The Wordtracker Academy

When Kevin Gibbons took to the stage at London SES, he was quick to remind delegates that links existed before Google. From the earliest days of the internet, people wanted to generate traffic, get leads and promote their websites. Here's a round-up of the link building tips that Kevin Gibbons, Blueglass.com and Paul Madden, Automica.com, provided.

A well structured site can improve your chances of ranking well with the search engines. Intelligent internal linking, can be crucial to your site's SEO success. Yet it's often overlooked. So, here are eight ways to improve your site's internal linking.

A well planned site structure improves your chances of ranking well in Google's results. So, today, we’re going to look at how to set up your site’s structure - so that the search engines find our best and most profitable content and your site's visitors have a great experience.

In April 2012, Google rolled out a change to its ranking algorithmic. Google Penguin, as it became known, hits sites where it hurts; in their rankings. One year on, many websites haven’t recovered their lost traffic. Yet rehabilitation is possible. James Newhouse, of digital marketing agency Receptional.com is one of the few people with experience of managing a full recovery. Here, he outlines his Penguin recovery strategy.

In webinars and emails, I increasingly get the question, “Isn’t link building dead?” The answer is that a certain type of link building is dead, and a new type of link building has taken its place ...

Whether you’re running the simplest blog or an enormous international ecommerce site, you should be measuring how visitors interact with your website.

There are lots of analytics packages you can use. The most common - perhaps because it's free - is Google Analytics If you're new to analytics, this article will get you kick started. We'll help you install the software on your site. We’ll recommend some important business metrics you should be tracking. And we'll help you set up a keyword dashboard so you can track your traffic.

Link building can be a difficult business. And sometimes you can ask yourself if all the trouble is really worth it. In times like that, it’s great to read about what other businesses in your situation have done to win fantastic links. Their experiences - and the benefits they got from link building - can inspire us all.

The SES London conference covers both basic and cutting edge SEO, PPC and online marketing. Julie McNamee, Gareth Davies and Justin Deaville collected the best top tips, takeaways and memorable quotes from SES London 2013. Here's what we picked up.

The ideas behind this article are not new. I have shamelessly stolen them and not only do I intend to get away with it scot free, but I hope over the course of the next 800 words or so, to persuade you to do the same and steal the very best ideas you can find.

The most important thing for any business is to satisfy customer needs profitably. In doing so you build a unique knowledge of your customers, an understanding of the problems they face and a pretty good idea of the questions they ask. You answer these customer questions every day and tell people exactly what your products or services do to solve problems for you. This is rich content for link building.

Compiling lists of all kinds is integral to the work of a link builder. Not only do lists make the job easier, they save a lot of time and ensure you don’t miss easy opportunities. Both Garrett French (the co-author of this article) and I almost build our working lives around lists.

You probably don’t need me to remind you of the 6 major benefits of link building because we covered them last week when we talked about how link building is a marketing priority.

Link building is not just important for search engine optimization. In fact link building has multiple benefits that can boost your online profits, yet often get ignored.

In this article, Ken McGaffin describes the six major benefits of link building and give you some tips for each so that you can maximize your return on investment from all those lovely links you’re able to attract.

Low quality links to your site can damage it and negatively affect your rankings.

Find out how to get rid of these links quickly and easily using Wordtracker's Link Builder and Bing and Google’s Disavow Links tools.

One of the highlights of London's LinkLove conference in 2012 was Mike King's talk on outreach email analysis (much of it manual) that had been carried out by his company iAcquire on 300,000 outreach emails. Here are some of the tips he passed on on what to incorporate into your link building requests ...

It's important that you understand what the links going back to your site look like. We call this your backlink profile, and it helps you decide what kind of links to go after, where to get them from and what anchor text to use. This article is a step by step guide to using the Link Builder tool to find this information, and make the informed decisions your business needs.

The Link Builder tool finds you sites to get links from. And with Custom Strategies in Link Builder, you can find relevant, quality sites that your competitors can't, in 6 easy steps.

Successful search engine optimization (SEO) requires inbound links from quality relevant websites. Using extracts from their book "The Definitive Guide to Link Building (2013 edition)", Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney here outline the definitive steps in a successful, long term link building campaign ...

Welcome to the sixth in our seven-day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker's Keywords tool.

To attract traffic from Google, you'll need to include relevant keywords in your site's links.

Watch this video and you'll discover how to include keywords in your website's internal links.

Search engines rely on links to tell them which sites are worth ranking and which are not. Simply put, the more links you have from a wide variety of quality sites, the higher your site will rank in Google's results.

Knowing this, it's easy to get carried away, building lots of links while forgetting that quality is much more important than quantity.

We’ve spent the past few months updating and changing Link Builder, so that it’s now easier to find and build quality links. In this post, we’re going to take you through the new features, and how they’ll help your link building.

If you don't think you have the skills to build links, you're probably wrong. Ken McGaffin explains why.

The Get Links! video training course - what it is, and why you need it.

Getting quality links from quality sites can be a time consuming and frustrating process. This new video training course presented by link building experts Ken McGaffin and Garrett French will teach you everything you need to know to get links that will bring traffic to your website for years to come.

As with all ranking updates, when Google launched Penguin many previously well-regarded sites lost ranking. The reason? Because Google is now looking at the over-optimization of backlinks. But what does that mean, and what can do about it?

After Penguin, Google’s latest algorithm update, a lot of webmasters have been looking at their ‘backlink profile’. I‘ve written about what this is, and why it matters, in the first in this two-part guide, Checking your backlink profile

In this one, we’ll discuss how to look for potential problems within your backlinks, and what those problems might be. Whether or not you’ve been hit by Penguin this is something worth checking.

Guest posting is all the rage right now. From getting visibility to getting links everyone knows that guest posting can’t be beaten. But just jumping on the bandwagon will not get you the results you need. Because of the popularity of guest posting the bar has been raised … but I’m about to help you get over that bar. The following five tips will help you create a guest post that will dazzle any A-list blogger … and get you the attention and traffic you deserve.

Social media can play an important role in your online marketing as a way to engage your target audience, but it can also be used in your link building strategy if you know what you’re doing. Here are the main three ways that you can gain additional backlinks to your website and boost your rankings using social media.

With the recent wave of updates from Google, including Panda and Penguin there has never been a greater need to build trusted authoritative links to your websites. Google’s Penguin update hit sites with lots of low quality links. And, if we believe the value of low quality links has decreased we must also believe the value of high quality links has gone up.

If your site sells products, submitting them for review can be a great way to get links back to your site, therefore improving your search engine ranking and getting more traffic. Garrett French advises how you go about that.

Garrett French explains how he seeks out link prospects on a very grand scale ...

When link building experts Patrick Altoft, Kristjan Hauksson and Mikel deMib Svendsen got together this year at London SES, the result was an insight into the world of advanced link building Here is what these experts had to say.

Wordtracker was at LinkLove London last week, and we've put together a list of link building tips and tricks picked up from a very practical conference.

Getting authoritative websites to link to you is one of the most demanding tasks in SEO (search engine optimization). Our latest infographic is a great reminder of 11 creative ways you can get links without asking.

Lisa D Myers of Verve Search and Patrick Altoft of Branded 3 look at link analysis, prospecting, linkbait and the things you want to avoid when undertaking what is arguably the most important activity in SEO … link building.

Ken McGaffin in the third article in his Link Building Made Simple series describes how to survey the current situation in your particular market, by building campaigns in Link Builder

It is of course important to measure the success of your link building campaigns. In this second in a series of six articles in the Link Building Made Simple series, Ken McGaffin shows how you can measure not only your return on investment but also what works and what doesn’t work for your website in your particular market.

Ken McGaffin, in the first of his Link Building Made Simple series of articles, explains how to form a simple strategy that will get your link building campaigns off to a great start.

Links bring your business multiple benefits that will repay your investment many times over and Ken McGaffin has written series of articles on how to build links the best way, very simply. Read his introduction to these articles, and links to the rest in series are at the bottom page.

Creating great content gives you tremendous ammunition for attracting links.

But content without active promotion is likely to turn into a very damp squib. So you must have mechanisms in place that will allow you to easily and repeatably get your message out to as many relevant people as possible.

Planning your content is crucial but it is not just something that you can churn out: it requires time, thought and effort. This fifth in the Link Building Made Simple series presents some ideas on how to produce lots of good content.

Link building has changed dramatically over the last dozen or so years that Ken McGaffin has been in the business. In this article he advises how the linking landscape has changed and how to target new prospects.

In four short and clear videos, Ken McGaffin introduces link building for SEOs and all online marketers explaining why links are important, what a quality link is, what sites need links and what kind of sites you should try and get them from.

Most of the links that come to your website will point to your home page and normally use your domain name as the ‘anchor text’ (also called ‘linking text’). Ken McGaffin in this eighth article in the Keyword Basics series advises how to turn that into keyword rich link text in order to attract more search engine traffic.

How do you persuade busy bloggers to link to you? By using the craft of persuasion, explains Ken McGaffin.

One of the most common difficulties in link building is getting a response from link requests. Ken McGaffin gives 10 reasons why you might not be getting answers and how to fix each problem.

Snow-forecast.com has achieved every link builder’s dream of getting powerful quality inbound links without asking.

When you're link building, you want to find high quality link prospects.
Yet, you also want to find prospects where there's a good chance of actually getting a link.
Ken McGaffin shows how such prospects can be found in the 'magic middle' ...

In Effortless link building (part one), Ken McGaffin showed how finding a single quality news source allows us to quickly and effortlessly build a link building campaign of many thousands of link prospects. In this follow up article, he’ll take that one step further and show how both newbies and more experienced link builders can systematically turn these link prospects into valuable inbound links.

Entering up to 10 URLS into the Link Builder tool can deliver thousands of link prospects to help you with your link building campaigns. Ken McGaffin shows how this works in the second in his Getting Started with Link Builder videos.

Always be on the look out for new link building opportunities. And some of the best can emerge from your day-to-day business activities. Chatting to a restaurant owner about a bad review on TripAdvisor.com led Ken McGaffin to an interesting site on travel technology. The site was a good prospect in itself but from that single prospect, he quickly built a campaign of many thousands of link prospects.

Sites that link to more than one of your competitors are must-have links that should be easy to get. Ken McGaffin shows you to find them.

A good link building campaign needs to be planned, managed, monitored and reported on. It will use a wide range of strategies with many link prospects for each.

This is a lot of work and Wordtracker's Link Builder tool has been rebuilt to do all these jobs for you. Can all this really be in one tool? Ken McGaffin says it can and here he shows you how.

In part one of SEO for editorial teams, journalists and writers, we looked at how quality editorial is at the heart of building the links SEO requires. In part two, Mark Nunney looks at how they can help promote their quality content to make sure it gets the precious links it deserves and needs for search engines success.

Guest blogging is receiving a lot of internet marketing buzz at the moment. Pro bloggers are regularly publishing new articles giving guest blogging advice. However this doesn't necessarily make the newbie's job easier as the information is scattered around the web. Worse, at least 80% of posts you read just share how great it is and why you need to try as well.

Assessing the quality of link prospects and sorting them using tools like Link Builder is crucial at every stage of a link building campaign. Get it right and you’ll be way ahead of your competitors: spending time on link prospects will bring you the best business and SEO benefits. But how do you assess the quality of a link prospect? No more mystery in that - Ken McGaffin gives you 13 ways to assess a link prospect.

Why would anyone link to your site? Here are 25 reasons why another site will link to yours. With real world examples from Ken McGaffin.

Since 1998 links have been the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm. But too many people still don't realize that 90% of what they need to do is to get other sites to link to them. Gareth Davies summarizes Patrick Altoft’s recent SES presentation on some basics of link building, including brand v keyword-rich links, competitor analysis, content syndication and replicating competitors’ links.

Ken McGaffin in this extract from Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building explains how online communities work and how to find and contact link building prospects within that community to help you build a profitable, traffic-attracting website:

Finding quality link prospects is easy. Making an approach and winning that link is not. And if you’ve got thousands of link prospects you’ll not have much success if you make the same blanket approach to each one.

Quality link building needs great ideas for content that others will want to link to. But ‘build it and they will come’ is not enough. You need to first find the sites you want to link to you and build relationships with them. Ken McGaffin shows us how to prepare for link building.

The latest Think Visibility conference organized by Dom Hodgson, was held this month at Alea Casino in Leeds. Around 150 practitioners of SEO, social media and affiliate marketing met for a one day powerhouse of a conference. With some big name speakers lined up as well as some big name attendees in the audience, Wordtracker sent Gareth Davies along to gather some of the top takeaways from the event.

Link building is a creative process. At least the type of link building that can generate hundreds of editorial links is. Where does the inspiration for such powerful ideas come from? A breakdown on the London Underground gave Ken McGaffin the inspiration for this article – and an opportunity to summarize some of his thoughts on creativity.

Competitor link analysis is much more than finding out who’s linking to your competitors and getting them to link to you. There is a huge amount of useful information you can grab if you just take the time to research carefully.

In this article, the third in the series, Ken McGaffin shows you how to get the most from competitive link analysis and introduces two new features to the Link Builder tool – linking text analysis and linking domain categorization.

Andreas Kambanis of the London Cyclist blog didn’t start as a blogging or a cycling expert. But hard and smart work have turned his cycling blog into his main source of income. Andreas is the first subject of a new series of Link Building Heroes and Ken McGaffin, co-author of Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building - How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response discovers how Andreas uses quality blog content to build links for SEO and an email list for marketing.

So you’ve found some great link prospects. And you’ve created some great reasons why someone should link to you. Now you want to make an approach and craft a great link request. But are your link requests missing the most vital ingredient? Ken McGaffin asks the question and gives the answers.

Some companies and websites can’t keep out of the news. Open up a newspaper, browse a news website, sit down in front of the television and you see the same companies featured time and again. How do they do that? Ken McGaffin explains and shows how to get link prospects from them.

We struggle to find link prospects for our websites. And that means we struggle to get the links we need to move us up the search engine rankings and bring more visitors to our sites.

Link building is one of the most difficult parts of search engine optimization and naturally we’re all delighted when we ‘crack it’ and get new links pointing to our site.

Job done. Good links. Let’s move on to the next job.

I don’t think so.

Link building is not only good for search engine rankings, it’s essential. But not all links are equal - some links are excellent, and many others next to useless. It’s quality, not quantity of inbound links that make winners stand out. That’s why link building is the biggest challenge SEOs and website owners face.

Creating keyword rich content goes well beyond writing a few articles for your site. Search engine optimization is a discipline which can be used in every corner of your website, including inbound and outbound links. In this article we show you just how easy it is to boost your search engine rankings simply by building keyword rich links.

We all know that one-way links from authority websites are essential if your link building efforts are to be successful. But what does it take to get those authority sites to link to you? Well, you’ll probably guess that it is not easy - quality links don’t materialize from feeble or automated requests. To get those ever so valuable links you’ve got to adopt the right mindset - the principles that show link targets you mean business and that you’re worth linking to.

Here’s my baker’s dozen ...

If you’ve been finding out about how to improve your website ranking, then you'll have heard about the power of link building. Search engines like Google rely on inbound links to inform their algorithm of site popularity, authority, and interest. As a result, focusing on link building strategies that can position your site correctly are ideal for generating top rankings. SEO expert Michael Fleischner introduces the link building techniques that work for him.

SMX London 2010 was SMX Advanced so we thought we'd push ourselves too and offer you 111 takeaways and top tips from the conference. Wordtracker's top tweeter, Mal Darwen attended and was supported by Mark Nunney reporting the coverage.

The Link Builder tool is designed to help you instantly identify your best link prospects - and build a linking campaign that exponentially grows your online presence. And here we explain the different parts of the Link Builder interface.

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in London was once again a great success and I've collected no less than 99 tips, ideas, statistics and memorable quotes from various speakers, panelists and a man in the bar.

Your Superman Pages are your most important for search engine optimization (SEO) - the ones you want to perform best on search engines. Get your site's navigation wrong and your Superman Pages will be trapped in a basement full of kryptonite. Here I show how to optimize your website's navigation for search engines and set Superman free.

Getting coverage for your business in mainstream media can be hugely beneficial in bringing a swathe of new visitors to your site, and building inbound links from the media and from all the other people who comment on it. In this article, I want to give you guidelines on how you can use publicity in your own business.

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” Jonathan Swift

Opportunities for great free publicity and inbound links are all around us. They arise every day from a host of newspapers, magazines, blogs and online news sites… but we just don’t see them.

The internet is changing the rules of public relations (PR). Now that anyone can break a story through Twitter or Facebook, how should the PR industry adapt? Has the old-fashioned press release become obsolete? Is the press embargo dead?

You need to actively build links if you want to improve your traffic and get high search engine rankings. But how do you do it? Eric Ward is a master link builder who counts the likes of Amazon, the Discovery Channel and Warner Bros among his list of clients. As a healthy obsessive, there is nothing Ward doesn't know about link building, making him the foremost expert in his field. In our exclusive interview Ward imparts some of his best pearls of wisdom on everything you ever wanted to know about link building.

In our last newsletter we introduced you to In Good Company Workplaces in New York, a company who gained fantastic media attention by sheer perseverance and good fortune. This time, we want to show you how one company got great press attention after they spotted an opportunity to piggyback the hottest story of the year – the credit crunch.

SEO is about the off page factors as well as the on page factors - small businesses usually neglect the former. Getting external sites to write about you, especially top news sites, can do wonders for your inbound links and as a result improve your search engine rankings. Here’s how one company got top rate media coverage.

To help you get the most from Wordtracker's Link Builder tool, we run regular online seminars.

Rand Fishkin is a popular speaker at search engine optimization conferences – not so much for his trademark yellow sneakers – but for his direct and uncompromising advocacy of social media marketing. His strategy is to focus on the ‘linkerati’, the new breed of bloggers whose approval is often the first stage in launching a successful campaign, and he insists the quickest way to kill a viral campaign is by giving it to your public relations department. Fishkin explains his approach and gives top tips on social media marketing.

Inbound links are links from other sites to yours, and they are crucial in all but the least competitive of markets (and even in those you need some links). You therefore need to know how many inbound links your site has.

SEO-PR has been offering optimized press release services since March 2003. But, the first time my online public relations firm recommends using top search keywords in headlines and at least the first 100 words of optimized press releases, I can't tell you how frequently new clients are surprised.

Many people mistakenly believe that search engine optimization and online public relations firms can magically optimize a press release - without modifying any release content - by adding invisible meta keywords tags. So, they are shocked, shocked to find that their top search keywords actually need to appear high up in very visible locations.

Often simple things really matter. And the use of keywords in linking text is one of those simple things that turn out to be hugely important. Linking text, sometimes called anchor text, is the clickable text that takes people to another page or resource. You need to choose that text carefully.

Sending out link requests is a time-consuming business. So wouldn't it be wonderful if other sites linked to you without being asked?

Sound impossible? Well, it can be done and here are ten strategies to prove it.

Finding quality sites to target is at the heart of any effective linking strategy. ‘Quality sites’ are not the ones that are easiest to get links from but those that will drive most relevant traffic to your site. In our last newsletter, we looked at how to maximize your link value to make your site more attractive to link targets. In this issue we’ll explore how to find quality link targets.

If you’ve gone through all the hard work of a link building campaign, you expect to be rewarded with some impressive links. The reality is that many people are disappointed with the trickle of links and the trickle of traffic that their efforts produce.