These days, the internet is practically bursting at the seams with information and content, especially so when it comes to SEO techniques. So we’ve done a bit of legwork and sorted the wheat from the chaff, finding 40 helpful and informative articles about link building and content marketing.
Link Building
Link building is unquestionably one of the most important aspects of SEO. Whether you’re a large corporation or a small local business, link building is essential for building your google ranking and getting noticed in the big wild world that is the internet.
1. Broken Links on Wikipedia
Razvan Gavrilas from Cognitive SEO describes the best ways to utilize Wikipedia for your link building strategy.
2. Link Building for the Little Guys
Moz.com’s Matthew Barby gives some excellent advice when it comes to small businesses starting their link building campaign.
3. 5 Easy Link Building Tactics for Small Businesses
A great article discussing various link building strategies including using images to build links. Written by Jon Ball at Search Engine Journal
4. Link Building Guide for Small Businesses
A handy link building guide written by Wojtek Mazur of Elephate. He goes into detail on search terms and ways to build links through niche directories and associations.
5. Getting Started with Link Building
A bit stuck with how to start your link building campaign? The helpful people at Link Now have compiled an easy to read article to assist link building newbies with getting their campaign off the ground.
6. 5 Paid Link Building Tools
Lee Odden from All Business has outlined 5 handy paid tools that every link builder should consider when improving their outreach. Majestic SEO and Buzzstream are two of the main players when it comes to increasing your link building effectiveness.
7. Using Blogs and Forums for Link Building
The guys at Web 4 Business have produced a short yet concise article detailing some great ways to include blogs and forums into your link building strategy.
8. Link Building With Content
SEO top dogs Neil and Sujan Patel from Quicksprout have written a brilliant ‘advanced guide to SEO’. Produced in the style of an infographic, chapter 7 of the guide includes a visually attractive article explaining how to produce quality content to gain top quality links. I recommend dedicating a bit of time to reading the rest of the guide as Neil is top of the game when it comes to SEO.
9. The Monkey’s Guide to Link Building
The friendly people at White Rapids SEO have written a monkey-friendly post aimed at getting small businesses to understand the importance of link building, local citations and backlink checking.
10. Google-Friendly Link Building
When it comes to link building, google are like the internet ‘link police’. This article written by the Grow Team at We Are Grow highlights important ways to succeed in your link building without getting penalized by the Google link police.
Citation Building
Citations are essentially mentions of your business name and address on various web pages. They may not be links but Google still recognizes them and attributes them to your company. Citations are a main component of ranking your website in Google and should certainly be considered in your SEO strategy. So here are 10 articles that explain citation building in more detail.
1. Why Local Citations are Important
SEO big shots Moz.com have written a short yet sweet post briefly explaining in a nutshell what a citations are and why they are important. A must read to get a feel of what citation building is all about.
2. What is a Local Citation?
Darren Shaw from Whitespark has a great post about local citations and why they are important when exercising local SEO. Whitespark even have a nifty tool to help you discover where to list your business for better local search rankings.
3. Citation Building Strategies
A great guide chock-a-block with handy tips and help from Benjamin at Local Stampede. He differentiates between all the different types of citation and how to achieve them.
4. Citations – The New Link Building
David from Search Engine Watch explains about local citations and why it is important to factor in the younger generation into your marketing tactics.
5. How to Build High Quality Citations
Sergiu Draganus goes into detail on how to get quality citations and also where Google’s algorithms stand on listing local businesses in the SERPS. A great post from Geo Ranker.
6. Post-Venice Citation Building
Zach Thompson from top marketing website Marketing Profs has written a great post detailing the strategies for building citations prior to Google’s Venice update.
7. Citation Building Tools the Experts Use
Ashwin Ramesh lists some helpful and useful tools when it comes to taking control of your citation building strategy. Tools include Whitespark and Moz Local to name but a couple.
8. A complete guide to local SEO
Daniel Thompson guest posts on Matthew Woodward’s blog with a super guide on local SEO, how to control link volume, and critical on page factors in SEO.
9. Ultimate Guide to Building Citations
Income Bully have written a post hoping to debunk some of the myths and farce surrounding local SEO. It also features a tutorial on local SEO that you can find here: Local SEO tutorial
10. How to Build Citations
Last but not least for the citation section – The wonderful Search Engine People have… you guessed it. They’ve given us tips about building citations! They’ve been very helpful and categorized the tips into beginner, intermediate and advanced. So choose your skill level and get local SEO’ing!
Content marketing
Content marketing is a popular buzzword right now, but it’s also a real and powerful way to grow your traffic and gain links. Done right, content marketing is like a cross between SEO and PR. It involves creating great content, building relationships and earning trust.
1. Content Marketing Strategy Infographic
A good looking infographic displaying some handy tips and statistics from Michael Gerard at Curata. See what tactics the top content marketers are employing to stay ahead of the pack in today’s ‘content is king’ world of content marketing.
2. Why Content is King in Today’s Marketing
Sonja Jefferson makes some great points about creating powerful content to sell and grow your business. In the article she explains some top strategies to get your content seen and shared. Overall a great post from Marketing Donut.
3. Tips for a Better Content Marketing Strategy
Lets face it, data and statistics aren’t the most attractive forms of content on the web. The blogging team at Spotfire explain how best to display your data in a way that is more visually appealing to your audience.
4. Is Your Content Marketing Strategy Painful for Prospects?
Paul Mottram rightly explains that most content is created for the sake of creating content and is clogging up the net. This great post from Text 100 sheds light on thinking long and hard about your strategy and ultimately creating content that is beneficial to readers.
5. 7 Steps to a Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing should be at the heart of your digital marketing strategy explains Dave Chaffey. Content marketing can either fuel your SEO efforts or be extremely detrimental to it, so give Dave’s infographic a read and take in the hints and tips.
6. 8 Quick Tips For Maintaining a Long Term Content Marketing Strategy
Sujan Patel is back with a brilliant article on maintaining your content marketing strategy. Since content marketing is the Kingfish in today’s marketing, it makes sense to plan ahead and give some continuity and longevity to your content strategies.
7. 5 Psychological Hacks to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
The single grain team introduce the concept of psychology to content marketing… And rightly so. Since content marketing has to be appealing to the human brain, basic psychology is required to get an insight into the human impulses and how to plan content and marketing strategies around them. Some of the biggest corporations in the world pour millions into researching this area of marketing.
8. Why You Really NEED a Content Marketing Strategy!
The ESTM blog touch on some great points and statistics on how to raise your business’s credibility and authority through content marketing strategies.
9. An SEO Driven Approach to Content Marketing
We all love a complete guide, and Garrett Moon spares no expense in this rather large post on content marketing. This article makes a good point to associate SEO with content marketing in a way that enlightens and pairs the two together quite effectively.
10. Content Marketing Title Generator
In today’s marketing, post titles appear just as important an aspect as the post content itself. This nifty title generator from Portent generates what I would describe as ‘link bait style’ titles to grab a person’s attention and do you know what… It does it surprisingly well!
Link Baiting
Link baiting is kind of like content marketing, but perhaps a little more superficial. None the less, a healthy dose of the right type of link bait mixed with a genuine desire to create valuable resources is a powerful recipe for success and links of course!
1. Hard Thoughts About SEO and Link Bait
Tom from Search Engine Land explains various link bait tactics and gaining traffic by designing your bait to go viral from the start.
2. 10 Extraordinary Examples of Effective Link Bait
Point Blank SEO guest posts on the Moz blog with some great examples of some very successful link bait. Use this as a frame of reference when constructing your own link bait.
3. Link Building Anatomy
One way to produce great link bait is by knowing how they are made and what they are comprised of. Elan from Tech Wyse has shared this great looking infographic describing link bait as a concept. The great thing about this is that he’s used link baiting techniques to make an infographic about link baiting techniques… Neat eh?
4. Examples of Great Link Bait and How they Succeeded
Web Page FX lists 15 great link bait examples and how they succeeded in getting their content off the ground and flying round the internet.
5. Why I used Link Bait and Stopped
Don’t get me wrong, link baiting may be an attractive and lucrative prospect to gain links and spread your content, but there is potential for misuse. Paul Boag makes some compelling points about why link bait isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
6. Link Baiting Techniques
Great link bait article from Sean Si who runs SEO Hacker. Sean includes some tried and tested techniques when it comes to building links and shows how they can easily be converted into bait.
7. Link Baiting Statistics
The Linkody blog has published a helpful infographic detailing which criteria should be taken into account for a successful link bait strategy.
8. I Confess, Every Blog Post I’ve Ever Written is Link-Bait
Now, that title in itself is link bait. Which makes Marcus Sheridan’s claim that much more believable! A great post from The Sales Lion, singing praises and generally sanctifying the use of link baiting techniques.
9. Using Link Bait Successfully
Dutifully written for the most part in giant H1 text, you’ll have no problem reading Created in Eden’s link baiting post, which describes interesting ways of creating ultra-clickable content for the aspiring link baiter.
10. Golden Rules of Link Baiting
Last of all, Smashing Magazine lends some much needed credibility to link baiting. Due to it’s negative connotations, link baiting often gets a bad wrap. However, link baiting has all sorts of applications for genuine, trustworthy SEO and content marketing.