How to Become an SEO Expert (10 Steps Guide)

Are you wondering what steps you need to take become an SEO expert?

Perfect because this guide is going to show you everything you need to know. Becoming an SEO expert isn’t as complicated as you may think.

All you need to do is follow the framework I’m going to show you and take action.

Let’s jump in.


Table of Contents
The Value of Being a Real SEO Expert
When I say a “real” SEO expert, I mean someone who can grow organic search traffic on a consistent basis. “Expert” level also means that you have enough knowledge to combat unexpected outcomes. Getting to this level takes time and effort.

The beauty of knowing how to do SEO is that there are many ways to monetize your skill.

Option #1: DIY
ANY business can benefit from SEO. Doing SEO for your own business has a few perks.

You don’t need to invest in an SEO agency. A quality SEO agency will cost you at least $2,500/month and will need a 6-12 month commitment.
You are responsible for your own success. You can work as hard or as little as you would like on SEO.
You can allocate capital towards whatever you want (since you won’t be investing in an agency).
You’re forced to focus on what will have the biggest impact. You have a business to run and grow. That means you can’t focus much time on the minutiae of SEO. This forces you to enter deep thinking and figure out what matters most in SEO. More on this in a second.
The beauty of learning SEO is that you can use it to grow every new business you start.

Option #2: Get Clients
Getting clients is the single fastest way to grow your income from SEO. It’s also a great way to get immediate cash flow, which you can reinvest into other SEO projects.

On the flip side, it’s also the best way to go mentally insane. I explain a lot of these issues in my SEO agency article. But I will also list a few of the issues of working with clients.

Unrealistic expectations. This is usually the product of a weak client application or vetting system. If you don’t establish realistic expectations, you will regret it. Don’t exaggerate what’s possible to meet your sales quota.
Clients can be unreliable and can hurt your cash flow. It doesn’t matter how good your collections system is. There are going to be clients who play games when it comes to paying.
Operations is a headache. Running an SEO agency is challenging because each campaign is unique. That means each campaign requires different actions. This makes it challenging to create solid systems, which as a result, makes it hard to scale.
Requires human capital. To scale an SEO agency, you need to hire people. You can only take it so far by yourself. New challenges arise when you bring employees on, but that will be a subject of a later blog post.
It’s a job with many bosses. Working with clients often feels like a job and not a business. Of course, you can fix this by taking yourself out of the equation. But, that’s easier said than done.
Option #3: Start a Niche Site(s)
A niche site is a website that focuses on a single topic such as “undercounter ice makers” or “baby monitors”.

Niche sites are how I got into SEO.

I believe starting a niche site is the best way to learn SEO. The reason is because you have to figure it out and there isn’t a ton of risk involved. Another reason why niche sites are a good place to start is because they don’t need much capital.

You can get started with less than $100.

Also, if you do keyword research right, you can find niches with lower competition. This increases your chance of success.

The biggest risk you can encounter when creating niche sites is time loss. But if you are trying to improve your SEO skills, then that time will be valuable in your progression.

But like anything else, there are some downsides to niche sites:

Lower revenue potential. That means you would need to create more than one niche site to generate a decent amount of revenue. And when you add more niche sites, you add more complexity to your business. Building one successful website is hard enough. Developing and trying to grow many niche sites can be an operational headache.
Decreased profit margins as your portfolio grows. That’s because you will have to spend more time managing your sites or you will have to outsource much of the work.
More volatility than authority websites. The EMD and Panda updates have proven that Google doesn’t like micro-niche sites. But to be fair, many of the sites affected by those updates, gave little value to users. And many had duplicate or thin content. You can decrease your niche site’s volatility by creating true value like I explain in this SEO strategy.
Option #4: Develop an Authority Site
I love the authority website model for a few reasons:

They have more opportunity for growth
They have less content restriction
They are more “linkable”
They have reduced penalty risk/algorithm volatility
An example of an authority website is Gotch SEO because it focuses on a large topic like SEO.

Like the other options there are some downsides as well:

Greater time investment. To create a great authority website, you need to have expertise in the niche you’re targeting. Producing surface level content won’t help you build an authority site. You must invest your time into becoming an expert or at least top 25% in your industry. Then, you can create an exceptional authority site.
Bigger capital investment. This won’t affect you if you’re writing your own SEO content. If you plan to outsource it, then it’s going to be capital intensive. That’s because producing “authority” content requires quality writers and larger word counts. Both of those factors increase your costs.
Option #5: Flip Websites
There are two ways to flip websites:

You can start a website from scratch, build it up, and then flip it.
You can acquire an existing website, improve it, and then flip it.
Each option has it’s own unique challenges that I won’t get into.

However, let me say that flipping websites is an amazing way to get instant capital. You can then use this capital to reinvest into other income generating SEO projects (recommended).

Or, you can spend your money on some type of depreciating asset like a car (not recommended). To each their own!

Here are some guides to get you started on flipping websites:

The Modern Investment: Website Flipping and Virtual Real Estate For Beginners
How To Flip Websites In 2016 – Flipping Websites Made Easy
Option #6: Sell Leads
Creating lead generation websites is a decent alternative to taking on clients. I have never taken this route, but know many that have. In essence, you first identify a local keyword like “Los Angeles plumber”. Then you create a website to rank for that keyword. Once the site is ranking, you can sell the organic leads to actual Los Angeles plumbers. Or, you can sell the website to a Los Angeles plumber.

Option #7: Become an Employee
I know this option isn’t ideal for everyone, but it’s a good way to get your feet wet. There are all kinds of businesses looking to hire in-house SEOs.



One way to go about this is to get hired and get some experience. Then, on the side you can work on growing your own SEO business or working on other projects. This way you won’t have to stress out about income.

Also, if you want to take the client SEO route, being an employee is a good primer. Your boss will give you the experience and backbone you need for having many bosses at the same time. 😛

Option #8: Diversification
This is my favorite option. Use your SEO skills to make money in many different ways. This reduces your risk and reliance any single method.

For example, if 100% of your income is from clients, you are playing with fire. In one day, all your clients could wake up and decide to fire you. What are you going to do then? Even if you have solid lead generation, you will be in a bind.

It’s okay to have no diversification in the beginning. But you need to work towards better income diversification as soon as possible.

Now that you know the value of being an SEO expert, let me explain the most important part in your path to becoming one.

Start With the Right Mindset
I’m not going to bombard you with personal development guru talk, but there is no denying how important your mindset is for achieving anything in life.

Let me start with this one important fact:

SEO is a Means to an End
The only reason why SEO is valuable is because it is a tool for growing revenues. Sure, it has other purposes such as branding, reputation management, and even deception. But most people use SEO to increase organic search traffic and grow revenue.

Never lose sight of the fact that SEO is a TOOL.

Sure, it’s fun to mess with algorithms, but always remember that MORE MONEY is the goal.

But before you can make some dough, you need to acquire base SEO knowledge.

Acquire Base Knowledge
If you’re an absolute beginner, then you need to get base SEO knowledge. And even if you have experience, you should still study and practice the fundamentals. This builds knowledge reinforcement.

“You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.” – Michael Jordan

Like any other skill, SEO requires learning a few important fundamentals.

Master the fundamentals.

Let me show you some of the fundamentals you need to learn:

KPIs, Analytics, & Data Analysis
SEO requires you to analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Don’t worry… this doesn’t mean you have to be a technical geek.

You just need to: A) know what data/KPIs actually matter and B) how to use the data/KPIs to improve your campaigns.

The #1 tool you need to understand is Google Analytics. Here are a few guides to get you started (or give you a refresher):

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics
Get Started with Analytics
Google Analytics Academy
After that, you need to learn how to use Google Search Console. Google Search Console has an array of functions that Google Analytics doesn’t have.

The final set of tools you need to learn how to use are for backlink analysis and management. The three most popular tools are Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, or Open Site Explorer.

Keyword Research
Identifying the right keywords is one of the most critical skills you can learn. Read this keyword research guide to get started.

Competitor Analysis
Finding prospective keywords is only the first step. You have to validate your keywords by analyzing the competitors. Start with this SEO competitor analysis guide.

Technical Optimization
Technical issues will kill your site’s performance in Google. That’s why you need to become a master of finding and fixing them.

Use these guides to get started:

The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO
The Technical SEO Renaissance: The Whys and Hows of SEO’s Forgotten Role in the Mechanics of the Web
Technical SEO checklist: 7 essential tips to implement now for 2017
Page-Level Optimization
You have to understand the art of optimizing organic landing pages. These are the keyword-targeted pages you want to rank in Google. This is the easiest SEO fundamental to learn.

Here are some guides to get you started:

On-Page SEO: Anatomy of a Perfectly Optimized Page
The On-Page SEO Cheat Sheet
Site Architecture
Understanding how to structure your website is a fundamental SEO skill.

A well-developed site architecture does a few important things:

It can help search engine spiders crawl your site more efficiently
It can improve user experience
It can reduce how many backlinks you need to rank because of the efficient flow of link equity.
Use these resources to get started:

How to Create a Site Structure That Will Enhance SEO
Site Architecture: 9 Effective Tips for SEO
Developing Content Assets
You have likely heard that “content is king”. This is true. Content is one of the biggest elements of a successful SEO campaign. It is fundamental that you learn how to create keyword target content assets.

If you get anything out of this guide, understand this one thing:

Nothing is more important than studying how to create effective content. Study as much as you can about content marketing, writing, and sales copywriting.

Use these guides to get started:

Turning Keywords Into SEO Content
22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue
The Nine Ingredients That Make Great Content
Relationship Building & Outreach
To elevate your SEO performance you have to learn how to build relationships. Yes, you have to communicate with real people to be successful in SEO. I know this is a tough pill to swallow if you’re an introvert, but it’s necessary. You can’t get very far in this world being a recluse.

The #1 tactic you need to know for building relationships online is how to exchange value. Value comes in many different forms including content, money, physical products, etc.

If you try to get something for nothing, then you will likely fail.

Here are some guides to understand this concept deeper:

A Model For Link Building: Beyond “Great Content” – read, study, and reread this guide. It is the basis of effective link outreach and value propositions.
Relationship-Based Link Building
9 Habits of People Who Build Extraordinary Relationships – a general guide on how to improve your relationship building efforts.
Link Acquisition
After content, backlinks are the second biggest ranking factor. You can craft the most beautiful piece of content, but without backlinks, it will falter.

Knowing what a quality backlink is and then knowing HOW to get them is a key to becoming an SEO expert. Our guide on backlinks is the best way to get started learning this important element of SEO.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Understanding how to drive organic search traffic to websites is a valuable skill. But knowing how to convert that traffic into revenue is even more valuable.

Remember what I said earlier? SEO is a means to end. CRO is how you can reach the “end”. The “end” being new email subscribers, leads, or sales.

Use the following three beginner’s guides to CRO from ConversionXL, Qualaroo, and QuickSprout.

Audits
Every SEO expert needs to know how to perform SEO audits. Audits help you identify issues that may be hurting a site’s performance. As I explain in this SEO audit guide, you should run an audit at least every quarter. This will ensure that you’re staying on top of things.

Those are all the fundamental skills you need to learn to become an SEO expert.

If you serious about improving your skills, then study each of the guides I gave you. Don’t give up on learning when a concept goes over your head. Try to understand it. After you have immersed yourself in these topics, it’s time to take action.

Take Action
You now know what you need to learn to become an SEO expert. That means you need to dedicate time to actually learning it.

Now be careful… don’t fall into the knowledge acquisition trap. Meaning, you are spending 100% of your time reading and learning, but never taking action.

You have to take action to see results. Crazy concept, right?

If you’re a beginner, then you should spend 80% of your time trying to understand the fundamentals. Then spend 20% of your time taking action. This 80/20 split should flip to 20% learning and 80% action after you understand the fundamentals.

Keep this mind: it doesn’t matter how much you “know”.

Like Mike Tyson says:

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

You can’t learn and you can’t adapt until you’re in the mud.

How to Take Action
If you’re new, then I recommend you start a niche website. As I mentioned before, it’s easy to start a niche site and it carries the least amount of risk.

Here are some guides to help you start your first niche website:

How to Build a Niche Site
11 Step Ultimate Guide: How to Build a Niche Website That Can Make $2,985 a Month
How I Made $32,000 in 12 Months with Amazon Niche Sites
Analyze Your Results
After you start your niche site, you need to analyze your results.

But before you do, you need to understand one of the most important rules of SEO analysis:

Correlation is not causation.

Now in Laymen’s terms…

Don’t make conclusions too fast. Google’s algorithm uses well over 200 different ranking signals. It is easy to make sweeping conclusions without looking at the big picture.

For example, you may say:

“My rankings for (KEYWORD) fell because I changed the title on the landing page.”

While this may be true, you don’t want to come to a conclusion that fast. You need to examine all factors before concluding. And most important, you need to let the data guide you.

Whenever your organic search traffic increases or decreases, you should follow this simple five step analysis:

1. Ask “why”?
It’s important to question increases and decreases because you can learn from both. Ask some of the following questions:

Did we acquire any new backlinks?
Did we modify on-page SEO?
Did we change the site architecture?
Did we add or subtract any internal links?
Are we having crawl issues?
Have there been any algorithm updates?
Is our rank tracking software accurate?
2. Develop a Hypothesis
Once you have identified some possible culprits, you need to develop a hypothesis. This doesn’t need to be rigid.

Something simple will work like:

“I believe our organic search traffic has increased/declined because of the following reasons:”

3. Wait
That’s right. You shouldn’t take action on your hypothesis right away. That’s because Google’s algorithm can be volatile. Sometimes waiting and not doing anything is the best solution. I usually wait one week or even up to a month to see if the issue corrects itself. If the decline continues, then it’s time for action.

4. Test It
Only take action on your hypothesis if you are at least 90% certain. Take one action at a time if you identified more than one. For example, take an action and wait at least a week before taking another.

5. Always Use Annotations in Google Analytics
Always, always, ALWAYS annotate your actions in Google Analytics. This is a check against your hypothesis. That way you can go back and see the exact action you took that either improved or hurt your results.

Run Quarterly Audits
You should audit your SEO campaign on a quarterly basis. This will ensure that you’re staying on top of things. It will also help you identify ways to improve your campaign on a more regular basis.

Pivot
In most scenarios, your SEO analysis will lead to micro changes. But, there will be times when you need to revamp your entire SEO strategy.

Remember that every website is going to have its own unique SEO experience. It doesn’t matter how many SEO case studies you read, your situation will never be the same as mine or anyone else’s. Sure, there are general principles that apply to every campaign. But how YOUR campaign unfolds is completely unique.

Find the 80/20 of every campaign. What 20% of actions are driving 80% of your results? Invest your time and effort into those actions.

Develop a System
There isn’t a set “way” of doing SEO, but you can build a loose system. For example, this guide is the culmination of years of experience, testing, and understanding of what factors have the biggest impact. But, I would never pretend that ANY system, including my own, works 100% of the time.

Every website is different. Every situation is different.

Your SEO system or strategy should be organic (no pun intended).

Don’t try to create a “perfect” system because that’s impossible.

Create your system, test it, and refine it over time.

Start with these guides:

Business Systems 101: How To Create A High Growth Business . . . Without Burning Out
7 Books to Read If You Want a Systematized Business That Runs Without You Successfully! – this is a perfect list of books to get you started. Each of these books can produce monumental changes to your business.

A Digital Marketing Career Path – Is it worth the effort?

f you are a student who is just graduating, or yet to graduate, digital marketing is a great career path for you, no doubt about it.

I have been a digital marketer for more than 10 years now and I have worked in amazing organizations like Razorpay, Practo & Instamojo at very high salaries. (Watch my video on how to get a high paying digital marketing job).

If you are fresher who has just graduated, you can get a digital marketing job by showing skills and experience with your side projects.

However, if you are already working in some other domain, is it still worth learning digital marketing and changing your career?

This article has the answer you are looking for (make sure you read till the end).

I did not start as a Digital Marketer
I keep telling people that I have 10+ years of digital marketing experience. I have been doing digital marketing since 2008.

However, I did not start learning digital marketing so that I could get a digital marketing job. I only wanted to start and grow a blog and that’s why I was forced to learn digital marketing.

When I started my motorcycle blog BikeAdvice, it did not grow by its own. To grow it I needed digital marketing expertise. I started learning content, email, social media, SEO and ads. By 2011, the blog was getting more than a million page views per month. You can learn more about my journey in my TEDx talk.

By 2013, I figured out that a lot of people need digital marketing and that’s when digital marketing jobs started coming up.

At that time, since it was a new job opening in most organizations, experienced people in digital marketing were not available. NIIT was one of the first institutes to come up with digital marketing courses and most of the people did not know where to learn digital marketing.

So you see, I did not learn digital marketing to get a digital marketing job. I learned digital marketing to grow my business.

Grow Your Business with Digital Marketing
If you learn digital marketing, it doesn’t need to be to get a digital marketing job. In most of the other fields such as Law, Medicine, Engineering… you learn them so that you can get a job in that field. Yes, some people start businesses in the same field in the long run, but the return on investment is not immediate.

However, if you know digital marketing, you can use it to grow your business. And you can learn digital marketing for 2-3 months and immediately start using the knowledge to grow your business.

I’m pretty sure that your idea is not be in a job forever. Everyone dreams of starting their own company some day or the other. Being an entrepreneur gives you freedom, power and the ability to create a life that you want.

Digital marketing will be the key to grow your business. The time, money and energy that you invest in learning digital marketing will never go to waste because this learning will help you in business growth in the future.

Even if you do not plan to start your own business, you need to brand and market yourself as an expert – in any field that you are in. A doctor who knows digital marketing can market his personal brand and clinic better than other doctors.

A lawyer can setup a law firm and grow it using digital marketing. An app developer can spread word about his app development skills using digital marketing.

Learning digital marketing is key to growing your personal brand. And you can grow your personal brand no matter which field you are specializing in.

Grow Your Personal Brand with Digital Marketing
If you know digital marketing, you can grow your personal brand with digital marketing. You can start a blog, write and publish articles, have a social media presence and even sell something online through your personal brand.

It doesn’t matter which career path you are in. You could be an AI engineer, app developer, lawyer, dietician, dentist or anything at all.

If you know digital marketing, you can get customers and clients through the web. Learning digital marketing is not always to have a digital marketing career path.

Digital marketing is not a career based skill. It’s a life skill. It’s like communication, public speaking body language and sales.

The better you can market yourself, or your products through the digital medium, the faster your will grow in your career – no matter what you do.

Digital Marketing is a Life Skill
So what does it take to learn digital marketing? It might look like a very complex subject, but digital marketing can be broken down into the following 7 simple components.

Understanding audience and market needs
Creating content for your audience
Ranking your content on the search engines
Getting your content to spread via social media
Driving traffic through paid advertising
Gaining a following and engaging your audience
Generating sales of your product through persuasion
If you learn all the above skills, it’s a super power.

The whole world is now connected via the internet and we have the power to communicate through digital channels.

Most of the people know only how to communicate (1 to 1) communication. At the max, they will be communicating with a group of people (on WhatsApp or Facebook).

If you learn digital marketing, you can communicate to thousands or even millions of people through the digital medium. Digital marketing is a force multiplier for your communication.

These very words that I am writing as a blog post is being read by 1000s of people. That’s because I have learned how to apply the above 7 components properly through learning and experience.

If you have the power to communicate to a large audience, you can start a movement, start a business, grow a brand, influence people and even persuade them to take action. This is unfair advantage.

That’s why Digital Marketing is not a career skill, but a life skill. So if you are thinking whether it will be worth your time learning digital marketing, my answer is Yes. Even if you do not end up getting a digital marketing job, your learning will help you in many ways.

Invest in Learning Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a deep subject. I still feel that I have a lot of areas to cover after learning and doing digital marketing for the past 10 years.

Sometimes, it might even unsettle you to see all the moving parts of a digital marketing campaign. But it is a subject worth learning.

Most of the people will not care about digital marketing and they will never have this super power. You are at least investing some time in learning about learning digital marketing (reading this post).


If you are looking to learn digital marketing from me, you can check out my Digital Marketing Mastery Bundle.
Also read-

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How to get Direct referrals for PTC sites

How I got approval for Google adsense in a month
How to qualify Ysense Clixsense surveys

7 Proven Ways to Build High-Quality Backlinks (2019)

If you’re a blogger, creating backlinks for your blog is one of the most important activities you need to do on a regular basis to improve your domain authority and organic rankings. There are a lot of students who asked me about the best ways to build high-quality backlinks for their blog.

In this article, I’ll talk about all the link building techniques that I have learned over the past 10 years of my blogging experience.

Getting high-quality backlinks for your blog is very important because it helps you in getting better search engine rankings for your keywords. But, link building is not as simple as it seems, you can’t build it overnight.

I have been blogging since 2013 on my blog digitaldeepak.com and it took me almost 6 years to build more than thousands of high-quality backlinks from unique domains.

Having a lot of high-quality backlinks helped my blog to a reliable domain authority above 40. You can check the domain authority of your blog with Moz Link Explorer.

If you are a newbie and just started your blogging journey, you must aim to achieve a domain authority of at least 40 within first 2-3 years, so that you get a fair opportunity to rank for the keyword you are targeting to.

In this article, let’s discuss some of the useful ways that helped me in getting high-quality backlinks for my website.

1. Publish Data Backed Posts

Earlier people used to get a lot of visitors to their website with content marketing because there was a shortage of good content on the internet. But now many people have started taking content marketing seriously and they are publishing high-quality articles in their blog.

Just because you have written high-quality articles on your website doesn’t guarantee you will earn high-quality backlinks to your blog.

If you have a community or an email list of thousands of people you will be able to cater great content by doing some surveys and research among your audiences.

You need to publish data back posts on your blog for more authority and you’ll be able to attract many high-quality backlinks than just opinions or How-to posts.

If your article is data-driven for example – with infographics, it will attract other publications to republish the data on their publication, and they will certainly go ahead and mention your website as a source.

Since I am in the digital marketing space, I keep doing research on what people actually want with digital marketing space. I have done a lot of surveys asking people in which city they want to work, what kind of positions they want to hold, what would be their expected salary and so on.

Once research of mine was picked up by a major Indian publication called YourStory, they published an article about it and linked back to my blog as a source. They also mentioned my brand which positively helped me in SEO.

If you have data collected from a research or a survey, always make an infographic out of it. It will not cost you much to get a designer to work on it. Whenever publications publish an infographic, its a journalism etiquette to link back to the source.

2. Giveaway Review Copies

If you have a product or service that you are selling on your blog, you can giveaway free review copies of your product and ask people to write a review on their blog.

Recently, I created a course on Marketing Automation and Zapier, and I announced on my community that I will give away a free copy of the course if you go ahead and write a review of the product on your blog. In majority cases, bloggers will link back their review to your blog.

Here are the reviews I’ve got for giving away free review copies of my Zapier Course:

Is the Zapier Mastery Course from Digital Deepak Any Good? [Detailed Review]

Automate Your Business – Check Out Zapier Mastery Course By Deepak Kanakaraju

Even if you do not get backlinks you will still have brand mentions and you’ll get more visibility for your product. When you do things that help you build a well-known brand, you will naturally earn backlinks.

If you have a SaaS product, you can giveaway free review copies of them as well. You might not be spending money on each copy that you give as they are digital copies. The cost of replication of the product is near to zero, and that makes giving away content and software one of the best ways to create value in the market and gain trust.

3. Interview People and Get Interviewed

People always wish to get featured on other websites and marketing channels. If I am interviewing any digital marketer on my digital marketing blog, I’m satisfying their ego.

There’s a high chance that the person who got interviewed on my blog would go ahead and share it with their audiences and might link back to my blog.

Once they link back the interview page that you have published on your blog, you will end up getting backlinks for your blog. They will link back to you without hesitation because you’ve featured them on your blog.

You can also earn backlinks by getting interviewed in other people’s blogs, for this you need to have a reliable personal brand.

For example, here’s an interview by Anil Agarwal of Blogger’s Passion – Deepak Kanakaraju Interview On Becoming A Successful Digital Marketer In 2019

Personal Branding is not something you can build overnight; it takes some time to build a personal brand but once you build your brand getting backlinks through interviews becomes easy.

Recently I announced on my Learn Digital Marketing Facebook group, that anyone who is interested can interview me and I will answer their questions.

A lot of bloggers reached out to me with their questions and I answered them. In return, they published it on their blog and linked back to my blog.

4. Contribute to Authority Publications

Once you have grown your personal brand and set yourself as a thought leader in a specific industry, you’ll be able to contribute articles to other publications.

I have contributed articles to authority publications like YourStory and Entrepreneur.com, and in every article in the author bio, I am getting a backlink to my blog.

Here’s my author bio on Entrepreneur Magazine

Most of the publications do not give you do-follow backlinks, but it is still going to help you with your SEO.

Publications like Forbes and FastCompany do not give any backlinks at all, but they will mention your brand and Google positively takes notice of your brand being mentioned in reputed publications.

You can also aim for the contextual backlink within the article apart from the link that you get from the author bio. This will be super easy if you add some statistics and data in your posts which are exclusive.

When you have data backed posts in your blog, publications will be obligated to link back to the source. You must be careful that you have a page on your blog with the source data.

Publishing articles in major publications also help in building your author rank.

Google apart from backlinks also looks for the author who has written the article and how much Authority does this particular author have in the market space related to a particular topic.

As a personal brand and a blogger, I recommend every blogger to remain focused on one specific topic. This way the search engines recognize you as an expert in a specific category.

5. Create a Free Tool

Another great way to get backlinks is by creating a free tool which is relevant to your industry. For example, Neil Patel created this free tool called UberSuggest which is an alternative to premium SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs.

Gone are the days when high-quality articles and eBooks were generating lots of backlinks, this is not the case now because there are too many of them on the web now.

Creating a tool is not easy and providing it for free means you need to pay for the server, resources, and development of the tool.

Since not everyone is capable of creating a tool by themselves, you will face less competition and it becomes easier for you to attract backlinks. Creating free tools enhance your brand searches on Google and help you in your SEO as well.

You can create a free tool for any market that you are into. It need not to be on digital marketing or blogging.

For example, I heard a while ago that one person who is running a digital marketing agency targeted all the lawyers in the country had built a tool for them. That tool also acted as a lead generation tool because people had to enter their contact details to use the app for free.

Your app can be a web app or a mobile app depending upon the needs of your customers. In general, tools have a high barrier of entry and this can help you gain a lot of high-quality backlinks in a very short period of time.

6. Write Articles On Current Affairs

A lot of people who publish articles and reports at the right time end up getting a lot of backlinks.

For example, Larry Kim the founder of WordStream published a report on Facebook ads vs Google ads, just before Facebook went public. This helped him to attract more than a million backlinks to his blog and it helped their SEO for a very long time.

With Buzzsumo, you can explore trending articles on your niche. Buzzsumo will show you all the popular articles on your space, you can get fresh content ideas based on social shares. Look out for the most popular posts and write a better version of that.

One of the reasons current affairs perform very well is because the amount of Articles out there on this particular topic is very low with low competition.

Secondly, creating high-quality content is not an easy job, you cannot create high-quality content overnight. That is one of the reasons, you will not face much competition when you are writing on trending topics.

7. Build a Brand

The most neglected method of building backlinks is to build a high-authority brand. If you become a category leader in one particular space, you’ll naturally start attracting backlinks in the long term.

I have never involved in active link building activities for my own blog. I’ve always been focused on understanding what my users want, publishing articles that they love to read, and distributing the article to peoples that might find the article useful.

If you do the creation of the content and the distribution part right, you will be able to attract backlinks over time naturally. This is earning backlinks rather than building backlinks.

If there is one book that I would recommend my readers and followers to read to learn about branding, it would be The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries and Laura Ries.

Building a strong brand is like growing a tree. It takes a long time, but once you build a strong brand, you are going to reap the compounded rewards of it over time.

Also read-

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What Are Backlinks and How to Build Them for Free

What are backlinks

First of all, it’s necessary to sort out “what is a backlink”. There is no need to explain everything in detail. The main thing to understand is what it is for and how it works. A backlink is a kind of Internet manipulator. It links one particular site with other external websites which contain links to this site. In other words, when you visit external sites they will lead you to that particular site. Backlinks are used for SEO purposes to optimize a website in a proper way.

Backlinks are external links to your website. They show the transition from one site to another or from one page to another. They help to index your website’s pages correctly.

Backlinks are an essential part of SEO process. They help search bots to crawl your site and rank it correctly to its content. Each backlink is a part of a ranking puzzle. That’s why every website owner wants to get as much as possible backlinks due to improving website’s SEO ranking factors. It’s a type of citation or hyperlink used in the text.

Google PageRank algorithm takes into consideration the sources and the number of web page backlinks, then estimates the importance of that page. That is why when you try to search for some goods, information or service, Google and other search engines present website links in a concrete order (from the most valuable to the least important ones). Backlinks help your website attract a primary audience. There are a few terms you need to know.

1. Link attribute

As usual, links have 2 types of attributes which make sense for SEO.

Nofollow link attribute prevent search engine robots from crawling a specific link. Initially, the nofollow attribute works at the meta tag level, but later, for more flexible control of search robots, it is considered for each individual link.

Dofollow link attribute points search bots what links are should be indexed. They intend to pass link juice from one website to another or from one web page to another. It is important for SEO goals.

How to use dofollow link checker?

If you need to check quickly if a certain URL or list of URLs provides nofollow or dofollow links, use dofollow link checker tool. With its help, you can prioritize your link building efforts to improve SEO. You need to submit the list of URLs you want to check and press “Start” button. The tool also extends its feature by providing you details of each site more briefly:

• On page parameter – the number of backlinks found to the number of submitted URLs;
• Follow – the number of dofollow backlinks found to the number of submitted URLs;
• URLs – the list of URLs verified to have a backlink to your website;
• Website link – URL where the backlink points to;
• Anchor – anchor text of the backlink;
• Status – if the backlink is found, the status is “Success”.
• Link Type – HTML attribute (dofollow or nofollow) of the backlink;
• Index – the indexation status of the backlink;

2. Link juice

This is the value of the link to the page being promoted, which is installed on a third-party resource. Link weight is an important parameter that should be considered in the process of website optimization. It is used by search engines to assign a website a higher status (domain authority).

In fact, dofollow and nofollow parameters are used to point search robots whether it should index specified link or page, whether to consider this link as a backlink. From a technical point of view, it is shown as:

a href="https://sitechecker.pro/de/" rel="nofollow"

or

a href="https://sitechecker.pro/" rel="dofollow"

Amount of backlinks

Unfortunately, backlinks are not free and their creation takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why it’s essentially important to learn the way to make each backlink you’ve purchased beneficial.

You can see that Sitechecker has the lowest amount of links, but due to the website content and quality of backlinks, Google ranks it for the keyword “seo backlinks” higher than others.

Here are useful and working tips and tricks that will let you do that:

• Optimize your website technically;
• Your website needs a reliable architecture;
• The content of your website must be valuable and attract clients.

Let’s talk about each step in more detail.

1. Fix all technical errors

You should fix all errors which can impair users’ expectations. By hurting user experience, you endanger the organic growth of your traffic because Google will surely limit it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works better when the technical optimization of your site meets the standards. While optimizing your website, look for the following technical issues:

• 302 (URL) redirection;
• 404 error;
• Directives wrong usage (nofollow, noindex, etc.);
• The speed of site loading;
• Redirect chains;
• Mobile device friendliness;
• Canonical tag mistakes;
• Duplicate content that is held as a description of stored data.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for issue #4, Google’s mobile friendly test for the problem #7, and Sitechecker for the rest of mistakes.

Find out all technical issues

Launch a website audit and detect all technical issues that brake your link building efforts

2. Improve website architecture

A strong and reliable site architecture almost guarantees the effectiveness of your backlinks profile. You’ll require fewer backlinks due to it. You should be updated with all website changes and correct errors when they happen. For these reasons monitor website changes and be notified every moment about something goes wrong with the website.

3. Make sure your content is valuable

Site-to-site connection resembles a pyramid or a puzzle. This system is impossible without proper site content. Low-quality website content will ruin your SEO campaign. You may have a thousand SEO backlinks and a well-structured site, but they won’t make any sense without valuable content. No good content – no success!

Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.
Google Search Console Help

If you have any doubts on your content quality, test it with SEO content checker, rewrite your text due to suggestions and send it for reindexing in Google Search Console.

What risks to consider

The process of backlinking is not very easy and it takes lots of time. In fact, there are two methods you can get backlinks:

1. Risky and quick way with a high chance to receive a Google penalty.
2. Careful and thorough way of promoting your site.

Less than 2 years ago everyone could promote a website within a month with the help of PBN (Private Blog Network). Then Google created “a sandbox” which made a site owner wait no less than 3 months before the effect of PBN backlinks turned to be visible.

There are two more negative factors: risk and financial investment. You will realize that neither your wasted time nor money were worth it. That’s why it’s better to rely on proper backlinks from real sites.

How to check backlinks

There is no secret that getting hiqh-quality backlinks is your website’s way to better ranking in Google. But how to differ good link from the bad one? Carefully choosing backlinks is a very tremulous and important task for everyone who wants to optimize their sites. There are a lot of different tools which can help you to check whether your backlinks are trustful and can bring your website value.

First of all, check backlink’s parameters.

• Start from PageRank. It’s one of the most valuable factors that make a big impact on your website. The logic is following, if high authority sites linking to yours, therefore your site is the trustful one too. This parameter can be checked by Ahrefs tool. Add needed URL to Ahrefs and verify its URL rating.

• Traffic. The deal is that you don’t need links from sites which nobody attends.
• Dofollow / Nofollow link. The tag rel=”nofollow” was created to prevent Google bots from counting all the link site has. As a rule, dofollow links are more valuable than nofollow.

All of these links’ key factors can be easily explored by Ahrefs backlink checker tool using “Batch Analysis”. It’s very helpful when you have to check a big amount of potential donors for backlinks. Besides, you can check domain rating (DR). Just add the needed URLs into Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool.

To find out more use Ahrefs trial. You can evaluate your links, competitors’ domains and build the winning linkbuilding strategy.

Secondly, all links to your website should be relevant to your niche. It’s considered that high-quality relevant links can help your site ranking better in Google.

“What does mean relevancy?”, – you may ask. Let’s imagine that you have blog about website building tips, but you have found an authoritative site about makeup trends. According to Google, this source won’t be a perfect one for you, because high authority sites should be closely related to yours. In other cases, it won’t work. The same thing goes for the content around which your link is inserted.

Full guide on how to check backlinks: Backlink Checker Tool: Comprehensive Guide

Five tricks for relevant SEO backlinks

These easy and effective recommendations will help you increase your website traffic daily.

1. Keep your links relevant

The relevancy depends on the following points:

• The general content topic of the connecting domain;
• The core of the linking page;
• The appropriateness of the backlinks which hit the domain.

You can check the relevancy with the help of Majestic SEO Trust Flow. It is really important to find backlinks which suit your website.

2. Make friends with authority websites

Together with authority websites, your site will be stronger. Analyze links with Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, Serpstat, and Linkstrategy.

3. Concentrate on websites with real traffic

Your tier one can be solidified with backlinks from real websites. They are hard to get but really rewarding. Check information about website traffic with SEMRush.

4. Be careful while spreading your anchor text

If your anchor text is aggressive and you distribute it the wrong way, your site will be deprived of ranking, and you may get a penalty. Most of your backlinks must be naked and branded. You should be very selective to anchors you use for your website, you can analyze your anchor list with the help of free backlink checker. It helps to understand what to improve in your link building strategy.

5. Get backlinks from high standard websites

Skip the potentially spammy websites which have content about Viagra or gambling. Such website has a lot of spammy backlinks, so it is only a matter of time them to get a penalty from Google.

• Public networks;
• Dofollow blog comments;
• Sidebar backlinks;
• Automated backlinks;
• Everything irrelevant.

Why? Firstly, the great number of public networks call themselves “private”. That’s not true. If the network is advertised, it cannot be private. We witnessed cases when Google destroyed such public networks and all the websites which had used them. They are easy to be revealed due to a huge number of outbound homepage links which are irrelevant to each other.

Their posts are short, and they cannot really block SEO crawlers. In fact, dofollow blog comments bring cheap backlinks which almost in 98% cases lead to a penalty. Secondly, footer backlinks look like paid ones, and Google smashes them. Automated backlinks and backlinks from websites with no valuable content can spread spam, so can be easily penalized by search engines.n

How to increase website authority

Every website owner inquires how to create power backlinks or how to increase the website authority. Such backlinks are trusted more than others, and you can be sure of their 100% relevancy. That’s the main reason why you require them so much. We already know that website authority depends on many factors. One of them is link acquisition. Here are 6 other ways.

1. If your links are not working, fix them

Everybody knows that external links leak site authority. That’s why it’s necessary to examine your site and find each broken one and fix it. You can find these links in your comment section and, of course, in the content. Here are several tools which can help you find them:

• Google Search Console;
• Sitechecker Crawler;
• Ahrefs.

2. Reclaim all 404 links

Thanks to Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and, of course, Sitechecker you can easily check your website, look for 404 errors and proceed to their reclamation. It’s a very easy and effective way to boost the authority. Use 301 redirects to remove them and transfer to an appropriate webpage or to your homepage.

3. There must be no unfixed redirect chains

When you use a redirect chain, it means that opening one page you may get directly onto the other linked one. Indirect chains include so-called buffer pages.

3. Replace 302 redirect chains with 301 ones

302 redirect chains can not only block but also steal the flow and the already existing authority from the site.

4. Receive editorial backlinks

To get editorial backlinks is only possible when you cannot enter the site, and your link passes the editorial examination. They are the most valuable for Google.

Unfortunately, it’s a real challenge to acquire these backlinks because you must build strong relationships with bloggers who are working in the same industry. You must have qualitative site content that will supply you with natural backlinks. This is difficult but rewarding.

5. The approach based on content

One of the most reliable and 99% guaranteed ways to drive your website authority is to create high-quality content. You have to search for appropriate target keywords; surround keywords with cool content; promote and advertise your content. Qualitative content is the only thing that Google cannot confiscate. Everything you should do is to make your post valuable and not spammy. Just important core information which won’t be spoiled by backlinks injecting. It’s better to have contextual linking. In other words, the links are to merge into your text.

So, now you know what can easily increase your site authority even without new backlinks. But that’s not enough if you want your site to be on the top. Let’s speak about foundational, editorial, and power backlinks.

“Foundational” backlinks

TrustRank takes into consideration website foundational backlinks. Search engines find quicker sites which are reliable and trustworthy and place them on the top of SERP. All doubtful websites you can find somewhere at the end of the rank if you decide to look at what is there. As a rule, people take the information from the first links and stop searching, in case they have found nothing on the first 20 top sites. Surely, your website may have that required information, service or goods but because of lack of authority, Internet users will not find them unless you have good foundational backlinks.

Foundational backlinks are all branded and non-optimized backlinks on authority websites.

There are the following types of foundational backlinks exist.

1. Directories with niche targets

Though directories are considered to be pointless and worthless, there are some which can be really helpful. They are called niche-target directories. They can supply you with appropriate dofollow links. It’s not so easy to find such links, that’s why you should look for them with the help of the following combinations:

• Niche + “submit site”
• Niche + directories
• Niche + directory

2. Social media

Use the following media sources for your business development:

• Instagram;
• Facebook;
• Twitter;
• Linkedin;
• Pinterest;
• Reddit;
• Quora.

It doesn’t mean than you have to advertise on these social media platforms. It means that they belong to that pyramid which will function better thanks to their support. Just secure them and decide which of them will suit your goal better. For example, you can choose Instagram because its audience is the most suitable for mobile devices and bits of advice of their exploitation distribution.

3. Business quotes and lists

It’s not a secret that Google appreciates business citations and listings. They are a part of its search algorithm. It’s a strong fact that must make you choose business links for your SEO campaign. The other benefit is that because of them you can receive unoptimized and dofollow links. These backlinks can guarantee trustworthy neighboring of your site that will attract Internet users and clients. Google considers these platforms as trustworthy and knows that they attract other business clients. In other words, almost all of them are accepted as 100% relevant.

4. Directories which are geographically targeted

These directories are an integral backlink source of local businesses. They will let you develop your business in a particular geographical place.

You can use the following tips to get geo-targeted directories:

• Directory +name of the town/metropolis/city
• Name of the town/city/metropolis + directories
• Name of the city/town/metropolis + directory
• niche+ town/metropolis/city name + directory
• submit my site + name of the town/city/metropolis

5. Forum backlinks that are niche closely connected

If you want your brand to be recognized, participate in industry forums. Referral traffic will be guaranteed in case you do everything correctly:

• Try to find closely connected or appropriate forums;
• Make your profile solid and informative;
• Take into consideration forum peculiarities;
• Post a lot and make friends;
• Initiate a thread.

So, when you find a relevant forum, be sure that you have written an authorized profile description and toss in your main concept or word of great significance. Then study the forum, its rules, and the way it operates. Examine the forum to know whether its members share links in threads. Become a reliable person making more and more friends and placing posts interesting for the forum participants. Thanks to that you may get more internal linkage to your profile and gain authority.

6. Blog comments that are appropriate to your niche

We may surprise you by saying that blog comments are considered to be “nofollow” links by SEO. Still, we don’t think so because they are quite effective. We use blog comments to:

• improve the quantitative relation between dofollow and noFfllow backlinks;
• make the website relevant;
• get referral traffic;
• modify anchors meaningfully;
• make so-called friends with bloggers which we can use for future backlinks.

7. Resource pages

This is considered to be good but old. Look for the pages and check whether there are any broken links. If there are none, then you’ll get denied without the reliable content asset.

8. Private blog networks white alternatives

If you don’t want to rebuild an expired domain, just take its backlinks and allow the linkers to be aware of the “to-dead-resource” linking. You can ask a link-builder to replace non-working links with your website’s one. If the content is relevant, you can try to restore it. Be sure that you can make it better than it was before. Reach out and inform the link-builder about the renewed content.

9. Leverage relevant dead domains

You can create a private blog network, and it’s important to do it right. It’s dangerous to purchase an expired domain. Your task is to search for relevant trust flow topics for your niche.

That is no doubt hard to perform, but it’s more than rewarding. One such link (acquired from a relevant domain) is more important and stronger than a couple of appropriate domains.

These are some useful tools which can find the expired domain for you:

• PR Powershot;
• Freshdrop;
• DomCop;
• ExpiredDomains.net.

10. Grey Hat backlinking

Grey Hat methods stand in the middle between Whites and Black ones. They deal with:

• Plagiarism or content stealing;
• Buying out-of-date domains;
• Cloaking;
• Social media spams;
• Link purchase.

A great number of people use it to boost their website authority and receive backlinks.

And we must warn that if you are going to apply this technique, you may get a penalty or be banned.

They are not safe and very risky. They are mostly chosen by those who:

• Desire to rank having no valuable content;
• Possess a high-risk tolerance;
• Don’t really care about penalties.

We strongly recommend not using them for your tier one backlinks. If you want, you’d better use them for tier 2 to support the first one.

11. Web 2.0s

One of the most widely used and oldest grey hat strategies is web 2.0s creation. It’s usually done with the help of such sites like Weebly, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. It really works but be careful because you may get a penalty, especially in case you use it on tier one.

How to Deserve Backlinks

A great number of people who deal with SEO confuse backlink building and backlink earning. These notions are different. What is backlink building? It means to create conditions for SEO backlink referring to your site. To earn a backlink means to deserve it. Is that really possible? Yes! If you want your site to be worth earning backlinks, you must do everything possible and impossible to please your guests and users.

How do you do that? SEO function is based on the users’ (clients) wishes. That’s why, first of all, you must also think of your user’s desires and preferences.

If your users are satisfied, Google will be satisfied, as well, because:

• Happy users will bring backlinks to you;
• Pleased clients are your business promotion;
• Satisfied clients will share your content and will always go back to your website.

There are a few tips for backlink earning.

1. The user must always be the center of your business

Google will like your content if your clients like it. The content should be helpful and contain less information which is already known to the reader. It is to meet their expectations. When users vote for your site, it means that Google starts accepting it as an authority site. That’s why content writing is as important as a speech of a candidate for the Presidency. The better it is, the more visitors you have.

2. Your user must be interested in your content

When an Internet user starts searching for something, he/she tries to solve some particular problem or achieve something. Your prior aim is to help them find a good solution. Don’t be obsessed with search volume only. Think about the user’s needs. There is no difference between 40,000 and 1,000 word posts and articles when we speak about their value. Try to create high-quality content and don’t pay any attention to certain stereotypes.

3. Your content must be unique, attractive, and valuable

Try not to write top Google articles just by using some other words. You need to make your message unique, interesting, impressive and well-structured.

4. Do what others don’t do

Don’t be lazy and improve your content daily. Don’t write only short or long articles. Vary them but don’t forget about the quality. Remember that some users don’t like to read much and that others prefer blog novels and detailed explanations of the problem they are trying to solve. You need to produce and get results.

5. Be inventive

That’s not easy but still possible. Look for the ideas that others haven’t found and highlighted yet. Look at the first Google pages and use Buzzsumo to see what information is valuable and what data is taken like garbage. Your site must be zestful.

6. Be extraordinary

Don’t duplicate already existing content. Publish super content, and you’ll receive your earned backlinks.

7. Be the best in your sphere

To be successful, you have to analyze Google top sites and study:

• why they are so popular;
• why their visitors share the content of the website on social media;
• why the content gets so many blog comments.

If you have already done it, then think of the best way to outperform them and don’t just copy.

8. Write periodically

Try to publish periodically. Thanks to that you’ll keep your users. Naturally, it’s almost unreal to write masterpieces daily, but you must NOT forget about your users and please them with new information, if not daily then at least every week. Use an editorial calendar and try not to change it. Then you’ll produce new posts automatically. There will be no need for constant reminding.

The other point is that you must devote yourself to writing and make your content good. Don’t feel sorry for the time you spend. Your goal is to have pleased users and received backlinks.

9. Look for new beneficial relationships

Don’t forget about interrelations and connections. Your blog is not supposed to be isolated. Nothing can be better than to cement relationships with famous bloggers. That’s not easy because you have to prove that you are useful for them. It’s approachable only in case of qualitative content.

It’s important to make a name for yourself and to always be visible by repeating well-thought-out comments and non-committal email sending. Ask bloggers in what way YOU can help them. That’s the best way for you to create exposure.

10. Advertise your content

Only visible content receive backlinks. There are many ways to make your content visible. Some of them are:

• to write great content;
• find sites which have linked to the same topic-articles before;
• address to them.

Again, don’t forget about the high-quality content that you can offer because it must be much better than those they have linked to.

Take into consideration top Google pages or Buzzsumo.

Also read-

Entertainment news, online money making

Know How I make money online through Ysense
How to get Direct referrals for PTC sites

How I got approval for Google adsense in a month
How to qualify Ysense Clixsense surveys