466 – The best SEO payoff in time and effort: Tom talks BackLinks

Episode 466 – Back Links
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody it's Tom here with Episode four hundred sixty six of Screw the Commute podcast. Now, I don't talk much anymore about things related to SEO search engine optimization other than the simple basics. But if you're going to work on SEO, getting back links are worth your time and can pay off faster than virtually any other SEO technique you can do. Plus, I'm going to show you how to ethically spy on your competitors back links and turn that spy research into cash for you. That's what I'm going to talk about today. I hope you didn't miss Episode 465. It was another one of my Ask Me a Question series where I covered the Zeigarnik principle, very powerful PDF and Kindle ebooks, social media and building an email list, hiring good people and the crowdfunding book. And I even talk about Britney Spears. How about that? All right, how would you like me to send you big checks? Well, if you're in my affiliate program, I do, and I will if you refer me for my products and services. So give me an email at Tom@screwthecommute.com if you're interested. And we'll see how you can. We can send you lots of money. Now, grab a copy of our automation ebook.

[00:01:51] It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You will thank me if you just implement even a portion of these tips and tricks in this book that have allowed me to handle up to hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and 65000 customers without pulling my hair out. So you will love this book, grab it at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. Now we're right in the middle of this great, wonderful super duper delicious. I don't have a nice word program to help people with physical disabilities go through my school where they can learn remotely and they can get paid remotely and work remotely. So please check that out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and that'll be in the show notes and then click on the crowdfunding campaign. Check out the people that are in the program so far. We're going to be using some of the money from the Go Fund Me campaign to hire people with disabilities to help run the program. So it's just a wonderful thing that you can participate in to help change someone's life for the better. So please give whatever you can. If you're really flush with cash, you can sponsor a person yourself. How about that? So check with me at Tom@screwthecommute.com, if that interests you.

[00:03:22] Let's get to the main event. Back links. But let me first give you a little of my history with SEO or search engine optimization. This is where you do things to try to get your site to come up higher in Google searches. I was taught by the best of the best at the time, Michael Campbell, and he could get all ten slots for himself and his clients without cheating, I might add, in AltaVista, which was the big deal at the time. And after he taught me I could get four to six of the first page results for both AltaVista and then when Google came along. And then I was I'll tell you a little bit later about what I was able to do with Google, but it was it was pretty crazy back then. Getting keywords in your domain name was really important. I remember purchasing domain names like public dash, dash, dash, dash, dash, speaking.com. You could stuff keywords all over your page and make them the same color in the background so people couldn't see them. But the search engines could just trick the search engines like crazy. You could get thousands of fake back links, which we're going to talk about today to your site, making it look like everyone in the world just loved you. Then the search engines evolved and started penalizing or banning people pulling what are called black hat techniques.

[00:04:55] Just the things that I just mentioned would be considered that. Even then, I was so good because of Michael Campbell at White Hat Techniques, that's the legitimate things you can do. I was the top one, two or three on Google for 12 years, straight on major keywords. But then guess what? Yet again, the search engines evolved and the competition at least quadrupled to where probably about six years ago. I quit anything but the basics of white mazzeo because it just wasn't worth the time and effort to do the things necessary for high rankings. And even if you got good results, Google could turn one dial and you disappear off the face of the earth. I remember on various Google updates, fairly large companies that relied on CEO had to lay off hundreds of people and eventually went out of business. This is why I went to paid traffic probably six years ago to a paid traffic ticket, turn on and off highly targeted traffic within a day or so, sometimes in the same day, you can test 10 different ads to see which ones pay off and you can cancel the rest. But anyway, I know some of you are still enamored with the SEO companies wooing you with great riches if you just hire them for six months to a year. So this episode is going to concentrate on one very specific aspect of SEO that probably gives you the biggest bang for your buck and return on your investment of time and effort.

[00:06:40] Plus, most SEO stuff takes many months to see any results. This technique of back linking can literally pay off the same day. So let's take a look at it. First of all, what is back linking? That's when some other website puts a link on their site leading to your site. The reason I say this can pay off the same day has nothing to do with Ezio. So let's say some popular blog accepts a guest posting from you. In other words, you write a blog post and give it to the popular site where they post it so all their visitors can read it. The day it goes up, hundreds or even thousands of people can read your posting. And usually at the end, there's info about you, the author, and a link to your website. That means the day your post goes up, you could get hundreds of visitors from that length. OK, that's instant traffic. But what does back linking have to do with Esko? Well, first of all, I always call Google and the other search engine similar, I call them like the Wizard of Oz, right? They know all and all. We'll see when another Web site links to you. Google sees that. And Google thinks if someone bothered to link to your site, your site must be pretty good.

[00:08:14] So it raises you in the rankings. It's like that site voted for you as being great. If hundreds of sites start doing the same thing. And that is linking to your site. Google says, wow, that must really be a good site if so many people are linking to. But here's the caveat, if if all the sites linking to you are spammy, rotten, pitiful sites, and of course, Google knows if they are because they know all and see all. Google says to itself, well, hmm, if only rotten, pitiful sites are linking to you, you must be rotten and pitiful so they lower your ranking. If Google thinks you paid someone maybe like on Fiverr to get you thousands of back links and they were all pitiful. Google may just ban your site. You'll never see the light of day. So what does this tell us, the better and more highly respected sites that link to you, the better you look to Google and you get a higher ranking. If only bad sites linked to you. The worse you look to Google and you get a lower ranking ranking or maybe even banned. Now, links have different values, let's say you get a link back from The Wall Street Journal because they did an article about you or mentioned you significantly in an article. That link in the eyes of Google may be worth a thousand times more like a thousand votes, more than a link from some new low content and low authority blog.

[00:10:01] Also, some links are more valuable because they are considered much harder to manipulate and of course, in a moment I'll tell you how to manipulate. All right. But but if you get a link from a dot edu, see, they're regulated. Everybody can't get to that idea, that dot gov and a dot mil for military. So here's how you manipulate a dot edu. Many schools give the students a modest amount of webspace. They can do whatever they want on. You could give a college kid a pizza every month to put a link on his school webspace back to your site there. You just got a link back from a dot edu. Now, another way that works for dot, edu, dot gov and dot military is to do some work for any of those entities and provide a resource page they put on their website for their employees, students, soldiers, whoever. Now, if those ideas work for you, that's great. But if you don't have any connections to school, kids are doing work for schools, governments or the military, no problem. You can concentrate on getting well respected sites to link to you. But before you do, I want to introduce you to the concept of anchor text and how it can help you.

[00:11:26] Now, before I explain anchor text to you, I want to remind you of why I harp on keyword research so much. Anchor text is another instance where your key words are really important, and I covered keyword research in Episode one in one hundred and thirty of this podcast. So what's anchor text, I'm sure you've experienced anchor text thousands and thousands of times and didn't know it was anchor text, anchor text is text you can click on, which takes you to some other Web page. You've probably also noticed that if you hold your mouse over clickable text, you can usually see a long, crazy looking link, which is the destination and tracking link that you'll be taken to on some other Web page or shopping cart would be another place I take you. So why is your use of anchor text important? Well, from a simple, practical point of view and from a usability standpoint for your visitor, you don't want to put a long, crazy looking link on your Web page or even in an HTML email, because it looks terrible in those crazy links can scare people from clicking. Now, from an SEO standpoint, words in your anchor text are given a greater significance. In other words, they look more important. That's why it's important for links on your Web site to have important keywords in them, even the ones that you know, the ones that go into other pages of your Web site.

[00:13:10] You can certainly use anchor text. Don't overdo it, though, because Google came out a few years ago and said, hey, if you do everything perfectly, we don't trust you. So just do it naturally when you want to show people where they're going to go on your site, on your site. It's easy for you to manipulate the angle anchor text. The problem comes when someone is linking back to you. You don't have control of how they link back to you. So an example would be you could link back to this podcast Web site, screwthecommute.com. And I would be appreciative if you did that. But here's how excited I get about it. Oh, well, all right, thanks, appreciate it. OK. All right, now, so if you were going to we're going to link back to me and you used anchor text like entrepreneurial podcast or entrepreneurship podcast, and it would still go to the same exact links to the dot com. Here's how excited I get. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. You're the greatest. All right. So so because you used the anchor text in your site leading back to my site, it made the link way more valuable to me.

[00:14:52] Now, if your site had high traffic and was a highly respected with a high authority rating with Google, here's how excited I get. Think about the last one. Plus I'll give you money. I'll give you my first born, last born, all my dogs, everything. No, I wouldn't give you all my dogs, but that makes it even more valuable if it's got an anchor text and it's coming from a really highly respected website. And throw in the fact that the highly respected website was relevant to your site. I'll take a news site because the search engines know that Wall Street Journal or the L.A. Times, are they those are going to cover lots of different topics. But another type of link would come from a site that's related to your topic and that gets more value to it. So all these things add up to value to you. It used to be quantity. Just get thousands of links from everywhere. But that's long gone, folks. Long, long gone. You want quality links from quality sites and the few a few of them can be worth a thousand times. What a thousand links from some other crap site can be worth. So what do you do if someone tells you they will link back to you? Well, all you really can do is suggest some anchor text that's important to you and hope that they use it. If they do, it's more valuable to you than just the link itself.

[00:16:23] OK, the next topic is deep linking, we never want Google or any search engine thinking that we're pulling something fishy. Here's an example. Let's say you had a great blog posting like I do on my school website titled Is College Really Worth It? If some other college related sites decided to link to that blog posting. Do you think they would link to the home page of my school and tell people to search for the article? Heck, no, that would be ridiculous. They would link directly to the blog post. This is called deep linking. See if all the links to your site just go to your home page. That looks really fishy to Google. And you go down in the rankings having links from other sites going deep into the various pages of your site makes you look like you are legit and have lots of good information throughout your site, which raises your ranking. And I have some graphics to show in the show, notes illustrating deep linking and the next topic is link balance. Link balance means you have links coming in from various types of sites, maybe you have a bunch of dotcoms in your field or related to your field, maybe some industry news sites, maybe sprinkle in some dot ideas, dot gov and dot militaries. Maybe there's associations in your industry that link to you, research sites, community sites, discussion boards.

[00:18:01] And along with this, 50 links from 50 different websites that are good is worth more than 500 links from one site. So, again, you want link balance. And if all your links are coming from one type of source, again, it looks fishy, like you purchased the links, which is a big no no. And speaking of purchasing back links, it's generally not a good idea and you'll get found out and likely banned from Google. However, you know, I'm good at telling you the tricks of the trade, but there is one technique hardly anybody knows about, but now you're going to know about it because of good old Tom here. And that is purchasing or actually renting an entire page on a respected site. Now, this could cost you a few bucks, but it would not look fishy and you can control the anchor text. And here's another thing, the placement of links on the page, which is my next topic, say all things being equal, the higher up in the HTML code and usually displayed on the page the back link is, the more valuable it is. The lower the less valuable and if it's in a sidebar, that's not as valuable either because it's just repeated on every page. All right, now, let me tell you another thing you should know about is do follow and no follow. You'll see these terms when people are talking about linking a do follow link means the link is structured so that it's telling the search engine, yes, we really believe in this other site and we're sending some of our authority to that site.

[00:19:54] And it's you can go follow this link, go over there and we're vouching for him. All right. That's like the layman's explanation. All right. A no follow link. It's better than nothing, but it's not as good as it do follow link. A no follow link actually has a link to you, just the same as the other link, except it's telling the search engines, listen, we're not sending any of our authority to this other site. It's just informational. And so don't follow this link. OK, so it's not going to help you with the search engines, but it still could help you with visitors from that site clicking on it and coming to your site. So don't complain. If all they offer is a no follow link, it's better than nothing. But do follow is better because the search engines come and give you credit for it. And also I kind of mentioned it earlier, the relevance of the site to you matters. So if it's related to you and there's a lot of other information about your topic in your industry and you get a link from that site, it's worth more than some totally unrelated site that links to you.

[00:21:08] You'll take the link from the unrelated site, maybe say there's a way to what they called this of this allow links. And I'm going to tell you also in a minute about how something where your competitor can really come after you and and try to ruin your linking strategy. OK, the relevance is that it's related to your topic. Authority means that it's thought of really highly by Google and the search engines. So if when you get those sites linking to you, that's very valuable. And then also one other topic I should tell you about is the natural speed of link. So you want all your link linking back linking to look natural to Google. Anything that looks fishy is going to hurt you. So a brand new site doesn't instantly get millions of links unless it's some national brand or something like that and major ad campaigns. And, you know, that's a different category. But if you put your site up and then all of a sudden a thousand people link to it from a bunch of spammy sites, you just the whole project is done. You know, your band, you're done. It's ridiculous. So even if you're doing a link building strategy based on the information I'm giving you today. You don't want now when you're if you have a brand new site, you can go a little harder and build things. But once you have an established track record of the of your link, you know, the number of links in the quality of links coming into your site and then all of a sudden a thousand of them come in from out of the blue.

[00:22:48] That looks really fishy. So once you get your link strategy going on, it's a long term strategy, but it pays off really big because these links pretty much last forever, most of them. But don't you know if you're if you're getting 20 new links a week? Don't go to 600 the next week, you know, because that's going to look fishy, so that's natural speed of link building. Now, I want to warn you about a way that your competitors are going to try to screw you over. Now, in a minute, I'm going to tell you about some link checking tools. This will allow you to evaluate your website and see what links are coming into it, but it'll also let you spy on your competitors. Let's talk about that in a minute. And there'll be a link in here with a bunch of the tools that we're talking about. So what a negative link attack is, is without you knowing it, some competitor goes out and gets thousand. It goes to five or somewhere and buys thousands of spammy rotten links. But they don't send them to their own site. They send them to your site. All of a sudden, thousands of of spammy links hit your site, of course, who sees it, Google and the other search engines.

[00:24:04] Now, this technique has become known, and so Google is not going to instantly ban you. But if it appears that it generated from you, they probably will. But if it appears that it and how they know this kind of stuff is far beyond my mental capacity, but. They are not going to instantly ban you, they're going to keep watching, you know, because if you've been naturally nicely building links over time and have a good track record and then all of a sudden a bunch of rotten links show up, they might think this is a negative attack on you from a competitor. So if it's not hurt, your search ranking, forget about it. If it is, there's tools with Google, you can disallow these links. This is why you can't just ignore your website forever and think, oh, I wonder what's going on, not only where your plug ins go bad. You know, you get hacked and not know what people will be using your web, your website to send out spam email to other people and you don't even know it. So you can't just set it and forget it on these things and don't care what kind of website you have. These things need to be addressed. But that's a way that somebody else can screw you over with a negative link at that.

[00:25:19] All right. So let's talk about getting links. Well, one thing obvious is super high quality content will naturally grab people to link to it. A problem with that is it's too slow. Usually if you don't have a lot of traffic to start with. What you got to keep in mind is you got to market your content. If you put a great blog posting up, go to these sites that you want to link to you and tell them about it and and a percentage of them will if it's really high quality. Unique content will get a natural linking. Sometimes it's called link bait, and example I have is when I first got into the protection dog business. I couldn't understand anything the trainers were talking about, it wasn't just plain old, you know, fluffy dog training, it was all kinds of equipment and things and, you know, techniques. I had no idea. So I figured I'm going to research this. And I started a glossary. So an industry glossary would be an example of link bait. It's so cool. Nobody else is going to probably reproduce it. They'll just link to it. So that's an example of link bait. Infographics get a lot of traction with linking. People will link to your infographics if they're good quality now, spying on competitors, why is why do I even put it here? Well, the reason I put it here is because.

[00:26:47] We're trying to get you to find places that could link back to you. Well, if you go to your competitors and you use link analysis tools to find out who's linking to them, that's the first place you go to offer content that those people will link to. They already linked to somebody like you, not that your competitors just like you, but it's just if it's the same topic, so. It makes it easy for you to have a starting place of where to go if your competitor has 3000 back links, there's 3000 people out of the billion Web sites that now you can attack directly instead of hurt or contact directly instead of trying to just figure it out on your own. So that's why it's worthwhile to and also it gives you a benchmark, like if they're coming up high in the search rankings. A great deal of it has to do with these back links so you can see, well, in my industry, the top five competitors have an average of 12000 back links coming in. Well, you know, that's what you got to shoot for, maybe in less popular categories. It's only 2000 or something like that. And and these aren't hard when I give you these numbers, these aren't hard to get if you do the things I'm telling you here and work on it. But it has to it takes a little bit of time, but the great part about it is, is, like I said, they almost last forever.

[00:28:18] So this good glow about your website can carry you for years and years and years. OK, so I'm going to have a link in the show notes, it's called Five Tools to Spy on Your Competitors Back Links, but I'm going to give you some now. Rush, a raft's HFS, RFE Mozi Buzz Zummo and Majestic Essere. But there'll be an astronaut and if you don't want to buy, most of these are paid tool's, by the way. A lot of them have free trials. But if, if you if you don't want to use any tools in your supertight budget to search out your competitors name and see all the other websites that that person showed up on, let's say they've been actively putting blog postings out. Well, you'll see all the blog postings and all the blogs that accepted their blog posting, and that's who you contact to get them to accept your blog post. So that costs nothing. Now, I don't want you to think that back links are the only thing that Google looks at. But if you were going to spend some time on SEO, this is the place to do it, because, like I said, you can get instantaneous results. And the results last for a long, long, long, long time, say so back links, if you were going to fall with NATO at all there.

[00:29:38] That's what you do now. I'll be glad that I didn't even give you all the deep details here. This you know, there's a lot of other details to this, but. My students certainly get all the details in my mentor program, but I'm not pushing that now because I really want you to pay attention to this program. We have to go fund me campaign for people with disabilities. And, you know, it's something that takes us 15 minutes to do, jump in the car, run the 7-Eleven man that could take, you know, a disabled person a couple hours to get all the stuff they need to do to make that happen. And and, boy, that's a hard, hard way to go through life. So that's why I decided, hey, I'm going to help these people out, get them hired, get them educated with techniques that are in high demand in the marketplace. Every business on Earth needs these skills that we teach. And so I'm going to help change these people's lives. But I really need your help to make it happen. So visit IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Click on the Go Fund Me campaign. Anything you contribute is great. You'll see these people and the things that they're facing. So far at least we haven't placed all five people yet, but we have two that are making great progress and really, really excited about changing their lives. All right, everybody catch you on the next episode. See ya later.