Google SEO practice on external links

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Once we have a website built and optimized according to our SEO strategy, our next task is to place external links. Anyone who understands even a little bit about the basics of SEO knows that the main thing is the content, and the main ones are inbound links. External links are the most important in all SEO. Google makes it clear that backlinks are still one of their most important search engine rankings. Thus, good work with external links can improve the overall ranking of our website.

The content of the article:

• 1. Principles of building an external link chain
• 2. Pick keywords
• 3. External network content planning
• 4. Create a Daily Content Creation Plan (Example)
• 5. Publication of external link chain resources
• 6. Common SEO plugins or tools
• 7. External links - an advanced network strategy
• 8. External link statistics
• Including External Links and Tracking the Effect
• 10. Inbound Link Adjustment Strategy

1. Principles of building an external link chain

Authoritative resource

In other words, we must select external chain resources with a relatively high degree of authority to build an external link chain.

Extensive link chains

That is, the resources of our external chain of links should be distributed as widely as possible, across many channels and many types.

Correlation

That is, the resources that we publish in the external chain should have a relatively large correlation with our business. If you're an auto parts manufacturer, don't go to the food forum to post external links.

Speed up indexing

That is, at an early stage we planned how many external links are needed to squeeze the page to the first page, and then we build external links according to the pyramid model. The mass is at the bottom of the tower (in large quantities). You can add external links to external links to speed up the inclusion of external links in the index, as well as increase the ranking of the website faster.

2. Pick keywords

1. How to get keywords

1. The first edition of the main keyword list is sorted according to the "Description of the XXX product model of the main customers" based on the direction of demand and the direction of the product (or service).
2. Find keywords in Yandex, Google, Bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and collect autocomplete in the search box and related search keywords at the bottom of the search results.
3. Search keywords on Quora and other Q&A platforms to find question type keywords.
4. Search Wikipedia to find keywords in the same area of expertise. If the keywords in the base edition correspond to a specific professional book, look up the keywords in the same area of expertise from the table of contents for that book.
5. Search Azon for top keywords to find related product keywords and intent keywords.
6. Search keywords on sharing forums like YouTube and Reddit to find long export related keywords.
7. Use Yandex Wordstat, Google Keyword Tool and Keywords Everywhere, Ubersuggest. Find more generalized long-tail keywords using well-known keyword recommender tools.

2. How to organize your keywords

Combine the keywords you have sorted through different channels, and after deduplication, generate a summary table of keywords, and group and sort keywords with the same semantics according to the level of traffic.

3. How to confirm the main push keywords

1. If keywords are loaded from various keyword tools, a keyword difficulty analysis is usually performed, which can be used as some kind of reference.
2. Put all the keywords in a keyword cluster in Google for search, check the search results returned and the required time (how many results are returned in seconds, you can judge how much content the word already has) and check the Top 10 page types: content, weight (whether then an authoritative website, homepage or shopping page). Prioritize keywords with fewer search results and fewer authoritative sites in the top ten results.
3. Confirm the order of priority of the words promoted by each keyword cluster according to the above two methods.
4. According to the analysis above, pick 2-3 keywords with traffic in the industry and not very competitive in the first week, then put those 2-3 keywords on google, ahref, semrush and other keyword tools. Find more advanced words in a search engine, form a keyword cluster under that keyword, and then edit the quality copy and add external links to those words with traffic. Continue for 2-3 weeks before changing other keywords.

3. External network content planning

Confirm the type of external network to be released on the same day

Common types of external links:

1. Blogs, Web 2.0: third party blogs, press releases, guest blogs, Q&A, etc.;
2. PDF: including e-books and industry documents, etc.;
3. Multimedia content: long and short videos and online broadcasts, information views and product images;
4. Links to bookmarks, article directories, yellow pages, etc.;

Confirm that the keywords you want to promote are appropriate for specific user purchase stages

Typically, a user makes a purchase in three stages:

Stage one: product awareness stage. The customer awareness stage is the beginning of the sales and marketing cycle. Most of these target customers know what products and services they need, but are not ready to buy them.

The current content marketing strategy is to help customers learn about products, how to use and product features, and to provide product usage questions, answers, and assistance.

This content includes educational text, videos, and infographics. Most article types start with what, how, list, etc.

— Stage 2: Consider the measurement stage. When customers come to the evaluation stage of products and companies, our content is mainly to offer products and product benefits to customers that meet customer needs, and continue to provide educational content on the use of products to convey a sense of trust. For example, template details, purchase guide, user guide, product parameter details, etc. Generally, these are mainly A and B articles or parameter comparisons.

- The third stage: the stage of making a purchase decision. The content of this stage is to enable customers to get a deeper understanding of the products and achieve conversion transactions, so that customers can understand what they can get with our products and services and save money. Articles of this type are mainly about comparing the benefits of our products, discount plans and pushing customers to make further purchase decisions, they are, roughly speaking, promotional articles.

3. Prepare the topic (title) of the article with an external link

Confirm the topic (title) of the article (image, video) by the main keyword and stage of the customer.

4. Create a Daily Content Creation Plan (Example)

Fourth, the creation of external network content

1. Purchasing content

1. Search Google for keywords or titles, check content in search results, and find content that matches the topic.
2. Collect product descriptions and reviews from other platforms such as AZON, ALIEXPRESS, Yandex products, etc.
3. Collect questions and answers related to the topic from social platforms, forums, etc.
4. Content published from various competitor content channels; use commafeed and feedly to subscribe to competitor blogs.
5. Video channels related to topics, content and industry products published by professional magazines and blogs (video content can be cut and edited into articles, purely original).
6. Find relevant resources on relevant domestic advisory websites, news websites, blogs and forums.

2. Requirements for writing an SEO article (original or pseudo-original)

Requirements for the original writing of the entire article:

Posting on news media sites, guest blogs, and high-quality third-party blogs requires the use of full-text original articles, and the external links provided by such articles are at the top of the pyramid.

1. 100% original content, no problems with grammar and sentence structure, good readability. There are sites dedicated to checking the originality of articles, for example text.ru, advego. You can check if the article is plagiarized and you can also check the readability.
2. An article is a combination of graphics and text, or a combination of text and video with rich content.
3. Images in articles should have alt text.
4. The number of words in the article is at least 1500 words (according to the survey, the average number of words on the first pages in Google is 1400 words), and the number of browsing screens on mobile phones is 4-5 screens, and the number of browsing screens on computers is at least 2-3.
5. The sentences in the article are fluent, the grammar is correct, there are no typos.
6. The topic of the article is clear and not confusing, the structure is also clear: first-level headings, second-level headings, third-level headings, subheadings, and a clear structure between paragraphs.
7. Keyword embedding is natural, main keywords and keyword clusters are evenly distributed and fit with the topic of the article, and the layout should be reasonable. Both H1 and H2 contain relevant keywords from the main push.
8. Variety of anchor text links: broad match keywords, exact match keywords, partial match keywords and open links. But keep in mind that a large number of exact match anchor text keywords can easily be labeled as a scam.
9. Make sure the link is correct and the anchor text link can open normally.

Common pseudo-original methods:

1. Permutation and combination method, cross-combining several intercepted paragraphs.
2. Comment, interception of paragraphs of other people's articles for commenting.
3. Comparative formula, comparative article between product A and product B.
4. Abstract type, summarizing other people's articles and writing abstracts of articles.
5. Translation into English or another language.
6. Extracting Video Subtitles - Video subtitles can be extracted to form articles.

The sorted pseudo-original articles can be sorted into a "content database" Excel sheet or an online document, and future articles can be directly intercepted and used.

Requirements for pseudo-original creative writing:

1. Requires 70% original content, pseudo-original can use tools to check grammar and originality.
2. An article is a combination of graphics and text, or a combination of text and video with rich content.
3. Images in articles should have alt text.
4. The number of words in the article is at least 800 words, and the number of viewing screens on mobile phone is 3-4 screens, and the number of viewing screens on computer is at least 1-2 screens.
5. The sentences in the article are fluent, the grammar is correct, there are no typos.
6. The topic of the article is clear and not confusing, the structure is also clear: first-level headings, second-level headings, third-level headings, subheadings, and a clear structure between paragraphs.
7. Keyword embedding is natural, main keywords and keyword clusters are evenly distributed and fit with the topic of the article, and the layout should be reasonable.
8. Variety of anchor text links: broad match keywords, exact match keywords, partial match keywords and open links.
9. Make sure the link is correct and the anchor text link can open normally.
10. Articles can have relevant queries or add alternative ones.

5. Publication of external link chain resources

1. What are the types of resources for external links?

• Blog/web2.0: wordpress, blogspot, medium, livejournal, etc.
• Forum: bbs, forum, etc.
• Q&A: Quora and more
• Social networks: facebook, vk, ins, twitter, linkedin, reddit, tumblr, pinterest, etc.
• Bookmarks: postila, Flipboard, mix, etc.
• PDF: edocr etc.
• Video sharing: youtube, dailymotion, etc.
• Image sharing: pinterest, fotki.com, flickr.com, ipernity.com
• Guest blogging, posting articles, etc.
• Review platforms, etc.
• Local advertisements on B2B websites or Yellow Pages websites, etc.

2. How to find resources with external links

Look for the three dimensions of inbound link resources: authority, relevance, and reach.

Method:

1. Google direct search, pdf sharing, blog builder, bookmark sharing, similar blogger site, etc., there will be many articles with lists of related resources, then check if they are available.
2. Search Google for keywords related to your industry or product, check your search results, and look for external linking resources available on non-trade websites.
3. Advanced Google search, for example, search for a forum website with colored contacts: colored contacts inurl:forum.
4. Look for external link resources of competitor sites, semrush and ahref can check competitor backlinks, you can see link type, resource weight, traffic brought by links, etc., download them and categorize and organize them. Check out the resources that can be submitted to the external chain and sign up to start posting external chain links.

3. How to analyze the pros and cons of external link resources

1. Install Google plugins like semrush, alexa, moz and seoquake and you can view page weight, domain name age, domain name weight and Alex Rank.
2. Check the links within the page for outbound links and spam links. The more links, the lower the quality of the page and the lower the weight.
3. The website is relevant to the industry in which we operate. The greater the relevance, the greater the weight of links outgoing from it.

6. Common SEO plugins or tools

1. Keyword search tools: Keywords Everywhere, Ubersuggest , keywordtool.io, Answerthepublic, LSIgraph.
2. Query tools for SEO analysis: semrush, ahrefs, Similarweb, moz, SEOquake, Alex, open site explorer, (flikover).
3. Work efficiency tools:
   1. Add articles to Spin Rewriter to create more articles, then optimize for readability in Readable.
   2. Convert each article into a slideshow in Lumen5.
   3. Convert every article to PDF or eBook on Designrr.
   4. Convert articles to videos with Lumafusion.
   5. Convert video to GIF with Giphy, gfycat, IMGURF.
   6. Use a scheduler like Eclincher, Agorapulse or SocialPilot to share content on social media.
   7. Use Ritetag to find hashtags.
   8. Automatically share content between different social networks with IFTTT.
   9. Use Pingroupie to find popular Pinterest groups.
4. Social tool for hot topics: Buzzsumo, social media, keyhole.co.
5. Social media publishing tools: Hootsuite, buffer, onlypult, gramblr, desktopify, Youtube: VidIQ, TubeBuddy

7. External links - an advanced network strategy

When building an external link from a highly authoritative site, the higher the weight of the resource, the more weight is transferred to us. Anchor text contains the target keyword, and broad match is better than exact match.

Choose resources with dofollow links, nofollow links are not taken into account by search engine ranking algorithms.

Try to find more different external link resources, the weight of external links of different sites is higher than the weight of several external links of one site.

1. Create an external link to the list of resources

There are several websites that specialize in collecting high quality content and consulting in the industry, you can see in these websites that they link to different website content. We can use the search command "Keyword" + "Link Summary" to search Google and then find websites in the industry that provide such aggregated resources.

Then email them about our content, how it fits with their review, and hope they add our content to their review list.

2. Smart use of other people's broken links

Search Google for industry and product keywords to find high-quality articles, and use the Google Check My Links plugin to identify broken links in articles.

Then write an email to the site owner to let them know about it and that you have high quality content on the same topic, hoping they can share our content as well.

3. Start a guest blog

Publishing guest blogs on authoritative industry websites can give our website more weight. So how do you find these guest blogging resources?

• First way – Search for “keyword+guest post” directly on Google. In the search results, we see that many websites request guest blogs. Currently, you can contact them via email to learn how to guest blog. some of the requirements and then give them a feed review as needed.
• Second method is to find a person who has written many guest blogs in the industry, then copy his avatar, upload his avatar to Google Image Search for search, and check the results below, basically all guest blog resources. You can then send an email to the person in charge of these sites to inquire about the blog requirements and prepare the article for publication.

4. Make quality infographics

When building your blog or website, creating high-quality infographics can help your articles get more exposure. And anyone who uses your informational image will give you a link.

Another way is to upload your informational image to the google image search box, view the image search results, click to view these sites, whoever used your photo but did not give you a link, contact them and ask them to give a link to the site.

5. Collaboration with influencers

On social media, look for influencers related to your business and then email them, hoping they will try your products and services, then give your products or services to influencers for a free experience, you need influencers to write reviews based on experience with a link to your site.

6. Become a Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

This directs you to helpareporter.com

Sign up as a volunteer to provide journalists with some information and investigations. If your submission or survey is accepted, you may receive a link back from a reputable news site.

8. External link statistics

After the external chain is released, the external chain statistics table will be compiled every day, the external link chain statistics will be compiled weekly, and the visibility and inclusion of the external chain will be checked every month.

Including External Links and Tracking the Effect

1. Use site: your external link to check if your external link is included in Google, for example: site: http://mylink.blogspot.com. Simply put, after the blog is written, it will be included for at least a week or so, if quickly, then two or three days, and if slowly, then maybe half a month.
2. Check the inclusion of external links to the site through GSA or semrush.

10. Inbound Link Adjustment Strategy

1. Pay attention to the newly added and lost links, and analyze the reasons for the lost external links, why they are included and lost, is there a problem with the links on the site, or the resource site forbade the removal of the link, you can contact the resource site site manager, re-edit the link . If the domain name is banned and it is no longer possible to send dofollow links, then the resource will be abandoned.
2. Depending on the number of searches for external links, pay attention to the survival rate and the number of link inclusions, and filter out resources that may be constantly freed.
3. Check your site's backlinks for weird anchor text, find the relevant article source, and fix it.
4. Check incoming low quality backlinks. Sometimes you will find some backlink sources that you have never seen in GSA, they come from low quality spam sites. You can currently disavow this link directly with GSA and opt out of linking to your website to avoid spammy links.

The real work of the external link chain, a vast amount of information. Requiring quite a lot of time and effort. I hope this material will help you to choose high-quality external links.

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