Are You Irrelevant to Others?
Date: September 14, 2013Category: Author: Michael Brinson
In a recent interview with Eric Enge, Matt Cutts clearly stated that “Not all link building is bad.” While that doesn’t come as any surprise to experienced SEO folk, still it is nice to have it reconfirmed from the head of Google’s webspam team.
As was alluded to by Matt, many types of link building are bad. Rather than get caught up in all of the ways to do bad link building, it’s better to just remember one underlying principle – Get other people to engage with you. After we push all of the little technical details aside, link building really is that simple.
However, simple doesn’t always mean easy, and this is especially true when we’re talking about getting other people to engage with you online. Life is busy and in order for you to be worth engaging with you need to find not just one way, but several ways to be relevant to others.
With that in mind, here is a list of ways to be relevant to others that is Matt Cutts approved. He actually discussed these ideas in this interview with Eric Enge.
- Create compelling content first before you try to get links to it.
Focus on good old fashioned marketing. Create a fantastic resource that people will love and then focus on ways to promote it. - Press release links.
The links in the press release itself won’t count in SEO terms, but if that press release convinces an editor or a reporter to write a story about it, then that’s an editorial decision and that’s something google wants to reward. You have become relevant. - Leverage social media as a way of building links
Build strong Twitter, facebook, and google+ presences and then push out great content that your audience will likely share. Matt Cutts said, “”I firmly support the idea that people should have a diversified way of reaching their audience. So if you rely only on Google, that might not be as strong of an approach compared to having a wide variety of different avenues by which you can reach people and drive them to your website.” - Guest Posting
Matt Cutts on Guest Posting – “The challenge with guest posting is that people have different conceptions about what it means.” He then goes on to explain that the guest post that you do needs to be a great piece of content that has been deeply thought about, labored over, polished, and then published on a highly reputable domain name. - Giving and Getting Interviews
Great way to build awareness of your brand and to generate and distribute insights. An easy and very effective way to do an interview is through Google+ Hangouts.
I’ll leave you with these words from Matt Cutts about getting links – “Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover [things that are relevant and useful for searchers].” So get out there and BE RELEVANT!
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