What is the Best Way to Improve SEO? Part 5A: Link Building Basics

Video Transcript for Link Building Basics for Houston Business Owners:

[00:00:00] Everyone Leonard Parker here. This video is going to be the first of a mini series of videos about link building and if you have started your SEO campaign or ever did SEO for your company's website, you probably came across the concept of Link building, but if not this video is for you. So just a heads up. This video is meant for beginners. So if you are a SEO Specialist, or you've been doing [00:00:30] SEO for some time, you might not get much out of this video, but thanks for watching. Anyway, make sure to subscribe and you'll see our other videos that go over more advanced topics. Now for this video. I'm going to talk a bit about link building and more. So from a high level what is link building and why do you need it? So link building quite simply is when a link

[00:01:00] Their website owner links to your website and the Google algorithm. It was built as part of the algorithm was built on links are sort of votes of popularity for a specific website. So let's say you're a water damage restoration contractor in the woodlands. So,

Let's say this is [00:01:30] your website. And then let's say this is your competitors website and let's say see, we also more shapes here. Let's say

you have

for websites linking to you

So all of these websites are linking to you, [00:02:00] but let's say your competitor on the other hand.

I am not an artist. So bear with me one two, three, four, five six, seven eight. So let's say your competitor on the other hand.

Has eight websites linking to his or her website?

So the way Google's algorithm was built. So we just look at this, [00:02:30] you know in a vacuum a backlinks or eight websites linking to your competitors website versus for linking to your website. So just looking at looking at the sheer number of websites. Your competitor has more votes of confidence because more websites or linking back to to their company's website and we just take that in ignore everything else. It's going to be easier for your competitors website to rank [00:03:00] because they have more votes of confidence, but it's not that simple so

If we just use the same example, let's say your your website. It has for backlinks or for websites linking to it. But let's say we have backlinks from the Houston Chronicle.

Maybe we have something from the Houston Business Journal.

And then maybe [00:03:30] association website.

for damage

Restoration. So basically you're a member of a Association for water damage or damage restoration contractors and your profile links back to your website and to round it. All it off. Let's say you have a back link from The Woodlands Chamber of Commerce.

Okay, and let's say [00:04:00] your competitor over here, even though he has a backlinks or a websites linking back to him. Let's say okay. He has Houston Chronicle, but let's also say he has something for something in New York where he doesn't do it.

Yeah, perform services and then let's say he has a back link from a Cialis website. Maybe someone spam this website and then he has another website [00:04:30] licking Tim. That's about Gucci bags. And then another maybe about art and photography.

So one one thing, you know, you want to look at the number of web sites that are linking back to you but relevancy pertaining to your business is also very important. So relevancy can come in two ways. First you have local relevancy. So you have a backlink from [00:05:00] you know, a web site that caters to Houston audience or willens audience. You have a website that's specific to your neighborhood or to your super neighborhood as they're called here in Houston. And you know this guy over here your competitor. He has a backlink from a New York website. So it's not very likely that someone reading that New York website maybe unless they're traveling or planning to go real estate in Houston or already [00:05:30] have real estate in Houston. It's likely that that's not going to be very relevant. So for local relevancy, this is kind of

Next out. So local relevancy is one way to be relevant or get a relevant back link. The other way is to topical or industry relevancy. So for damage restoration having a backlink from a damage restoration website or damage restoration Association, [00:06:01] maybe a backlink from a Blog that's about damage restoration or even you know, you can make it more General as something about Home Improvement or Home Maintenance or storm prep know we know we get tons of hurricanes and storms down here in Houston. So those will all be relevant websites to your industry. Whereas your competitor friend over here. He has a backlink from a website about sex in his stomach pills [00:06:31] and Gucci bags and art and photography which you know, something wrong with art and photography but really doesn't relate to his

Core Business, and then finally, if you don't you're going to have General business websites both for you guys are in business. So these are backlinks from somewhere like your chamber of commerce or if you're involved. Maybe your local BNI group backlinks from directory Pages like yellowpages.com or [00:07:01] homeadvisor.com. You see this guy he doesn't have any of those things. So the key takeaway here is that number of referring domains are number of web sites that are linking back to you is important but what's just as important and probably even more important is that you're also getting relevant backlinks either local relevancy or topical relevancy. So just keep in mind that to keep those Balance.

Now the third thing I want [00:07:31] to look at in this video is this idea of website Authority? So obviously if we had a I'm not sure what's the local paper for the woodlands, but let's just add here at the bottom.

The woodlands and this is a something I'm making up the woodlands weekly journal. And as I say, that's the Let's Pretend. That's the weekly paper further willens targeting [00:08:01] for the willens audience. Well, this might be a great paper but more than likely they're going to be more readers and more website visitors for the Houston Chronicle website compared to the week The Woodlands weekly journal. And so that among other things that's going to give the Houston Chronicle website Maura dority. So in other words that link from the Houston Chronicle website is going to have more weight versus the link from The Woodlands weekly journal [00:08:31] and you know back in the day Google had a metric all PR or page Rank and this essentially was a skill on no single number that gave a website kind of great at our website for its Authority. So how powerful it was.

As in a search results and how powerful a backlink from that website would have so Google they still use that system but it's not that information is no longer made publicly available [00:09:01] because unfortunately as cos, we were spamming the the hell out of it. So now we have to use these proxy metrics and domain Authority is from a company named laws. It's probably the most frequently used metric for gauging a website's Authority. But there are other metrics out there. Aah refs. They have a metric called domain rating, which is very similar. It's really the same thing, but they [00:09:31] have their own variables that they use to come up with that domain rating number. You also have trust flow which is another metric by Majestic SEO, but for the sake of this video, I'm just going to talk about the main Authority.

Motz and so you can actually download it's a free tool called the Mars bar from Oz basically you would go in free create a free account on laws. And basically it's a Chrome extension that you lad here [00:10:01] in your in your bookmarks bar or your exercise your extension bar. And this little number here it pretty much tells you how much Authority a website has. So the current website. I'm on now aww app.com and I'll assume in here a bit so you can see better. It has a domain authority of 51 that's on a scale of 1 to 99. So powerful websites like YouTube and Google there a domain authorities are in the 90s. [00:10:31] Let's say if you launched a new website today and it's a brand new domain. It's going to have a website Authority or domain authority of maybe one and so there's the main Authority but then there's also a page Authority. So let's say just

Give you another quick example. Let me zoom out a bit here.

zoom out a little bit more

So let's say on your website. [00:11:03] You have your homepage and we're still using a damage restoration services example, and let's say, you know, you have your main water damage restoration page and then under that page you might have things like clean up.

mold remediation

What all she might have something, [00:11:33] you know dealing with broken pipes or water pipe resolution and then you might even have a emergency page where you know, people need to contact you and me immediately. So your 24/7 Emergency Restoration page and let's just say you're the main Authority for the entire site is 35 it but each of these Pages they're going to have their own individual Authority [00:12:03] metric and that's call your page Authority. So just to make it clear here. You have your domain Authority.

for the entire website

and then you have your page Authority for individual pages. And so let's say your home page is usually going to be your most of your most authoritative page because most people visit to it if you're doing any link building [00:12:34] usually all those backlinks are going to go to the home page or an overwhelming majority, but your water damage restoration page, you have a page Authority as 10 your cleanup page have a page authority of five mold remediation three is so on so you get the point there. And so when you're going out there to acquire it back links, not only do you want to look at the Domain Authority, but you also want to look at the page Authority for that particular for that particular [00:13:04] page that you're trying to get a link from and usually if it's a new page it's going to have a very low page Authority. So if possible you want to get links from pages that are a

So they've been published for some time. And again Paige had already that's another metric that you can get from laws. So I'll show you how this works here. So you can see here now click the mouse fire twice and then now it comes [00:13:34] up with this little black bar here and it's PA. That's your page Authority. So the domain Authority for this site is 51 in the page Authority is also 51. So that's how you that's how you're able to get the page Authority in a domain Authority. So those are the main metrics and things to know about link building. There are more advanced metrics like looking at the number of websites that allow that a backlink has or that a particular website has linking to it. [00:14:04] So let's say we were starting a link building campaign. We will look at the Houston Chronicle to see how many web sites are linking back to it. And usually you want to go for websites that

Have a referring domains of at least 100 and you can use I won't go over in this video, but you can use a tool from Neil Patel. There are also premium tools called a ahrefs and sem restaurant that will tell you the number of referring domains or websites linking [00:14:34] to another website, and that's just another way to gauge the popularity of a website. So hope this video has been helpful, make sure to subscribe to see the other videos in this link building miniseries and to see all of our videos that we post to the channel. Well, thank you. Have a great Saturday and hope to see you soon.

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Diagram Used During Link Building Basics Videos

Free Tools for Link Building

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What is the Best Way to Improve SEO? Part 5A: Link Building Basics

Video Transcript for Link Building Basics for Houston Business Owners:

Diagram Used During Link Building Basics Videos

Free Tools for Link Building

Premium Tools for Link Building

More Link Building Basics Resources

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