Timothy Carter

Achieving true link building services at scale (and eventually improved rank in search engines) only happens after you reach the organic traffic tipping point. It’s the coveted position where your quality content achieves enough SERP visibility that you start to receive regular inbound links as a reward for your hard work. But this isn’t something that occurs just after a few months of effort. Scaling your link building to the point that you receive daily, quality inbound links from other bloggers can take years. There needs to be a consistent purpose in order to enjoy sustainable results. More specifically, quality backlinks at scale should be the aim of every webmaster. But building truly natural backlinks at scale can be time-intensive and expensive. In this blog post we discuss: the difficulties in scaling link building and how to scale your broken link building with a great (internal or outsourced) team. Let’s get at it! Is Your Link Building Stale? When you first launch a link building strategy for your website, it’s easy to see progress. Each step feels like you’re taking a giant leap toward something exciting and opportunistic. You go from zero backlinks to 10 backlinks – all the way up to 100! Your efforts are being rewarded and the data is there to support your expensive and time-consuming investment. Then, rather suddenly, it all slows down. It’s not that you’re moving in the wrong direction, but just that you aren’t making any significant gains. At some point, every business finds itself in a build-links rut where the underlying strategy becomes stale, repetitive, and low-returning. Nothing seems to work and the excitement of progress wears thin. The competition is surpassing you and all of those little techniques you were using so successfully six months ago no longer seem to provide much of a jolt. Listen…we’ve all been there. Every business finds itself in a marketing rut from time to time. And if you’re truly invested a link building strategies, you’ll reach a point where you feel like you’re treading water. The first step is to recognize that this is where you are. The second step is to create scalable systems and structures that help you break out of the rut. 6 Ways to Scale Up Your Link Building Scalable relationship-build links is a sexy term that rolls off the tongue and instantly makes you sound smart, but what does it mean? It means getting more consistent high-quality links built to your website: Most people have an incorrect view of what scalable Backlinking is. As digital marketing expert Geoff Kenyon explains, the majority of businesses and marketers try to find a way to transform Backlinking into a process and scale link building the production of that product. But this almost always leads to something gimmicky and unsustainable – like automated directories, link networks, comment and forum spam, the purchase of sidebar few links, and automated social bookmarking. While there’s a time and place for trying new things, the truth is that the staples of link-building have remained relatively consistent over the years and will continue to be predictable in the foreseeable future. If you’re failing at scaling different link-building products, then perhaps you need to be scaling your link-building processes, perhaps using a productized method of SEO sprints. A good goal would be to identify the biggest pain points in your current (manual) link-building process and to improve and streamline it wherever possible. If nothing else, you should be on the lookout for opportunities to spend your time and creative energy more wisely. For some brands – perhaps yours included – this looks like this: 1. Create More Linkable Assets Content is the foundation of any good link building campaign. This sounds rather elementary – and it is – but it’s amazing how many brands take shortcuts and invests in link-building without first establishing an inventory of quality content. In order to generate links, you need linkable assets. Every brand’s linkable assets will look different, but there are certain elements and characteristics that define this type of content: Content should be evergreen and timeless, so as to continue providing value long after publication. Content should be relevant to your target market. Linkable assets should be visually pleasing. Written content still works, but it should be formatted and supplemented in a way that appeals to visual thinkers. Focus on link bait type articles (e.g. common statistics, listicles, etc.) The more sticky, linkable assets you have, the far greater your chances are of generating backlinks over time. Try as you might, there’s simply no replacement for quality content. 2. Establish a Link Building Teams As Google’s Matt Cutts once said, Link building is sweat plus creativity. When building links efforts go stale, it typically has something to do with the people running the campaign. Generally speaking, they lack the expertise to take the strategy to the next level and are tired of doing the same old repetitive tasks with minimal understanding of the “why” behind them. To scale up your efforts, you need a team of people who are highly skilled and trained at crafting content, finding and securing building links opportunities, monitoring progress, and doing technical SEO work. Some of these people may work directly for you. Others may need to be outsourced, but your building links team should include: Project manager Outreach process reps Outreach manager Writers Editor Publishers If you’re looking to hire writers, I suggest ProBlogger’s premium job listing. For $75, you’re likely to receive 100+ candidates to review: The best link-building teams for agencies are those that perform white-label link-building at scale. In fact, most of our revenue is from other agencies who use our systems and processes to scale up their link building efforts. 3. Research the Mess Out of Your Competition It’s good to be focused on your brand, but be wary of putting on blinders and ignoring the world around you. There’s tremendous value in doing market research and understanding what your competitors are

Keyword research is relatively simple (and we’ll get to it shortly). But online keyword competition can be fierce. Consider the the total number of SERP results for “SEO”: Is it any wonder why you might be having difficulty ranking for a particular keyword or key phrase? The sheer volume of competitors in online search in nearly every conceivable niche makes those top 10 positions more coveted (and valuable) than ever. So, if you want to be successful in SEO, you need to understand what people are searching for, how often they’re searching for it, and why they’re searching for it. So how can you find this information? It all starts with a repeatable keyword research process of uncovering keyword phrase opportunities for your brand to rank higher in search engines. Step 1. Brainstorm your “seed” keywords You’ll start your keyword research by selecting what I call “seed” keywords. Seed keywords are those that you either already know your target audience is using to search for your product or services, or that you would use if you were a member of your target audience. Also be sure to include SEO power words in your seed keywords list. For example, since SEO.co is a content marketing agency, I can easily guess that my target audience might search for “content marketing agency,” or perhaps one or more of the following variations of that keyword: Content marketing services Link building services Digital marketing services Content writing SEO etc. When it comes to your initial focus, especially if you are a startup doing digital marketing, you will want to focus on the long-tail, particularly long-tail keywords where you feel you have a competitive advantage for matching the search intent of your target audience. Long-tail keywords are extended phrase search queries, such as “what is the best roofing company in Wyoming?” Compare that to a traditional “head” keyword or keyword phrase like “roofing company” or “roofing company Wyoming.” There’s no strict line to draw here, though generally, if a query is in sentence format, it can be considered as a long-tail phrase. Long-tail keyword research can be more advantageous because when they tend to have a much lower competition than head keywords. The catch is that the long tail, by nature, have low monthly search volume. It’s great to use long-tail keywords to rank quickly for niche positions, but if you’re looking for some heavy-hitting rankings to build over the long-term, head keywords are better. Step 2. Add seed keywords into your preferred keyword research tool Now that you’ve got your seed keywords, it’s time to start gathering data on them. Start by plugging at least one from each group into various third party and even free keyword research tools. Moz and Ahrefs are the industry standard, but don’t forget to use third party keyword tools in conjunction with Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics and Google Ads Keyword Planner. All three include quality data for finding quality keyword opportunities. Below is a Moz screenshot of the search results for my keyword, “content marketing services.” Source: Moz Keyword Explorer Or the same result from Ahrefs: If you want to generate an expanded keyword list of long-tail keywords, we like to use AnswerthePublic, which provides a fan-based UX for showing new keyword ideas, searches related to one another and other keyword variations you may not have considered. AnswerthePublic fan graph related result for the phrase “content marketing” Step 3. Conduct competitor research & content gap analysis Next, you’ll want to take a closer look at the competition, and what types of strategies they’re using in their search campaigns and how you stack up. Competitor content gap analysis helps you identify content opportunities by analyzing what your competitors are ranking for, but you are not. By understanding the gaps in their content strategy, you can develop and optimize your own content to capture those missed opportunities. Ahrefs “Content Gap Analysis” tool to help you understand where and how your competition is ranking for various keywords in search engines and how you can create new pages and posts to find new content ideas for your next post or page: You’ll get to see their names listed, as well as their relative competition “level,” and where they’re winning the keyword game. You can export the data and manipulate it to source keyword ideas for your next blog post. Compare the pages that rank for your target keywords with your own website’s content. Look for gaps where your competitors have content that you don’t. These gaps may indicate opportunities to create new content or improve existing content to fill those voids. SEMRush and Ahrefs are fantastic automatically listing some of your “main organic competitors” once you enter your website domain name: (Image source: SEMRush) Examine the content that your competitors have created for the keywords you’re targeting. Look at factors such as content length, format (blog post, video, infographic, etc.), depth of information, and engagement signals like comments and social shares. This analysis will help you understand why their content is performing well. There are a few reasons you need to learn about your competitors: Inspiration. If you can understand how they’ve optimized their websites, where they currently rank, and how they’re getting more relevant customers to their sites, you can adopt some of these techniques for yourself. Understanding competition levels. When you analyze keywords, you’ll be able to gauge what level of competition you’re in for. Are your competitors all fighting viciously for web real estate, or is it an open field? Discover weaknesses and opportunities. Are there certain niches that your competitors haven’t been able to touch? Are there opportunities for development they’ve missed? Based on your analysis, develop strategies to address the content gaps. This may involve creating new content targeting specific keywords or enhancing existing content to make it more comprehensive, valuable, or engaging. Consider the unique value propositions you can bring to the table. After implementing your content improvement strategies, monitor the performance of your

Raise your hand if, after launching your landing page(s): You see conversions flat line or drop Audience engagement with your landing page is paltry Your revenues and up-sells as a result of your pages fall Your search engine rankings for that page fall  So how on earth are you supposed to tell why your landing page isn’t working? How do you fix it? In this guide, we present to you 50 possible reasons your landing page isn’t working—with landing page optimization solutions for each. Why Landing Pages Matter If landing pages are so complicated in the first place, why use them? Landing pages provide destinations. No matter what types of marketing and advertising you’re pursuing, your users need somewhere to go. Landing pages provide that ideal destination. They’re a focal point for conversion. Landing pages give you the opportunity to confront your users with a conversion opportunity, maximizing your potential revenue and/or customer value. They allow for segmentation. Because landing pages are separate from your site, you can also use them to segment your target demographics and cater to them individually. So with all these advantages, why isn’t your landing page seeing better results? Why You Aren’t Getting More Landing Page Conversions Let’s diagnose your landing page problem: 1. You haven’t measured anything. First, ask yourself how you’re able to determine the success of your landing page. Are you going by a gut feeling? Are you just noticing that nobody has filled out your contact form? If you aren’t measuring more in-depth metrics, such as how many people are visiting your landing page or what your exit rate is, you’ll blind yourself to the real variables responsible for your performance. This is inexcusable, especially since so many free tools, like Google Analytics, are on the market. If you haven’t been measuring and analyzing your progress, get started immediately—you’ll need those numbers to measure how effective your correctional strategies are. 2. It isn’t loading properly. Don’t scoff at this. You’d be shocked and embarrassed to learn how many people scratch their heads over why more people aren’t converting when their pages don’t load properly to begin with. Fortunately, this is simple to detect and fix. If you’re looking for the easiest way, try visiting your landing page using as many different devices and browsers as you can think of. Is it loading? Are all your images viewable? Is your form easy to see? Is your page loading fast? You can use a tool like BrowserStack to help test this. Otherwise, be sure to check out Google Search Console, which can tell you if your website is down and help you track down the reason. 3. It doesn’t view correctly on mobile devices. Mobile SEO is a critical feature for your landing page, just like your main website, as the majority of traffic, for many businesses, now comes from mobile devices. Because landing page layouts are especially sensitive to directing users’ eyes and interactions, it’s vital that your page look attractive and engaging on mobile devices specifically. Is the bulk of your content easily viewable? Is all your text readable? Are your buttons easy to find and click, without zooming? Is it able to scroll easily? If not, you may wish to reconsider your design to cater to these mobile users. Again, BrowserStack can help diagnose landing page problems here. 4. The buttons or form fields aren’t functioning properly. Your web form is the star of your landing page; if it isn’t functioning properly, your landing page visitors aren’t going to proceed with converting. Run multiple tests on multiple browsers and devices to make sure your functionality is intuitive and responsive. For example Is it easy to click into a form field? Do you proactively warn your visitors when they haven’t filled out a required field? Are your buttons easy to click? Do your dropdown menus load quickly and easily? Any deviation here could be an excuse to abandon your landing page, so don’t take chances. 5. You aren’t targeting a niche audience. Who, specifically, are you targeting with your landing page? If you don’t have an answer, or you have a generic one like “our customers,” you’re doing something wrong. One of the greatest strengths of a landing page is its ability to communicate with high precision to one specific group of people. If you aren’t taking advantage of that high relevance, your users aren’t going to be engaged. Think carefully about what niche you want to target, considering your competitors as well as your demographics’ dispositions, and narrow your focus to that audience. 6. Your tone and presentation aren’t appealing to your target audience. Of course, if you already have a target audience in mind, you could be suffering from a lack of relevance—or an inability to target those users effectively for search intent. For example, you could be using a vocabulary that’s too high for your users to follow, or so low that it compromises your online reputation. You could seem too “boring” to your young users, or too “juvenile” to your older ones. Examine your brand voice carefully as it permeates your landing page, and reevaluate the tone you use. A good brand can outrank other, more well-known competitors. 7. Your color scheme is off. When it comes to the colors you use in your landing page, there aren’t many “right” or “wrong” decisions. However, there are a few best practices you’ll want to follow. For starters, your coloration should be in line with your brand and your industry—if the colors don’t feel like “you,” or if they give the wrong impression, it could interfere with your results. Your coloration should also enhance your text’s readability—if it makes it hard to read, you’ll deal with the consequences—and it should help to call out prominent areas of the page, such as your call-to-action (CTA). 8. Your design is obsolete. When was your landing page designed? Who designed it? The fundamentals of SEO web design have changed significantly over

Search engine optimization, including link building is an increasingly difficult task. Thanks to the broadened benefits of SEO and link building; with time and effort, it’s easily possible to build up to earning thousands of visitors per month. However, this appeal sometimes morphs into a lust. The desire to pursue SEO as a strategy becomes something like a get rich quick scheme, where the idea of thousands of inbound visitors takes precedent over the realistic and patient applications of SEO tactics and best practices. Inevitably, entrepreneurs possessed by this rampant desire end up disappointed, feeling that the strategy wasn’t worthwhile because it failed to meet their expectations. Without SEO goals, it’s nearly impossible to objectively measure your progress, but with too lofty or unfounded SEO objectives, you’ll only set yourself up for a skewed sense of disappointment. Setting realistic SEO goals is the remedy for this problem, and there are three rules to do it effectively: 1. Factor in Your Available Resources Your goals need to be grounded in your means to achieve them. That seems obvious, but to many entrepreneurs and marketers new to SEO, building ranks is akin to switching on a light; you’re either making progress, or you aren’t. SEO simply doesn’t work that way. Instead, the amount of effort and type of effort you put into it has a direct impact on the eventual results you’ll achieve. Therefore, if you’re only investing a few minutes a day to your campaign, it would be unreasonable to set a goal that a large company with an entire dedicated SEO team might set. In other words, your budget of time and money will be your biggest limitation in SEO. There are several of these factors you’ll have to keep in mind: Consider the man-hours you’re pouring into your efforts. Are you doing this yourself in short bursts? Do you have one dedicated person? Five dedicated people? Consider how many outlets you’re using in conjunction with your SEO campaign—including how much link building, onsite and offsite content writing and how many social platforms you’re using. Be realistic about your expertise. If this is your first company, or your first time launching an SEO campaign in this industry, be more conservative with your goal setting. There is no objective way to go about this, but do make sure to temper your expectations with the type of effort you’re putting forth. SEO can take months and years, so patience is a necessary virtue. 2. Use Long Time Periods and Relative Measurements This is almost two rules in one, but they’re both related to the way you measure your goals. First, use long periods of time to measure your progress. Don’t look for rapid climbs in growth in the span of a few days or weeks. Instead, you’ll have to look at periods of months or more—this is because it takes a long time for SEO to show results. It’s also important to use long time periods to compare against each other—for example, it’s better to compare a first three months with a second three months than one month to a second month. This is because traffic and rankings fluctuate, sometimes randomly, and could skew your data if you’re only using a small sample size. Relative measurements are also important. Rather than aiming for an objective goal, such as getting 1,000 visitors a month by September, aim for something less concrete, like at least 10 percent visitor growth, month over month, until September. Using firm numbers can sometimes blind you to your otherwise substantial progress. 3. Make Adjustments. Under most circumstances, goals should not be changed. You set a goal at the beginning of a given period, and follow that goal to the end. In the world of SEO, it’s okay to make adjustments throughout the course of your ongoing SEO strategy, and it’s because your strategy is ongoing. It is a fluid process that undergoes nearly constant changes, so it only makes sense that your goals and expectations should change along with those circumstances. Let’s say you’ve set a goal to increase your monthly organic traffic by 25 percent within the first four months of your campaign. In month two, you bring on a new freelance writer to increase your onsite content and social media efforts. At that point, it would be reasonable to increase the expectations of your goal. On the other hand, let’s say in month two, Google releases a new algorithm change that sets you back several positions on a number of target keyword topics. At that point, you would need to lower your expectations. 4. Don’t obsess over “traffic” There is a tendency for business owners and entrepreneurs to focus on “generating more traffic” with SEO. While getting more traffic is the point of SEO, if you focus on this too much, it’s going to side-track you from more important goals. Pursuing “more traffic” is a trap and makes a terrible goal. Remember, if a goal doesn’t support your main objective, it’s a distraction. Creating hoards of traffic isn’t going to get you more sales and leads on its own. Traffic has to be relevant, but also, your web pages need to be convincing enough to convert. Think of it this way. Say your current conversion rate is 3% on a given page. If you spend a large portion of your SEO budget generating traffic, your conversion rate will probably drop significantly because you’re not doing anything to increase conversions. More traffic doesn’t guarantee more sales. If your conversion rate is low, obsessing over traffic will eat up all the time you should be spending on more important goals, like optimizing your pages for higher conversions. 5. Create milestones A major component in setting realistic SEO goals requires setting milestones. A milestone is like a mini-goal that, when achieved, tells you you’re on the right path. For example, say your goal is to rank in the top 30 results for a specific search phrase. Currently, your position is

Whether you realize it or not, your entire website could be plagued by keyword cannibalization problems, resulting in confused visitors, lower rankings, and ultimately, wasted SEO potential. Fortunately, with your awareness and dedication, it’s not only possible but relatively simple to fix keyword cannibalization issues on your site. Here we’ll discuss what SEO keyword cannibalization is, how it can hurt and what you can do to resolve it on your website. Let’s dive in! What Is Keyword Cannibalization? In search engine optimization (SEO), much of your strategy will depend on your onsite content creation. You’ll be writing and optimizing onsite blog posts, whitepapers, and other types of content with the hope that they’ll rank as highly as possible for your target keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs). Oftentimes, content planners and SEO strategists will create a lengthy list of keywords and phrases they want to rank for. Then, they’ll create new articles for each of these targets (while simultaneously creating discretionary articles). Whether you’re extraordinarily careful with your keyword targets, totally flippant with them, or something in between, you can eventually run into a “keyword cannibalization” problem. Let’s say for a target keyword phrase, “best bike for a teenager,” you have not one but two pieces of content ranking. One of these is at position 4, while the other is at position 6. Cool! You have two pages ranking. More ranking pages is better, right? Not necessarily. In fact, this is an instance of keyword cannibalization in action; two of your pages are competing directly with each other in the SERP (search engine results page) for the same keyword, with each interfering with the other’s potential. In short, you don’t want to compete with yourself! Why Is Keyword Cannibalization a Problem? Why is this such a big deal? There are actually a few potential issues that arise from keyword cannibalization. Stealing the spotlight from better-converting pages. Let’s say you have an excellent, comprehensive written guide that’s designed to convert incoming traffic. It works well, with a high conversion rate and lots of good feedback from the people who have read it. Right now, it’s ranking at position 6 for a target phrase, while another article on your site is at position 4. Which one do you think visitors will click if they see both? In these cases, a competing page will siphon traffic from your more important pages. In this scenario, instead of ranking for the same keywords, neither ranks well or a page that converts more poorly might outrank a money page. Decreasing rankings for both pages. You’re likely aware that much of your ranking potential will be dictated by your link building strategy. The more links a given page earns, the higher it will rank (in general). If you funnel all your efforts to one powerful page, you might earn or acquire a 100 free backlinks. But if attention is distributed between two competing pages, they might only earn 60 and 40 links, respectively. Accordingly, neither page will be able to rank as high as a single page would if it had all that attention. In other words, both pages will fail to reach their true ranking potential. This is especially important because the vast majority of traffic from SERPs goes to the top-ranked result. It’s often better to have a single rank one position than to have several positions deeper in the rankings. If you can trade your rank 4 and rank 6 articles for a single rank 1 article, you’ll typically end up ahead in terms of visibility and traffic. Google confusion. There’s another argument that having two pages covering the same topic can be “confusing” to Google, showing it two conflicting visions of the same topic coverage that compete for the same keyword. However, this argument doesn’t hold much water; Google’s algorithm is very good at determining the intent and subject matter of each article (not to mention content quality), so there shouldn’t be any issues there. That said, Google doesn’t know your goals or intentions – and even if it did, it wouldn’t go out of its way to align with your personal motivation. It’s important to build your strategy deliberately and with Google’s ranking algorithm in mind. User confusion. More to the point, having multiple entries for a given topic in a single SERP can be confusing to web users – especially those who have never encountered your brand before. They’re seeing two different articles that cover a similar topic and compete for the same keyword. Which one is better? They may only click one – are you okay with them clicking the wrong one? When Keyword Cannibalization Isn’t a Problem Okay, let’s back up a second. Keyword cannibalization can be a problem – emphasis on “can.” There are also situations where it’s perfectly fine. For example, let’s say you have two awesome articles ranking at position 1 and position 2 for a keyword phrase. Both are highly relevant to the target phrase. In this scenario, you’re not really siphoning traffic or compromising your full potential; you’re already sitting at rank one, the best-case scenario, and nothing can take traffic from you. In fact, most of the people who don’t click the first position link end up clicking the second position link – which you also occupy, so you lose nothing here. It’s a nice spot to be in – and not something that requires intervention. Unfortunately, this is a rarity for keyword cannibalization events and usually only benefits websites that have existing, high domain authority. How to Discover Keyword Cannibalization So how do you know if you’re currently affected by keyword cannibalization? There are a few simple, straightforward methods you can use for identifying keyword cannibalization problems. Unfortunately, they tend to be manual and time-consuming, so they don’t work especially well on a large scale. For example, you can conduct a search for a given keyword and simply see whether any of your website’s pages are featured in the SERPs.

If your site or specific page URL acquired 100 hyperlinks today and 10,000 tomorrow (without any virality involved), would that look natural to you? No. Google doesn’t think so either. If you build links too quickly in an unnatural way, it is likely to sound the search spider alarm bells. Link velocity trends are one of the hundreds of factors included in Google’s ranking algorithm for SEO. But, what is it? How is it calculated? Why does it matter? How do you implement a proper and natural link velocity? Let’s dive in.. The Math of Link Velocity Link velocity refers to the number of backlinks pointing to a single URL, measured over time. Backlinks are essential because they increase your page rank with major search engines. As search engines and other crawling software become more sophisticated, they can find and index links faster than ever before. Link velocity is the term given to describe this phenomenon. The relatively new SEO field involves strategies for ranking websites in search engine results pages (SERPs), thus increasing their exposure and popularity. Link velocity trends are like many things in the world of search engine optimization (SEO) – it may be something you know exists, but you might not realize how significant an impact it has on your site’s rankings. What Is a Good Link Velocity? A good link velocity for Amazon.com is going to be very different from a startup doing SEO. Amazon is acquiring thousands of natural backlinks daily, while a new website has no business of acquiring more than a handful in a week. The best gauge of what might be a natural link velocity for your website is to look at the historical link velocity trends of your website. You can certainly ramp up what was curated historically, but just not too quickly. If you acquired 10 links last week, then you may justifiably be able to acquire 15 or 20 the subsequent week, but not 500. It is best advised to work with an SEO expert to determine the best velocity for your link growth. Virality & the Importance Of Quickly-Appearing Links Within search and social media, building links are the most critical tool for communication. Companies creating content exist in a competitive environment where every second counts: Links need to show up as quickly as possible after publishing. If you can naturally scale your link building, the faster the links appear, the better it is for companies looking to maximize traffic and visibility. The optimal link velocity can also be enhanced through different frameworks, such as social media marketing. PageRank PageRank is a number assigned to pages by Google that essentially tells us how important they are within the entire index. We’re all familiar with this concept because of browser toolbars that assign web pages a PR value, generally ranging from 0 to 10+ (for sites like Wikipedia). A higher link velocity means that a site is popular and well-respected within its field. High link velocity also shows us how fast a website changes, which can tell us if it has been recently updated or not. For instance, if we see two sites side by side, one with many links and one with none, we expect the site with many links to be more influential than the other. However, too many new backlinks coming in at once will seem unnatural and might raise red flags with the search engines. The proper balance between how much you publish and how fresh your content should be – meaning when you last updated it – is called the ‘sweet spot’ for link velocity. If you publish too often, your website will have no time to accumulate PageRank, authority, or trust amongst link participants. Linking Out A link building strategy that has been adopted by many designers lately is called “linking out.” This means that one page, upon linking to another page or website, will place the website’s link within proximity of the first page’s link. The idea behind this tactic is that linking out increases the likelihood that an automated crawler will find it and follow both links back to their respective destinations. The Power (and Danger) Of Reciprocal Links Reciprocal links, also known as “Network Links,” are links used to trade traffic with another site. This is done through a simple system where you link your site to theirs. In return, they link back to yours on the same page, in the same post, or within an article. You obtain these links from other websites that share information about your site with their readers. Besides, they might also offer a reciprocal link on their websites in return for a link on yours. Reciprocal links serve as an advertising tool that spreads your brand name further while not making any effort. You may have experienced receiving reciprocal links already without even knowing it! When you search for something on Google, the results page also shows other websites which have reciprocal links with your website. There is no exact science as to which reciprocal links you need, so it’s best to approach every website, hoping you can obtain a reciprocal link from them. If the website has content related to your site’s content, you have to see if there is some way you can provide them with information or access they might need help with that will encourage them to exchange reciprocal link arrangements with you. The benefit of reciprocal linking is that not only will it drive more traffic towards both sites, but it will allow you to build up your PageRank faster by increasing the number of PageRank (PR) passing-links pointing at your site. While it is difficult to determine which reciprocal link partner will click through on their end, several steps can be taken to increase the likelihood of them clicking through. This includes placing reciprocal link buttons in sufficient quantity at strategic locations throughout your website or including them in prominent positions within your resource center. Hence,