SEO crawlers – Qwik Solutions

1. Conversational Keyword Phrases

Google’s 2013 hummingbird update brought many changes to how keywords are interpreted on the web. The most considerable change from this update improved the way the search algorithm understands “conversational” phrases – questions entered in a search query to make sure the whole phrase is understood rather than each particular words. So, what does this mean for SEO experts?

• Don’t use your PR company to build links and make sure linkbacks are from trustworthy sites.

• Try to ensure anchor text linking back to your site is more natural way and less “keyword focused.”

• Make sure your website is useful and entertaining that targets your audience with sharable content and multimedia.

• Establish a strong social presence across all all major platforms.

2. Traditional links and Brand Mentions

Yes, inbound links are still considered the most important factor in page ranking but the way Google interprets these links has changed. Google caught on to certain old practices that link building campaigns brought on. It used to be that a link was a link, and the more you had, the better you ranked. Now, however, Google takes into account “implied links,” also called “brand mentions” and the ratio of how they are spread around the web. Brand mentions are words on another webpage mentioning or referencing your brand or company without the use of a hyperlink.

A key takeaway from this is to make sure your links appear natural from a wide range of sources with high authority if you are involved with any link-building campaign. Establishing your own brand authority is an important factor that will contribute hugely to ranking. And as explained above, if you are link building using your master keyword list as anchor text and the same URL for the hyperlink, be careful as Google will recognize the correlation as being tied to an SEO campaign and may penalize your site. Mixing URL structure (i.e. http://yoursite.com vs. http://www.yoursite.com) and keywords and phrases will allow your link building campaign to appear more natural.

3. Mobile Optimization and User Behavior

While this isn’t a new trend, the decision for marketers to support mobile environments should not even be an option. When 1 out of every 5 people in the world own a smartphone and 1 out of every 17 people own a tablet, you are only shooting yourself in the foot without mobile support. In 2014 and 2015, it’s clear SEO campaigns will not only support mobile optimization strategy, but building on this strategy beyond simply having a responsive website. Not only should your site be readable and accessible from every device and multimedia platform, but it should also be optimized accordingly for each. Images and content need to be lighter on smaller devices rather than simply scaling down and re-adjusting to the browser window. Google algorithms now take user behavior like bounce-rate into effect. If you deliver a bad user-experience because your site is not optimized properly, your ranking will be effected.

4. Content Is Still King

Your website has to really deliver if you want to rank for relevant search terms. The days of taking advantages of loopholes and quick fixes are long gone. The web basically breaks down to simple content, and Google search algorithms strive to make sense of this content and to deliver the best most relevant content to the searcher. It only makes sense that content continues to hold the throne.

5. Social Media Integration

Because Google search algorithms are becoming pretty much the closest thing to artificial intelligence, it only makes sense that human signals will play a more important role on the future of SEO. If you don’t have a strong presence and strategy that allows for people to find and share your content, you’re doing it wrong! Social media is clearly not going away. Understanding your target market and delivering quality content is essential. Every time a major change happens with Google search, the question “is SEO dead?” always arises. In my opinion, it’s the strategy that dies and not SEO itself. As a marketer or web developer, it’s your responsibility to evolve and change your strategy on the fly. Thinking in terms of “optimizing” may be on the way out. Instead, thing of it as SEM (or Search Engine Marketing) as just another branch off the marketing tree.

2015 is less than a month away. 2014 saw one of the most devastating Penguin updates getting released. As it’s expected from it, the update literally crushed hundreds of thousands of sites that used link spam to rank as it started rolling out. Not only traditional link spam, the update targeted numerous forms of low-quality links that had become mainstream.

This makes genuine webmasters, small businesses and anyone else dependent on Google for organic traffic wonder, what are some of the best, safe link building strategies for 2015 and further? I list out and discuss about 7 such strategies in this post.

1. Use Pillar Contents to Earn Links

Pillar contents are one of my best bets for earning links to a site that I’m really serious and passionate about. I’ve tried this strategy with TechTage, my marketing blog, and came up with a very extensive guide (over 11,000 words) focusing on increasing domain authority. With a bit of outreach, the post went on to become the most successful post of the site in terms of links acquired.

It doesn’t have to be textual content all the time. The basic idea here is to provide more value than all the other current resources about the topic. The form isn’t the most important thing as long as that holds the value. Gareth Bull leverages this strategy mainly by producing super-detailed infographics, and he is successful too.

2. Leverage Content Curation for Earning Links

Content curation works and it works super well. Brian Dean from Backlinko is seen leveraging this tactic often and that’s how he came up with some of his most popular blog contents like the definitive guide to link building which has earned links from over 100 high-quality domains as of now.

This strategy is especially suitable when you just start a blog and you need some solid content to start with. At that point, referring to a lot of your own content won’t be possible, and that’s where content curation comes into play.

3. Utilize Press Contacts to Gain Links

Though it doesn’t always produce the highest success rate, helping a journalist with your own data or input to back his/her claims is an excellent strategy to get some links on very high-quality authority sites. The more exciting thing is that nothing is needed apart from your experience about a certain subject and some outreach skills. There are two exciting services that makes utilizing this technique easier. They are, ResponseSource and HARO.

4. Give Out Testimonials in Exchange for Links

Another way to use your existing popularity or authority in your own field is by giving out testimonials in exchange for links to your site. Patrick Coombe from Elite Strategies is seen on the front-page or the “what our customers say about us” pages of a lot of reputable services and companies in the SEO field like Ahrefs and Advanced Web Rankings.

5. Scale Broken Link Building

Broken link building is not just about you, it’s also about fixing the web. If you can scale your broken link building efforts, you can see much better results from it, earning links from reputable sites in your niche on aged, powerful pages. One of the best ways to scale broken link building is using Ahrefs’ Incoming Broken Links Checker and Outgoing Broken Links Checker that I wrote about more than a month ago. Alternatively, you can use SEO crawlers like ScreamingFrog. You can run it from your desktop or from a server, and crawl authority sites in your niche (that you’re well aware of) and find pages that contain broken links. You can then reach out to the respective sites notifying them about potential replacements from your own site.

6. Curate Quotes from Top Personalities in Your Niche

People are always interested in quotes from top personalities in a certain field. According to Troy Shanks (expert SEO known for utilizing this strategy), “The almost-obvious thing is to target influencers with the most social following in your niche. A better way is to manually look up the search volumes of the names of those influencers in Google Keyword Planner. People with the most search volumes for their names surely have more interest about them and thus have a better chance of attracting links if their quotes are featured”.

Neil Patel of QuickSprout got a lot of links and gets a ton of traffic to his post about 101 motivational business quotes.

7. Use Engaging Quizzes to Build Links

Using engaging quizzes is a great way to collect emails. Did you know that it can be used to earn links too? Engaging quizzes are still engaging content, and like other forms of engaging content, have the ability to acquire links naturally. If you use some content promotion strategies or outreach strategies on top, you can easily maximize the results obtained from this tactic.

Conclusion

Now that you know about 7 future-proof link building strategies, it’s time you start trying some of them out. You don’t have to worry about these strategies harming your site, as they’re pretty safe for your site.

What other future-proof link building strategies are you aware of?