Timothy Carter

Consider this digital marketing guide an overview of marketing and how all of the dozens of little puzzle pieces fit together to create a cohesive tapestry that reaches your ideal customers and convinces them to buy from you. Take what you learn in this digital marketing guide and apply just one thing right away. Then, as you build momentum in your digital marketing execution, you can add to it. And before you know it…well, you’ll be executing (as an expert) on your own digital marketing strategy. Digital marketing is so much more than just SEO and content. That’s one of the reasons, we have expanded our service offerings through the acquisition of Marketer.co and PPC.co, where we providing leading digital marketing agency services to some of the world’s most well-recognized online brands (shameless plug). As you read this guide, consider all the ways you can improve your digital marketing strategy this year and beyond! Let’s dive in. What is Digital Marketing? Let’s start with the very first question most people think, but are afraid to ask (for fear of looking foolish): What is digital marketing? If you ask a dozen people in the industry this question, you’ll get a dozen answers. And, to be honest, most of them are a little stuffy, academic, and vague. Take HubSpot, for example. Their definition goes like this: Digital marketing encompasses all digital marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital marketing channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers. Okay, that gives us a little information, but it still leaves you thinking, so what? In short, digital marketing campaigns are: …any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic devices. That’s catchy and easy to remember, but still sounds like it was written for a Marketing 101 class in 2007. The American Marketing Association merely regurgitates what everyone else is already saying: Digital marketing is the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media marketing, search engines, and other digital marketing channels to reach consumers. Some online marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an entirely new endeavor that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how potential customers behave compared to traditional online marketing. While there’s no such thing as a perfect definition – particularly for a field that’s evolving more than traditional marketing – we don’t feel as if any of these are fully indicative of what digital marketing is and why it matters. They aren’t compelling enough to acquaint people with the reality of what we’re doing. So while there are elements of truth to each of the definitions above, here’s the definition we’re going with: Digital marketing is the process of leveraging online mediums – such as websites, email, marketing automation and social media marketing- to strategically reach the right people at the right time with the right message, all in an effort to increase brand awareness and ultimately convert these individuals into customers who go on to become loyal and raving fans. A bit wordy? Yeah, probably so. But it cuts straight to the heart of what digital marketing is and why it matters. Digital marketing isn’t about using electronic devices to reach people. It’s about utilizing the power of the internet to deliver a cohesive message that moves people through a journey over time. And if you do that with consistency, you’ll win big in the business world. Why is Digital Marketing Important? We’ve already touched on this some in our definition of digital marketing, but let’s go even deeper. Here are a few specific reasons why digital marketing is so important for brands of all sizes: Digital marketing personifies your brand The first thing that digital marketing does is clarify and personify your brand. You already know what your company is about, but the marketplace does not. By investing in digital marketing, you’re able to share your story in a way that brings your brand to life. It makes you relatable and engaging. And in this sense, it magnetizes people to your brand. In the later stages of your digital marketing strategy, a personified brand can help you in many different ways. In addition to having more loyal fans and more engaged prospects, you’ll have an improved foundation you can use for customer support, social media channels, and other interactions with your base. Digital marketing creates brand awareness Speaking of magnetizing, digital marketing is all about creating awareness and understanding. Think of it as the PR arm of your business, reaching out to the marketplace and telling them, Hey…over here! Without digital marketing, you’re totally reliant on word of mouth marketing and other elements that are outside of your control. When internet users and even potential customers are more aware of your brand, and when they have a better understanding of your brand, they’ll be much more likely to turn to you when they have a need you can solve. Admittedly, building brand awareness can be a slow process. It’s hard to build brand recognition, and even harder to build familiarity and a good reputation, but the upfront effort is worth it if it means achieving a more dominant competitive position. Somebody is going to tell your story online. A digital marketing strategy makes sure it’s you (not the competition or misinformed customers) that’s telling that story across all online channels, including websites, news outlets and social media. Digital marketing streamlines the buyer journey We often think of a buyer’s journey as happening along a simple one-way continuum. But the truth is that today’s buyer’s journey with various digital marketing channels is more like a pile of spaghetti noodles. People zig and they zag. They get distracted and lost. For example, a potential customer may learn about the problem they’re facing, but refuse to take action on it. They might sit on the problem for months before delving into research on how to solve

Google advertisements have been around on the search engine since, well, Google itself, and businesses have been taking advantage of them in every iteration they’ve seen. From the off-hand ads that nobody clicked, to the yellow-denoted paid search results at the top of your list, to the carousel-like shopping results for products related to your search, Google is always tinkering with the way it processes and displays advertisements. For many marketers, these ads are a blessing—they’re a quick, relatively cheap way to increase online visibility on the most popular search engine on the planet. But there’s also a flip side for businesses looking to generate more attention organically. Dealing with prominently displayed ads means receiving less search traffic—even if you’re ranking first, organically. This can impact your local rankings. There are only two ways around this dilemma. One is to pay for your own set of ads on the search engine, but because so many businesses are competing for that ad space, costs have dramatically risen over the course of the past few years. The other solution is to go after more targeted, niche phrases that don’t carry advertisements, but those generate far less total web traffic. Both solutions only mitigate the problems that paid search ads present for organic search marketers. Now, Google is unleashing an entirely new type of advertising, to roll out immediately, that could disrupt the local SEO world and reshape strategies for improving local SEO metrics. If you’re involved in search engine optimization — specifically local search marketing — you need to know the specifics and start preparing for the inevitable changes to come. The Extent of the New Local Ads and Local SEO Tactics The local ads produced and managed by Google are a bit different than their older counterparts. Perhaps most notably, they’re only available on mobile devices. When a mobile user searches for certain keywords or phrases or performs location-based searches, he/she may now be subjected to these new “local” advertisements. However, on a desktop or laptop, only organic search results may appear. We know that “near me” searches for physical locations have more than doubled in the past year, further emphasizing the growing importance of local SEO for mobile users. With most of those queries being performed on a mobile device, it makes sense that Google would try to appeal to that growing demographic of local searchers. Google, as a search engine, is calling these mobile-specific ads the “nearby businesses” pack, which generates local search results based in part on proximity. This shift highlights the importance of aligning your paid advertising strategy with your local SEO efforts to maximize visibility. For certain queries, up to four separate local search results may appear—sometimes less, but never more. The paid ads themselves are quite similar to organic listings, featuring the name of the business in a functionally similar layout. However, as you might expect, paid ads are listed more prominently, and they feature not only the name of the business and a link to their site, but also hot buttons that encourage customers to call the business or get directions. The advertisements function within Google AdWords like any other paid Google ad. However, they are primarily driven by the optional location extensions that businesses can enable. Because it is a new feature, not much is known about the tricks and settings you can play with for the best possible results. Google will likely experiment with the ads further before becoming satisfied with the layout. How Nearby Business Ads Will Affect Local SEO Local SEO was once a relatively safe haven for businesses intimidated or frustrated by the level of competition in a national search. Optimizing your business for a local audience was faster, easier, cheaper, and ultimately more successful, especially if you only had a limited budget to work with. It was a space where any local business could conceivably rank at the top for at least one keyword phrase. Now, paid local ads are reshaping the competitive edge traditionally held by strong local SEO strategies. To maintain that edge, businesses must continuously refine their local SEO efforts to adapt to this new advertising model. Even in local-specific queries, users will first face a list of paid advertisers , meaning a top organic rank today won’t generate as much traffic as a top organic rank did a few weeks ago. However, that doesn’t mean that a local SEO strategy will no longer be effective. There are a couple of complicating factors that make local SEO still viable within search engine optimization, even in this new context. First, consider the fact that paid ads do generate substantial local traffic, but many users still see paid ads as white noise, skipping down to the organic search results because they know the businesses listing themselves have an ulterior motive to generate revenue. This means that, while paid ads will take away some of your organic visitors, they won’t take away a majority of them. You can strengthen your local SEO presence, despite the increased competition. Second, the competitive landscape for local ads will be less severe than the one for national ads, just like local SEO is less competitive than national SEO. This means that fewer businesses will be listing ads for the majority of search queries, leaving some of your territory completely untouched and other parts of it with one or two ads, rather than four. Finally, remember that paid ads are a good option for generating more traffic—it brings to mind the expression, “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Integrating paid ads with local SEO can enhance your visibility and overall marketing strategy. Nearby business ads will cost less than their national counterparts, and will guarantee you some level of traffic for your local SEO campaign. If working in conjunction with a traditional local SEO plan, your results could easily multiply. As of now, there is no indication that these new local advertisements will kill local SEO performance. On the contrary, they may

SEO is a duality – there’s good SEO and bad SEO. Bad SEO is considered “black hat” while good SEO is considered “white hat.” In general, what separates black hat tactics from white hat tactics is quality and longevity? Keep in mind, however, that the following “hacks” should only be implemented if first have a good solid foundation in the basics of SEO. What’s wrong with “Black Hat” SEO? Black hat SEO tactics are dead SEO tactics that don’t work over a long period of time and they tend to produce poor quality content and spammy links in the process –two things that will hurt your rankings and traffic the most. On the other hand, white hat SEO tactics will generate results over a long period of time and produce high-quality content and strong links in the process. And that’s exactly what you need for a successful SEO campaign. Are you wondering what SEO methods are still valid? Are you’re looking for some white hat SEO hacks to gain a competitive edge in your industry? If so, check out this list of 31 white hat SEO hacks for 2021. 1. Impeccable quality content creation Content has always been king. However, in 2021 and beyond only quality content will rank high. The machine learning algorithms that power the search engines have had years to learn the difference between low and high-quality content without human input. It’s not easy to fool a search engine algorithm in 2021. In the past, it was easy to rank poor quality content by keyword stuffing and buying mass quantities of backlinks that got published on spammy blog networks. Today, those tricks don’t work, at least not sustainably. You have to put in serious and genuine effort to rank your content in the search engines. Your content needs to be relevant and have context. Getting ranked high in the search engines all starts with creating high-quality content. What do search engines consider high-quality content? Everyone talks about “high-quality content,” but what does that actually mean? Contrary to what you might think, a 5,000-word article that covers 30 different angles on a given topic isn’t automatically considered high-quality. There are multiple factors that determine how search engines perceive the quality of content. Search engines look for these signals to determine if a piece of content is high-quality: Length of the article. People don’t agree on exactly how long articles should be, but there’s no debate about the fact that long content in the 1,500+ word range tends to rank higher than short content. Ideally, your content should be long, but only long enough to dive into your topic in-depth. If you’re filling in space just to expand your word count, your content is too long. The article’s topic. Search engines know the difference between content that explores a topic on the surface or in-depth. For example, say you write an informative article explaining that manufacturers produce lighters in bright colors with a list of all the colors and shades you’ve seen. That article won’t rank as high as an article discussing color psychology, why people are drawn to bright colors, and why bright colors are a fantastic marketing strategy. Keyword density. Keyword density is the number of times exact match and long tail keywords and phrases appear in an article. If your goal is to rank for a search term like “best digital marketing tips,” you want to repeat that phrase in your article several times. However, you don’t want to flood your article with too many instances of a phrase. SEO experts suggest using a target keyword phrase once for every 200 words of content. Sometimes that’s not possible if you want your content to be grammatically correct, flow, and be well-written. For example, after using your targeted phrase, you might need to begin the next sentence with your phrase (or part of it) to avoid writing a vague sentence. That should be fine as long as you don’t go overboard into what would be considered keyword stuffing. It’s easier to limit keyword density by using LSI keywords, long tail keywords and synonyms to ensure you have a variety of phrases in your article. Just make sure you don’t overdo any of the phrases you use. Links and anchor text. The quality of your links matter. Search engines know when content is full of links that lead to spammy sites. You always want to link to high authority websites over low-quality sites. Your anchor text should also be relevant to the content on the page being linked. However, you should avoid using exact match anchor text. Search engines view large quantities of exact match anchor text as a sign of manipulation since that was a popular black hat tactic years back. Instead, try using between 3-7 words that capture some kind of action or emotion. For example, instead of linking the words, “best marketing strategy,” link the words, “link building gets businesses phenomenal results.” You can still make “best marketing strategy” part of the sentence, but don’t make it part of your anchor text. Creating high-quality content with the right keyword density and varied anchor text is the ultimate white hat SEO strategy. 2. Outsourced content marketing Content marketing is a fantastic way to get high-quality backlinks from targeted publishers inside of content you create. With content marketing, you always have control over how your backlinks are presented and linked, and where they are published. Outsourced content marketing is a way to hand off the content writing and publishing to another company. You’ll still have a hand in how your content is created and will approve the final result before publication. However, you won’t have to do the work. Outsources content marketing is highly effective Content marketing is most effective when you can create content fast, regularly, and in large quantities. That sounds great, but most business owners and entrepreneurs just don’t have the time to crank out content on a regular basis. Even writing one

It’s nearly impossible to achieve any measurable search engine optimization (SEO) results without at least some link building. The high-level view of link building strategies is simple enough; place or earn more links pointing back to your domain so your domain-level and page-level authority grow, at which point you’ll naturally rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The truth is this exhaustive list of link building strategies should only be used to give your ideas. It can all be intimidating and difficult for a link building newcomer, and frustrating to a seasoned veteran who just can’t break past their most recent traffic plateau. These link building strategies include some of the best ways to get free backlinks. We’ll also answer the following questions: What tactics should I focus on for my niche? What tactics should I avoid, or which are too costly or time-consuming to be worth my time? SEO pricing can be expensive, but repairing poor SEO is worse. What are the easiest ways to acquire quality backlinks? How do you make your blog posts and other on-site content irresistibly link worthy? How do you avoid spammy link building strategies? What are the best link building strategies for new websites? How long does it take for even the best link building strategies to work? Once you get a good system in place for link building, how do you scale it up? How many of of my backlink strategies should involve guest blogging or guest post outreach? Should I manually acquire high quality links or rely on passive link acquisition strategies? How do I effectively outsource my link building? In this post, we delve into 77 link building strategies most likely to help you boost the visibility of your own site in the SERPs. In the rest of this article, we’ll be exploring link building strategies in different categories, from earning backlinks naturally with attractive content to best practices for managing publisher relationships. Curious about your site’s existing backlinks compared to your competitors? Use our backlink checker to view your profile and get information about how you can improve. These backlink strategies will help you ensure that the links you build are the highest possible quality: 1. Quality > Quantity. And quality is typically time-consuming and more expensive. This first strategy is more about what you shouldn’t do. Newcomers are often tempted to build as many links as possible, without putting much thought into which types of links they build or how they build them. Before you even start link building, make sure you have a clear vision. What are you trying to accomplish? Which links will help you the most? What links could hurt? Based on technical keyword research, what phrases do you want to rank for? Have you developed an anchor text strategy for your outreach? It’s much better to build a small number of extremely helpful links than a large number of links that might hurt you in the long run. Be VERY picky about the links you work to acquire manually: Work to be that guy or gal in your organization that won’t take or stand for acquiring garbage backlinks! 2. Relevance > Authority. Good links exist in context. A lengthy URL existing by itself in a forum comment isn’t going to get much positive attention; it isn’t helpful, valuable, or even natural. But a link embedded as a citation to a resource page, or a solidly written article is a different story. When building links, your first priority should be the content housing your link, and the context that justifies its existence. Focus on: Links from quality sites Links embedded in quality content Links using appropriate anchor text (depending on your existing profile) Links that point to a relevant page to the content topic AND the referring domain Without good content as a backbone, your link building strategy won’t get far. 3. High DA > Low DA (duh). Google judges not just the number of linking domains to your site, but also the quality of those linking domains. Domain authority (DA) is a relative measure of the trustworthiness of a given site. Source: Moz The higher the DA of a domain is, the more authority its links will pass. Your rankings will increase with 1) enough high DA mixed with low DA sites and 2) enough time for those links to vest. Accordingly, getting a link on a high-DA site is better than a comparable link on a low-DA site. As an added bonus, high-DA sites tend to get more traffic on their own, which means they’ll have a higher likelihood of passing referral traffic your way. 4. Favor new domains and IP addresses over already-linked domains. Links pass authority from one site to another, but there are diminishing returns for links on the same domain. In other words, the first link you build on a 78 DA website will pass significant authority to your site, but the second link you build there will pass much, much less. As a general rule, getting a link on a new domain is a better use of your time, even if its DA is slightly lower. In this example, a link on a new 55 DA site will be superior to a second link on the 78 DA site. Of course, this isn’t written in stone; even if you aren’t getting as much authority, new links on already-link domains will still increase your brand visibility and may forward additional referral traffic your way. 5. Link to a high-quality, internal page onsite. You can technically link any page of your site, but it’s a good strategy to link to the best-written blog posts or otherwise most valuable content pages of your site. This is useful for a few reasons. First, it strengthens the value of your link, meaning it’s more likely to be accepted by publishers and clicked by readers. Second, it passes page-specific page authority (PA) to this page, increasing its ranking potential disproportionately to the other pages

When it comes to content marketing, SEO, and link building, there are dozens of important elements in play. But some are more critical than others. Anchor text certainly falls into the critical category. But do you know how to leverage on-site and off-site anchor text to your advantage in SEO? The anchor text variations that you use when linking to your web page are a crucial component of any SEO strategy. This is because search engines will use the anchor text variation as one ranking factor in determining how relevant a link is to the content on your site. In this article, we’ll discuss everything there is to know about proper anchor text variation, including exact match anchor text and how it can impact the SEO of your website. What is Anchor Text? Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The anchor text can either be descriptive or generic, but it should always accurately reflect what the page being linked to contains. For example: “our company” vs. “click here”. Your website’s ranking on Google will depend largely upon how many links your site has and how relevant those links are when it comes to incoming traffic (i.e., whether they contain quality keyword phrases). The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher likelihood that search engine rankings for your site content will improve over time – this is known as building an SEO foundation with link equity! On the HTML code side of things, it looks like this: On the user-facing side of things, it looks like this: Best SEO agency If it weren’t for anchor text, you’d have to write out the exact web address each time you wanted to link users to another linked page or resource. They would then need to copy and paste that link into their web browser. Anchor text provides a clickable shortcut that’s both aesthetically pleasing and convenient. But it goes far beyond looks. Anchor text is ultimately one of the top factors in the link building process. Why is Anchor Text Important for SEO? Anchor text is vitally important for SEO because it tells search engines what your website’s content is about. This ensures that your web pages will rank higher in SERPs (search engine result pages) as a result of the keywords you optimize them with and help provide more clarity to any potential visitor who lands on one of these web pages through organic or paid traffic channels. Ultimately, this all comes back to high-quality links. Higher quality anchors mean better rankings from authoritative sites – which means an ideal situation like higher click-through rates and conversion rates over time. Anchor text serves a variety of purposes and can be utilized in numerous ways, but the two biggest benefits – in terms of link building – are as follows: More link juice Google uses anchor text to help determine the relevancy of a link. So, while overly optimized keyword strings are no longer a best practice, keywords still matter to an extent – so long as they’re natural. The right anchor text can feed more link juice to the page being linked to. Some would even say it’s the single most important factor for backlinks (outside of the domain authority of the referring domain). Better clickability It’s not all about technical SEO. There’s also a practical aspect of anchor text. The right anchor text makes a link more attractive to human users and, as a result, more clickable. This drives traffic and engagement. (The benefits of which may include direct sales, but also enhanced SEO signals.) The Evolution of Anchor Text Anchor text has played a valuable role in SEO since, well, the origins of search engines. But that’s not to say things have stayed the same over the last couple of decades. Anchor text, much like every element of SEO, has undergone significant shifts over the past few years. Prior to 2011, keyword-rich anchor text was considered a best practice. If your keyword was “yummy chocolate brownies,” you were instructed to use anchor text like: Yummy chocolate brownies Buy yummy chocolate brownies Yummy chocolate brownies buy Buy yummy chocolate brownies online For more info on yummy chocolate brownies visit: yummychocolatebrownies.com Yummy chocolate brownies: yummychoclatebrownies.com Image link alt=yummychocolatebrownies The entire goal was to exploit the Google algorithm. There was nothing dishonest about this – it’s just the way the game worked back in those days. Some savvy SEO experts would find out what made the algorithm tick, and everyone would jump on. SEO was about manipulating the algorithm. Unfortunately, this came at the expense of user experience. It was possible to over-optimize with exact match anchor text and achieve impressive SERP rankings, yet have links that looked obnoxious, spammy, and out of place. Google saw webmasters manipulating anchor text and decided to make some major changes. In April 2012, the first Penguin update was released. And for anyone using the same keyword rich anchor text, rankings plummeted. And when rankings began to fall, so did traffic, and revenue. The whole cookie crumbled overnight. Ever since that first Penguin update, Google has continued to emphasize user experience, while implementing requirements that dissuade spammers from gaming the system. Anchor text is just as important today as it’s ever been – especially from an SEO perspective. It just looks a little different than it did 10 years ago. It includes ratios that are natural, including the surrounding text around the backlink and not just the anchor text in the link itself. What is Anchor Text Ratio? Anchor text ratio is the proportion of links on a website that uses any given keyword. This metric can be used to understand how prevalent keywords are in your SEO strategy and whether or not you need more content relating to those terms. The goal should always be an average anchor text ratio of about 20%. This means that for every 100 optimized pages, there will typically be about 20% with

A link exchange is an agreement between two sites to share and exchange links with each other for mutual benefit. While it was once a common practice of even the most sophisticated link building campaign, it now is considered a link scheme. Reciprocal links include benefits, concerns, and flat-out risks. Here we’ll discuss: Google policies surrounding link exchanges Link exchange best practices Risks of reciprocal links or excessive link exchanges Some benefits of link exchanges Let’s go! The Link Exchange in Practice When building links for your site, the goal is to seek out reputable and authenticated sites to backlink to in order to share your content with them and theirs with you. This helps to organically generate traffic to your site, improve your ranking on Google, as referral traffic is a valuable metric, and improve your reputation as a business. This can be done in quite a few ways, from sourcing content on social media to having guest posts done that are then shared by others, to finding broken links and replacing them with new and fresh ones. Link exchange requests to other webmasters or website owners is one of many link building strategies. It is essentially an agreement between your own website and another party to share with each other. Sounds great right, mutual benefit for all? The truth is that these agreements function much like any other agreement out there. They are reliant on both parties to fulfill their end of the bargain. This can be a problem when one site is merely attempting to piggyback off of another’s work. If you think of it like getting a roommate, you expect the roommate to pay their portion of the rent, respect your boundaries, and clean up after themselves. Only, after the first couple of months, the common areas are a mess, they keep stealing your stuff, and they never pay their half of the rent and always claim “I’m good for it.” This is the problem with link exchanges, if you enter into one for the sole purpose of link building, you may find the relationship to not only, not be beneficial, but downright detrimental to your site in the first place. There are also issues with Google and policies on link abusing and other issues that we’ll go into, but for now, let’s talk about how to prevent a bad link exchange. Google Is Anti-Reciprocal Link Building This is one of the most important points you need to remember if you’re thinking seriously about reciprocal link agreements: According to Google’s webmaster guidelines, Google considers excessively exchanging links with others to be a type of “link scheme.” Too much reciprocal linking is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it could be seen as a form of unfairly manipulating Google’s ranking system. If you get caught violating Google’s policies, your site may be penalized, potentially rendering your links as useless as your old Hotmail account. This is the most important statement in this entire post! Per Google’s webmaster guidelines, reciprocal linking is highly risky. Period!  To avoid Google’s wrath and disdain for link building, start small when deciding how many weekly or monthly reciprocal links you and another site owner will include in your content. You can increase the number over time if you find there are no significant consequences. More importantly, make sure your reciprocal link building strategy is based on sharing links when it makes sense to do so. When you link to someone else’s site (and vice versa), it should be because there’s a practical reason to do so in that context. Don’t randomly link to an article on “10 Celebrities You Didn’t Know Were Raised in Orphanages” in a blog entry about “10 Kitchen Hacks You MUST TRY.” All that said, this isn’t meant to discourage you from giving reciprocal linking a try. Those who’ve researched the topic have found that many high-ranking sites across a range of topics feature at least some reciprocal links. While this doesn’t necessarily confirm that reciprocal links will help a site grow, it does give some reason to believe reciprocal links aren’t inherently harmful to a site’s ranking. But, you may find the opposite to be the case and that Google could eventually end up punishing reciprocal links in the future (and not just ignoring them). Avoiding a Bad Link Exchange As we talked about at the beginning, all link-building efforts, including link exchanges, should be done with the intent to improve the traffic to your site. Simply adding backlinks willy nilly will do nothing but overpopulate your web pages and eventually send up red flags to Google. Even though we were talking about bad agreements between exchange partners, there are other things to look out for as well. There are millions of sites on the web and forming a link exchange with lots of them would likely be as simple as containing the domain admin and asking, but that doesn’t mean that’s what you should do. The first thing to consider is that whatever you want to backlink to is relevant, informative, and beneficial to your users. Linking to a list of your favorite restaurants in Denver isn’t going to help your business when you sell boating accessories (maybe if your customers are hungry and live in Denver, but we doubt that much of your traffic fits that description). Instead, focus on relevancy first. There are many ways to do this. Using indexes, RSS Feeds, social media, Q&A forums, and other spaces to find information and links that are relevant to your business will help you with getting the link-building part of the process rolling. Once you have loads of relevant links, use a content management system to get and keep it all organized. Having subdividers that specify content niche and other factors can help as well. You’ll want to keep this list updated as you go along because link building in SEO is an ongoing process. Out of all the hundreds or even thousands of links,