Easy wins for a brand new SEO campaign?

thamonsta

thamonsta

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I want to see if I can still rank just by using easily gettable links and the rolling-up of sleeves for some lower-competition keywords. I have my "knowem" stuff in order - any other go-to's that you guys are using for new projects?

PM if you don't want to post it publicly. Thanks squad.

In exchange I'll write you a 5 line poem for each link opp (seriously, you'll weep it'll be beautiful.)
 
The below might not apply to you directly, but they are what I classify as "easy links".

1. If its an online store reselling products, try and find if the brand of each products has a website. Chances are the supplier has a section on their own website listing shops where their products can be purchased from. I'd have no idea why they wouldn't add your site.

2. If you're working with large retails or brands that have physical store locations, see if any are situated within shopping centres or plazas (just ask the client for a location list). I gained 4 links this way for a large retailer this week by sending out 4 emails which took me all but 10 minutes or so.

3. Set up brand alerts, I use Google Alerts and Talkwalker (both are free and easy to use). I get weekly emails to see where my clients get mentioned online. If suitable (not on negative articles of course), a quick email asking if they could add a link back to our site works quite well.

4. Keep track of lost links. Check with Majestic/Ahrefs to see which ones you lost and try and figure out why. Could perhaps be a mistake by a web developers so you could always enquire about it.

5. Once you have some content up and running (I'm talking about proper guides here), do some searches for "keyword inurl:resources" within Google. This will give you a list of sites that have a resource section dedicated to your keyword/topic. If you think you article/guide deserves to be on there, shoot them a quick email.

I'll try and think of some others over the weekend.
Good luck!
 
You can absolutely rank using links you'll build yourself. I'll list some of my tips below.

0) Before doing anything, make sure your site looks great. Disable excessive ads that might put people off. If you wouldn't link to your own site or approve a comment with that URL - no one will.

1) Comments. Default wordpress system, or disqus/livefyre - all of them are good and will often send you some traffic too. The key here is to work on your approval rate and select targets properly.

I suggest getting comment targets from Twitter. Follow a bunch of active users in your niche and watch them post daily links to their fresh blog posts. Reply to tweets, favorite them, reblog their links with a commentary - that will establish some trust. Right after that (ideally you could wait and prepare your link drop further but same day works for me too) go and write a decent comment on a post they shared. Note the URL of the blog post somewhere to track it later and save the comment text next to it as well - you might re-purpose it later if it doesn't get approved.

About 1.5 hours per day commenting like that is a lot of fun - you learn stuff, see what people do and get new ideas, and you get about 30-50 decent links per week. I know I'm always happy to receive a great comment and approve it on my site if the target site looks nice too.

2) Go through SERPs and see what can be done there. Just google your keywords and examine each site in SERPs above you, there are great links out there if you get creative. Some large sites will let you register and create a profile, or a blog, a review or a wishlist - anything. Even if they don't allow link drops - mention the plain text of your URL, once that gets crawled your site gets more love. I've seen success dropping url mentions in wishlists/shopping carts of some large online stores and the URLs were crawled and indexed later (I helped). Once you poke around long enough you can find some fat link/URL placements. Even if you don't - you'll spend time learning your competition.

3) "Knowem"-type stuff only starts with the sites actually listed at knowem.com. You can create profiles, blogs, lists, bookmarks, pages and aggregators on hundreds of other sites and they'd all be good links. Look for them using either search footprints like "sign up" & "create account", top site lists (e.g. sift through Alexa top 1000 to see where you can register), competitors' mentions ("competitorurl.com" -inurl:"http://competitorurl.com") or plain and simple guides already put together. E.g. using all the platforms mentioned here might get you ranked alone: http://www.confidentbrand.com/guides/a-basic-guide-to-online-reputation-management

Start "boards" or "collections" of niche-related links on content curation sites (great starting list here: http://www.curata.com/blog/content-curation-tools-the-ultimate-list/). Drop your link into your own collections after a week or so. Grow the boards more and drop more links from your sites later too.

Do not forget to create simple videos and post them to major video hosting sites - they'll get scraped and syndicated by dozens of smaller ones.

4) Outreach. A lot has been written about that (best at backlinko.com) and the sky's the limit here.

I like to go through steps 1-3 first to make sure I take advantage of all the links I can control first, and only then move to contacting people (yeah, very introverted :D). Very often I don't have to do active outreach at all and a simple press release sent after all the manual links have been created is enough to rank the site already.

Obviously you need to channel links to all pages of your site and write the description/comment content accordingly at least a bit.
 
If it's a brand new site, the easiest win is to do nothing. Maybe build one or two links to get that thing indexed, but that's about it. Let the site age and continue to add content consistently until you're out of that new site sandbox. Then, go ahead and start link building with some age and authority.
 
dzianis said:
I like to go through steps 1-3 first to make sure I take advantage of all the links I can control first, and only then move to contacting people (yeah, very introverted :D).
Click to expand...

Me too. As you said, you can go very far building very white hat links and citations all over the place. I hit up every generalized site or site with millions of users for the profile and link drop in the profile whether it's do or nofollow, I don't care. I can make it contextually relevant with the About Me section. Then I go comment, share, follow, etc., on 5-10 spots just to make sure I get crawled and indexed in a timely fashion. I don't even care about indexing, just crawling and inclusion in the link graph.

Also, the beauty of this when you're starting out is that you can snag a link here and there without any impact on your time. Goofing off on Reddit and found a post you liked? Drop a quick comment on that site. Saw something on Google News and clicked through? Drop a quick comment.

I also like to get as much of the social networking sites and forums set up early as possible. That way when I create some killer graphic for a specific post on the site, I can drop it on all of the platforms with a link pointing back. I get legit links and expand my social presence.

Not to mention, as @stackcash said, we should be focusing on growing content at this time, which only creates further linking opportunities and internal link juice creation to spread around. Building these "easy win" links doesn't get in the way of producing content during the early phase.

I like to get all of this done and out of the way so I never have to think about it again. Later on, content production hits the conveyer belt, 95% of link building time is spent on outreach and pitching journalists and becoming contributors to huge sites, and 5% is just dropping more comments all around the web and continuing to fill up the forums and social profiles with stuff I'm creating.

I think outreach is the most important and powerful though. Contextual links on contextually relevant posts on contextually relevant sites are the rank boosters, but those little boosters become rockets if you've planted the authority and trust seeds all around the net. If you're interweaved with the net/web as a whole, you've got a brand presence in a different sense of the word than if you were just in your vertical. I spread my wings first, then I go in for the kill once I've built up my muscles and made my nest look so spectacular that people want to be associated with it so bad that including my link seems like a great opportunity for them.

That's the key... if you've treated your site correctly and are visible enough, you don't have to convince or persuade anybody.

This whole "getting links" business is only an issue because internet marketers are pumping out garbage sites on free themes with zero customization, rewriting and spinning content, not spending time resizing and customizing images, etc. The web is built on links, that's why it's a web and not a trillion single isolated nodes. We love to link and discover new worthy things. Is your stuff worthy?

My current main project... I've almost spent an entire year on design, base content, and building this gigantic brand presence. Sounds absurd? Not when you start fetching PR6, 7, 8+ dofollows from the top sites on the planet.

The easy wins position you for the even easier, yet ridiculously powerful wins later.

Great thread. I dedicate this post to waking up 6 hours earlier than normal, hammering 3 cups of coffee, and micro-dosing addy.

EDIT:

My recommendation is that when identify easy wins, you add them to your spreadsheet of easy wins. Categorize them, make note of where the link comes from, what type of site it is, what you need to do to make sure it sticks, which input fields aren't being sanitized (sneaky... I squeezed a do-follow out of a DA60+ site the other day that only allows you to link to your LinkedIn... except they don't check the domain that you put in. If you know the site, don't out it openly or they'll fix it).

Eventually, this spreadsheet will be huge. Don't include every place you might drop a blog comment. I don't include those. But profiles, submissions, forums. Have a generalized section and then a section for your vertical. Save all of your login information. Not only can you return to those to further boost your new content, but if you start a new site in the vertical after flipping the first one, you have the perfect blue print for domination. And you have the perfect blueprint for getting you most of the way in any vertical with your giant generalized portion of links.

As for easy win types, think outside of the box. How tangentially related can you get? Did you know there are something like 50 awesome sites where they are all about showcasing graphic design? Did you know your logo counts? What about all the ones that are for artists who hand draw images? Draw one or have someone draw one. Videos, audio recordings, music... it goes on and on and on.
 
stackcash said:
If it's a brand new site, the easiest win is to do nothing. Maybe build one or two links to get that thing indexed, but that's about it. Let the site age and continue to add content consistently until you're out of that new site sandbox. Then, go ahead and start link building with some age and authority.
Click to expand...

How much time it takes to get out of the new site sandbox?
 
iam_mine said:
How much time it takes to get out of the new site sandbox?
Click to expand...

I think it only exists if you get your link velocity out of natural rhythm. Not just quantity of links, but also quality of links (amount of juice). And if you get out of natural rhythm, you can prove that it's not unnatural if you're actually getting social engagement and traffic (which is measured far more effectively than people realize, since most sites use G. Analytics).
 
iam_mine said:
How much time it takes to get out of the new site sandbox?
Click to expand...

I think it's 90 days. I'm not sure if that's an official number. Just what I've seen through experience.
 
iam_mine said:
How much time it takes to get out of the new site sandbox?
Click to expand...

There is no "new site sandbox". Or, to say it better, there does not have to be one. There are some factors that may and do influence site's early performance, as @Ryuzaki wrote above, but Google does not just automatically push new sites down for any amount of time - if they did they would be missing everything new and viral on the Internet.

The whole sandbox talk made me check the timeline of one of my sites, just to back my point. It's an EMD, average volume keyword, and it went live on December 4th 2014. The only links it had were some profiles (~60) and one press release distributed. Here's how it progressed:

EAjxR2q.png

Basically it started ranking thanks to the content, onpage and internal links in just 6 days. In about 2 months I started sending some handmade profile links to the site, and it tanked (which is a normal Goog's reaction to confuse me and start disavowing my hard earned links). In 3 month it came back and settled at numbers 1-2. I added a press release for some authority and that's been it.

Sure, normally it's hard for a new site to penetrate SERPs for serious keywords, but there is definitely no universal rule that keeps it down. With proper keyword/niche research you can jump right in.
 
@dzianis, I'm seeing similar results. What's different with my site (EMD as well) was that link building and site creation happened at the same time.

In month 1 to 3, the site slowly moved up in the SERP and the rankings stabilized at the top after 6 months.

Again, link building was only done on day 1 and, to my knowledge, no one else linked to the site.

There's no sandbox but, IMO, Google doesn't give your site its full weight until 6 months in. Compare this to Bing who'll let you rank quite fast.
 
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