In episode 151, I chat with Lindsay Halsey of PathfinderSEO. If you are an owner of a eCommerce site built on WordPress, you will learn a lot that will help you with your link building no matter what you are selling.

When we think of link building, many tie it directly to guest posts and think of it as the answer to all off-site SEO. But in this show, Lindsay talks about how we can go beyond link building for off-site SEO. We chat about the importance of your online authority, link building through organization affiliations, and other opportunities, such as podcasts and sponsorships.

We also touch on how outgoing links play a role in SEO and other ideas. This show is filled with tips, so don’t miss any of the expertise Lindsay shares with us. 

Some of Lindsay’s Tips:

No matter how much you may know as a DYI’er, it’s always good to get solid SEO advice.

It is a blend of an art and science so it can be really helpful to talk things through.

Importance of off-site SEO and building your authority online.

How does Google actually know if it should trust your content and your website? It measures that trust in part by thinking about the links that are pointing to your website. Those links that say good things are measures of authority and gives Google the confidence to display your content in the position or sort of rank that it deserves.

I consider offsite SEO and link building to be important components of offsite SEO, as being somewhere around 40% of the game.

Offsite SEO and building one’s online authority is still an important component of performing well in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

My earlier days of building authority without a heavy pursuit of link-building.

Back then, jumping on the bandwagon with some of those gray area link-building techniques, ultimately you probably made the smarter choice.

It’s been been of high value to have missed the little window of actively engaging in link building.

The more businesses we work with— local businesses to enterprise level companies— there is a huge array of strong professional relationships. But only a fraction of those professional relationships are echoed online in a way that Google can pick up and understand via the backlink network.

How much do in-bound links from organizations online, such as chambers of commerce, play in the role of SEO?

I usually ask myself on the value of a link from a chamber of commerce: does the business serve a local area? And if the answer is yes, it makes total sense.

Not all chamber of commerce websites include a link that passes SEO value …. but even if they don’t have that type of link, just being included in that list gives Google a bit of trust and confidence that that business really is serving that local area.

The value of in-bound links around podcasts and sponsorships.

When I think about guest blogging, sponsorships, podcasts, they all fit into the broader, everyday, real-world marketing. It’s not just about SEO, it’s not just about link building, it’s about building your brand.

So it’s about the business value of being a sponsor and going to an event and having a presence. One of the positive byproducts of that is picking up a backlink. And a lot of people aren’t thinking in those terms. So they’re going out and sponsoring an event and they forget the fact that they should get a backlink.

It still comes down to these basic contextual text links in blog posts, in web copy, that still have tremendous value in terms of organic search.

When a request to add a link to an existing mention in a post, is there a benefit for the person who adds that to their site?

External links pointing out of your website and going to third party websites can have value for your own organic search results.

If you never link out from your website to any third parties, you look very isolationist.

The biggest value you get is if you link out to a trusted resource.

Make sure the link you add to your post is valuable for your readers

If you linked out to one of their deeper posts, a blog post about what is or how to and you thought it was really good, then that relationship is showing that you value their content.

You never want someone to click on a link and have that experience of like, oh, that’s not what I thought it was going to.

Is back-linking being played down in the SEO industry or is it as important as ever?

It’s all about your readers and your site visitors. I think it depends on the SEO agency.

You can have a team that helps you build links without having to go out and hire a third-party agency that is probably going to pick up much lower valued links.

Thoughts on sites that simply reproduce numerous feeds of other sites and if that is effective for them and the receipient as far as SEO?

Syndications of RSS feeds, that news site, whether it’s in the WordPress space or not, is going to need to do more than just pull in 20 or 30 different RSS feeds and then categorize the content and link out to all those sources to actually do well for a keyword like “WordPress news” or something like that.

They’re going to have to have some unique content or a really strong offsite network that’s pointing to that site and saying, this is the best place to read WordPress news.

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Find Lindsay at:

PathfinderSEO.com

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