And that's why we're going tobe going over link building for the whole week. Now, of course, if you want torank in the organic section, which isn't roughly in the middle, at the top you alwayssee ads whenever you do a Google search, but theorganic search results is what gets the most traffic. You need the magical thing which is links. And I'll end up breakingdown how you can build them throughout this lesson. But first, what is link building?
Well, link building is aboutacquiring new inbound links to a website from external websites. That's like anotherwebsite linking to yours. You know when you clickon those blue links or orange links or whatevercolor a website has them and it goes and sendsyou to another website? That's a link, and it's a proven tactic that boosts search enginerankings over time. But it's not always about quantity. Years and years ago,there was this site called Get Rich Slowly that gotbought out by a lot of money, and there was this new website, now this website isn't new anymore,
called The Penny Hoarder. And The Penny Hoarder wasgetting way more traffic than Get Rich Slowly, but yet, they had a lot less links, and it shows you that quantity isn't everything. See, a link isn't as simple as the more you have, the better off you are. It's more like a voting system. And here's what I mean by that. Let's say there's two people. If President Obama,who was a old President of the United States, and me, Neil Patel, a marketing guru, if I tell you to vote for someone for a political election, or President Obama tellsyou to vote for someone,
who do you think carries more weight? If you think Obama carriesmore weight, you're right. And it's because he's a expertwithin that subject matter. Now, on the flip side, ifa well-known doctor said, "Hey, vote for this companywhen it comes to marketing," or if me, Neil Patel,
who'sknown for marketing tells you, "Hey, vote for this other company "when it comes to marketing," who do you think carries more weight? And it's me, and the reason being is, my expertise is marketing.
So the way links goes is the more right links you get from relevant, authoritative sources, the better off you are. And here's some of mysites over the years. You know neilpatel.com, QuickSprout, which I nolonger own, Crazy Egg. In essence, if you look at all my sites and you combine them, I built literally millions and millionsof links over the years. Now here's the beautiful part. If you do things rightand you're following all the previous lessons and modules,
you'll start naturallygetting links over time. But at the beginning, you'regoing to have to kick start it. You're going to have to go outthere and find quality links. And you can do this using two tools. Ubersuggest, which willhelp you find the links; and then Mailshake, youcan use to do Outbound to go and get the links. I also have attachment, theLink Building Score Card. Make sure you download this, because this will allow you to rate the links that you're getting and find the right ones. And if you're watchingthis video on YouTube or somewhere else, you cango to neilpatel.com/training, click on SEO Unlocked, and when you go tomodule five, lesson one, you will end up seeing the file of the Link Building Score Card. But let's go over the central items in the Link Building Score Card and the optional ones. So, the first essentialthing is referring domains.
This is the most importantpart about link building, in which everyone thinks the more links you have, the better. It's not about getting onesite to link to you 1000 times. That isn't the same as 1000different sites linking to you. So the key is to get as many unique sites linking to you as possibleversus getting the same site linking to you over and over again. Another one is do follow versus nofollow. Everyone's like, "Oh, do follow," which is telling the search engine pass search engine juice, so it helps them rank higher. No follow's saying, "Hey, don'tpass search engine juice."
Everyone believes, "Oh, youonly want do follow links." And although that's true,there's a lot of nofollow sites that have a lot of traffic. They have a lot of authority. And they can drive you revenue as well. See, link building isn't just about ranking higher on Google. Link building's also gettingthat referring traffic from other websites andconverting some of those visitors into customers, as well. You can go to Ubersuggest, the tool, and in the side where youcan click on backlinks, and any URL you put in,
whether you put in yourown or your competitors', you can see the nofollowlinks and the do follow. All you do is just click on that button. And you can also seehow popular a site is. So the more traffic awebsite drives, the better. So if you're thinking about getting a link from someone likeneilpatel.com, which is my site, you can go to the Top Pagesreport in Ubersuggest, put in my domain or someone else's, and you can see how many visits they're gettin' to popular pages.
The more popular pageslinking to your site, the better you are because the more traffic it's going to drive, which in theory, has abetter shot of driving you leads, or sales, or conversions. Then there's domain score and page score. The higher this number'sfrom zero to 100 and more so, one to 100, but the higher you go up, the better off you are.
Like the super authoritativesites like Wikipedia, Google, they're going to be up there. They're going to be 100 or close to it. Smaller sites are goingto be lower on the scale. The higher up you go,the better off you are. because in theory, the moreauthoritative the site, the more effect, the morepower that link holds. This is like Obama telling you to vote for a political candidate versus Neil Patel.
Obama carries much more weight because he's in the political arena. Another essential is anchor text. This is the keyword thatyou click on in the link. So the keyword may end up being dog food or it could be the word marketing or whatever your business is. If the link contains a lot of keywords, that tells Google, "Hey, this page "that we're linking to isrelevant for these keywords, "so maybe you should rank themhigher for those keywords."
And when you go over to Ubersuggest, and you look up a link in the Link Report or Top Pages or any section, and you click on the backlinksand you're trying to see, "All right, who are all thepages linking to this URL?" It'll show you the anchor text. And the anchor text will vary. Sometimes, it'll say the brand name or www.yourdomain.com or it could be your site name all one word or it could say some keywords.
It'll vary a lot. And that's natural, and you want that. If all your links say a keyword, Google will know thatyou're manipulating them and that's not natural. So, when you're naturally building links and earning them becauseyou created good content, you have a great website, that means your link text isgoing to be all over the board and that's okay. Some of the optionalthings are link placement. Ideally, in-content links are better. Footer links not as great.
Sidebar links not as great. What you'll find is editorial links, the ones you earn and go after, they tend to be within the content. But don't obsess overwhere a link is placed, because some people, they'llnaturally link to you from a resources page, andalthough that's not as ideal as them linking within their content, something is better than nothing. Relevancy, it's also important. The reason I say this is optional is because you can't alwayscontrol relevancy either. So if Facebook links to you andeven if it's nofollowed from a fan page,
do you really care ifFacebook is a social network, and they talk about everything, but your page linking to you, even though it's on that social network, it could drive you business. So that's okay if they'renot all 100 percent relevant. Now of course, if your website is about dental and teeth implants, you wouldn't want a site on Mars, a website about outer space and Mars to link to you because thatjust wouldn't make sense. But you will see somewhat irrelevant links like social profiles andsocial sites linking to you and that's okay and that's common. Another one, strategy, this is optional. When you go into the Ubersuggestreport for backlinks, you'll see that largercompetitors have links.
You may come up with a strategy on how you can get allthose people to link to you and you could do well with that strategy, but it's optional because there's formulas that you can follow that'll get you links,and I'll show you that over the next few lessons as well. So now that you know thefundamentals of link building, you probably have some questions, and I want to address them. First is,
how long does it take to work? Well, according to Moz research, it takes around 10 weeks to improve your rankings from the link. We usually see that it takes anywhere from three to six months fora link to really kick in. And you can also see that on the graph, so we have very similarfindings on our end. And if you're working with a agency, you'll find that they canget ramped up within a month to a few months, samewith the in-house builder. It could take a few weeksfor strategy,
as well. You're going to have todo a lot of outreaching, and when you go throughthis whole process, what you'll find is from day one to month three, that's when you'll startseeing a lot of the links. And then give it another three months, and then you'll startseeing those links kick in. So, give it three monthsto really build and ramp up your link building, and then give it another three months forthe links to kick in, but you don't want to stopafter the first three months.
You want to keep pushingand pushing and pushing. So before we wrap up this lesson, I want to end this off with going over some link building mistakes. The first one is toomany exact match anchors. So if you're trying to rankfor the keyword dog food, all your links shouldn't say dog food. That would be unnatural. The second one is not enoughsemantic keyword anchors. So if your keyword is dogfood, it may be dog food, food for pets, food for puppies. Those are all variationsof dog food that's natural that people may link to you.
The third mistake, you don'thave enough junk anchors. Some of the people linking to you will be saying like, www.yourdomain.com or click here or the fourth mistake is not having brand mentions. That's another one of junk, someone just put your brandname, which is common. You also want to make sureyou have social signals going to your websites, sothis is the Facebook shares, the Twitter shares,Pinterest, it all helps. You also want to avoid buying links. It's a bad thing, and of course, you don't want to exchangelinks with other websites.
That's reciprocal link building. I link to you; you link back. Now if you naturally do that, that's fine, but you don't want to do itto manipulate or game Google. So the last thing I havefor you before we move on to the next lesson, I want you to go to neilpatel.com/training and download the Link Building Score Card and fill that out and start working on it. Thank you for watching.