in-house team (Average employee tenure of over 8 years) Full access to our proprietary SEO Dashboard and Tool Suite Regular SEO Recommendations, Monthly Reports & Campaign Reviews with Jim Boykin Average client retention of nearly 5 years Services start at $7,500 At the end of 2019, the average client's Google Organic Traffic was: P P P U 65% U 47% U 102% After 3 Months After 6 Months After 12 Months Want results like these? Visit imninjas.com or contact [email protected] today! INTRODUCTION A LINK BUILDING CHECKLIST TO EARN MORE & BETTER LINKS AUTHOR Anna Crowe If you want to rank well in organic search, you need links. Google has told us as much, revealing that links are one of the top 3 ranking factors. Quality links increase the overall authority and trustworthiness of a page. Quality links to multiple pieces of content regularly can increase domain-wide rankings with time. Not too long ago, creating links went through a few dark seasons where almost every link we built was boring and spammy. No personalized email, content not needed, and only a dab of brand mentions. Link building was all about quantity instead of quality. But then the term “link building” began to transform. We heard new terms like link earning, link giving, link acquisition, and relationship building. Link earning is about building relationships, being a part of a community, and developing content ideas that are actually worth sharing. This emphasis on quality, meaning, and engagement has restored balance to the link building universe. But you also need a diverse link profile. That’s where this link building checklist comes in. INTRODUCTION What follows is a recap of everything we will discuss in our link building guide so far, with tasks broken down by month and week. Rather than rehashing all the same information again, I’ve provided links to the relevant chapters of the guide so you can get more detailed information about whichever topics interest you the most. Happy link building! Do Not Pass Go Without Technical SEO Ask yourself these questions: What happens when you build links to a poorly built website? Can you rank a website based on backlinks alone? This might be a me problem, but I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one that leans to “nothing” and “no.” The colossal pool that is search engines fills up with fast, mobile- friendly, clean websites. Will Google rank your poorly designed website with high-quality backlinks? INTRODUCTION Or, will Google rank your fast, mobile-friendly, clean website with high-quality backlinks? Do the technical SEO work before you start to worry about backlinks. Or, work in tangent to get both done at the same time. Plus, a webmaster is more likely to link back to your website naturally if it’s technically sound with a clean user experience. Breakdown of Link Building Activities I created this handy yearly calendar of all the link building activities listed in the chapters below. Here is a link to the template. Please make a copy for yourself INTRODUCTION to edit. QUARTERLY Here are the link building tasks I complete monthly: Backlink Audit Export a full list of your backlinks from Google Search Console. Then, begin to manually review the sites, adding irrelevant, low-quality sites to your disavow file. Update Disavow List I always review my disavow file quarterly. It’s a good chance to remove sites or add more to the list. Competitor Backlink Analysis Every quarter, I pull the backlink data for three of my top competitors. I analyze the data and build a list of sites that would be good for my clients. MONTHLY These are the link building tasks you should plan to do every month: Email Outreach Depending on the size of the site, I aim to pitch at least 10 new sites per month along with maintaining my ongoing editorial relationships. This also includes emailing websites I’ve mentioned or linked to in my articles. Brand Mention Monitoring Set-up Google Alerts or mention tracking to review competitor mentions, brand mentions, and even your INTRODUCTION CEO’s mentions are a good place to start. Guest Blogging Writing authentic, high-quality guest blog posts is a great way to earn links. The goal is to build ongoing content relationships with editors to maintain a monthly contribution. Content Syndication If you’ve for really amazing content, like Larry Kim-worthy style content, you can work with publishers to syndicate content that you’ve already written. Win-win! Testimonials & Reviews Testimonials and reviews are an untapped link building activity that is easiest done monthly. If you provide a testimonial for another brand, you could gain a link back to your website. Spread the love! Directories Directories are not so outdated when it comes to gaining foundational links. After you’ve submitted your site, you still want to continue to monitor the NAP. Affiliate Links Growing a loyal, affiliate audience is another awesome way to start building links. Plus, your backlink’ers will add a little coin to their bank too! Broken Link Building An oldie, but a goodie! Broken link building is one of the quickest and easiest ways to gain backlinks. Finding a broken competitor link is like finding a burrito with your INTRODUCTION name on it! Content As we all know, content still reigns supreme. But, using ego bait, controversy, or data to create quality content that will generate backlinks naturally, is one of the best ways to use content to build links. Charities & Events Charities and events are another good way to build backlinks. By donating your time or money to charity, you’ll get lucky with a .org or .gov backlink. And, with events, you could co-sponsor an event. Plus, you’ll gain INTRODUCTION access to other sponsors that make for quick wins. Breakdown of Weekly Link Building Activities WEEK 1 & 2 Link builder runs an internal backlink audit and competitor backlink audit to identify topics for different verticals of link building. WEEK 3 Brainstorm article titles for creating content. Send article titles to the client for approval. WEEK 4 Prospect link opportunities. Build out email templates for client approval. Find opportunities for co-citation. Outreach to 50 high-quality prospects. WEEK 5 Start writing Get the client to review content. Here is an example of my favorite link building spreadsheet. INTRODUCTION Why & How to 1 Tackle Technical SEO Before Link Building When you consider a link building campaign, you may not be completely reaping the benefits of your SEO efforts if you ignore technical SEO. The best results happen when you consider all the points of your website’s SEO: Technical SEO. Content. AUTHOR Brian Harnish Links. In fact, there are situations when you must tackle technical SEO before ever thinking about getting links. If your website is weak in technical SEO areas, or extremely confusing for search engines, it won’t perform as well These five points illustrate why regardless of the quality and it’s important to tackle technical quantity of backlinks you have. SEO before link building. Your top goals with technical If your site is unable to be SEO is to make sure that your crawled or is otherwise deficient site is: in technical SEO best practices, Easily crawled by search you may suffer from poor site engines. performance. Has top cross-platform The following chapter discusses compatibility. why and how you should be tackling technical SEO before Loads quickly on both starting a link building campaign. desktop and mobile. Employs efficient implementation of WordPress plugins. Does not have any issues with misconfigured Google Analytics code. WHY & HOW TO TACKLE TECHNICAL SEO BEFORE LINK BUILDING Make Sure Your Site is Easily Crawled by Search Engines YOUR HTTPS SECURE IMPLEMENTATION If you have recently made the jump to an HTTPS secure implementation, you may not have had the chance to audit or otherwise identify issues with your secure certificate installation. A surface-level audit at the outset can help you identify any major issues affecting your transition to HTTPS. Major issues can arise later on when the purchase of the SSL certificate did not initially take into account what the site would be doing later. One thing to keep in mind is that you must take great care in purchasing your certificate and making sure it covers all the subdomains you want it to. WHY & HOW TO TACKLE TECHNICAL SEO BEFORE LINK BUILDING If you don't, you may end up with some issues as a result, such as not being able to redirect URLs. If you don't get a full wildcard certificate, and you have URL parameters on a subdomain – using absolute URLs – that your certificate doesn't cover, you won't be able to redirect those URLs to https://. This is why it pays to be mindful of the options you choose during the purchase of your SSL certificate because it can negatively affect your site later.