The Ultimate Guide To Link Building for Local SEO

Link building, the bread and butter of SEO.

It comes as no surprise that backlinks make up a great deal of your website's search engine optimization success.

A recent Moz study showed that over 80% of Google's algorithm is dedicated to the measurement of inbound links and other elements related to it; including but not limited to anchor text, link building velocity, thematic relevance of incoming links, quality of inbound links, referring domains, referring sub-nets, etc...

With links being such an essential element of search engine marketing, you'd think that more people would thoroughly educate themselves on how to build links, which links have the most effectiveness, which types of links do more harm than good, and how to leverage the power of automated tools to ensure your search engine supremacy.

If you're reading this guide, I'm assuming your doing your homework on links, and I applaud you for that. I've looked for guides like this for as long as I can think of in all areas of the internet. The truth is, most people have an idea of how to build links, but not how to do them properly.

In recent years, Google has really cracked down on the practice of link building and has begun to severely punish people who use guest blogging, automated tools, pyramids, PR networks and the likes. The fact of the matter is, these methods all work wonders when done correctly and Google is well aware of that. They may put out press releases and other tactics to try to scare the public off but if you know where to look, you can really start to dig in to what's working and we're very good at looking into that.

It's not so much throwing the kitchen sink at a website to make it go up and down the SERP's because you can very easily become a target in Google and get yourself a nice slap.

So without further ado, let's crack right into it.

Link Building 101

I'm going to cover a series of topics here so if you want skip sections just do CTRL + F and search for the number.

• Private Blog Networks [65433]
• Community Outreach [65434]
• Donations [65435]
• Competitor Backlinks [65432]
• Citations [65436]
• Web 2.0 [65437]
• Automated Tools [65438]
• Press Releases [65439]
• Anchor Text [65440]

Private Blog Networks

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Private Blog Networks are a very controversial subject so I thought I'd cover them first. I'll start off this section by saying I freakin' LOVE THEM. They're incredibly effective when done correctly and can really take your website from obscurity to prominence.

The reason they are extremely controversial is because they've been under Google's watch for the better of this decade now and with good reason - they hit Google right where it hurts.

Private Blog Networks (PBN's) are aged domains with a strong backlink profile, a good amount of social signals, and huge signs of trust & authority from Google that you can purchase through public GoDaddy auctions or backorders. You can also scrape them using tools, or you can buy them off of people.

Now, an aged domain, doesn't necessarily mean PBN and this is where it begins to get complicated for Google. Anybody can purchase an expired domain and do with them as they want. Such as build new blogs, local business websites, or any other use.

They're completely legitimate and given their power, they can be used to speed up the ranking progress by leveraging their established trust.

Where they become controversial is when you utilize them to build links back to your main website which is an extremely easy and powerful way to dominate the search results.

As mentioned in the start of this particle, Google places a great amount of emphasis on a website's inbound links and PBN's are a great way to hit all the right spots of Google's algorithm.

I'm not going to dive into how to build PBN's on this post because that is a mammoth of a post within itself and a subject you can really talk about for hours on end.

However, I'm going to briefly go over how to use them.

Before we go into that though, I have to breakdown how Google finds them and the best practices to keeping yours safe and evergreen.

Here's where we go into footprints.

Google's Watching You

Footprints are characteristics that PBN's have in common that make it easier for Google to track them down and de-index them. Here's a list of them:

• Hosting Accounts
• Registrars
• Linking Patterns
• Plugins
• Themes
• Hosting IP Class (AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD)
• Amount of Content
• Website Design
• # of Pages
• Much more.

Arguably, the biggest footprint that most PBN's share in common is that they're fairly static websites with a large history that now have 2-3 pages with 2-3 posts with most of the content on the front page. They also don't "leak out" link juice.

Since the last crackdown on PBN's, most websites that got de-indexed were sites that hadn't been logged into in a certain amount of time, hadn't updated to the latest version of WordPress, and didn't have much activity going on around them.

With that said, it's relatively easy to lose an entire private blog network if you don't constantly take good care of them. This means, logging in every now and then, updating the plugins, adding a blog post or two, creating social media profiles, etc...If you take care of your PBN's and set them up correctly, they can become a deadly weapon.

Another thing to keep in mind is to be very creative when you set them up. Something that really helps their longevity is to add custom logos, custom website design, creating social media profiles, posting high-quality content, and adding privacy policy, contact and about pages.

Taking just this minimal extra 20 minutes when creating your PBN can really make them seem authentic and real which will help their lifespan but also increase their power. Most people are extremely lazy and don't really care for them, these are the people that also get smacked often and piss & moan about it on SEO forums and proclaim that SEO is dead.

Innovation really goes a long way when it comes to PR Networks. I've heard of people go as far as making custom videos and personas for them. It can be a really fun process to experiment with these and really make them unique and giving them that extra punch.

Once you have your PBN set-up and ready to go, what you then do is drop a link somewhere in the post back to your website - being very mindful of the anchor text that you use.

Typically you'd want to build more branded or LSI anchored links as to protect yourself from a Penguin penalty.

However, if you already have a strong backlink profile and are using PBN's to give your site an extra push in the SERPs, you can utilize some partial match and perhappppps an exact match anchor. I cringe when I type that because you really have to be careful.

This is a general overview of how to use PBN's to build quality inbound links to your website and on another post I'm going to really detail how to leverage their power.

With that said, let's go into a much safer way to build related quality links that can really power up your rankings. I'm talking about Community Outreach.

Community Outreach

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Community Outreach is what I like to call the white-hat private blog network. At its very core you're reaching out to industry or community related authority websites & figures and asking for them for links. Some people utilize this as a foundation of their link-building efforts but to me, it just seems needy and a very time consuming way of building backlinks.

Some people call this "white-hat" and whatnot but at the very essence, they're trying to manipulate Google just like PBN's are and that is against Google's guidelines.

Essentially, they're breaking the rules the hard way.

I wanna take a second to point out here that it really bothers me when people point fingers and call others black-hat, or grey-hat or what-have-you but at the end of the day, we're all outlaws in the eyes of Google. Any link building done that is not natural (i.e. having to reach out or manually build them through PBN's) is against the webmaster guidelines set by Google.

With that said, let's keep moving.

Now, networking for backlinks can be done in other methods than just purely begging for links. Rather than emailing website owners and being like "link pliz?" I personally prefer to offer them some kind of value in exchange for a link. Some people like to do guest posts, I tend to offer "ghost writing" instead.

In my mind, it really gives out much more value to the owner of a website if you write a monster article from them that they can put under their name in exchange for a harmless link back to your site.

How I'd go about approaching a situation like this is by emailing webmaster and telling them that you just started this website in x industry / place and you're trying to build quality backlinks to aid in your ranking progress and that you'd love to write a quality article in exchange for dropping a link on their website back to yours.

Make sure that you really go all out in this post that you're doing for them because their brand can be affected by it. A website owner is not going to let you jeopardize their brand.

However, if you go the extra mile and do some in-depth research, you structure your content well, you provide some innovative information and go beyond of what's usually available in that industry / community then you can really make some strides.

A big plus that can come out of this is that they refer you their friends and you can really speed up your link building progress. Nothing looks more natural than a quality website that is being linked to from local authority sites.

This is not only a great tool to use when building strong links but also expanding your online presence in your community and becoming someone who is trusted and seen as an authority.

Quality content is revered by Google so you're also going to build additional trust to that owner's website so it really is just a win-win situation. Make sure you paint it as such and you don't just come across as another needy webmaster asking for links with no real value to offer.

Another great way to build legitimate links in a mutually beneficial relationships is through donations. Which we're about to kick into.

Donations

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Donation links are somewhat similar to community outreach in that you're exchanging value between parties. You donate to their cause, and they allow you to place a link on their website back to your site.

These can be a great asset because many people engage in this practice just for donations sake and don't really know the SEO benefits behind them. As such, it's not a very widely use tactic and Google hasn't been specifically trying to find ways to stop it yet.

Finding donations around the web can be a time-consuming task but it's well worth it as you can build a significant amount of trust and authority in a relatively short period of time. In order to find these linking opportunities you have to come up with search strings and then dig deep into the search results. Here's a few examples to get your brain thinking:

• "donors page"
• "contributors page"
• "sponsors page"
• “donate for”
• “donate to”
• “donate online”
• “donate now”
• “make donation”
• “make charity”
• “charity online”
• “money for donation”
• “goods for donation”
• “services for donation”
• “partner”
• “support”
• “contribute”
• “sponsor”
• “sponsorship”

From here just keep looking and digging around. Make sure that the websites you're dropping your links in not only have high metrics but they also don't have spammy backlink profiles.

Personally, I like to look for places where they have more than 35 PA and 20 TF. Also keep in mind that because there's a lot of people also dropping their backlinks there, the link juice can get diluted and be rendered less powerful.

That's why I look for high authority websites.

Some website owners also let you have whatever text you want as your anchor and  this can be really powerful because it's not only an authoritative link, but also you can manipulate what you want it to say. These pages are usually ideal and I like to save the link somewhere for future projects.

Another way to find great donation links is to look at your competition's backlink profiles and dig around for linking opportunities. However, we're about to get into that next.

Competitor Backlinks

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This is where things really begin to get fun.

As the name entails and you might have already guessed - we're going to be matching your competitors' backlinks.

This is an immensely powerful strategy because if you can match your competitor link by link and capitalize on their On-Page miscues, then you can very easily dominate them.

As always you should always try to match whoever's ranking #1 is doing but also look around in other cities in your industry and see what those guys are doing.

Even if it's people not in your industry. You never know where you're going to find a golden nugget.

In order to properly do backlink research, you're going to want to know where to look, what to look for, and why you should be looking at that. So let's break that down first.

The components of backlink research

• Anchor Text
  • Anchor text profiles can be one of those areas where you can very easily capitalize on your opponent's mistake. The reason being - Google has really been tightening up on anchor text lately and the smallest miscues can send your website to SERP oblivion.
  • Ideally, you'd want to have your exact match money keyword at less than 5%, these are terms like "ac repair Miami." Then you want LSI & Partial Match at around 10% each and these are things like "Boca Raton SEO Expert." The majority of your anchor text should then be branded and url's such as "http://ift.tt/1QFin8l", "http://ift.tt/1H2aJm7", "alvarez web services" or generic like "here", "website", "click here", etc...
• Trust Flow to Citation Flow Ratio
  • I've covered this before but I'm going to briefly touch on it as well. What these metrics measure is the ratio of quality inbound links to the total amount of incoming links to your website.
  • Due to recent updates, you want your trust flow to be much higher than your citation flow and at the very least have a 1:1 ratio. This will allow your website to rank highly and if your competitor is doing sub-par then you can really begin to take advantage of this mistake.
• Domain Authority
  • Domain Authority has really been coming into the yes of the public lately because it has an uncanny ability to predict how well your website will rank in Google with as much as 80% correlation.
  • You can check this metric by visiting Moz's Open Site Explorer and it can really give you a huge perspective on where your competition is getting their most authoritative backlinks from and give you an opportunity to match them.
• Link Sources
  • If your competitors has a handful of authoritative links but also a lot of spammy links, it can give you an unfair advantage if you can match their more powerful ones. Chances are, their low-quality links are bringing down their trust and authority and this is really a huge opportunity for you to capitalize on.

Here are some easy link-stealing opportunities and how to go about them:

• Guest Blogging
  • If your competitors went out and got some links from guest blogging on industry-related websites you can simply just go to that website and ask for an opportunity as well. You already know they might be open to letting you do it since they let that other person do it as well. Something you should do is to really build up that competitive spirit and one-up their content tenfold. Don't give your competition any breathing room to beat you, as a matter of fact, beat them at their own game.
• Donation Links
  • These are quick & powerful links you can easily score and match your opponent on. I like to one-up my competition here by building one paid link for every one that they have. Word of caution here though: be careful when building these links and make sure to allow some time in between each one as not to trigger penalties.
• Citations
  • These are links that I quite haven't gotten to touch on yet, but they're extremely powerful. Especially at the local level.
  • Citations are basically listing in directories. These can be local, industry-related, national, and / or niche-related directories.
  • They're very easy to match your competitors on and can very well skyrocket your rankings when implemented correctly. Make sure they're done on quality websites and that all your information stays consistent across all of them.
  • These are also awesome for ranking in the local map pack.
• Web 2.0's
  • The premise here is very easy. Whatever your competition has, match them and one-up them on it. Simple. They have a twitter account? Make one. Facebook page? Make one. WordPress, Blogspot, Weebly, About.me, Flavors.me? Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Always match them on it. These are awesome links and are greatly valued by Google. I'm going to go more in-depth on these in the next couple of sections.

Once you look at your competition's metrics, you can really start to formulate a plan where you can overtake their spot by one-upping their backlink profiles. Important to note that your links can also have a much bigger effect if you properly silo your site.

This is where you really start stacking unfair advantages to dominate the search results and is the very core of our entire search engine optimization campaigns.

Once you snoop around your competition, then you have to take a look at your own link profile. See if you have any low-quality links dragging you down and use Google's Disavow Tool and begin cleaning it up. This way, you can optimize your campaign and build a solid structure to work off of.

Now we're going to dive into some of the most powerful links out there on the internet, if you can correctly leverage the sheer power of these links you can really start to dominate the search results for any kind of industry you want.

Let's get right into it.

Citations

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As I explained before, the easiest way to describe citations is business directory listings. The great thing about citations is not only the fact that they get you more visibility and put your website right in front of targeted customers who are looking to purchase your service but if you look at the domain metrics of all these websites they are incredibly high. Here are some examples:

• Yelp! - 93 Domain Authority, 75 Trust Flow
• Yahoo! - 100 Domain Authority, 90 Trust Flow
• YellowPages - 83 Domain Authority, 75 Trust Flow
• Better Business Bureau - 95 Domain Authority, 83 Trust Flow

When you take a good look at those stats, you can begin to imagine the sheer power that these links can transfer back to your website. Not only that, but it's completely natural to have upwards of 100 citations on quality websites. It's actually extremely beneficial.

What you can also do is then come behind these citations which are already powerful links, but then you can build more links to them which will further increase their power and skyrocket your rankings in both the organic results and the map pack.

Since Google's last map pack update, the search results for most local search terms have been pushed down below the fold for the most part. This can impact organic click through rates but it can also mean that if your website ranks within the top 3 in the map pack, you'll double your chances of getting a click.

As I explained before, citations are also an easy way to match your competition link by link so they are a powerful tool to have in your arsenal without a doubt.

In the automated tools sections I'm going to go over how to safely use automated link building software such as GSA SER, SeNuke XCR, FCS Networker, amongst others to boost the authority of your citations which will result in higher Google map pack rankings.

• United States Top Local Citations
• Top Local Citations By Industry / Niche

If you've been doing local SEO for a while, then you should know by now that having your citations be done correctly & accurately is absolutely vital your local search results success.

With that said, creating & verifying local citations can be extremely time consuming and by all means outsource them. If you're going to be using a local SEO agency, or an outsourcer, make sure that they know what they're doing and ask them to provide you with examples.

Respectable entities should have no problem with this and will be quick to show you not only examples but also results that they've been able to produce for their current / past clients.

This section now leads into the next one which is another incredibly powerful link building method that Google loves and will skyrocket your trust and authority when done correctly.

These are WEB 2.0’s!

Web 2.0

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Web 2.0’s are by far one of my favorite ways to build obscenely strong links to my properties.

The reason being – they’re easy, they’re visited by millions of people every day, and they have tremendous domain metrics. They’re also extremely useful branding tools.

Some examples of web 2.0 properties are:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• G+
• Blogspot
• WordPress
• Weebly
• Tumblr
• me
• me
• RebelMouse
• LiveJournal
• Diigo
• Digg
• Delicious

The list is long and distinguished but the point is this – they are extremely powerful. And you can leverage their power in various ways. Here are some uses you can put to work right now:

• Branded social media profiles
  • Google loves social media. So having your brand on every social media profile out there is only going to increase your likability in G's HQ.
  • Another indirect bonus of creating dozens of branded social networking platforms is that not only can your customers and clients follow your activity, giving you easier access to re-market your products / services to them but it gives an opportunity to blanket the whole page for a search term which triples your click through rate. Three times the click through rate means triple the revenue.
• Second Tier Links
  • Second tier links are essentially links that support your first tier links - in this case your branded social properties. So what you're doing is, strengthening incredibly powerful links, with equally powerful links. Once you wrap your head around this, it can really start giving you ideas for you to play with. 

This is at the base of what's being called the semantic web. It is just not enough to have quality links and social signals coming to your site, but you also have to syndicate your content to all corners of the web to really enhance the power of a success link building campaign.

Many marketers preach that content marketing is king, or that backlinks are king; however, the magic lies in the middle. Or should I say, the extreme of both.

Building highly authoritative backlinks and producing top notch content.

Now lately I've been stepping up my game as you can see with this monster 7,000 word post. I'm creating master-thesis type content on a consistent basis, and this is a great skill to have in your arsenal.

I was going to separate a section for content marketing in link building but I'll just add a quick snippet here. The best way to drive evergreen authority links to your website is to produce very high quality content. Period. People love content, coincidentally, so does Google.

While it is great to build backlinks with all the methods that I've outlined in this post, if you implement a kick-ass content strategy along with it, you can really go far. Content syndication and social signals are at the heart of the semantic search.

The truth is, while Google still highly values links and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future - content will always reign king in any marketing campaign. Plus, as human beings, we tend to make a lot of errors when it comes to anything and that includes building links. If you mess up somewhere in the quality of the link or link building velocity, having great content on your website will allow you to recover very quickly as Google will see you as an established authority.

What would happen to YouTube if suddenly someone spammed it with links? Probably nothing. Because there's so much content and user activity on it that its value cannot be overlooked.

However, don't mistake that last piece of advice as a "oh I can spam my site with GSA because of my great content," no - definitely not. What I'm saying is that if you do have very high quality content, you can get away with some mistakes that might cause some people's site to get slapped.

Now you've heard me talk a great deal about content syndication and are probably wondering what the hell it is. Well, content syndication has been around for centuries now. Newspapers syndicate content all the time, they take original articles, syndicate it to their customers and credit the original source.

Nothing new here.

The power of it lies in the authority and trust of your social properties, distributing the content to give it a "viral effect" and producing thousands of social signals and traffic back to your website which can really supercharge your progress. Especially since the rank brain update.

How do we actually do this?

Content Syndication 101

You can do it through various methods but I'm going to outline my two favorite here. Basically what you do is take the url of your rss feed, if you have wordpress installed on your website it would look something like http://ift.tt/1QFiocx by default.

Then you can use services like HootSuite or IFTTT to set-up automatic posting and hook it up to syndicate directly to your branded properties.

Now all you have to worry about is constantly producing content on your blog and you will have dozens of incoming powerful links and social signals to your website as well as traffic. Once you keep posting and putting out new quality material, your ranking progress is going to skyrocket and Google will love your website for years to come.

Here's why:

• Fresh, unique content.
• Constant Traffic.
• Influx of Social Signals.
• Content Distribution.
• Plus all the quality links that you're already building.

Now you can really see how powerful content syndication can be. It's a shame that most SEO's are strictly labeling themselves as this hat or that hat and miss out on all of the great aspects of combining content marketing with link building.

It makes for an extremely powerful snowball effect of user interaction with your website.

However, now that we've covered this section in detail, let's go into how to make content syndication disgustingly powerful.

Automated Tools

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We know the power of web 2.0 social networking platforms. They're very powerful just as is, but if we really want to dominate the competition, we're going to have to utilize a little more "link juice".

What I'm referring to here is beefing up your social branded properties to create an unstoppable force of incoming link juice, trust and authority to your website every time you post something.

Picture this:

Facebook has a Domain Authority of 100. When you hook up HootSuite to your feed and Facebook Page, every time you post it will have a "ow.ly" link shortener which has a Domain Authority of 90.

This means that now you have a DA 100 Link linking to a DA 90 link which then links to your website. This is extremely powerful itself.

However, what if your Facebook Page had a Page Authority of 40? Now you have even more power going through that link chain which shoots right into your website.

Obscene! Right?

This is the kind of link power that we can generate using automated tools. The problem with these is that it's often spam and Google freaking hates it. Just like the other link building methods that we've discussed here ;)

The quickest way to receive a penalty is to incorrectly implement these tools and have your website completely disappear from the landscape of the internet for good.

However, if used correctly, it'll shoot your website up to the top of the search engines screaming.

What most SEO's do wrong is that they send an incredibly amount of links - as much as 20,000 to their websites which is way too much to say the least. Instead, there are far better ways to go about this to produce the kind of results you want.

As you should know by now, there's a higher premium placed on the quality of the incoming link rather than the amount of them. So it should come as no surprise that what we should be heavily focusing on is using automated tools to create highly authoritative platforms that we can turn into quality links using other link building software tools which then link to our branded social platform.

These are called pyramids.

What we then do is create several clusters of these pyramids to all of our branded properties that are syndicating our content which is going to give us that obscene amount of link power that we want.

An illustration that describes perfectly what I'm trying to talk about here is this one:

Courtesy of SEO Nitro

However, in order to avoid penalties, we want to avoid building "pyramids" and focusing on chaos. Patterns & footprints like we discussed earlier can trigger penalties and Google spam flags.

We don't want that, that's no bueno.

Instead what we want is just pure chaotic linking structures around our website that a machine can't figure out. That's why we introduce clusters, which is where all the chaos happens. You want something that looks like this:

Courtesy of Semantic Mastery

You want authority & trust surrounding your website. Not spam. Spam kills any SEO efforts you've made in the past and can hinder or even completely kill off your progress by having your website de-indexed.

This is something to keep in mind as Google begins rolling out real-time Panda & Penguin updates. What I like to do is manually create my branded social properties that syndicate my content to make sure I am ensuring the quality of my direct links.

Then you can use a tool like SyndWire or FCS Networker to create more Web 2.0 properties to protect and back-up your tier 1 properties and then hit those with "high quality" spam.

Focus primarily on wiki links, social bookmarks, comment links, guestbook links, forum links, profile links and the likes. Don't spam these properties with 1000's of backlinks in any way, shape, or form. Try to keep it as high quality as possible.

Again, it's very easy to err with these tools so try always to make mistakes on the safe side. Going too hard, too often can sometimes trigger penalties and get you penalized. Even with all the chaos and interaction surrounding your website.

What does help with these types of tools is having strong foundation of pre-established inbound links to your website so Google might look the other way if you do over-optimize on anchor text or link building velocity. It's always to be on the Big G's good side and they'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

So as far as you produce high quality content and promote user interaction on your website, all will be good. Some tips is to ask people to subscribe, click through certain links, share & like your content and advocate blog commenting. These are some ways to produce user interaction signals that can propel your rankings as well as save your ass from penalties every now and then.

An other easy way to produce an influx of links, social signals and traffic to your website in a completely natural manner that encompasses all of the elements covered in this monster guide is Press Releases. They have great branding elements, but their SEO impact is beyond measure.

You could honestly ignore everything I've said on this post and skyrocket your rankings with a properly done Press Release.

With that said, let's dive right in the good stuff!

Press Releases

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That's a pretty cool sticker to have right? It's the epitome of trust and authority! Fortunately enough, this is what a Press Release can do for you.

Any time you see this anywhere, the person or company that has the privilege to post this image alongside their brand is already perceived as an authority figure subconsciously. Even if you deny it, they're an established authority.

We can do the same for Google. 

Press Releases work wonders. Especially for local SEO purposes. There are several techniques that you can utilize to triple their power which I'm going to outline on this section but first let's go into what a Press Release is and how & why they work so well.

A Press Release is any time you have a news story written about your website or brand that is then distributed through major news outlets such as NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX. What happens then is that if you manage to properly implement this practice you can very easily get on "Google News" and create a viral effect going on around your website. This lets you get away with more aggressive link building and dilute your anchor text.

Aha! Exactly what we want!

But more than that, millions of people every day log on to these websites and they may come across your story. What then happens is that if they're interested they click through to your website and they may share and / or like your post.

This creates an insane amount of backlinks, social signals, and traffic which hits Google in all the right spots. As you can see, they're insanely powerful!

So, how do we implement them correctly?

First, you have to dig around your industry and find out what's going viral or if there are any news that are spreading like wildfire. You can check on these websites for that:

• Google News
• BuzzSumo
• Trendspottr

If you can't find anything, then just keep your eyes on the news and try to conjure something up. What you then do is create an infographic that spits out facts. Really spend some money on this and make it look legitimate. Stats have shown that people share infographics more than any other type of content in the web by a landslide.

Then you give it an emotionally compelling title and feel to the post. This will also create more links, social signals and interest. At the base of every viral marketing campaign is emotionally stirring content.

You couple all of these factors together and you have the base for a very good viral marketing opportunity.

Now you order a press release on this and write an article about the subject. You can find press release orders by simply doing a Googly search.

You syndicate your content to every single social media profile you own.

And watch it EXPLODE! :)

If you see that the post is really catching steam and your website generates a significant amount of traffic and interaction, then don't be afraid to build an extra amount of links to your site. This will be completely natural and will make sense because your content is getting shared all over the web.

This is something I like to do whenever I make a new site, or I bring on a new customer because it can really set the ground floor for an extremely successful SEO campaign.

Once the dust begins to settle you can start to dial back on your backlinking effort and watch your website steamroll its way to the top of the Google search engines while you deal with all the sales that your website is going to now be generating on its own ;)

This influx of incoming links can also diminish the severity of any penalties your website may have probably received and kind of "re-brand" itself in the eyes of Google.

Suffice it to say, Press Releases are freakin' awesome!

 Anchor Text

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Anchor text is a topic of great discussion. It is the cause of many Google penalties but when utilized correctly, they are a very power ranking factor.

The thing with anchor text is that if, say for instance, you were to build a PBN with decent metrics and link back to your site with an exact match anchor - the jump that you might see from this can be pretty...seductive.

However, get carried away and you might find yourself in Google oblivion.

Anchor text plays a huge part with your domain name and your permalink structure (or slug).

If you have a branded domain name like I do, you might be able to get away with some more aggressive anchor text such as having the exact match money keyword as 10% of your inbound links. However, if you have an exact match domain name, then you might want to keep it well below 2%. As a matter of fact, you'd really want to dilute your anchor text profile with generic anchors such as "click here" "website" "look here" "here" because even URL Links can trigger Penguin penalties.

Let's go into what are the types of anchor text used and what the best practices are. Seeing as this is a huge part of building links and should be covered in extreme detail. Remember that anchor text is one of the main ranking factors that Google uses to capture a sense of what your website is about.

Types of Anchor Text

• Exact Match
  • Exact-match anchor text is when you use the exact money keyword that you want to rank for as the linking anchor. You should rarely use this, if ever.
  • Example - "ac repair miami"
• Partial Match
  • Partial Match anchor text is when you use the exact keyword plus a word or two after or before it. You can should limit this to around 5-10%
  • Example - "ac repair services miami"
• LSI
  • Latent Semantic Indexing (or LSI) the best way to describe this is related terms that people might use when linking or searching for your website naturally. You should limit this to around 10%.
  • Example - "ac repair services in Miami, FL"
• Long-tail
  • Long-tail is when you use your keywords in a sentence-like structure that seems more natural. You can play around with these if you're smart and you can build 15-20% of your links like this.
  • Examples - "find ac repair services in Miami, FL here"; "company that provides ac repair services in Miami"; etc...
• URL Links
  • These are links that use no anchor text that follow this structure - http://www.domain.com/
  • Keep these around 30% of your link profile. Careful if  you have an EMD. (exact-match domain name)
• Naked URL Links
  • Much alike URL Links but in a different format such as www.domain.com or domain.com. Use this at around 15-30% as well.
• Branded Anchors
  • Branded anchors are awesome if you know how to use them because you can get creative and combine them with exact match, partial and LSI anchors.
  • Examples - "company name"; "variations of company name"; "company name ac repair"; "company name ac repair services in Miami, FL"; etc..
  • If you're primarily just using your brand name you can keep this at 30% of your anchor profile but if you use LSI's, exact-match and partial-match anchors in combination with the brand name then try to limit it to 15-20% and you're in the clear. Again, be creative with your anchors and vary it up.
• Generic
  • Generic is used to dilute your anchors and mitigate penalties but they should form a part of your anchor text profiles nonetheless.
  • Examples - "here";"click here";"see here"

Best Practices for Anchor Text

Something I like to do is use branded anchors for web 2.0's and citations as well as naked anchors and URL links. Then on PBN's and Donation Links I mostly use LSI's, Partial Match and Long-tail anchors and reserve the exact match for special occasions. Such as when you're #3-5 and you need that small extra push to beat out your competition.

Also remember that the strength of the link does matter. So if you dilute your anchor text with a bunch of weak links just to water it down, and then use a highly authoritative private blog network link back to your website - you're bound to get slapped.

A constant reminder throughout this whole guide is that you should realize that Google's algorithm is pretty smart. Just because it's an algorithm doesn't mean it can't detect patterns and tricks to play it.

As a side note - since the launch (or discovery) of Rank Brain, it's become quite clear that Google is now using artificial intelligence to crawl the web and assign rankings. This is coupled with the fact that they're now also implementing semantic search algorithms.

It's getting a lot harder to trick Google and game its algorithm. Some people in the SEO community have even gone as far as saying that "SEO is dead" but these are just people that way lazy and were using exact-match anchors with automated link building tools to rank.

Which used to work wonders, but not anymore. That's why we have to be more sophisticated with our link building efforts and surround our websites with trusted and authoritative properties so we can get away with some cheating to edge out our competitors.

I've always been a fan of longevity rather than churn & burn methods that'll last a couple of months before the website is completely de-indexed. And the strategies that I've outlined in this post promote strictly just that.

Anyways, this has been a pretty exhaustive guide and I hope you find it somewhat useful. At 7,000 words it's been the largest writing project that I've ever done in my life.

Hope this post provides some value to you guys and I'll be speaking to you soon,

David Alvarez.

 The post The Ultimate Guide To Link Building for Local SEO appeared first on Alvarez Web Services.

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