You will learn:

• The need to disavow backlinks.
• Types of bad backlinks that you should disavow.
• How to disavow links effectively
• Way to use BacklinkGao to create your disavow list.

Disavow link is a proactive approach that entails regularly checking your backlinks to ensure your links do not come from spammy, low-quality web pages. With the number of backlinks you have, finding the “alarming” backlink to disavow is not so easy.

A link disavow tool can help you minimize any negative SEO impact.

Read on to learn how you can disavow bad backlinks and ensure that your webpage remains appealing to Google crawlers and readers!

The need to disavow backlinks.

The second most important Google ranking factor is backlinks. Thus, in five years, 92% of marketers believe that links will still be the ranking criteria in Google algorithms. When the search engine evaluates your page, the number of links and quality of links pointing to your site is taken into account. In order to rank higher, the quantity of backlinks is not enough, you still need to make sure about the quality of backlinks.

If there are a lot of quality sites with backlinks to your site, that’s great. It tells the search engine that reknown sites find your site reputable, too. It’s like the sites that Google has already deemed reputable are giving your site a thumb’s up. 

On the other hand, if you have a lot of backlinks from low-quality sites, that can be bad for your SEO. Successful link building is about focusing on quality over quantity, and low-quality links can significantly hurt your rankings and organic traffic. Unnatural links were the target of Google Penguin algorithm update, one which changed the link-building landscape for the better. 

Bad links can damage your site’s SEO if you don’t remove them. That’s where you need to disavow backlinks.

Types of bad backlinks that you should disavow.

If you have never disavowed any backlinks, you can get confused about how to know which are the bad backlinks. Below are the four examples for you. 

#1. Paid Links:

After all, using paid links is lazy link building.

Paid link-building manipulates Google’s algorithm and is a low effort yet extremely high-risk tactic. When money changes hands in exchange for a link, you are straight-up violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes paying sponsorship fees for guest posts, as well as gifting products or services in exchange for a link. If a link is paid for, it has not been editorially placed.

Most paid-for links end up coming from sites that are not topically aligned, which have a high count of outbound links and are generally low quality. Aside from this risk, don’t forget that if you can buy links, so can your competitor.

Since it is a no-go from an SEO perspective, you need to make sure to add rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attributes for full transparency and avoid the links being identified as unnatural.

#2. Private Blog Networks

A private blog network (PBN) is a black hat link-building tactic that involves building and maintaining a collection of sites that are used for the primary purpose of adding in links to other sites. They are usually developed from expired domains, which are repurposed. 

Many black hat SEOs would argue that a truly private blog network would never be discovered by Google. However, the issue is that many are easy to spot by experienced SEOs. Therefore, Google itself may appear to be natural to an everyday web user.

#3. Comment Spam

Another legacy link-building tactic that is associated with toxic links is comment spam. 

These comments are often automated using software that places large numbers of irrelevant comments on blogs. The hope is that some go through without moderation, and the goal is simply to try and land as many links in comments as possible.

#4. Exact Match Anchor Text Links

Links that use exact match (keyword rich) anchor text are often toxic, largely regardless of the source. 

Most people wouldn’t naturally link to an online clothing store using a link text of “buy cheap shirts.” They would be far more likely to link using the brand name or domain. If there is excessive use of keyword-rich anchor text, it is a potential flag that you are paying for links or that they are not editorially placed.

Ìf you are not 100% sure if a backlink should stay or if it needs to go? Ask yourself these three questions:

• Is the link relevant to my website and my visitors?
• Does this link have a purpose beyond SEO?
• Can this link bring legitimate traffic to my site?

How to disavow links properly?

#1. Start by compiling a list of backlinks.

Any backlink analysis must begin with aggregating as much relevant backlink data as possible.

There are many ways to do this, but you can start with tools like Google Search Console. The first way to check your backlink profile is by using Google Search Console. If you don’t have this already, install it as soon as possible. Open the Google Search Console and scroll down to the menu and select ‘Links’. It will give you a breakdown of all the top external links directed to your website.

Or you can use a third-party tool like BacklinkGap. I will talk about this amazing tool in the next part.

#2. Identify bad backlinks.

Once the full list of unique backlinks has been generated, it’s time to identify bad backlinks. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do this. One way of judging backlinks is manually visiting each one and evaluating whether or not the link is sensible and genuinely useful. If it seems like it is, Google probably isn’t penalizing it, so there’s no reason to disavow it. On the other hand, if the site seems suspicious, that’s a good reason to try and remove it.

Tools and algorithms are great, sometimes you have to see the outlying cause of your link penalty with your own eyes. Who knows, maybe you’ll get insight into how you can avoid future trouble. 

However, manually investigating the sites linking to your page can be time-consuming, and it is also not accurate. If you don’t have that many bad links, you should take the time to visit each link. But what if you have thousands of backlinks?

Don’t simply invalidate links at random. As Google said, you can damage your own SEO through costly mistakes, and you want to avoid that. You need to understand what you are messing with before you dive in head-first.

#3. Contact whoever owns the site and ask for that link to be removed. 

Once you’ve decided to try and remove a link, contact whoever owns the site and ask for that link to be removed. You can write an email to the site owner and politely request they remove the link in question. You should be professional in your approach and clear in your purpose.

You should reach out to them around three times and clearly document each of these attempts. This is usually enough to get the link removed.

If this way is not effective, then move to the next steps.

#4. Ask Google to disavow it. Use Google Search Console

If the site’s owner fails to respond or refuses to remove the link, you can ask Google to disavow it. You can include the documentation showing that you asked the other site to remove it and they did not comply. Google almost always honors disavow requests that include such documentation (But it also takes a lot of time.)

Once you are done assessing your links you can create the disavow.txt file that will be uploaded to Google Search Console.

Below are some guidelines from Google on how to create your file.

• The file name must end in .txt
• File size can be no larger than 2MB and 100,000 lines
• Each URL should be on its own line
• If you want to disavow a whole domain you should start the line with domain: 
• If you want to disavow a URL you can just enter the URL

Remember that you cannot undo a disavow. Once you choose to disavow links, it is disassociated from your site. Be sure to do your research on the external site before choosing to disavow it.

The use of a link disavow tool – BacklinkGap

You should only use the Google Disavow Tool like Google Search Console if you have enough experience to evaluate a website. You can damage your backlink profile if you’re wrong about an external link, it’s important to have knowledge about what makes a site spammy or harmful.

Using a tool like BacklinkGap can support you in the first two steps, saving tons of time checking the quality of the backlinks.

With BacklinkGap, you can: 

• Know your referring domain: Uncover where your backlinks come from and the quality and trustworthiness of them. 
• Manage disavowed links: Efficiently identify and compile unwanted backlinks to disavow.
• Identify spammy websites: Uncover suspicious domains that might be practicing spammy backlinks from your backlink profile.

Besides the features that help you to disavow links like above, you can also use BacklinkGap to:

• Discover your backlink profile strength: You can see the value and authoritativeness of all your backlinks. The friendship score stands for the number & the quality of backlinks you have. The higher the score you have, the better your websites are.
• Backlink Monitoring: You can identify the movement of all the backlinks pointing to you. You can see the history daily, weekly and monthly. The status of the backlink is also at the top of the dashboard.

• Know your backlink types
• Discover your competitors’ profile

Link-building tactics for you to avoid bad backlinks

Prevention is better than cure. You need to make sure your link-building tactics bring good outcomes, rather than seeking more backlinks without thinking about the quality. It is to give your sites a great picture in the search engine eye and save your time from disavowing a lot of links.

Monitor your backlinks regularly

Tracking the activity of your backlink profile is very crucial in terms of effective SEO analysis. This is to either get rid of spammy links or track new and lost backlinks every day.

If you don’t monitor your backlinks consistently, spammy backlinks can make their way into your backlink profile. If you don’t monitor regularly, you will not be able to solve your backlinks problem as soon as possible.

Use backlink building tactics like:

It is critical that you be aware of the link-building tactics that can lead to toxic backlinks. Try these tactics to help you get more quality backlinks.

Guest blogging

High-quality guest blogging, on the other hand, is not only alive and well, but also remains highly effective. 

The concept itself behind Guest Blogging is pretty simple. At its core, it’s about sharing your expertise in an article to be published on someone else’s website.

As a byproduct of sharing content that is authentic, valuable, and unique – you’ll be able to get a backlink that points back to your website, or your client’s website.

When done right, guest blogging is considered to be a White Hat technique for link building. And it’s an extremely effective technique used by professional writers and SEO agencies to drive traffic and influence rankings.

Broken link building

This method involves replacing broken links pointing to nowhere by swapping them out for your link. So if an article is linking to maybe an old resource that doesn’t exist anymore, you could reach out to the author and offer your link as a replacement.

Improve site content quality

The better your content is, the more backlinks you’ll be able to earn.

Backlinks from a long blog post—anything over about 1000 words—will have a greater impact on SEO than a link from a short blurb.

A lot of content gets ignored, but there are some types that, regardless of the subject matter, receive more attention than the others.

Regular blog articles perform OK, but the following formats tend to blow them away in terms of views:

• List articles
• Quizzes
• “How to” articles
• Infographics
• Videos

TL;DR

Knowing which links to invalidate can get really tricky, but it’s an important step before using a link disavow tool. Luckily BacklinkGap is here to help. 

Remember to export the disavow list into files and send it to Google Search Console to “say goodbye” to the bad backlinks.

You will learn:

• Why you need backlinks for your sites.
• Do’s and dont’s when do linking in SEO
• What to do before you start your link-building strategies.

Today, it’s harder than ever to create and execute a successful backlink-building strategy. In fact, 65% of marketers say that link building is the most challenging SEO task. You must know that you can’t just build a website and then sit back, wait for new customers to come knocking on your virtual door.

You need to do your linking in SEO tactics proactively.

Why do you need linking in SEO?

Do you know that the #1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions #2 to #10? Ranking on the first page of any Google search now requires a web page to be truly valuable

Basically, search engines use links to crawl the web. They will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website and crawl the links between entire websites.

During that process, search engines recognize that the backlink has value and reward the target URL, interpreting the link as fully intentional; they assume there’s been some level of editorial assessment of the target webpage. The more links you have from relevant and authoritative websites, the better your website will perform in search for relevant queries.

In addition, having great backlinks also gets you:

• Referral Traffic: By mentioning your link/website as a source of information, people will click on the link and visit your site in order to find out more.
• Higher Authority: If you look in the dictionary, you’ll see that a person who has authority is “a person with extensive or specialized knowledge about a subject: an expert.” The more good quality websites linking to you means that you are an authority on the subject, the more trustworthy you will become in your field.

Naturally, the more authoritative the site you’re getting backlinks from, the more authority they can transfer on to you. This is why targeting great quality sites for outreach is so important.

As a result, when you get high traffic, enhance your authority, your ranking will also increase.

What is a good backlink in SEO? 

Firstly, a good backlink needs to be relevant.

Relevance refers to the context of the page or website that is linking back to you. Relevance is extremely important for your backlink quality because it sends a signal to the algorithm that the backlink makes sense, adds value to the page, and that because it’s relevant to your business, you are qualified to discuss whatever the subject of the page or website may be about. 

In short, most of your link-building efforts should focus on relevant opportunities. 

But, the problem is there are fewer link-building opportunities that are 100% relevant to your website. Don’t worry, just pay attention to the first idea. 

Then, you need to get links to your site from websites that have organic traffic. In general, sites that are popular in organic search are valuable link-building opportunities.

If a website is getting organic traffic, it likely has authority. Backlink quality considerations around trustworthiness and authority are directly related to the website that is linking to your website. 

Essentially what we are looking at here is how trustworthy or authoritative does Google view the site that is providing a link back to your website. The stronger a website is, the harder it will be to get the link. That makes those links even more valuable, so it’s worth the effort.

Do’s and don’ts when linking in SEO.

Acquiring links that you didn’t ask for is the nirvana of SEO. It’s always something that you should be striving for and building towards over the long term. You do this by putting in the work to make your website link-worthy, whether that’s through a great product or aspect of your service, or via producing great content that is referenced by other websites. 

Here are things that you should avoid during the link-building process, as well as the recommended strategies that you should try out.

Don’ts

Buying Backlinks

Several sites and services help you buy text links on other sites that pass SEO credit. This is probably the most tempting bad link-building strategy. You will get to control what sites you are getting links from and you will also need to analyze these sites to ensure you’re not placing links in bad neighborhoods. If you don’t want to receive a red card from Google, don’t ever buy backlinks.

Not Creating Link-Worthy Content

The simple truth is that if there are no valuable blog posts or pieces of content on your website, it will be hard to get backlinks. This is often the case for websites that prioritize quantity over quality. You need to be a quality source, then more and more people will come to you.

Having Only One Link Building Strategy

Although you might be experiencing a bit of success with a particular method of link building, it’s never the best choice to put all your eggs in one basket. The online world changes every time, and a single link-building method can quickly become less effective.

Do’s

Alongside this long-term approach, you can also leverage a range of link-building techniques which allow you to build your authority and increase your chances of ranking well and getting traffic from organic search.

Build linkbait content

You may have a thousand SEO backlinks and a well-structured site, but they won’t make any sense without valuable content. And genuinely, having quality content makes it more likely for other sites to link. Especially, with quality content, many bloggers will willing to make reference to your site without your having to approach them first. Others in your industry will also be following other websites, such as yours, so to earn a backlink from them you need to make sure you’re worth linkbait content.

The fact that long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles. One of the most attractive pieces of content is a complete guide, which is pretty straightforward. Your job is to create the best, most thorough, and most complete resource on a topic ever published.

On the other hand, visual content attracts more links than non-visual content, so you can make use of design images, infographics, and so on.

Broken links building

All you need to do is search great quality sites for broken links, which are used to point to other niche pages but no longer exist. You can point out the broken link in your email and offer a page with similar content on your site. Remember that your content also needs to be up to date and well written. It’s good to look for links that have been neglected by your competitors.

Instead of looking for links that are old or blank pages, you’re looking for links that give a 404 error. If you’ve spent any time on the internet at all, the chances are high that you’ve come across a 404 error a couple of times at least.

Once again, you’ll want to find resource pages for your industry and check them for broken links.

Testimonials

All companies, whether they are big or small, love showing off the testimonials they’ve received from their clients. 

In fact, you’ll notice that most business sites showcase a few select testimonials on their homepage, and a few have whole pages dedicated to customer reviews. And these testimonials always have a link on the homepage – an eye-catching place.

You need to write a short and to-the-point email to pitch your testimonial and how it can add value to the overall site (whom you tested out their product/services). Once you’ve received a green light to go ahead with a testimonial, you can start working on it. Don’t forget to insert your links or business name into the content logically.

Link Reclamation

Sometimes, your business or brand will get mentioned online without any link to your site. This step is usually due to human error, but the good news for you is that it can be a new source of backlinks.

Link reclamation is simple but very powerful. You find that someone has mentioned you on their blog because they like your products or services. They’ve brought your brand or business up as part of a larger narrative and not linking to you, just reach out to them. An email that simply asks them to link to your sites where they mentioned you is great to reclaim your backlinks.

What to do before starting your link-building tactics?

Know your backlink profile

First and foremost, you need to know where you are standing now. 

You can do it step-by-step on Google and collect each backlink manually. All you have to do is open up your search engine of choice. For example, let’s say you’re using Google. Now, in the search bar, you are going to want to write “link:”. After the semicolon, you would then write the name of your website. For example, “link:yoursite.com”. Once you’ve hit search, you will be able to see all of the backlinks that Google has on record. 

Otherwise, there is a more easy way for you: use a backlink checker tool like BacklinkGap. You will see the information on the tool below.

Competitor analysis

Don’t forget to compare yourself to your competitors and see how you stack up against them. The fundamentals of any good marketing strategy start with a competitive analysis, and that’s exactly where the start of your link-building campaign should take you.

To help you create good content that will earn your site backlinks, you want to spy on your competitors. It is very easy to understand because there are chances that they’ve got great content that is already ranking well and has generated a lot of backlinks.

So analyzing your competitor websites will also give you a link if you approach them correctly. You can set up some questions to investigate, like have they done anything that was particularly link-worthy? What sort of things are people linking to in these pages? This should start to give you some idea of what sort of niches are interested in what you do. 

This takes some reverse engineering and seeing how your competitor got the link in the first place. Did they write great content? Did they share an infographic? Then when you find out the answer, you can try to replicate this method for yourself.

Use a backlink checker tool – BacklinkGap

Many different tools can help you check whether your backlinks are trustworthy and bring your website value. BacklinkGap is one tool that stands out from the crowd and is definitely free for you to use.

Backlink checker:

• Identify all backlinks’ “friendliness” and authoritativeness.
• Strengthen your backlink profile by identifying new and lost opportunities, a number of backlinks, and referral domains.
• Uncover your nofollow, dofollow and broken links.
• Manage your disavowed or to-be-disavowed links.
• Uncover spammy domains pointing at you.

You can also share your report with BacklinkGap. You can share the pattern of your backlinks to any one with filtering the row and data to share. The backlink report can help you see your changing pattern.

If you wish to monitor your backlink profile daily, monthly and even yearly, BacklinkGap has its monitoring feature. It helps you identify the movement of all the backlinks pointing to you. The status of the backlink is also at the top of the dashboard.

Also, you can analyse your competitors’ backlink profiles just by entering their URL/domain. 

TL;DR

The art of getting more backlinks is a massive topic. You should always keep your eye on your backlink profiles when performing SEO tasks. Do not buy links, create useless content, or have only one link-building strategy to strengthen your profile. In contrast, if you want more backlinks, try to create more link bait content, fix broken links, try out testimonials and reclaim your unmentioned link.

After all, a backlink checker tool like BacklinkGap can help you on linking in SEO.

You will learn:

• What keyword gap and keyword gap analysis is.
• What kind of keywords you should pay more attention to when researching.
• 4 steps to finding keyword gaps with RankingGap.

Selecting the right keywords to target is essential for search engine optimization (SEO) and your overall content marketing success. You can lose a lot if you attempt to rank for terms that aren’t related to your products and your target audience. Likewise, it is useless to rank for keywords that users don’t type in the search bar at all.

No matter what industry you’re operating in, there’s always a gap between you and your competitors. And they might have the time, money, and resources to do extensive keyword research and target the perfect phrases that attract the most customers.

That is the solution for you: Find your keyword gap to know the most relevant keywords. And of course, you don’t have to do this manually. A keyword gap analysis tool like RankingGap can help you with this SEO part.

What are keyword gap and keyword gap analysis?

Simple keyword research can have mixed effectiveness. That’s especially if you’re a beginner at SEO and don’t know how to properly use the terms you find. Or, maybe you target the wrong keywords and go after ones that don’t have enough search volume or very little potential for growth.

A keyword gap is a keyword that is bringing traffic to your competitors but not to your website. In other words, it’s the keywords you’re not taking advantage of. 

Keyword gap research can also be called competitor keyword analysis. Keyword gap analysis is the process of identifying keywords that a site’s competitors are ranking well for. You’re analyzing the sources of competing websites’ traffic and using them to address holes in your own content. 

This sounds obvious, but there are likely dozens of smaller, niche keywords for which competitors rank better. The cumulative traffic of all of these low-search-high-intent keywords could be the thing that gives the competition the edge.

Why do you need to know your keyword gap?

In fact, keywords are the second most important factor for an SEO-friendly website. Thus, when choosing the keyword to target, keyword relevance is the most important factor. You can’t waste your time optimizing the keywords that do not relate to your business. 

The thing about your competitors’ keywords is, they’ve already proven to be effective. You can see that they’re in high use and generating plenty of traffic for them. So identifying your keyword gap is also a great and fast way to get your relevant keywords.

In general, knowing your keyword gap can help you:

• Capture the right audience at the right time.
• Figure out where you should be spending your time and budget.
• Introduce you to opportunity gaps in your niche.

The ultimate goal of any holistic SEO content strategy is to drive traffic to your site. But you don’t want just any traffic. You want high-value, high-intent website visitors whose problems you can solve. That’s just what you get when you use a keyword gap analysis to reveal areas of opportunity where you either don’t have content or where you can improve existing content. 

More importantly, a comprehensive strategy for competitor keyword research will also introduce you to opportunity gaps in your niche. This means that you can see which keywords have high intent levels but haven’t yet been captured by your competition.

Keyword gap analysis is vital to creating quality content that will capture the right audience at the right time.

If you can understand the competitive landscape for your keywords, then you’ll be able to see how difficult it is to rank for certain terms and figure out where you should spend your time and budget.

Overall, a competitor keyword analysis is incredibly helpful in helping you to fine-tune your marketing plans, make the most out of your budget, and create more effective SEO campaigns.

What kind of keywords should you pay attention to?

There are a lot of keyword types, but generally, you can look more at these 3 below keywords.

Keywords Focused on Products and Services 

Your keywords must be relevant to your products and services. They must talk about your offer, improving the features of your products and services.

You can also use product keywords to build interest around a product. These keywords are great with landing pages to gain new customers at scale. In the SEO industry, we say these keywords have high commercial intent. This is because customers who do a search with these phrases have a higher intention to buy a product.

Long-tail Keywords

It’s a keyword with a more specific search phrase. Long-tail keywords are phrases consisting of three or four words that are specific to your product, service, location, and brand. 

While these keywords often have low search volumes because of their specificity, they’re valuable for SEO because they’re less competitive. 

But most importantly, they’re more likely to drive website traffic and conversions because the searchers using them are looking for particular products or services. Then, you will have better chances of ranking for particular multi-word phrases than general single-word or double-word terms.

Geo-Targeted Keywords

Especially if you’re a business that serves local customers, you’ll want to include geo-targeted keywords in your list. 

Geo-targeted keywords might include words like “near me”, “in (specific location)”, “open now”, etc. 

• residential landscaping in Chicago
• patio installation company near Lincoln Park
• Chicago area landscaping services

4 steps to find your keyword gap with RankingGap

There are many tools out there that will help you identify the keyword gap. The tools on these platforms allow for a specific page on a competitor’s site to be analyzed, identifying which keywords that page is ranking for. 

If you are looking for a tool to explore, find new keywords and what people are looking for then RankingGap is the best choice to explore the monthly search volume and cost of those keywords.

With RankingGap, you can do all the 4 steps necessary to find your keyword gap. Let’s discover the 4-step-guide now.

Step 1. Finding Your Top Competitors: 

If you want to find your keyword gaps, you’ll need to know who your competitors are. You may already have a few ideas, but you need to know for sure who you’re going up against. It might be surprising to find exactly what websites are drawing traffic from your target audience.

For this step, you can use the Competitor Discover feature in RankingGap to find competitors. 

Just enter your domain, RankingGap will show your potential competitor with the overview and the graph.

Step 2. Use RankingGap to find your keyword gap:

To get the best list of competitive keywords, consider comparing your website with your competition. Ask yourself questions like:

• What do competitors target that my business is not targeting?
• What do I target that my competitors don’t?
• How do they target differently than my brand?
• How many keywords do they target per page?
• What type of content do they produce around those keywords?

The best thing about RankingGap is that you can compare your website with four of your competitors in a single profile to determine the best keywords within your niche effectively.

If you don’t know which web pages or where to start, you can just compare your website to your competitors’ websites to identify all the ranking keywords. Conducting a domain to domain analysis also helps you identify your competitors’ overall best-ranked keywords and content.

RankingGap has 4 keyword views:

• “Unique” keyword view: Keywords that you rank, but your competitors don’t.
• “Missing” keyword view: Keywords that your competitors rank, but you don’t.
• “Common” keyword view: Keywords that both you and your competitors rank.
• “Gap” keyword view: Ranking keywords that you and most of your competitors don’t have.

Do you think that comparing domains (including the sales page, landing page, blogs, etc.) is way too broad of a strategy? And you only want a method to gauge keyword data for a specific category effortlessly?

By using page intersection, you get to compare your content about “male skincare guide” with all the blog posts relevant to your topic from your competitor’s website.

To dig in deeper and obtain hyper-specific keyword gaps, you can do an exact URL matching. Comparing specific web pages (URLs) allows you to find the most relevant ranking keywords required to optimize your page.

Step 3. Shortlist your keywords refine and filter keywords based on what you identified

Once you’ve gathered up a big list of keywords to fill your gaps, it’s time to decide which ones are actually worth pursuing.

You shouldn’t just be pulling out random keywords and hoping for the best. They need to be relevant to your target audience, and a good choice for increasing growth.

It’s important to understand where the keyword is coming from, so consider looking back to your competitor. You can analyze how much traffic they get. Are they top in your industry (and a difficult target to beat), or a moderately successful but low-hanging fruit (much easier to catch up to)?

RankingGap has the Advanced Filter feature for you to shortlist your ideal keywords.

• SERP features: You can filter keywords according to the SERP features you want. If you see recurring keywords, no worries! That’s just keywords ranked with different SERP features that you can filter out.
• Ranking position: Set it to “1 to 10” if you are aiming for the first page in the SERP. Otherwise, you just need to choose your preferences.
• Competition: You can leave it blank, but to narrow your keywords down, you can set it as “0 to 30” percent (low). A percentage of 30 – 50 is considered to be of medium competition; anywhere above 50 is too high.
• CPC: You can leave CPC as it is if your focus is on improving your organic traffic. But it can also give you an idea of how competitive a keyword is.
• Search volume: A general rule of thumb is to pick keywords with a volume of a minimum of 1000.

Keywords with the highest value should be your main keywords, while the lower value keywords should act as related keywords supporting the main term.

You should then create a label for every keyword you have. You can mark it as the main or supporting keyword. In RankingGap, you can star the keyword you want to note.

Step 4. Recognize a pattern in your final keyword group: 

Competitor keyword gap analysis shouldn’t end just with getting the list of relevant keywords you should use in your content. Instead, if done correctly, you’re able to learn more about your audience and get to know them better.

After you get that, you’ll get a clearer picture of who you are serving and what these people want. This will help you spot a pattern in your keywords, predict keywords that will improve your following content, and develop a winning strategy.

TL;DR

You need to keep in mind that this isn’t just something you do once. As new events pop up in your industry and your target audience evolves, keywords can shift and new opportunities can pop up. You want to stay on top of that and keep doing keyword gap research all the time.

RankingGap with a range of features is one great keyword gap tool for your business. Discover your competitors and your missing keywords with RankingGap now.

You will learn:

• The necessities of backlinks.
• The top 7 best backlink checker tools.
• 4 tips to get more backlinks with “linkbait” content.
• what you need to know to get more backlinks.

The easiest way to think of backlinks would be as conversations among websites.

While the algorithms in Google have changed over the years, backlinks still remain as one of the most important ranking factors.

However, SEO details like building backlinks can be complicated most of the time. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about it because there are a variety of tools available to help users do most of the “heavy-lifting”.

After reading this article, you will know the ultimate best backlink checker tools to create a successful backlink strategy.

Why do you need backlinks?

A backlink is a link from one website to a page on another website. It is also known as a one-way link, inbound link, an incoming link. 

You can think of backlinks as  “votes” for a specific page. Search engines use these votes to decide their ranking. So a high number of backlinks will help a page rank high on the SERP. 

Backlinks play an important role in search engine algorithm, SEO planning, and your overall strategy for growing your website. However, 65% of digital marketers state that link building is the hardest part of SEO.

To be specific, content pieces and backlinks are the top two most important factors for ranking on Google for target keywords. As mentioned, backlinks are “votes” from other websites. When more websites link to your page, they are essentially telling the search engines that your content is valuable, useful, and credible. The search engines will then absorb this information and rank your site higher on the search engine results page.

In addition, more backlinks can bring more traffic and authority to your sites.

Let’s picture Alex as a blogger, and he writes a very interesting article about a sports event.

Another blogger, Roma, links to Alex’s article when sharing her perspective. Since she writes about the topic on her well-known online magazine site, this creates a backlink to Alex’s post.

Because the online magazine is popular, many other sites will link back to her article. This increases the online magazine’s authority, while Alex’s article will also gain a valuable backlink from a reputable site.

Top 7 best backlink checker tools

BacklinkGap

BacklinkGap is a free backlink checker tool. It is very simple to use the tool. The way to use it is very simple. You just need to enter your domain or URL and wait for this backlink checker to generate your results.

With free access, you can discover your backlink profile fully. Thus, you can see a number of useful data that is ready for you in the dashboard, such as the number of backlinks, total referring domain, new & lost backlinks, new & lost referring domain, etc.

When you see more details on the dashboard, BacklinkGap also provides you with information about link attributes, link types, platform types, and semantic elements.

With the monitoring feature, you can keep your eye on your backlinks profile anytime. You will not need to sit and track your backlinks manually. The feature can keep data daily, weekly, or monthly. BacklinkGap can also help you If you want to get the CSV files or export the report for your backlink profiles.

SEMrush

An ‘all-in-one marketing toolkit’, Semrush combines several different digital marketing tools to help boost your SEO strategy. 

With one of the best backlink checkers available, SEMrush makes it easy for you to understand and analyze your backlinks to boost your rankings. 

Like other similar tools, you first need to enter the domain into the Backlink Analysis section. 

SEMrush will then pull up lots of relevant information about the domain and its backlinks. To uncover more in-depth information, the platform will generate detailed reports about each of the domains. 

Mangools LinkMiner

Unlike the other backlink checkers mentioned on this list, Link Miner is purely a backlink checker tool without any additional SEO features. 

LinkMiner has some pretty extensive backlink-related features. You can filter your backlinks by new, noFollow, lost, and deleted links. 

This is particularly helpful if you want to keep a list of deleted or lost links that you want to recover for your site. It’s also a handy way of seeing new backlinks straight away as they appear. 

To help you target competitors’ backlinks, LinkMiner allows you to create a list of favorite backlinks so you remember which ones are the most important ones to target. 

Ahrefs

It’ll come as no surprise that Ahrefs has one of the best backlink checkers. Enter any site, your own or a competitor’s, and view all the backlinks that refer to that specific site. Once a list appears with all the links, take a look at metrics like the domain authority and the exact location of the referring website. 

Ahrefs allows you to see new, broken and lost links to a site as well. With new links, you can start generating a repertoire with those sites to earn more links in the future. With broken and lost links, you can work on contacting the websites that initially linked to you and get those links back.

Their own ‘Domain Rating’ shows you the value of each site that is linking to you, displaying the number of backlinks and Dofollow links. 

Ahrefs is also great for showing you any backlinks you’ve lost. These may be links that are broken or link that the website owner has deleted from their page. 

Majestic Site Explorer

Majestic Site Explorer is the best backlink checker for understanding where your current link profile stands. 

With this tool providing standard metrics like the total number of external backlinks, you can also review other key stats like referring domains, referring subnets, and referring IPs. These technical bits of information are essential for having a strong understanding of your current link strategy. 

More in-depth data is also presented in innovative charts and graphs to help you visualize how your site is doing. The backlink history chart will give you a clear picture of whether you are gaining or losing links over any given period of time.

Monitor Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks is a great tool for snooping on your competitors’ backlink strategy.

If you want to discover more about which links are boosting your competitors’ rankings and which backlinks are pulling down your SEO efforts, Monitor Backlinks could be the best backlink checker for you. 

The link checker tool will tell you when you receive a valuable backlink, when a blogger reviews your product or when competing sites are racing ahead with their link-building strategy. 

You can also view a ton of useful backlink-related metrics to keep your strategy streamlined. See the number of referring traffic per backlink, external link count as well as page or domain authority for each backlink.

Linkody

One of the simplest and cheapest backlink checkers, Linkody will give you a full picture of your backlink profile while helping guide your future backlink building strategy. 

Instead of having to worry about manually checking your backlinks, Linkody automates the whole process to be faster and more efficient. 

All relevant backlink data is displayed on a user-friendly dashboard making it easy to understand the comprehensive backlink metrics. 

Your backlink profile is always changing so it’s important to know in real-time what’s happening. 

Tips to Get Backlinks With “Linkbait” content

“Linkbait” is content that’s specifically formulated to attract links. It’s something so cool, valuable, and unique that any industry blogger/influencer would be hard-pressed not to link to it. These links then help to improve the site’s rankings in search engines.

#1. Understand What Site Owners Are Looking For: 

Some sites get links just because they pitch themselves well. On the flip side, sites with amazing content that can’t pitch themselves well will not get backlinks.

More often than not, people will look for content that is trending, entertaining, or something out of the ordinary.

Besides, you can also analyze your competitors’ backlinks profiles. As the name suggests, this strategy focuses on analyzing your competitors’ best work and, most of all, understanding why and what worked for them. You can then take these learnings and create a better piece. 

#2. Emphasize What Benefits the Site Gets: 

Most sites are looking for the same benefits, such as content relevant to their site, detailed content, well-written content, a legitimate site. Be wary of the fact that not all educational guides, news, etc. get links.

#3. Write Relevant and Competitive Content:  

If you don’t have any content worth linking to, no one will link to you. At the heart of generating backlinks is creating great content, and it needs to be better than other content in your industry.

You can follow up with these tactics in your article:

• Include higher quality images than any of the competition.
• Have a higher word count on your blog post—or at least make every word matter.
• Write a more compelling title.
• Use an interesting featured image.
• Write a title tag and meta description that is more focused.

#4. Comment on Other Relevant Blog Posts

While you might occasionally have an opportunity to tactfully include a backlink in your comment, more often than not, the comment needs to be for the primary purpose of building a mutual relationship with the author. Being a regular reader and commenter on other blogs of your niche is a great way to build your brand and bring traffic over to your own blog. 

What you need to know to increase your backlinks

Great content is the first thing, but it’s not the only thing you need for acquiring backlinks. For that, you’ll need to actively target high authority websites with content that they’re interested to link to.

With an abundance of low-quality links or excessive activity in building the link mass, the site can suffer from filters and search engine penalties. If there are a lot of low-quality links or if the speed of link building is too high, the site may suffer from search engine penalties, and it will be impossible to promote it.

Google can penalize your site if:

• there was a sharp increase in the number of backlinks;
• commercial links are abundant;
• low-quality donor sites are prevalent.

Google has become more scrupulous in analyzing backlinks. So, it is in your best interest to regularly monitor backlinks directed to your site and leave only those that come from relevant and reliable resources. 

TL;DR

Businesses can create great links with the right approach without spending a lot of money. Regular monitoring of backlinks will help you realistically assess the situation and quickly adapt to changes. The best backlink checker tool will help you with this work. 

There are a lot of tools in the industry; however, we recommend Backlink Gap as one of the best tools that provide the most value. The free access can support you to discover your backlink profiles and get informed of the changes in your backlinks.

You will learn:

• Understand SEO rank tracking meaning and its importance.
• How to do rank tracking effectively.
• Things you should know before and after do rank tracking.

Knowing where you rank for specific keywords is essential to your overall SEO strategy. After all, ranking top for your keywords ensures huge share of organic search traffic. In turn, you gain more leads and a boost in brand awareness.

Keeping tabs on your SERP rankings is a critical component of any digital marketing campaign. It helps you effectively grow your online presence, traffic, and improve your conversion rates. That ultimately results in a boost in revenue. That’s why getting the best SEO rank tracking tool must be a priority.

What does SEO Rank Tracking mean?

Keyword ranking positions are simple to understand. Rankings measure where your site shows up on the search page for any given keyword.

Rank tracking is the process of checking and analyzing where your keyword ranks on the SERPs (search engine result pages). These include keywords you use on your site, both you don’t optimize for, and those for which competitors are ranking.

Why do we need to do it?

Do you know that search engines are the starting point for 68% of online experiences? But within billions of searches that happen on a day, 15% of daily searches are new to Google. So among these results, knowing where you are standing is crucial to start optimizing your content marketing.

To Increase Your Business Visibility

When doing rank tracking, you can determine how well your keywords are ranking currently in the SERPs. It helps you to identify best performing keywords that will increase your visibility.

Monitoring how your site ranks on search engines and analyzing keywords can help you achieve better SEO performance. These are essential factors to grow your online presence, organic reach, and boost conversion rates.

To Monitor Your Sites Rank Positions

By monitoring rank position, you can determine which keywords are working great for you. If the ranking falls, you can also check the reason behind the downfall, such as competitors outranking your site, technical errors, etc. After all, you can use this information to fix the issue and improve your rankings.

While executing SEO strategies, or in between major marketing campaigns, receiving an immediate alert when your rankings drop can help you make fast decisions to improve the campaign

Let’s say your website ranking has slipped from the 9th to the 11th position, which means your website is now on the second page of the search engines. From receiving the rank tracker’s alert, you can quickly generate more content or search for underdeveloped keywords to help boost traffic.

To Assess Your Competitors

SEO rank tracking tool is a great way to find the keywords that are working for your competitors in achieving high ranks. Understanding how your competitors are performing can help you make informed decisions about your own marketing and content strategies. You can also find which keywords they are missing and how they perform for your target keywords. Plus, you can also discover best-performing content, backlinks, online presence, social engagement, etc. 

The tools allow you to select the right keywords for your site wisely to rank for while making informed decisions.

You can also use rank trackers to help you follow competitors and monitor their traffic. For example, if you generate content for the same type of keywords as your competitor, but your competitor still ranks higher, you can examine their content to see why they’re outperforming you.

To Find Keyword Opportunities

When you continuously track for important keywords, it becomes easier to find better keyword opportunities according to search volume, ranking pages, search intent, and competition. This helps you prioritize keywords efficiently.

In addition, you can also keep your eye on keywords that help the potential to rank higher, or the ones that not doing good.

What do you need to do before tracking your rank?

You probably need to have a good idea of what keywords are most important for your business. 

The search terms that are displayed in SEO ranking reports are the keywords people use to search for specific information. For example, if someone wants to find a new pillow, they might search for “most comfortable pillow” or “best pillow for a good night’s sleep.” These phrases are the SEO keywords that the rank report generates to help businesses understand what their consumers are searching for and how to attract their attention.

If you’re the owner of a restaurant, you’d be missing out if you didn’t really care about ranking highly for local search keywords like “restaurant near me.” 

However, there are a lot of different variants on searches about restaurants – may be a potential customer will search for “restaurant” or “restaurants” or “restaurant menu.” 

Eventually, “find restaurants nearby” or potentially hundreds of other variants can out. What about someone searching for the best fine dining in town or the best restaurant for date night? You want to show up for those searches, too.

This is where keyword research and SEO come in. You need to have your list of targeted keywords first. You cannot do tracking work if you do not know what you should put on the search bar.

How to do rank tracking?

#1. Track manually

The first way involves manually checking keywords by searching for terms using the incognito window and scrolling until you find your site. 

However, this can be challenging, considering you most probably target more than one keyword. How about typing your keyword into Google, counting the results, and then adding your position to a spreadsheet? This is not exactly ideal. Especially if you want to track a larger number of keywords, or you have a lot of sites, manual tracking is a waste of time.

#2. Use Google Search Console 

The second option is to use Google Search Console. Google Search Console’s “Performance” report contains many of the basic pieces of data you’ll need to rely on for SEO. One of those is the keywords that your site and pages rank for, called “queries” within the tool.

To see your keywords in Google Search Console, log in to the tool, click “Performance,” and scroll down the page.

You can also see what keywords your individual pages rank for. Although this tool is free, it requires a bit of heavy lifting when tracking keywords.

#3. Use an SEO Rank Tracking Tool

The third and recommended option is to use a rank tracking tool.

What is a rank tracker?

An SEO rank tracker is an important SEO tool that should be in every serious marketer’s arsenal. After all, manually checking keyword rankings for every keyword you’re targeting is next to impossible, because there are usually several keywords, and rank can change regularly. 

These tools help you measure the performance and optimization efforts of your SEO strategy. There are a lot more reasons why you need these tools.

Simply type in the keywords you want to track, and the tool will do the rest. The rank tracking tool will then monitor your rankings and notify you of any changes to your rankings.

Why you should use a tracker tool?

It provides beneficial support to companies and organizations. Knowledge is power! And asset tracking gives you knowledge about all of your company’s assets. With real-time information about the assets your company owns, you can make more informed and better decisions about procurement and usage.

In addition, rank trackers operate autonomously. They are outside your site, hence no direct connection will be detected to your site. Alternatively, some of the rank tracking tools give you options to prevent search engines from temporarily blocking your IP when you send numerous queries. They offer search safety options that minimize your risk or prevent the use of your IP address.

So with the effectiveness and safety that rank tracking tools bring, you can do your work much easier. It saves your time knowing your ranking while monitoring your changes.

Since Google Search Console only provides the average rank, rank tracking tools offer much more specificity. It helps to notify you if your website has dropped its position on one or multiple search engines. 

Our recommendation: BiQ’s Rank Tracking

There are a lot of tools for you to do rank tracking, and BiQ’s rank tracking tool is what we want to introduce you.

BiQ concentrates on working around keywords. From research to content creation, it focuses on using correct keywords that lead to better business ranking. 

BiQ’s Rank Tracking is one of the best SERP tracker tools when you want to track your site’s SEO status real fast. With a modified system that minimizes manual keyword inputs, there is more efficiency through the automated tracking procedure. 

Rank Tracking starts from a simple registration. Through the process, the platform monitors your business’s SEO position daily. You can access all your SERP results through the created profile.

The tool gives you many benefits beyond just helping you monitor your site‘s performance in search engines. It helps you identify which SEO techniques work, monitor your competitors’ performance, and more. 

One of the metrics that you may want to include in the report would be the performance of the ranking. This includes how many keywords have started to rank since your last report, what are their last positions, and the performance change over time. Guess what? You can easily find all these data in Rank Tracking.

Here is how you will see your keyword ranking.

If you want to sort keyword types, the tag features in Rank Tracking allow you to divide relevant keywords into several groups, making it easier for you to track them. You can categorize them according to quality, content topic, and importance.

Moreover, you can check the rankings drop with just a temporary blip or gradually dropping. You can also do your analyzing work easier by comparing within days or weekly rankings.

BiQ’s Rank Tracking also allows you to keep a rank tracking profile of your competitors. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to identify the keywords that they are targeting and start putting some effort to compete with them on those keywords.

You can do this by creating a new profile using your competitors’ URL.

With BiQ, you can also save your budget. Why? Because you will only pay for what you use, and don’t have to pay for what you don’t need. In other words, if you want to use BiQ for keyword ranking purposes, then you will be charged on the Rank Tracking part.

What to do after knowing your rankings

Once you’ve analyzed the SEO metrics and you’ve known your SEO performance, it’s time to make some tweaks so you can improve your techniques and drive better results.

Now you have your top priority target keywords with high search volume, and the greatest chance for your website to rank, and you know how to format other ranking content for keywords. What you’ll need to optimize and boost your SEO performance varies depending on the results you’ve got from monitoring and analyzing the various metrics.

After shortlisting your potential keywords, you can use your expertise. Then you can create valuable posts and pages for your target users.

Then, go again for keyword research and track the keywords you just optimized. SEO is a long-term process. So does the work of rank tracking, you need to continuously repeat the steps.

TL;DR

SEO rank trackers provide beneficial support to companies and organizations, enabling them to make important decisions that can help their businesses flourish. To gain the insights you need to keep ahead of the competition in the organic search content space, you’ll want to revisit each step in a cyclical manner to achieve superior SEO content performance!

An SEO rank tracking tool like BiQ is definitely suitable for every business. With a range of detailed data and features, you can get your fullest keyword ranking insights.

But, we know navigating the waters the waters of this relatively new Google tool can be tricky. How do you know if it is working? How can you see if it is actually helping your web presence? How can you streamline the verification process? These are all questions we have also asked. Luckily, there are some great tools (beyond Google Authorship) which are incredibly helpful. These four are our favorite:

1. Google’s Structured Data Tool

Structured Data refers to the information which Google is able to learn about your site by crawling it. This information directly correlates to how our websites perform in search results. The more information Google is able to garner, the higher our search rankings.

Additionally, Google uses structured data to create the rich snippets of detailed information for their users. To give our blog posts additional authority and place those beautiful, identifying pictures beside our URLs, we make sure Google Authorship is activated for each post.

To test whether or not Google has recognized our Google Authorship we use their Structured Data Tool. We can also use this tool to check and see if content from another blog has been linked to a specific author.

Start using Google’s Structured Data Tool.

2. SEOPressor WordPress Plugin

We love our WordPress sites and we know you do too. The dashboard is easy to use and plugins give us the specialized functions we want. This is exactly why we think the SEOPressor V5 plugin for WordPress is a rockstar.

It allows us to easily and seamlessly authorize every one of our posts, no matter how many blogs we manage. Because lets face it, most of us have more than one blog. Our time is precious. And, Google’s tedious verification process can be hassle. Why go through the hassle multiple times?

For more information about SEOPressor V5 check out this recent blog post where we have explained the easy to follow steps.

3. Author Stats within Google’s Webmaster Tools

We don’t have to tell you that analytics are key to succeeding in the big ball game of SEO and website rankings. Google’s Author Stats give us another level of comprehensive information about how our own verified content is performing. You will be able to see how your articles are ranking and how many click-throughs you have received. You will be able to see which articles are actually displaying your picture because not all do. And, you will be able to view which articles have been attributed to you which should not have been.

Yes, it happens. Google is trying hard to find and link all text to a specific author. So, sometimes content which isn’t actually yours will be linked to your account.

4. Google+ Ripples

Knowing that our content has been shared is one thing. It lets us know what’s working and when the results are amazing, it can give us all kinds of warm and fuzzies. But, we know a successful web presence is based in building relationships. It is accomplished through engagement. Google+ Ripples allows us to see who is sharing our content and where they are sharing it. This is gold. It lets us target our audience specifically.

Keep in mind, all of the tools in the world do not make up for cra**y content. The goal of Google Authorship is ultimately to provide the user a better experience by improving search results. The demand for high quality, valuable content is real. As we work to improve our own search rankings and utilize the power of Google Authorship, value and relevancy remain of the utmost importance.

Have additional questions about Google Authorship you would like addressed? Shoot us an email. We love answering personal questions.

Staying current in search engine marketing is important.

So let’s talk a bit about how you can keep your marketing and your on-page SEO up to date for the rest of 2013 and beyond!

How Penguin 2.0 Has Changed Search Engine Marketing

Penguin 2.0 is focused almost solely on links, both your own and your backlinks.

Relevance is the most important watchword here: You want links to and from websites which are relevant to your business and to the topic at hand. Too many links from unaffiliated or overly-generalized websites can hurt your SERPs, as it often indicates link-buying or other underhanded methods that Google is trying to stamp out.

Your anchor texts are another primary focus of Google’s changes. Previously, it had been traditional in SEO to focus on anchor text which was an exact match for your keywords. Google frowns on this practice, as it is fairly blatant advertising, and instead is now looking for a variety of anchor texts that flow organically from the article.

Honestly, what this boils down to is simply to link like a regular human being. Don’t force your links, and don’t flood your article with exact-match keyword anchor text. Link naturally to sources -internal or external- as is appropriate, using anchor text that’s relevant to that link, rather than to your keywords.

Changing Keyword Usage Going Forward

The art of keywords themselves has changed significantly in the last few months as well. Previously, the rule of thumb was that for good SERPs, you wanted one or two keywords, each making up roughly 1-2% of the text. This is, of course, a fairly simplistic way of identifying what your article is about, so it’s unsurprising that Google’s methods have become more refined.
Google is now using a process known as Latent Semantic Indexing, which allows it to more accurately deduce the content of your webpages without relying on heavy-handed keywords. As a result, having a keyword-heavy page is now being depreciated in search engine results.

While no one has yet found specific numbers or percentages to use, as a rule of thumb, you should focus on varying up your keyword usage within the text by using variations and\or synonyms. Try not to repeat the same keyword more than a few times in any one article.

This, however, can actually free you to increase your keyword usage. Since you no longer have to worry about shoehorning the same phrase into an article over and over, it gives you more freedom in your writing. You can discuss more broad topics, without worrying about “confusing” the search engine spiders.

Use Location-Aware Optimization

When you’re looking to boost your social appeal and help reduce your bounce numbers, think about where your visitors may be when they see it.

With the rise of mobile devices, your leads may be absolutely anywhere and still view your webpage – but their surroundings are going to be influencing their state of mind, and that affects how they see you and how much time they’ll give you. Plus, location-based keyword targeting is a great search engine marketing strategy.

If many of your leads are going to be looking up information on you at a point of sale, such as in a store, it needs to be short, captivating, and to the point. On the other hand, a businessperson looking up information at home in the evening is likely looking for more detailed information and infographics.

Remember that use of location-based social media services are on the rise as well, so having a website designed to optimize location-aware searching will also help encourage social sharing among people in person as well!

Constantly Re-evaluate Your Link Profile

What this all adds up to is a need for online marketers to closely monitor your site’s links, both inbound and outbound. As time allows, you may even want to begin cleaning your own blogs of bad links and overly-focused keyword use, as Penguin 2.0 now reads and evaluates all the content on your site.

Getting rid of poor backlinks is harder, but potentially necessary if you believe they are dragging your SERP down. Often, you can simply request a website stop linking to you. However, if this fails, Google does offer a link disavowal tool to distance your website from inbound links you don’t want.

Some days I wish the pace of change in search engine marketing would slow down a bit, but it’s just not happening. Keep up-to-date, and keep an eye on your metrics! SEO success will soon follow.

The first thing that should be emphasized is that creating “viral content” is not formulated and there is a reliance on a number of factors that are beyond your control. However, there are some measures you can take to create the best possible content that has a chance of “going viral”.

1.Understand the limits

As stated above, you cannot “make” content viral but it can be hoped for. Ultimately the chances of success initially depend on the content of the article. Blog or tweet, and what may appeal to the majority of readers. The reality however is that if content does “go viral” it is in all probability down to luck.

2.Content

This is the one aspect that you have full control over so make the most of it. Viral content needs to be one or more of the following, interesting, engaging, compelling, funny or at least amusing, a niche topper and moving. Many people will advise content of 300- 600 words for an article but contrary to popular belief, a longer article will be read if the content contains the right characteristics.

3.Create value

This is another aspect you can control to an extent by adding value or perceived value to the content with catchy titles, for example, How to…, top 10… I.e. content that has instructions on how to achieve something. Breaking news, warnings about products, online viruses or phishing scams, contests and freebies normally attract higher levels of interest.

4.Knowing what people want

On the surface this appears to be a difficult hurdle but there are some basics that improve the possibility of “going viral”. Positive uplifting content, something that makes the reader feel good about themselves and others, content that triggers an emotional response or valuable information are typical approaches toward creating viral content. Depending on your niche then other factors can come in to play such as cute babies, adorable animals, animals performing tricks can all aid in capturing the attention of the reader and enhancing their experience of your article.

5.Provide an abundance of free information

Sharing as much information as possible without an agenda of a sales pitch will gain more respect from the end user. Good quality and useful information is always readily accepted but beware of the possibility of excess product or self-promotion.

6.Overdoing your content promotion

If you are providing links to external sites, be selective in where you are taking the end user. It is not possible for everything you are highlighting is “the next best thing” and over promoting can be a real turn off and your internet traffic is likely to fade away quite quickly. The bottom line is to refrain from making the reader feel pressurized in to buying something or reading something they are not really interested in.

7.Make your content visible

An obvious aspect to gaining viral content is to make sure your content can be found easily and quickly. The starting point is the domain address of your website, is it something easy to remember? If you are using sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr etc. Have you already got a good following? Social Media sites are a great place to advertise, using links back to your website, with some short captivating headline and content to raise the level of interest. In the article content, make use of good keywords and tags to make it easier for search engines to find your site.

8.Build momentum

To become “viral” you need traffic but how do you increase this traffic and create a momentum to take your content through the roof? One method is by planting an idea in the readers head, a subtle “call to action”, whereby the reader is pondering whether or not to follow through. As an example you post a tweet and you want retweets, simply ask for this to be done by adding “please retweet”, the result may surprise you. Making full use of social media icons from a website is a must as most of your traffic is likely to come from one of these sources, especially if retweets and link sharing is taking place on the social media sites. Do not be shy of asking for end users to perform certain actions on your behalf such as posting a poll, check out my blog, article, video, free brochure etc. Even asking for feedback on your website may attract attention but be prepared for criticism as well as praise. In the current wave of online social interaction, many people are only too happen to give an opinion, so make use of this and act accordingly in future articles and promotions.

9.Be careful with the timing

Timing can be crucial but unfortunately this is possibly the single hardest aspect to control. When exactly is the right time? To know the answer you will need to be highly attuned to the topic you intend to publish; it is more of a feeling than a scientifically based theory. If you have vast knowledge and experience in the field you are dealing with, instinct will play a major role in selecting the “right time”, unless a competitor has already published something similar, in which case the right time becomes “now”.

10.Connecting with your readers

Many readers may want to know more and if there is a simple method available for them to contact you. An email link, comment box, forums, contact forms effectively perform the same function, to create social interaction, and readers like to feel involved.

A well written article can attract and retain traffic.

Outsourcing SEO to improve page ranking

The moment you outsource SEO work you lose some control of your website, more so if you rely entirely on their efforts. There’s a range of tools at the disposal for a person that is competent in applying them and while there are literally thousands of these so called “experts” available to undertake a range of background activities on your behalf to boost your website rankings, not all of them are really that good. New businesses in particular are susceptible to receiving unsolicited emails and phone calls by SEO “experts” and other marketing companies with promises of elevating a website to Google’s first page on searches but if you take a step back and analyze what they are saying, you’ll able to see some flaws in their sales pitch – because their business does not show on the first page!

SEO does have a place in marketing a website but it is not necessarily a long term solution as so many other businesses are doing the exactly the same thing and added to the equation, the algorithm that is used by search engines (especially Google) is incredibly complex and perhaps only Google knows how it performs, and even that is up for debate. As a client having little or no control over search placing or the ranking of your website if you are relying solely on the services of a third party. You can help by suggesting suitable Meta tags but with a little knowledge this is something that does not need to be outsourced at any price.

So what can you do to increase a search ranking position?

Part of the horrifically complex search algorithm (of which there are many parts) look at the actual content of a webpage, however it does not stop there, and go a little deeper in to identifying “quality content” of a webpage, just as it does with back links (website’s that link to your website), and to provide the quality content the Google “spiders” are searching for, you need to have information about products or services that are relevant to the overall webpage, that however is only the starting point. A product with a good description will be noticed in searches with the right keywords but in many cases this still is not enough to leapfrog the myriad of other websites advertising the same or similar products of services, and this is why “blogging” has become the primary tool for websites to add further content, attract and retain traffic.

What is a blog?

The original blogs were essentially a means whereby an individual could place their thoughts on to a “blog website” for other people to find, read and perhaps subscribe to, another form of social media in effect. However, it was not long after that businesses began to recognize the potential for a new form of advertising in social media circles, and so “blogs” have either began to appear on business websites, or on an independent website that are connected to the “main website” with back links. These blogs, on the whole, are not a place to pour the author’s thoughts, but an additional advertising stream that place a greater focus on a single product or service, one blog for each product or service.

What effect does a blog have on SEO?

A well written blog will typically contain a number of keywords, specifically related to the product or service, to an optimized level, which is typically anywhere between 1-3% of the blogs overall content, although occasionally higher. With the right keywords and density, search engines will look favorably at these blogs and a higher page ranking is achieved.

Where do I get good written content?

There are many providers of article’s and blogs that are SEO optimized or focus purely on content and structure, of which both are good methods of “blogging” to get noticed in searches. Outsourcing of this role is very common but the quality can vary quite considerably and may be a case of trial and error until a suitable provider is found. The art of blog and article writing is very much alive today and is recognized as an essential element for many websites to enhance their quality content, and therefore improve page ranking. However you may choose to add your own content, providing if you have the time to commit to creating an article to a regular schedule (typically one per week).

How does SEO Article content differ from other articles?

SEO articles are written with a focus on one or more keywords or key phrases (a possible search term by the end user). The quality of these words or phrases will determine the quality of the overall article or blog, which should be around 300 words. If awkward keywords are requested, the content quality can be degraded as a consequence, and this will be noticed by search engines and page ranking may decrease as a result, if it is a frequent occurrence. For example the key phrase “Wholesale China” does not enable the author to easily create a sentence that is grammatically correct, however such a phrase may be searched and found, but equally “Wholesale in China” can be applied to an article with greater ease, will still show in the same search and is grammatically correct, and in theory should be favored more highly in searches.

No, the art of article marketing isn’t dead, far from it. It is evolving in parallel to the changes and enhancements to search engine algorithms with quality content being the over-riding asset to any article, the definition of quality in this case is relevancy, informative and engaging to the reader. With these three components your articles should begin to elevate your page ranking to a higher level.

Get your page to rank high on Google today!

3 simple tips for a successful B2B social media marketing campaign.

If you are a B2B company, rather than a B2C, there are a few distinct differences that you’ll want to keep in mind when focusing on the best ways to evolve your social media marketing campaign. Unlike B2C businesses, the focus of a B2B social marketing campaign often includes the goals of searching for investors, locating exceptional talent and generating media buzz. By following a few simple tips, you can achieve all these goals: save time, money and frustration, and watch your business grow into the powerhouse that you envisioned.

1. Find Your Audience

According to a recent social media marketing industry report published online by www.socialmediaexaminer.com, both LinkedIn and Facebook tied for first place among B2B marketers as their most preferred marketing platform. By pulling in a respectable 29% each, or 58% of the 3,800 total B2B respondents, Facebook and LinkedIn came in well ahead of all other responses. (Blogging and Twitter came in second and third with 19% and 16% each, respectively.)

What does this all mean for your B2B social media marketing strategy? Simply put, if you want a piece of the action, you must become part of the action. If you are interested in developing strong business connections and relationships with other B2B companies, your first step should be maximizing your presence on LinkedIn and Facebook. This step alone will get you headed in the right direction.

If you need further evidence, think about this: over half (58%) of the B2B respondents in the social media marketing industry report indicated that they had developed crucial business partnerships through the use of social media. Think about that for a moment. By investing a little bit of time to build up your presence using Facebook and LinkedIn alone, you have the potential to significantly grow your business relationships.

You won’t be alone either. Based on the same report’s B2B respondents, 78% plan on increasing their presence on LinkedIn. While Facebook can be an important tool for B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the only service that was designed specifically to facilitate B2B relationships.

With a presence in over 20 countries and active users totaling more than 225 million, LinkedIn is the go-to social media platform for B2B marketers whose focus are both local and international.

For B2B marketers who focus largely on local business relationships, it is equally important to invest adequate time in building and promoting lead generation through both Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook is a wonderful tool to announce local promotions, and its integration capabilities related to email marketing tools will save you time and labor. It’s also a great way to help gauge the popularity of a businesses ’brick-and-mortar’ locations

2. Consider SlideShare

According to LeadFormix, Inc, SlideShare, which is sort of the YouTube equivalent of the PowerPoint world, is used by almost half of all marketing experts and gets more online traffic from business owners than other platforms. Since SlideShare receives approximately 60 million unique visitors monthly, by aligning your B2B company with SlideShre (which was purchased by LinkedIn in 2012), you will increase your search rankings which, of course, will lead to more online exposure for your business.

Another reason to get on board with SlideShare is that it runs very smoothly on the LinkedIn platform, which is one reason that SlideShare has become really popular with the LinkedIn community. So, if you are going to increase your presence on LinkedIn, why not add SlideShare to the mix, for a productive double whammy?

3. Where are You Headed?

Finally, and, most importantly, it is imperative to have a social media marketing policy in place before you fully engage in any B2B marketing campaign. Otherwise you could waste considerable time and money, which are the two most valuable resources for any business.

Questions to ask yourself: Do I have a clear plan of action in place to ensure that my online marketing strategies will go off without a hitch? Do I have designated staff to monitor the results of my marketing strategies and to ensure that those strategies remain efficient and effective? If not, then you are on a ship without a map or a captain, and you will not get where you want to go.

So, LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, and a plan. Is it just that simple? Well, yes and no. While there are many other considerations to take into account, the pointers listed here are imperative to the success of a B2B social marketing strategy. Follow them and you will be well on your way to achieve your business goals.

* If you haven’t signed up for LinkedIn or Facebook, you should do so today! While you are at it, connect with us for more great tips on social media marketing!