Skills that Link Builders Should Master

Judging link building as an unnecessary SEO practice based on Google’s action against poor link building methodologies is wrong approach. Link building has unchanged importance. It can be proved by the fact that agencies, which do not give importance to quality link building despite implementing every SEO method professionally, miss good results. Similarly, the conventional high quality link building alone cannot solve all the problems and, hence, a link builder needs to think outside the box in order to get good results. Below are some skills which definitely explain the difference between a link builder and a great link builder.

• Do not focus only the page you are linking to in your site. Take into consideration the entire site. It wouldn’t really matter if the quality of subpage you are linking at is perfect. The overall quality of that site has the pivotal role which cannot be ignored. You wouldn’t really want to add a subpage link belonging to a bad quality website in your content.
• Emailing the high authority website owners to get your link added in their websites is a common practice. However, the email has to be written professionally. It doesn’t mean that you should write an email that would take 15 minutes to read. Keep it short, professional and meaningful while explaining how adding your link can be useful. It’s definitely a give-and-take deal.
• Make sure that internal linking of your website is functional. Avoid such practices that would end up breaking the URLs. A broken URL suggests the search engine that your website would not do well if placed on the top position in SERPs. As a consequence of having more broken URLs, you might need to add redirects which also make those links useless for the users. It can be disastrous in the long run.
• About 75% of link builders use keywords for creating anchor texts. This technique had worked well in the past but the latest trend in link building suggests that this technique is going to be unsuccessful in the future. The machine learning and artificial intelligence possessed by search engines now focus on more useful information for the viewers. Hence, the anchor text creation would need to be eventful.

Valuable Practices of SEO Audit

SEO audit is a vital process that helps us know about the website’s weaknesses which could hurt the marketing process. The top SEO experts from SMX West have shared their findings which are briefly explained below.

Elements involved in discovery and planning - Jessie Stricchiola

The first thing that should be taken into consideration, according to Jessie Stricchiola, is to know the purpose of SEO audit. SEO audit is usually performed for certain reasons; i.e. the website is new, the website has been redesigned, domain migration has been performed, or drop in traffic and penalties are to be analyzed.

While you are being hired for the task of SEO audit, you may need to find the answers of certain questions which include duration of website’s existence, the skill level of client, the nature of development and engineering methods used with the website, and the reason for the end of previous work relationship between the client and SEO and development agency.

Recommended Tools for SEO Audit – Benj Arriola

Benj Arriola presented some great ideas for SEO auditing. He suggested some tools which can help in performing an accurate SEO audit. Starting with the common errors like broken links to complex logical errors, these tools can make the life of SEO audit person pretty easier. Below is a brief description of every tool:

·         Xenu – it is the free tool which you can only use if you are PC user. The use of this tool to audit bigger sites is a difficult task.

·         Another good tool for auditing is Screaming Frog. You will need to pay very little amount to use this tool. Compatible with both Windows and Mac, this tool helps in finding errors in heading tags, title tag duplication and many more.

·         Another cheaper and good quality audit tool is Deep Crawl. This tool is equipped with a wide array of methods which track and help in fixing many errors such as broken links, problems in status headers, errors in XML sitemaps, blocked URLs, issues with AJAX, duplication and thinness of content.

Arriola further suggested some tools to fix the issues; which include SEOquake to fix problems in indexed domains, DYNOmapper and Power Mapper to fix issues with topic hierarchy.

Retaining a Local SEO Client

The SEO personnel often seem worried about how to retain a client. It’s a fact that clients are the people who expect SEO to do wonders for their sites. That is the major reason they keep asking the questions; how long it would take for my page to show up on top, or how bigger traffic the SEO strategy would manage to direct to my site.

If you are dealing with such a client and you want to satisfy him/her, the only way is to make the client understand your SEO strategy and its importance for the website. It doesn’t mean that you should start explaining every bit of complex information in order to make the client understand everything from the scratch. There are simpler and easier ways to explain things and this is what you should do.

What does local SEO include?

Local SEO is connected with several signals which exist on and off the site. These signals are the ranking factors each of which holds a specific and vital value. Below is the diagram of ranking factors by Moz.

Looking at this image, it becomes obvious that improvement in website’s rank requires work to be done in certain areas. Hence, there is no single department in which one can dedicatedly work in order to extract desirable results. Moreover, SEO for different niches, even in the same locality, is different. You cannot just implement a successful SEO strategy for auto repair business to promote insurance business. Even the same businesses located in different localities need separate and sometimes completely different SEO strategies.

How explain SEO equation to the client

The first thing that you should be able to make the client understand is the factor of competition. In other words, the business you are trying to promote doesn’t have a monopoly. Hence, the SEO process wouldn’t be sufficient if you are promoting just a few pages. For successful Chiropractic SEO, you will need to pay equal and adequate attention to all of the relevant signals.

Another factor worth explaining is that your niche has competitors you are fighting with. Therefore, even if you have managed to beat the competition, it would only serve as a signal of motivation for the competitors. This example should be sufficient to make the client know the fact that SEO is a never-ending process.