Timothy Carter

Fake news is just what it sounds like—(often intentionally) misleading articles with inaccurate facts, missing details, and other flaws that render them unreliable. Despite this, they’re presented as factually accurate, and because of this, they have tremendous destructive power. It’s worse than clickbait titles whose MO is simply to drive eyeballs, fake new is factually inaccurate. Fake news first came to light in the aftermath of the Presidential election of 2016, when it was revealed just how many fake news stories circulated to members of each political party. However, fake news highlights was likely a major problem long before this—and it continues to be a problem today. We all recognize fake news or false news as a bad thing. Whether it’s a tool used to manipulate people, the byproduct of lazy journalism, or part of a grand conspiracy for political influence, its negative consequences are hard to overstate. But what is the role of fake news as it relates to SEO? Can fake news impact your SEO rankings? Can you use fake news to your advantage in some way? Google and the History of Fake News Let’s start by examining the history of tackle fake news, and how that history ties into Google. Google has always wanted to provide news stories to the general public. Even in its early stages of development, you could search for a topic and see a range of news stories listed in Google’s “News” section. This was a valuable informational tool, and it added to Google’s trustworthiness in the eyes of users. Around 2014, Google made significant changes to its “In the News” section, pulling in articles from a wide range of different sources, including social media literacy sites like Facebook and Reddit. With the benefit of hindsight, you already understand that this was a flawed decision. The internet is essentially an open forum where anyone can write a story and popularize it on social media accounts—regardless of inherent accuracy. As you might imagine, this led to some interesting results in the “news” section. Google immediately attempted to correct this error in part by renaming its “false news” section to “Top Stories” (although this was never stated as their official motivation for the change). At the very least, this lent some plausible deniability to the situation; a “fake story” is much better perceived than “fake news.” There is significant debate as to how much responsibility should be taken by Google, Facebook, and other tech giants to control fake news. Obviously, a fake news or false news story circulating at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) can do a lot of damage. But should Google step in and do something about it? On one hand, Google is just an algorithm fueled by user actions and authoritative measurements (like the number of links pointing to a source). In this dimension, it’s about as neutral as it can get. And if Google decides to actively manage stories, we’ll have a new problem; Google’s bias affecting news visibility and search results. On the other hand, algorithms are relatively easy to manipulate. This was proven in the wake of the 2016 election, where more than 20 fake news stories handily outperformed “real” news (at least in terms of user engagements). Surely, Google should take at least some measures to filter out fake news, right? There are some of you reading the heightened engagements associated with fake news who think this could be a valuable opportunity; you’re right. We’ll touch on that more in a future section. For now, hang on. Suffice it to say, Google took this constructive criticism and has since taken more advanced measures to guard against fake news. Fact Checking and Google’s Motivation Let’s be clear. Despite it’s “don’t be evil” founding philosophy, Google isn’t inherently altruistic. It’s a for-profit company and its primary motivation is making money. To make money, it must generate ad clicks. To get Google Ad clicks, it needs a lot of traffic. And at the bottom of this motivation funnel, to get traffic, it needs to be trusted. Google’s motivation in filtering out fake news is to increase public opinion or public trust. In line with this motivation, it took a couple of important actions. First, Google added new “fact checking” systems to its search engine and News results. Only reputable, vetted sources are included in its roundup of news organizations or News stories. Additionally, some stories in some regions have a “fact check” label, which identifies disputed claims and supports controversial claims with evidence from third-party sites. These are designed to improve user awareness and knowledge, while simultaneously making the News section seem more credible. Second, Google (along with other major tech social media platforms and media outlets) cracked down on known sources of fake news. While stating a controversial opinion and even outright lying aren’t a direct violation of Google’s terms of service, spammy and low-quality content are violations of those terms. In line with these quality standards, Google has been known to penalize, derank, and sometimes even delist known fake news sites from its search results. How can this possibly benefit your SEO strategy? We’re getting there. What Is Fake News Exactly? One important consideration in any discussion on fake news is the fact that “fake news” isn’t always “fake”—per se. For example, is fake news any story that isn’t completely accurate? In many cases, facts aren’t known, and in other cases, facts change over time. With the COVID-19 pandemic, our initial assumptions and findings quickly became irrelevant in favor of new data and knowledge; are the initial stories fake news despite being based on the best scientific knowledge we had at the time? Is fake news any story that has an intention to persuade someone? If so, the entire mainstream media literacy is guilty of fake news in one form or another. Opinion pieces are both common and valuable, and we shouldn’t be restricting their publication or accessibility. And almost any news story is bound

Your product or service is worthless without a steady flow of people who are willing and able to buy it. In other words, you need leads. And you need lots of them…indefinitely. But it’s rare that you’ll engage with a customer who is ready to buy the first time they hear about your product. Typically, you have to let them gently slide down the sales funnel. And though a bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFL) lead is the most fun kind of lead, almost every BOFL starts as a TOFL, or top-of-the-funnel lead. By learning how to generate and manage these leads, you can accelerate your results. Quick Funnel Primer There seems to be a common misconception among business owners and entrepreneurs about what a lead is. You probably have a pretty decent idea of what actually constitutes a lead, but before we dig into lead generation too deeply, let’s clear the air. A random Facebook user who sees your post in their news feed is not a lead. The person driving by your store is not a lead. Your second cousin’s best friend is not a lead. Each of these people can become a lead…but they’re not leads simply because of proximity. A lead is someone who takes action and interacts with your brand in some capacity. The random Facebook user becomes a lead when he clicks on your post, visits your website, and downloads your ebook. The person driving by your store becomes a lead when she parks the car, enters the store, and begins talking to one of your salespeople. Your second cousin’s best friend becomes a lead when he picks up the phone and calls you to request a quote. In other words, awareness doesn’t make a lead. When someone engages with your business, they can officially be considered a lead. To further clarify this, let’s look at the classic marketing funnel. As you know, a marketing funnel starts with awareness and then moves through the states of interest and action before ultimately (hopefully) resulting in a sale. The problem is that most businesses assume someone becomes a lead in the awareness stage. And while you definitely need people to start in the awareness stage, these are not leads. They’re just people who know you exist. Many of these people will never become leads, no matter what you do. (Take your mother-in-law, for example. She knows your business exists, but she’s not ever going to buy anything from you. She’s not your target market!) The key to a successful marketing funnel is to make as many people aware of your business as possible, but to then identify and focus on the ones who slip into the second state: interest. It’s at the interest stage of the funnel that a person becomes a lead. This is a true TOFL. TL;DR: You need awareness in order to fill your funnel with potential customers, but a person only becomes a lead when they have a genuine interest. If you can start out with a lot of people who are interested, the rest of your funnel becomes more productive. 5 Tips for Generating Top-of-Funnel Leads Generating TOFL requires two parts: (1) Creating awareness, and (2) Qualifying which of the “aware” group is interested. Keeping this in mind, let’s explore a few tips for generating high-quality TOFL that can ultimately be converted into customers further down the funnel. 1. Create Valuable Content Content is your currency. In today’s online world, you need lots of quality content to generate awareness and nurture people into leads (and ultimately into customers). More specifically, you need content that adds actual value to the reader. Generic, salesy copy isn’t going to do much for you at the top of the funnel. You need to give away value so that people have something to sink their teeth into. Examples of high-value, actionable content include: How-to articles. Any piece of content that shows your ideal reader how to accomplish something is considered a value-add. If people walk away smarter or more capable than when they started reading, that’s a win. They’ll come back for more (and feel indebted to your brand for the value you’ve added). Research and data. Have you run a study, survey, or focus group and discovered interesting insights that your reader may find valuable? A report on this information can be an excellent on-ramp and trust-builder. This is more than just simple SEO keyword research. It involves in-depth articles that show the depth and breadth of your knowledge of the subject matter. Courses/webinars. Most businesses sell courses as products and/or use webinars to sell products. But you can create a ton of value by using these as pure education plays. People are so pre-conditioned to expect the hard sell at the end, that they’ll be pleasantly surprised when there’s no “sell.” (You can still offer a CTA, but keep it light.) The important thing to remember with content is that quality is always more important than quantity. You’re better off creating three to five exceptional pieces of content to feed your funnel than generating a dozen flimsy blog posts each week. 2. Expand Your Reach With Link Building Even with the best content, most brands struggle to reach enough people to fill their funnels. The key is to expand your reach. And if there’s one sure-fire, sustainable way to do this, it’s via link building. Link building is the process of acquiring inbound links to your website from authoritative publishers, websites, and domains. This can be done via any number of approaches, but is most effectively accomplished through guest blogging. 3. Go Live on Social With all of the noise that exists on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it can be really difficult to cut through the junk and connect with people. If you’re pushing out traditional posts and nobody interacts with the content in the first 15 minutes, you’re going to struggle to gain traction. One of the top ways to rise above the social “riff-raff”

If you’re going to run and SEO campaign, chances are you’ll need someone to help you do it. As a business owner, you don’t have the time or resources to train yourself on the process of SEO, nor can you rely on some other random team member to shoulder the responsibilities. Instead, you’ll be faced with three main options: hire in house an in-house SEO expert, outsource your work with an external SEO agency, or come up with some kind of hybrid of the two, potentially leveraging independent contractors or consultants. In-house SEO experts can seem like the wisest choice, since there are both good and bad agencies out there (and good agencies tend to be expensive). But as you might imagine, there are pros and cons to in-house SEO agents, just like any other option. In-House SEO Advantages In-house SEOs can help your business in many ways: You’ll remain in full control of the internal hiring process at all times. The best SEO agencies will offer transparency to their clients, and strive to get direction and guidance from business owners. However, most agencies also have tried-and-true operations and practices that aren’t easily movable. An in-house SEO specialist guarantees you some level of transparency, and gives you near-full control over what strategies get implemented (and how). As long as you trust your expert, you’ll be in a good position. You’re guaranteed to have a representative fully immersed in your brand. An intimate knowledge of your brand is necessary to complete SEO work successfully. Ideally, you’ll be producing content, social media posts, and maintaining relationships with external sites throughout the entirety of your campaign, so if you’re using someone who lives and breathes your brand, you’ll have a greater chance at keeping everything consistent. This advantage is weakened if you also use contractors for your work. You can always outsource parts of the work. Using other contractors is also an inherent advantage of having an in-house SEO agent. Because agencies generally take on all SEO responsibilities at once, you don’t have many options when it comes to work orders. With an in-house agent, you can find other experts and contractors to bring on for portions of your SEO strategy. For example, you can mix and match a in house team of writers and link builders to suit your strategy best. In-house SEOs can collaborate with your in-house SEO team. The best enterprise SEO strategies involve the entire marketing teams—designers can make more appealing websites, developers can include more SEO-friendly architecture,web development and even an account SEO manager can help your social media and external link building efforts. Having an in-house SEO means hosting more SEO-related collaboration within your organization. You’ll benefit from cross-training. Your in-house expert might be able to take on some peripheral responsibilities, giving them a dual role, or might be able to impart some industry knowledge on another one of your in house team members. Either way, your in-house SEO team will improve through cross-training. In-House SEO Disadvantages There are also some serious disadvantages that come with in-house SEOs: You’ll probably end up spending more money. Agencies take a lot of flak for being expensive, but the reality is, most are inexpensive compared to the cost of hiring someone full-time. A full-time salary for an experienced guru could easily be more than $3,000 a month, while SEO agency costs for lower packages start below $1,000. Consider all the costs and benefits thoroughly before making a decision. It’s impossible to have one person who’s an expert in everything. SEO involves a lot of moving parts; you’ll have onsite SEO, content writing, social media, link buildings, and dozens of other small strategies making up your overall campaign. It’s impossible to hire an in-house agent who is an expert in everything. Compare that to an SEO agency, which deliberately hires individualized experts in each of those fields to rely on. There’s little accountability when something goes wrong. If your strategy doesn’t work with an in-house SEO specialist or many SEO specialists, you can fire him/her, but that doesn’t exactly help your position and there’s little accountability beyond that step. With an SEO agency depends, you can point out a lack of progress and force them to step up their game if they want to keep you as a client. You won’t be able to grow as quickly. It takes a lot of time for an in-house agent to ramp up a strategy from scratch. Agencies generally move quicker, with more resources and more experience to get the job done. Your strategy won’t be quick to evolve with the times. Agencies are serving a variety of clients and competing with other agencies. They have to stay well-versed in the latest search engine optimization (SEO) best practices if they want to stay alive. In-house SEOs, on the other hand, can easily sink into a habitual pattern of work that never grows or changes. There’s little incentive to change or adapt, which means your strategy could quickly become stagnant. Conclusion There’s no right or wrong answer to which enterprise SEO solution is right for your business. Every business is different, and every business owner will have unique priorities. If your ultimate priority is getting hard, measurable results and growing with the times, an SEO agency (or hybrid model) might be better. If you prefer to have more control, transparency, and brand immersion, there’s nothing that should stop you from hiring someone in-house. Weigh your options carefully, but don’t be afraid to trust your gut. If something doesn’t work out, you can always switch.

Are you confused by digital marketing strategies? As a business owner, you likely have heard you need a strong digital marketing strategy so often you’re pretty sure you’re caught in some sort of Groundhog Day type loop. Business experts emphasize digital marketing strategies because it’s true. Yes, providing your customers with quality services and products is essential, but even if you strive to do so, your business might still fail if you don’t market it properly. Digital marketing will help you do this right. This applies whether you run a large corporation or a small business. That’s a key word: properly. There’s no single digital marketing strategy that’s right for every business. While there are some general best practices that apply to virtually all businesses regardless of their industry or niche, the specific details of an effective marketing plan can vary on a case-by-case basis. You need to experiment with different digital marketing strategies to determine which is right for your goals. If you’re not sure how to get started, review the following examples. They describe strategies others have employed that may inspire you when developing your own digital marketing strategy. Educate or Entertain Content can be considered its own marketing strategy. In 1996, Bill Gates published the essay “Content is King.” It describes how the Internet has provided nearly all businesses with a platform through which they can provide an audience with content that either educates or entertains. Gates stated that this will be the primary way businesses reach customers in the future. His prediction was correct. Content marketing is now an essential component of a digital marketing strategy. In fact, content marketing could be the most important of all digital marketing strategies. Whether it’s through blogs, podcasts, videos, ebooks, social media posts, or online courses (although you should ideally be creating content for a variety of media and channels), you can attract new customers and maintain loyalty among existing customers by regularly offering valuable content. Without content marketing, your digital strategy will suffer. The way in which you implement your marketing strategy will simply depend on the nature of your business and brand. For example, if you run a law firm, you can publish informative blogs and videos with a professional tone that explains various legal topics that may be relevant to your customers. Every organization’s digital marketing strategy will differ, but is founded on the same principles. However, digital marketing content doesn’t always need to be educational. For some brands, content is more effective when it’s entertaining. That’s right, some businesses base their entire digital marketing strategy in humor and/or satire and it’s an effective marketing strategy. Consider the example of MoonPie. This century-old snack earned a lot of attention when the powers that be decided to hire someone to post weird, absurdly funny content on the brand’s Twitter account. By simply entertaining customers with short, exceptionally bizarre Tweets, the brand gained much more exposure than it was typically accustomed to. This is a great example of how odd humor can be one of your best digital marketing strategies. If you’re not sure which digital marketing strategy will work for your brand, connect with a digital marketing agency to work with a pro. Guest Blog Do you guest blog as part of your digital marketing strategy? A blog can be a very powerful digital marketing tool. Again, it gives you the opportunity to educate your audience, establishing your brand as authoritative in the process. The problem is, a blog that’s only published on your site has limited potential reach. That’s not ideal when your goal is to grow brand awareness. Digital marketing will help you grow brand awareness fast. Publishing a blog isn’t a marketing strategy by itself. Guest blogging will help you acquire backlinks to your blog, which will then help you rank better in the search engines. Along with posting blogs on your own site, reach out to the editors of relatively popular sites and digital publications in your niche. Ask if they accept guest submissions, niche edits or link insertions. Often, they will, allowing you to mention your business or link back to your site in lieu of direct payment. To get the most out of your digital marketing strategy, you have to think outside the box and be bold. Even if you don’t think a blog will accept your guest post it never hurts to ask. You might even be able to get a backlink to a landing page. Emphasize Sustainability One of the smartest (and easiest) ways to develop an effective marketing strategy is to research consumer attitudes. For example, research shows that sustainability is increasingly important to consumers. Many are eager to support businesses that strive to conserve resources and minimize their carbon footprints. If sustainability isn’t part of your digital marketing efforts, it should be included as soon as possible. Maintaining a socially responsible image is an effective marketing strategy that has worked well for thousands of brands. Look for ways you can boost sustainability at your business. Make the necessary changes, and promote them via all marketing platforms and channels you currently use, not just digital marketing channels. You can even apply for sustainability certifications to ensure customers aren’t skeptical of your claims. Emphasize Safety Digital channels aren’t the only places to market. In a post-Covid world, it’s more important than ever that business owners work hard to keep their properties as safe and germ-free as possible. In fact, emphasizing safety and following through are good marketing strategies to provide reassurance to your customers. Customers aren’t exactly crazy about visiting businesses that look about as clean as a dorm room at the end of the semester. Is your business one in which customers may visit brick-and-mortar locations? If so, make a sincere effort to promote their health and safety while on the premises. Just as you advertise your sustainability efforts with digital marketing, advertise this aspect of your business as well. Create Video Content Media is a huge

Here’s a perfect example of an overly-superfluous clickbait title: This Cute Puppy Shows This Homeless Veteran One Weird Trick for Weight Loss—and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! While some have heralded clickbait headlines as a useful engagement style, most have harshly and vocally criticized it as tabloid-style sensationalism. Criticisms range from calling it gimmicky to insinuating that it’s responsible for the death of journalism, but no matter where you stand on the clickbait issue, clickbait still works. Clickbait continues to drive many of the eyeballs for Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and many other online media outlets (including many legitimate media sites). If it works for them, should you use clickbait as part of your SEO strategy? Does it harm your brand? The answers depend on your understanding of what clickbait is and how you use it. What is Clickbait & How it Evolved Rob Steffens from Bluleadz.com defines clickbait as content calculated to maximize reader clicks, attention, and shares By this definition, clickbait isn’t inherently misleading. It’s simply the art of enticing users to click. Unfortunately, clickbait is synonymous with unethical marketing thanks to the intentional disconnect between headline and article. sensationalized headline have always been around in some form—most notably on the cover of supermarket tabloid magazines—but it’s only within the past few years that they truly rose to prominence on the Internet. To understand how the phenomenon came to be, we must look at the two signature qualities that allow it to exist: the motivation to earn clicks by any means necessary, and the social element of viral ideas. The key motivation in most Internet-based schemes and gimmicks is to make money. So if clickbait is a way of making money, why has it only risen to prominence recently? Money-making schemes used to be all about getting money directly from web users, such as the infamous Nigerian prince scheme or weight loss pills. When the web was fairly new, these spam emails and flashing advertisements were everywhere—and they worked—but users and web authorities quickly became aware of the schemes. Spam filters and ad flags quickly got rid of the majority of these attempts, and user savvy avoided the rest of them. Today, it’s almost impossible to get direct money with these schemes. In order to make money, you have to get people to your site, and get them clicking as much as possible. “Clicks” are the new cash, so instead of doing whatever it takes to get your money, companies are doing whatever it takes to get your clicks. Clickbait evolved naturally. Consider the case of Upworthy, which has become one of the most notorious propagators of clickbait on the web. Their editors didn’t intentionally create gimmicky articles—instead, they used a straightforward mathematically testing process to figure out which type of headlines worked best for their shared material. It probably won’t shock you to learn that clickbait-style headlines just happened to perform the best, so they stuck. The second key environmental quality of clickbait is its propensity to be shared socially. The rise of social media encouraged the growth of this industry. Rather than having these articles naturally found by searchers or web browsers, companies could use similar tactics to get them shared thousands of times across the web, drastically increasing their reach. Facebook and Google United Recognizing clickbait as a new form of spam, both Google and Facebook (two of the web’s biggest authorities) have begun taking measures against it. Starting in 2011 with the Panda update, Google has gradually refined its ability to detect “high quality” content, eliminating any duplicate or unoriginal content (which is common in clickbait) and learning to recognize gimmicky headlines designed only to attract clicks. Now in the era of Panda 4.1, Google has all but eliminated the worst clickbait offenders from its search results. Stories published to Facebook (that include relevant links to your content) are ranked based on a multitude of factors, including how much time people spend reading the content after they click. When users click away and come right back to Facebook, the algorithm presumes the person isn’t interested in the content. Despite the slap-down from social media sites, clickbait continues to generate hordes of traffic for sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy. In 2014 Facebook began cleaning up its newsfeeds, eliminating both organic posts and advertisements that were deemed to be “spammy” and allowing users more control over the types of posts they see. While the exact specifications of its quality analyses are not made public, there has been a significant decline in clickbait-style articles in most users’ newsfeeds. The combination of these efforts has led to a decline in the social shareability and overall visibility of these articles, throttling their potential impact. However, the association that clicks = money still remains. The Shift From Upworthy Marking a major shift in the clickbait trend, Upworthy hired a new editorial director to take over the company’s content operations. In a startling move, she immediately laid off several content “curators” responsible for generating this type of material, and hired replacements who serve as quality, talented writers. As one of the biggest clickbait authorities on the web, this could be a major sign that the combination of Google’s and Facebook’s efforts have finally convinced clickbait artists that it’s time to step up the quality of their work. How Long Does Clickbait Have Left? As with any major change in trend, it won’t happen all at once. You can expect to see clickbait articles (or “soft” clickbait) in your news feeds for several years to come. However, as Google and Facebook become even more adept at filtering out “bad” content and users become wise to clickbait schemes the same way they did Nigerian prince schemes, it’s only a matter of time before they’re gone for good. If I had to guess, I would suppose 2020 to be the last year of clickbait relevance (though a new form of “baiting” may emerge by that time). How to Take Advantage of the Shift Not

As difficult as it is to master the technical aspects of SEO, there’s arguably no more challenging piece to the puzzle than link building. There are no substitutes for the time and creative energy it takes to create content, building links, and drive authority and traffic back to your site. And for eCommerce business that want to experience steady and sustainable growth around their website, it’s important to understand the ins and outs of quality links building – the dos and don’ts, if you will. Link Building Tips and Best Practices If link building were all about purchasing power and ad spend, only large ecommerce websites like Amazon and Etsy would have success. But the fact that smaller ecommerce companies can find success in a crowded online world indicates that Quality links building has more to do with consistency, creativity, discipline, and intentionality. 1. Be Consistent With Content There can be no Quality links building without a commitment to content creation. If you want to funnel SEO “juice” back to your eCommerce website, there has to be regular content creation – both onsite and offsite. There’s no hard and fast rule that says you need to publish “X” number of blog posts per week, but there should be some weekly content creation. A handful of posts per week will eventually lead to a library of content that Google and other search engines will take seriously. Even just two pieces of new content per week will give you more than 100 linkable resources per year. 2. Create Sticky, Linkable Content Resources There’s a difference between consistency and quality – and you need both to excel in your link building efforts. It’s easy to say, “We’re going to publish a blog post every Monday and Friday.” But if the content is thin and irrelevant to your underlying marketing objectives, it’s essentially worthless. In order for content to be effective within the context of eCommerce link building, it needs to be sticky and linkable. When developing content, you need to put yourself in the shoes of bloggers, customers, social media users, and anyone else who will run across it. What are you doing to make people want to links back to your content, reference it, or encourage others to click? Examples of sticky content include: This roundup post by Neil Patel, which provides readers with 44 Must Read Resources on Content Marketing. People love resourceful, evergreen articles and are more likely to link back when there’s lots of value packed into a single URL. This Dollar Shave Club video is sort of the gold standard for sticky, viral content. And while not every ecommerce brands will be able to pull off the same brash, humorous approach, it does speak volumes of how well video can work in today’s social media environment. People love data and visuals. Bloggers, social media users, and website owners also love to share data and visuals. This makes infographics – such as this one from WebFX– highly effective for eCommerce link building. You’ll ultimately have to decide what sort of sticky content works for your ecommerce site, but these are a few good examples. In today’s world, boring doesn’t cut it. You need something to magnetize your audience. 3. Work With Influencers Not all backlinks are created equal. Running some sort of influencer program where authoritative bloggers and influential social media users are incentivized to link back to your website will take your strategy to the next level. Make a list of websites and individuals that (a) have sizeable audiences, and (b) have clout with your target market. Craft outreach emails or messages to engage the names on your list and build mutually beneficial relationships. 4. Guest Blog It can be challenging to convince bloggers and other digital media influencers to link back to your ecommerce website or content. They don’t always see much reciprocal value in it. Having said that, your best option may be to develop guest blogging relationships. With guest blogging, you write the content, plug in the building links, and give it to another blogger to publish on their platform. This gives them free content, while simultaneously providing you with valuable backlinks. Link Building Mistakes to Avoid As is the case with any element of SEO, myths, misnomers, and falsities abound. The internet is filled with self-proclaimed gurus who have the “secret sauce” to unlocking unlimited potential and growth. But in case you’re new to the world of SEO, here’s the only secret you need to know: There are no magic wands or five-minute tricks. True SEO success takes time and commitment. In addition to following the tips and best practices outlined above, it would be in your best interest to avoid making the following eCommerce link-building blunders. 1. Not Building Deep Links Naturally, everyone wants to build links to the homepage. And while it’s great to get these links, it’s also necessary to build links to the internal pages of your site. In link buildings lingo, these are referred to as “deep links.” For eCommerce website, category and sub-category pages are especially valuable real estate that you should be deep linking to. While it can be harder to pick up backlinks to these pages, it is possible. Any extra investment you make in this area will yield significant results. 2. Not Targeting High Authority Publishers Depending on the connections you currently have – and what sort of brand recognition you have in the industry – you may have to start small with your link building strategy. But understand that there’s a significant difference between the value that a high authority publisher and low authority publisher provide. DA is the search ranking score that those in the SEO industry use to grade or qualify websites and publishers. The scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater authority. As you develop your strategy, look to source backlinks from high DA partners. This will accelerate your efforts and enhance your eCommerce site’s SEO health. 3.