Off Page Search Engine Optimization is CRITICAL to ranking your website better in Google and the other search engines.
I've shot several YouTube videos about building links and improving your Off Page SEO:
Transcription of above Video:
Hello. This video is about off-page search engine optimization, otherwise known as link building. It's a tutorial for beginners in 2019. Really, this will be valid well beyond 2019. I think Google's algorithm has settled in a lot of ways, whereas seven years ago there was still a lot of room for improvement. I think they're happy with where they're at and there's definitely a direction they're going. And I'm going to talk about that in this video. I'm also going to talk about giveaway. One of my top secret techniques that really allows you to tell if a link is a good link or a bad link. There are bad links. It used to be there weren't bad links and you could just get as much as you wanted. But now, a lot of the links are really bad. Either they're going to hurt you or they're going to waste your time and not helping you. I'm also going to give real link building strategies that even beginners can start to do today.
But let's start with, so who am I? My Name is David Hood, and I've made well over a million dollars with SEO, and all of the stuff I talk about with regards to SEO are based upon real studies, real actual data, not what should be true, not what people think sound good, but based upon real case studies and what really works. You can't really trust a lot of the blogging that goes on out there. A lot of it is half truths and misinformation. Google only gives you a little bit of the truth, and you just think they're going to tell you exactly what you want to know. No, they're not going to tell you exactly what you need to know.
Okay, so one thing I want to say that's really important is that off-page SEO is the most complicated part of SEO. So be patient with yourself even though there are some beginner strategies that you can use here, really understanding it at a high level does take time and experience. So make sure you have test sites and make sure you're trying several different things on several different sites where you have complete control over them. It's very easy to set up a site, it's very inexpensive, and start seeing what you can do with it. And if you think about it, this is kind of what Google's doing, only they're doing it to a much more exponential degree. I don't know. There's a trillion websites out there. And they essentially are looking at all of them at once. They're looking at, not just what links are going to your site, but what links are going to the sites that are linking to you and what links are going to the links, going to the link, going to the links, going to the links, going to the links, etc.
Okay. And I think they go four tiers back for each website, but at the same time they're looking at it holistically. One thing that allowed them to really exponentially be able to look at more things was they had some speed upgrades in their algorithm with a… I can't remember whether it was Panda or Penguin or both, but this allowed them to evaluate a whole lot more links within a reasonable amount of time. Because one of their biggest limiting factors is actually the computational limitations of being able to look at things. And so with each level they go back, it's exponentially an order of magnitude greater in terms of computational power that they need. So keep that in mind when you're doing this.
Okay. So, let's talk about how to know if a link is good, bad, or let's say a nothing burger. So I'm going to open up a window here. Okay. So a common thing that you might run into is someone offering to get you a link on a specific site, and they say it'll cost X dollars. And so this is an example of an actual website that someone linked me to. So first thing you want to do is you want to go to Google and you want to put the domain name in the search bar. And if it doesn't show up at all for just the domain name, what you can do is you can also do site. Okay. So this means it's de-indexed. This is the 100% you do not want a link from this site.
Now, let's say you could see it in here and it was at the top. That doesn't mean that that's something that you would want. Let's say we wanted this one. All right, let's do this as an example. So, what you could do is you'd put this in here, okay, you see it in here, well, there's not another title in there. So that's a bad example. We want something with additional words in the title. So here we go. So we'll do this. So let's say we search this. Okay, it shows up at the top. That's what it should do. Now, we're not done yet, but what we want to do is we actually want to put some words from its title. So let's do expert paid search. Okay. So, now it should definitely show up on the first page for something like this.
If it does not, even if it shows up, even if it has the site and it actually shows, it's not de-indexed, but I would consider this to be penalized. And this is actually a very powerful technique. I haven't really seen anybody else talk about this. There's only really one guy who's talked about this, and it's not very common for people to use, but this is a great way to evaluate, “Do I really want to link from this site?” It hasn't been penalized by Google or filtered, which is a more accurate way to describe Panda and Penguin. Okay. And I've skipped the factors here, but this is the penalized trick, the domain plus home. So as you put in the domain name plus homepage title.
All right. And actually I want to bring up, so I haven't used this in a long time. Someone contacted me and they said, “Okay, here's a bunch of different sites that you can buy links from.” So this [inaudible] cost, these are some numbers, if you know what domain authority is. And all these ones in red essentially were de-indexed. Okay. So that means they definitely didn't want them. And then quite a few of these other ones were ones that failed this penalty check. Okay? And so, this is actually one of the better ones, but you can see a very large amount of them are sites where you definitely would not want a link from it. It could actually hurt you. And so, that's why when you probably get a lot of emails, if you had a website up for awhile saying, “Oh, I can get you a link on Huffington Post.” Definitely I ignore those now, they're not worth it. There's not very many of them. And it's difficult to really know if that's something where you want a link from. A lot of those links are going to be really bad. Think about it, they're just selling those links to a bunch of different people.
Okay, so what are the other things that you're looking for in a link? Basically, you want your on-page SEO factors that you would for your site to be matched on the sites that are linking to you. Sounds pretty simple, but this is not something that a lot of people think about. This is actually a big secret out there right now. So, for example, if you're looking to rank for search engine optimization, for example, and you get a link from a site that has in its main factors SEO or search engine optimization or search or closely related things, that's going to help a lot.
Well, what are those major factors? I'll put a link to a video about this in the description and hopefully I'll remember to put it up there as well. But to put it shortly, domain name, titles, and URLs, those are going to be the main areas where you're going to look for words that are in phrases that you actually want to rank for. Okay? So this is going to be how you're going to tell whether or not something is a good link or a bad link. And if you found that to be really useful, because that's not something I've seen on anybody else's videos, please subscribe to my channel for more real valuable things that you can learn about SEO based upon real world actual data. Just something to think about.
Okay, let's see. Finding some link opportunities. All right, so get the notepad out because there's some really going to be some actionable items here. So let's say I wanted to rank for ninja tee shirts. Let's say ninja costumes. Party City. I want to find somebody who's a little bit more focused on that. Well that's not a good example. Ninja costumes for adults.
Speaker 2: Damn, Shawn, where'd you find this?
Maybe Yandy. Don't know. Ideally, you want a home page, something that where the homepage ranks. Let's try ninja tee shirt. No, I don't want Cafe Express. It's going to be difficult to… This looks like a super competitive market. So when you put in cafe press. So basically what we're going to try to do, we want to try to see what links that these companies are getting and try to put them on our own. For example, this page right here, if we were to check the links of this actual page, it's not going to be a very good representation.
So let's do a local example, because it's more likely to be simple. So what you'd want to do is you'd actually want to… You'd know more about your market, you'd be able to have some more specific search phrases. And let's see, Ninja Fortnite. Let's try this real quick. And you'd be able to find better examples of competition. This is not a good example.
Speaker 2: 20 minutes later.
Let's just do Dallas. Use this as an example. This one will be much easier and much more useful. Okay, here we go. This is what we're looking for. So we come here, I want to take this domain name into play. Okay. So we're going to look at this and we're going to use this tool, [inaudible 00:09:50]. It's not a perfect tool, but it catches a lot of things. So think about what I said before. So if you're a Dallas plumber and you're looking for things that have Dallas or plumber or things closely related to that in the domain names, titles, and URLs. Okay. So, home and garden, that's related. Nothing in there. Texas. So looking for Dallas. Okay, so there's Fort Worth. Oh, plumbers. Okay. This is Yellow Pages, you should be able to get Yellow Pages, so that's not really something new. Chamber of Commerce. It has the city. Plano is a really big suburb of Dallas. Plano. There's emergency. Emergency's actually really useful because there's actually emergency plumbing keywords. It looks Benjamin Frank… So this would be… I'm surprised a competitor. They must be related somehow. But this is plumber Dallas, Dallas, this has plumbing. This is a great link if you could get this [inaudible 00:10:51]. Right? A job search. So you might actually want to make a job post on McKinney Chamber and just post jobs. This is okay, a press release.
So, what you'd want to do is you want to go through here, and these are sorted essentially by the value of URL, so that you look at this column right here. And you probably want to just look at it, once this hits zero, you definitely want to stop. You might want to just look at the first couple pages, but if you really wanted to put the time in and the site was really important, you would go through a lot of these. You'd take notes and you'd try to get links from some of these. And a lot of them you're not going to be able to get links from and a lot of them you are. Okay. So that's something that is going to be able to get you links. Okay? Find out what links your competitors have and try to get those as well. And do that for 10 or 20 competitors.
Now, you can also do, let's say you're a Dallas plumber, you could still do a Miami plumber. Right? So you could still look to see what plumbing related links they have. You could also do Dallas electrician. Okay. Again, you could look at what's Dallas based, what these guys have that have Dallas in them. I would do that after you've looked at the top competitors for the Dallas plumber. These are going to be a little bit further, but the amount of links that you could find just go on and on. You can do the same thing with the Majestic tool. So let's actually put this guy in. I prefer [inaudible 00:12:21], so I prefer how it displays it, but Majestic is also good. There's no reason you can't use it and go to backlinks, and do the same thing here. You're looking for words that are part of phrases that you want to rank for, and the domain name titles and URLs. Domain name is the most powerful, so that's definitely ones that you'd want to and you'd be willing to pay more for.
And part of one of the tips is going to be niche geo directories. Okay, so, what are these? I bet we'll be able to find one. So this is technically a niche geo directory. Okay. So this is a geo directory. Okay. So this is Frisco, which is again a suburb of Dallas. It's pretty wealthy. And so, this is essentially a directory where it's giving the business information. You could also find plumbing directories. There's actually quite a few plumbing directories if you're doing that. I've done those before. If you're working for a lawyer or you are a lawyer, there's lawyer directories. Getting those with the right kind of text in the right places, that's going to be something you're going to see a lot when you're doing these what I call link stealing.
But also you can just go to Google and you can just do plumbing directories. All right. So the good news about this is that you probably wouldn't need to do any penalty checking on this, because it's already ranking. And some of these you're not going to want, like HomeAdvisor, you probably don't want. And Plumber SEO, that's probably someone trying to sell SEO services to plumbers. But this one's theplumbinginfo.com. You could come here, this is pretty good. You'd want to make sure that… Let's see, add your listing. One dollar per month. Really what you want is you just want a website link, and you don't really care about the feature or the logo. I mean a dollar per month. What I would do is I'd also go and I'd take this and then put it into Majestic. And I'll put links to Majestic and [inaudible 00:14:26]. I don't know if they have affiliate programs where I get a commission, but if you're signing up for them through me, it doesn't hurt you or anything to do that.
Let's see here. So, they do have a lot of links. So they pass the penalty check essentially, and they have links. So if they had zero links or two or three links, then you might want to just say, “Oh, okay, it's not really going to be worth it.” And so, this one… Where was that? So dollar per month, I'm assuming that they actually gave… You'd want to go look at and see if you can find an actual listings. So, Green Plumbing. You'd want to go find a listing and make sure there's actually a link on the page. Okay? And so, let's see.
Let's move on. Reverse outreach. So a lot of people, they do outreach where they say, “Hey.” They'll email someone they want to get a link from, and they'll say, “Hey, I'd like to write an article for your site in exchange for you giving me a link.” And there's tons of people that are doing this. This is very common. And so it does work. It's a lot of work and it's okay. I wouldn't say it's a great way to do it. But I think a better way to do it is what I would call reverse outreach. And there's several different ways to do this, but essentially it's instead of saying, “I'm going to write something for you and you're going to put it on your site,” you say, “I'm going to write something about you and I'm going to put it on my site.” And what they do is they end up… And you link to them and they end up linking to you as a result. And so, you want to make sure the same pages aren't linking to each other, maybe you're linking to their homepage and they're linking from a separate page to your page. That way you'll get the real value, but this can work a lot. You could do top five companies that we in other places, that are not direct competitors.
And then you send them a message saying, “Hey, we wrote about you guys. We heard you guys are doing a great job.” And you don't ask for the link, you just say, “Hey, just wanted to let you know.” And a lot of times they'll essentially reciprocate.
Broken link building. There's all sorts of tutorials out there about this. You can find out what websites. There's tools that will help you find web pages that have links on them that are no longer working, and you can go and you can say, “Hey, I found broken links on your site. Can you link to this resource instead?” And you insert your own resource. That works pretty decently.
Blog comments. This is an old school technique where you used to be able to send tens of thousands and it would rank really well. A lot of people think, “Okay, well blog comments don't work.” They still do work, to a certain degree. I wouldn't do a lot of them. This also brings up the no follow versus do follow. So there's really no such thing as do follow. There's no follow and not no follow. Essentially, if I'm linking to someone and I put a no follow tag on it, it means that you're telling the search engines not to count it, but they still do and it still matters. So no follow links still matter. Do follow links are better and they're more powerful. No follow links, your anchor text, if you want to look that up, that's pretty simple. It's basically what you would click on, on a link. And it used to be a major, major factor for it, you ranked for now. It's still a significant factor but it's not as big. Basically, in no follow links, the anchor text doesn't matter. For do follow, the anchor text does matter. So you can just go to relevant blogs. You want them to be relevant, preferably, you want them to have the title and the URL.
So, let's see, we got, there was a domain name, title, and URL. To have some keywords and the domain name, title, and URL. And even if a no follow, if they're relevant, they're going to help. And sometimes they can even drive traffic if you make a really good comment.
There are websites called Web 2.0s. So it'd be like wordpress.com, where you'd get joesplumbing.wordpress.com. There's all sorts of other websites like this where you'd get a sub-domain, and you can build up links, you can link to your own sites, you have complete control over those. There's a lot of different ways to link. I can't really cover all of them in one thing, but I think that's a lot. It's still, if you're new and you have no idea where to link from, now you have a lot of different ways to link.
Feel free to let me know what your favorite type of link building is in the comments below, and I will respond. If you disagree with something or you think there's a really great way, please let me know. And then, I want to talk about link building 2020 and beyond. So, first of all, this has been a core part of off-page SEO. It's been a core part of Google's algorithm since the beginning, is the reason in the '90s why their search results were better than everyone else. Everyone else was just looking at on-page, and they came along and they said, “Hey, we think we can look at the internet like a popularity contest.” So this was a core part of their algorithm then, and it still is today, and it will be well into the future.
They've said that they're constantly testing algorithms that don't take in account off-page SEO link building or links, and they say that they're terrible. So this is still going to be a critical part. Going to need to do something about this. And if you ignore this, yes, you can get natural links where you just build great content and eventually people will link to you. But that's not really a great technique and you can spend years doing that and get nowhere, even with great content. So I think this is a really great starting point for you to go for starting to rank your website and start to actually get real links that are valuable and understanding what's good and what's not good.
So, let me know what you think. If you thought this was valuable, please like, subscribe, or share with your friends. And again, I do read all the comments and I will respond if it's something that makes sense to respond to. So please comment and let me know what you think. And thank you for watching. Have a great day. Bye.
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