Are Backlinks Still Effective – Is Backlink Building Dead?
Of course backlinks are not dead, that would mean that every search engine has now changed their entire algorithms to no longer count backlinks. Its unrealistic to think that gaining naturally dripped backlinks from IP diverse, niche focused blogs wouldn’t benefit us any longer… that would be simply crazy talk!
Content Marketing is about growth, engagement and traffic generation. Granted it takes effort to grow you sites rankings and engagement but if you don’t start growing and adapting today, when are you going to do it?
Lets start with the basics to help you get going in the right direction:
Have your house in order… if you don’t have your onpage SEO work completed already, don’t worry about any off page link building because its not going to do you abit of good if your on your onpage isn’t solid. Once you have your site ready, then its time to begin to focus on your off page SEO efforts.
Have you done your Keyword Research?
Don’t go any further until you know what keywords you are targeting, is your research done, do you have your keywords ready? For example we hope you don’t target “dogs” because that is way to broad a category, its not specific enough to provide you with targeted traffic . Its always better to target long tails such as “Dog Collars For Dobermans” etc. Take your time, there are plenty of free resources out there for refining your keyword list with the best free resource being Google AdWords.
Remember what you put in is what you get out :
Build out your content and keep it fresh because that is what people want. Provide value at every step of the way so that when the person decides to make a purchase, your site is top of their mind. This is what the best brands do and there is no reason why you cannot do the same within your niche.
Write for your readers 1st and the engines will love you for it:
Be natural, don’t try to keyword stuff, load or write an advertising article, bring value to your readers. Where appropriate include relevant images, infographics or video to help your readers engage with your content. Quality content will yield better results, pay more attention understanding your readership and target them with content they want to read about!
Social Media is now being used for ranking metrics, not just any social signal will do, you need social signals from real people and profiles that have a certain level of edge rank, influence and engagement:
Don’t buy likes or followers from services like Fiver, soon you will find that not only will these empty unengaging profiles not provide any ranking lift, they might end up hurting you. With the UAW Social Exchange, you will receive real likes, shares, tweets, retweets, G+ and views from real people. Take advantage of this service, its free, its powerful, its needed for 2013
UAW has moved beyond simply facilitating a system and a article marketing community, we have embraced the ever changing landscape of the new SEO. Over the past 24 months UAW has been testing & analyzing what works and what doesn’t, tweaked our systems to ensure that UAW remains the most effective and cost efficient community driven Content and Social marketing platform available to everyone, not just the privileged few.
To learn more about how UAW has evolved, you can listen to the very candid conversation I had with David Jenyns of Melborne SEO, where we covered many topics such as Google Disavow, Backlink Building and how UAW consistently tests and monitors performance for members. You can listen to the full interview here
Once you are ready, you will see that UAW has a tight integration of social media where members can now achieve greater results and more engagement to grow their business & traffic, not only to increase search rankings but for social engagement and social search. Take a look and see how you can achieve growth in a natural and safe way through the use of UAW:
Great infographic depicting the various services UAW Members have access to!
Remember, don’t simply build links all nilly willy, as you can see below you should try to achieve the “money” as it relates to a natural mix to help you rank in today’s environment:
- Content marketing, Technical SEO and Social make up the new seo
Yes backlinks are still effective, yes they still work for ranking BUT, you need to have a natural, healthy mix of backlinks that include social metrics (not bought from false or shell profiles) from real people all available to you inside!
Key Takeaways:
- Write for readers 1st (not search engines) include images and videos where appropriate
- Focus on your on page optimization, if you don’t, your simply wasting your time
- Detailed keyword research is a must, take your time, look for the longtail keywords – focus on 5 to start
- Be natural when your ready to build links – spamming 1000′s of links just isn’t natural, you will raise red flags
- Write for your readers, not search engines
- Social is now part of SEO and do make a difference for your rankings
- Fresh Unique Content is an important metric for search algo rythms, update your site often with fresh original content
- Rankings and Engagement take time, it has to grow so the sooner you plant the seeds, the sooner you can reap the rewards of your efforts!
~ Jason
Tags: seo, Smo, Unique Article Wizard
Backlinks are surely the lifeline of a blog thanks for sharing !
Many insights here thank you for sharing
There has been a lot of talk about only using mass article directory submission like UAW for second tier links as you are probably not going to get a lot of link juice to the money site with direct article directory links. Any thoughts on that?
Great question! – Lets 1st dig a little deeper into what UAW provides its members as UAW is much more than simply a “mass article directory service”…
• Yes UAW submits content to many directories however the largest % of submissions are to niche related blogs with matching categories and topics = relevancy
• Social Signals are an ever growing importance to Content Marketing therefore UAW provides social signals for all members through its social exchange = social signals
• Fresh Original Content is a must for your Blog/Money Site- If you have added Plugin UAW, you can receive UAW versions or Original content to your blog manually approved or autopilot = freshness ranking factors
• Author Profiles – you can use your author profiles in a number of ways (depending upon your strategy) especially now that your author profiles have Professional Profile listings, full access to the Social Exchange, you can update their statuses from inside UAW, include links and information for authors profiles across their networks you have authorized and more… = social profile authority
There are members that only use UAW to build niche content related links their money with great success, there are members that only use UAW for their Tier II sites that then link up to their money site(s), there are yet another set of members that mix it up and do both all with great success so it really comes down to what you feel most comfortable with, what your overall link building strategies are and how much time, effort and resources you have to develop and successfully manage your programs!
Thanks for the detailed reply Jason. I was a UAW member for a over a year and jumped off the UAW bandwagon straight after the penguin update (probably not alone there I’d imagine). Prior to the second Panda/Penguin update I was successfully ranking many of my niche sites in top 5 just using UAW and now defunct My Article Network but since then I have been working on a more diverse and manual link building strategy. Would love to see a case study style post on this blog at some point and see how some of your other members are achieving success in the current SEO environment.
Manual link building is a great way to rank if you have the time and expertise to do it effectively. Gone are the days of simply using the same Anchor Text in all your links for example pre Panda/Penguin – members could use the same anchor text for the same link in every article, it was not that UAW was NOT effective, it was the method by which members used it
Follow the guidelines, lower the velocity, increase the quality of your content, gain social signals etc. enables members to build a natural link profile with much less effort and time! UAW promotes quality over quantity, we also take into account the velocity and social signals being generated which are part of the recipe today.
Thanks for your suggestion on the case study post, we will look into providing this type of information in a future post!
I agree, backlinks are certainly not dead……..but you really need QUALITY backlinks, that is the secret!
There are many different ideas of what a “Quality” backlink really is but if you are referring to quality backlinks as High PR sites linking to you – its just not natural to have only these links pointing to you… You need a wide range of links from sites ranging from pr0 to the highest of PR sites you can achieve, links from social media sharing, profiles and web 2.0′s all should be included in your overall link diversity strategy!
What part of adsense do you get keywords
Sorry it was a typo, should have read “Adwords” – https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool -
BL is still working but need quality along with onpage SEO. Great article. Thanks
Over the last 2 years I have experimented and tested many backlinking tools – UAW being one.
I can confirm that UAW (if used correctly) can and does provide quality links that give a webpage real authority on the web.
I have tested many tools, some of them very expensive in comparison, and whilst they also work well, UAW is great value for money and one I will continue to use on my sites and my clients site also.
we only have to diversify our backlinking strategy
Where can we see the full range of services available to us?
Thanks
Kevin
Hi Kevin,
Here is a partial list of what services are available with your membership:
+ Content Creation Wizards
+ Monthly Distribution/Postings for your content on Niche blogs and Directories
+ Publishing Rates for your content performance
+ Keyword Ranker and Tracker for your domain
+ Scheduling of automatic content distribution and velocity
+ Category and Niche Matching distribution
+ Manual Review process for best practice enforcement
+ Unlimited Author Accounts and Profiles on a PR 5 Identity Mgt Service
+ Pro Author Identity with Do Follow links to your social profiles PR 5
+ Social Exchange Use/Access
+ Social Network Management & Status Updating
+ UAW Plugin (Original and UAW Content)
+ Pay Per Use Content Writing Services
+ Live Chat, Support and Help Desk
+ Training Resources and Videos
+ much more…
I did not know that UAW was doing social things. I thought that you only could add article and did not know i could put video and images in my arrticles also. Is this true, where I can add images into the content that I submit to UAW? I am very interested in the social aspect in what UAW does, can you direct me to a page about this? Thanks
You can embed images and videos directly in to the body of your content. Go to “Content” > “Manage Videos” (or manage images) there also is a “How to” video that you can watch (same with images) If your logged in simply click this link to watch http://byt.io/SclXJ
As for social, simply log into your account and navigate to “Social Tools” which will provide you with direct access to the exchange along with “How To” videos that you can watch for more information!
If you need some assistance you can click the live help from your control panel!
I am still a little confused…. Are we putting our niche site URL into UAW or is it best to do a tier 2 type of link building?
Yes you can link directly to your niche site but what we (and many other professionals) do is to link your UAW articles to your tier 2 sites (web 2.0 properties/profiles, etc) and then link those to your niche/money site… In our testing this gives you the best results and most flexibility!