Identify Author Rank Indicators

Before you can begin optimizing, you need to identify what indicators affect author rank. You need to start with the most obvious indicator – Google+. Optimize your profile to reflect your brand and provide as much information about the business as possible. Add your blogs and other content you produce in your profile – this is the first step to claiming authorship.

Social sharing signals also show how relevant others find your content, and these contribute to building up your online credibility. The following in particular are believed to help boost your author rank:

• Adding the Google plus-one (G+1) button to your content. Each +1 you gain contributes to your rank indicator.
• Facebook likes and comments
• Tweets, retweets and mentions on Twitter
• Social network shares – both the number of shares you get, and the speed with which readers share your content

Claim Your Authorship

I’ve already mentioned the first part of claiming your authorship on Google. Create a Google+ profile if you don’t have one yet, and optimize it to match your website. Choose a profile photo with a recognizable headshot – this will appear on your search listing once you’ve successfully claimed your authorship. Make sure to add all the content you’ve published online in the “Contributor To” section of your profile, and if you don’t have the +1 button on them yet, add it to your posts. Make sure the profile discovery option in your G+ profile is checked.

The second part of claiming your authorship is to add authorship mark-up to your website, your blog, and your other published online content. All you need to do is to add a link to your Google+ profile in your content using the following HTML code:

<a href=”[PROFILE URL]?rel=author”>Google</a>

Make sure your link contains the ?rel=author parameter – this is what tells crawlers you are the author of the content. Each existing content piece you tag with this mark-up will add credit to your author rank, and each piece of content you add to your “Contributor To” list and tag with the same mark-up will likewise contribute to your ranking. Your listing will look like this once it’s done:

Create and Share Quality Content

At the heart of author rank is credibility, and to build that, you must consistently create and share high quality content relevant to the business you are promoting. You need to show innovation, give a fresh take on elements of your niche that sheds new light to the industry, or simply provide a simpler solution to the problems that your target audience has.

Share your insights through a wide variety of content – blogs, articles, press releases, whitepapers, and lately, even through videos and images – in order to keep your audience engaged. When you create shareable content for your audience, the likes, shares, and comments will naturally follow.

Talk to us today for more tips on boosting your author rank. Your account manager will be very happy to answer your questions and to discuss our solutions to help boost your online credibility and visibility. If you’re not yet our partner, sign up for free today and get started. Keep checking back for more updates!

Contribution and Collaboration

Right now, you may be relying on third-party experts to write about your industry on your behalf. This is quickly changing as the quality of content becomes much more important than the amount of content you put out. You will need to work closely with your clients to produce more personalized expert-level materials.

Your role as a content marketer will move from doing all the research yourself and providing raw content to editing content provided by your clients, either written by one of their people or written by your team with their help. Start now by keeping communication lines open with your clients and consulting them about themes, subjects, and processes they want to discuss. You can pick up the collaboration process from there.

More Substantial Rich Media

People expect more than just written articles today – they want variety. You have less than a minute to get their attention before they go back to the SERPs and browse another site. The only way for you to keep that attention is through rich media.

Your target audience will want richer, more informative content in different forms – video, audio, slideshows, infographics, e-books, and more. As this decade progresses, and content becomes the central part of every online marketing strategy, you will need to produce longer and richer multimedia materials. Mixing different types of media to create unique content will also continue, and the integration will be smoother and easier as technology develops.

Overlapping with Paid Marketing

Right now, content affects paid marketing in two ways: through the copy, and through the landing page. While this system will remain as the years progress, content will overlap with paid marketing differently. Companies will be paying for the traffic they receive for each feature article recommended in a high-authority, heavy-traffic site.

Instead of offering ads, which some people are not particularly fond of, you will offer targeted, information-rich content to your audience. Content engines are already beginning to do this by distributing content to relevant, high-authority websites. This technology poses a challenge for online marketers: get more traffic by providing more quality content. This way, content will overlap significantly with paid marketing.

Technological Advancements

You cannot discuss the progress of content marketing without including the technology used for it. I’ve already begun by mentioning content engines in the previous section, but you can expect content marketing technology to continue developing in the years to come.

One of the most important developments you should anticipate is the development of CMS. Being an integral part of your content marketing strategy, CMS systems should evolve to integrate with other systems more easily. This will allow richer content to be posted on your clients’ websites more fluidly.

Another important development (one that needs no guessing) is the advancement of analytics programs. Analytics is important in studying your audience’s behavior towards the materials you share. As content marketing becomes more sophisticated, analytics tools will be enabled to read and track different types of content. Expect to see advanced features that will let you measure your content’s impact on conversions.

Hybrid Marketing

Finally, as content marketing becomes the main driving point of your online marketing efforts, you will find an increased need for hybrid marketers – specialists who are able to develop marketing plans for different types of campaigns, especially those involving different types of content. Clients needed different teams to carry out various marketing campaigns before; now they only seek marketers with multiple capabilities. You will need to be an expert at all content sharing platforms and marketing technology in order to land more campaigns in the future.

New opportunities arise for you every time new content marketing developments and trends emerge. We’d be happy to help refine your methodology and explain the opportunities you can explore in the future. Get in touch with your account manager today or sign up for free to get started.

• Establish brands and individuals representing your clients’ companies as leaders in their industry.
• Get your target audience talking about your own or your clients’ brands.
• Build quality links from respected, high-authority websites.

Choose Reputable Publishers

I already mentioned this in the blog I mentioned earlier, but it’s important to reiterate this point. Don’t treat your content marketing strategy as merely link building. Think of it this way: Where would you be proud to be featured? Don’t be afraid to aim high – many established and respected media and blog sites accept feature articles.

Start by checking if your target site accepts guest posts. You can easily do this on Google – see the sample below that checks The Washington Post:

Once you’ve established that your target site accepts guest posts, check their editorial policy. Make sure their rules are in line with Google’s policies. Expect these guidelines to be very strict, and in most cases, not to allow rich anchor texts. These are the sites you want to contribute to – sites that are reputable and high-authority.

Develop Industry Authority

After you decide where you would like to be featured, you need to choose what you would like to discuss. Developing and establishing your authority doesn’t mean writing about some new discovery you’ve made related to your niche or industry. You can write about a common topic, but choose a different angle to your story or a different approach.

Think about how you will measure your progress as you keep writing posts. Decide what factors and tools can show you are going the right direction. The easiest way to see if you are developing your authority is through the activity your articles generate. Ask yourself the following:

1. How often do your guest posts get likes?
2. How often are they shared on social media sites?
3. Do they spark comments and discussions among readers?
4. Do you get the attention of your peers?

Think of a Long-Term Content Strategy

When developing your guest posts, don’t think about them as individual entities. Imagine yourself writing for your own column – aim for it. This will help keep your voice consistent, push you to create a publishing calendar, and help in establishing your authority.

We always say “Diversify your back link profile” and “Get links from unique sources.” While this remains true, think of the opposite and what it will imply: When you are published in an authoritative website multiple times, or when you write for them regularly, it says you are their trusted authority when it comes to your topic of choice. This is true for both your human site visitors and for your other visitors – the search engine crawlers. Try to get published in the most relevant, the most authoritative websites often. This kind of long-term strategy ensures a stronger back link profile and it solidifies your status as the expert in your field. That’s hitting two birds with one stone.

Target Influencers

Influencers play an important part in getting your guest blogs across a wider audience. Build relationships with them through networking and PR, and bring something substantial to the table to make them interested in you. Make third-party industry influencers your target audience when writing your guest posts and feature articles.

Targeting influencers works the same way as targeting your audience – find out what they want to know, and provide solutions through your feature posts. Start by communicating with them directly through the comments section when they post something, and then you can link your guest posts answering their questions later on for them to share to the readers.

Think about the best way to get the attention of influencers when creating your content strategy. Remember what I said earlier about developing your industry authority: Find new ways to discuss old topics, and find new angles for each topic you undertake. Combine this with easy-to-follow solutions, and you’re on your way to reaching more people and establishing trust through these influencers.

Establish Social Media Presence

Social media is a great medium for promoting your guest posts and feature articles. You can share it with your followers free, lead your audience to your article and eventually to your website, and monitor the resulting traffic. You should promote your guest posts on all your existing social media profiles. There are programs that allow you to synchronize posts automatically, allowing you to post on just one profile while ensuring it appears on all your other profiles.

Conclusion: Write for People, Not for Rankings

Remember that search engines are only a means to an end, and your desired goal is to reach your audience and convince them of your authority as an information source and your reliability as a service provider. Write relevant and high-quality guest posts and feature articles for your target audience, maintain your presence in both high-authority websites and in social media, and grow your network of influencers. Building your authority and your back link portfolio takes work, but consistency has its rewards.

We’d like to hear what your current content marketing strategy is. Talk to us today – you can start by signing up if you’re not yet our partner, or by contacting your account manager if you are. I’m looking forward to helping you out personally, and in the meantime, keep checking back here for more updates and useful tips to help your agency become successful.

Features

The new real-time conversion-tracking tool features two live bar graphs that show all conversion activity occurring in your site in real time. One graph shows goal hits per minute, covering a total span of 30 minutes; one shows activity per second, covering a total span of one minute. The bar graph format makes it easy to spot how high the converting activity is on your site and see short-term conversion trends.

Below these graphs, you will see a table containing a list of your goals and what percentage of your total goal hits each goal contributed over the past 30 minutes. You can click on each goal individually and drill down your converting pages. You will see how many people have completed a specific goal.

What This Means for Our Partners

Seeing how many conversions take place in real time is very useful, especially when you are checking the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and improvements in your converting pages. The real-time information, combined with data from other sections of Google Analytics’ real-time tracking, will let you analyze the behavior of your target market more accurately and make adjustments on the spot. Having a more accurate profile of your audience lets you develop more targeted campaigns.

This also means you can give your clients more detailed updates during conference calls and visits to your company. With this tool, you can provide the most updated data on their campaigns and show them their performance in real time. The Conversions section of Google Analytics will continue to track long-term performance, and this data is included in your monthly executive summaries, but the live updates provide a good picture of where your campaigns are headed in between reporting periods.

Contact your account manager today if you need help analyzing your target audience’s behavior using this new feature, or if you simply need assistance with setting up goals in your Analytics account. Don’t forget to sign up for free if you’re not yet our partner – we’ll help you with your marketing strategy and provide advanced SEO tools. Keep checking back for more updates!

We believe that Inbound Marketing is the future of providing end-to-end services for your clients. That’s why we’re updating our products to include exclusive online magazine and media outlet features, videos, local citations, brand interviews, product and service reviews, rich media, great marketing collateral and much more.

All campaigns on this month’s 1st cycle will be updated to our new products. Since nothing changes with service cycles or pricing, the transition for existing clients will be seamless.

I’d like to highlight some awesome new features of our products:

Publishing Rich Content

Content placement remains a critical role in link building, organic search rankings, and brand reputation. The location, structure, and diversity of published content must be of high quality for the search engines to reward and positively acknowledge its legitimacy. This means that it’s no longer enough for content to be well-written. It must also be placed on authority websites, modeled properly, and must be associated with influential sites on the web.

We’ve strategically partnered with high authority magazines, news sites, niche industry publications, and media outlets for content publishing. As preferred partners, we have the ability to do product placements, company reviews, interviews and press releases in quality media locations. This will improve organic search rankings by ensuring the link portfolio is high-quality.

Editorially Given links

These are links that are editorially positioned because the site is producing good content and is an industry authority. The links are usually given by columnists of different publications.

Media Link Building

Links in media publications are important parts of the article because these identify the reliable sources on which the article is based.

Topic Modeled Content (LDA)

Our content writing method helps Google better understand the context of the article by looking at recurring words and the general intent of each piece.

Our approach to SEO includes diverse content through the following:

1. Magazines Features that showcase your client’s company in authority online magazines.

• Reviews
• Brand Interview
• Product/Services Reviews
• Reputation Building

2. Brand Interviews – articles that feature a conversation with a key member of your client’s company and position you as industry leaders.

3. Products & Services Reviews – comprehensive reviews of the client’s products and/or services.

4. Blogs – regularly writing blogs for you to publish on your client’s blog. This promotes traffic to the website and increases web visibility in search results.

5. Name Address Phone Number (NAP) – we ensure that your client’s company name, address, and phone number are consistent across the web to help search engines realize this is a location and scrape it, thus resulting in higher search rankings.

6. Citation Building – creating consistent NAP listings on relevant sites that will mention the client’s business name, address, and phone number helps build high quality relevant links.

7. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – search engines are “learning models” that attempt to understand the “context” of words. We analyze this process and apply its principles to your content to help search engines associate your brand with the right keywords and ideas.

8. Video Creation – videos are original and creative. They outline the website’s products or services and give high quality links promoting it.

Sending out email newsletters is one of the easiest ways to reach your target audience. Email correspondence brings you one primary challenge though: ensuring that your message reaches your target audience’s inbox. I want to share some practices that will help ensure your emails will reach their intended recipients, and not the dreaded spam folder.

Relevant Content, Relevant Elements

It’s easy to say “Write content with your audience in mind, write for real people,” and this is true. You should write content that gives your audience information. What you may not realize, though, is you need to focus on all elements of your email being contextually relevant. Think of the basics you may overlook:

• Your subject should be relevant to the body of your message. It’s easy to overlook this when you want to catch people’s attention and increase your open rate, but if your subject is not related to the content of your email, you will be marked as spam.

• Your body should explain your information / news clearly, and let your reader know what’s in it for them. It doesn’t have to be long – it could only be a few sentences short – as long as it covers your entire message for that email. Make sure it’s easily readable; Divide it up into chunks and bullets if necessary.

• Your images should be related to your copy. Don’t choose random images that are not relevant to what you are trying to say just to make your email look better. Make sure they’re clickable and that they contain alt text explaining the image to plain-text email recipients.

• Have clear, persuasive calls to action. This is what sets authentic email messages from spam. You know what you want your audience to do, get them to do it! Your headers should be persuasive, your links should be clear calls to action, and your content should have a sense of urgency.

Basic formatting rules also apply – use fonts between 8 and 14 pts. large, avoid using Flash and other types of media that take longer to load, spell-check before sending, and do not capitalize words fully. Choose your font color carefully, as email filters read many messages with light grey, red, and invisible fonts as signals of spam. Make sure you use the appropriate title and header tags in your copy. These may sound like basic optimization rules, but they apply to your newsletters and email blasts as well. Use your SEO strategy as criteria: What would you not do to on-page content? What would you want to see?

Including Trust Signals

Every email you send should include trust signals that tell email service providers you are a trustworthy sender. You normally find these signals at the header and footer of each newsletter or email. By providing these information, you confirm several things:

• That you have a physical address, and that you can be contacted by means other than email
• That you have a policy that protects recipients’ information from being used inappropriately
• That you are not sending an unsolicited message (which is not permitted in some parts of the world – you need to be very careful with this).

Before sending your email, make sure you include your company’s name, physical address, and complete contact information. Include links to unsubscribe and to your privacy policy in the footer, and a short note explaining why recipients are getting your email. This is easy when you are using an email publishing platform because they require all this information and automatically add it to your messages, but if you’re doing it manually, make sure you create a template that includes these.

Boosting Deliverability and Open Rate

The appearance of your message on different preview panes may be something you are ignoring now, but you’ll need to pay attention to it. What people see on their preview panes convince them to open your email, but it also has another purpose: it also builds trust with email service providers. Familiarize yourself with what possible elements your target audience will see on their preview panes and make these look professional and consistent with your message.

What recipients usually see vary from simple blurbs containing two to three lines of text, to part of your email body text, to part of your email body with images. The text that appears in the preview pane should contain your main message and should be engaging and compelling. If you have images, logos, links and calls to action, make sure that they appear on the preview pane. This ensures that your recipient knows what you want to say and what you want them to do after reading your message even before opening your email.

These basics should help you get started on a successful email marketing campaign. Monitor updates on spam laws in your region, and keep changing your strategy, and you’ll maintain and even increase your email deliverability in no time.

We’d be happy to help you with your campaign. Email newsletters are part of our new product developments, which we’ll be launching this May 1st. Talk to your account manager today to find out how we can help boost your email marketing. If you’re not yet our partner, sign up for free today to get our complete online marketing solutions

Month over month we’re connecting with marketing agencies worldwide and producing content and collateral that helps clients get more search visibility and better rankings. The update we’re making May 1 adds robust inbound marketing methods to our solutions and positions our agency partners as end to end marketing providers. Our product update will include more diverse marketing solutions, rich media and an improved user experience.

What’s New?

Real Content For Real People

Our content is written with readership in mind. We’re incorporating writing strategy that includes topic modeling, LSI structuring, diverse linking types, rich media and much more. Our content positions your agency as an integrated marketing provider that publish top notch content. This strategy and publicity also greatly helps in Reputation Management.

Link & Citation Development

Search engines need to associate the content about your client with other relevant sites around the web. Writing content for users includes using citations, Name Address Phone number, video and visual content and rich media to help develop links that improve organic rankings. We also will be arming your clients with an arsenal of social signals and local business listings that will help improve local SEO rankings.

Publishing On Tap

We have strategically partnered with online publishers, magazines, industry publications and news outlets that we will feature your client’s content in. These exciting partnerships place your client’s business’s, products and services in high quality media outlets and magazines online. This work will improve the reputation of the business or organization online, and is permanently a part of reputation management and search coverage for your clients.

Since our strategic partnerships are with authority magazines and industry publications, this influences the organic search rankings of your clients significantly. Your clients will get more search exposure and better rankings because of quality content marketing and quality backlinks. Magazine features, business reviews, product and service reviews, PDFs, videos, leadership interviews are all part of the content marketing strategy.

What About Existing Campaigns?

If you are a current client, we will apply the update to your existing campaigns starting May 1. If you are on the May 15th cycle, this update will take effect when your campaign renews on May 15. You will have the option to keep running the legacy campaign on your project, but we encourage everyone to take advantage of this very much anticipated update of our products.

Roll Out

Our account managers will be in touch with everyone to explain what’s included in detail before May 1. If you have any questions, call us at US 415-625-9700, UK (44) 203-393-4830, or AU (02) 8484-1116. Stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter if you’re not already subscribed to receive the roll out and product specifications on May 1st

More Interaction

More feedback and communication from your clients allows us to position them better in the search results. We encourage our agency partners to stay in constant touch with clients and gather promotions, events, new product roll outs, and other relevant information we can use in our marketing efforts. Doing this keeps gives your clients maximum search visibility.

We will also send a newsletter, and have a complete list of campaign details available starting May 1. If you are not a partner agency, we’d love to work with you. Sign Up Today and become a part of selling Marketing People Love.

Being featured in a reputable online magazine brings many benefits. It gives your business publicity, puts out your brand name as a reputable provider, presents you as an industry figure to watch, and adds to your link profile. These benefits make online magazines an important tool in your online marketing strategy. Get featured in the online magazines relevant to your industry by following these simple tips.

Research about the Magazines

• Select reputable online magazines related to your industry. These magazines will let you reach a wider relevant audience. It also helps strengthen your link profile because the backlink will be coming from an established source.

• Watch out for online magazines that may violate Google’s accepted practices – you may receive penalty if you get a bad link from these sources. Check their background and do a site quality check before adding them to your list of prospects.

Learn their Writing Style

It’s important to know the right voice to use in your mag feature. You need to develop content that aligns with your target magazine’s voice. Reading some of their features before emailing your pitch will let you discover what writing style they want. It will also let you see what themes they feature – you can select a topic based on the direction they are taking in terms of content.

Improve Your Website

Prepare your website for that time when editors and magazine owners check your facts. You should make a good and lasting impression with your website. Your website should look professional and should contain information that their readers will find useful. It will serve as the calling card online magazines will give their readers, and this serves as an endorsement. Remember that they will only associate their name with brands they believe are reputable and professional.

Grow Your Network of Writers and Publishers

It helps to have contacts in the online publishing industry. Start by doing the following:

• Join networks where you can find other writers and publishers exchanging information about their research.

• You can also reach out to other writers and exchange ideas via Twitter. This is the perfect platform to exchange ideas quickly, connect with other writers, and get noticed by publishers through association.

• You should also participate in writers’ conferences related to your industry and put your brand name out there.

This gives you a chance to grow your contacts and start becoming their source of information when researching features. It also helps you get more referrals – it’s easier to be featured in online magazines when you are referred by someone the magazine already trusts.

Pitch Your Feature

Keep the following in in mind when pitching your feature:

• You need to tell publishers why they will benefit from featuring your brand, not the other way around. They’re always looking for new stories, and bringing free publicity to their table gives them that fresh story they need.

• Get their readers interested in what you have to say. Keep your research handy when suggesting a feature to the editor or the magazine owner – this will back up your pitch and show them how you will bring in more readers and help their magazine.

• Online magazines want features that are unique, that take on a fresh angle, and discuss something in high demand.

Submit, Submit, Submit

Being featured in an online magazine takes time – there’s no such thing as an overnight success. Expect to receive many rejections, especially when you are only beginning your publicity campaign. Prepare several pieces and submit to different publishers. This has several benefits:

• It ensures you have a back-up plan in case you are rejected in just one magazine.
• It also cuts the waiting time you would otherwise spend waiting for each magazine publisher’s response.
• You’ll have more visibility and more backlinks if your feature receives more than one editor’s approval.

Write to the Editor

This is the easiest way to be “featured” in a magazine without having an article dedicated to you. Write to the editor and participate in discussions started by the online magazines, and leave your name and your business website as your signature. You can exchange your thoughts, start to build a relationship with the editor, and get your name and website URL up in their online magazine. Most online magazines have a “Letters to the Editor” section similar to that in print – get the email details of the editor and start writing!

Use a Third-Party Service

You always have the option of using a third-party service where you can submit content and have them distributed to partner publishers. This makes the process easier for start-ups who have yet to build their contacts in the publishing industry.

We can help you get started and be featured on renowned online magazines through our wide network of publishers. Contact your account manager today to know how, or sign up for free and become our partner to get started. Visit our blog again soon for more updates and tips!

Last year, when they rolled out Google+ Local, they still kept Google Places for Businesses up. This confused many owners with business listings who weren’t sure where to focus their local online marketing efforts. Google is now beginning the process of transferring all Google Places listings to Google+ Local. Now business owners can focus their promotional efforts, manage their AdWords campaigns, and give their audience updated information from one profile.

Three-Step Update Widget

Creating and editing your business listing is easier with Google’s three-step widget. You can begin creating your profile by providing your contact information first, then your business hours, and your business description. Google looks up your contact number and grabs information from your website or other listings to make the creation of your listing easier. The same process appears when editing your listing – Google will indicate what information you need to provide in their three-step widget. No overwhelming forms required.

Faster Information Updates

Updating your business details was a pain in the previous platform. Changes took days to reflect on your listing – this could cause you to lose business when potential clients cannot contact you. Google’s latest updates promise quicker turnaround. You can expect to see changes in your business listings in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Google AdWords and Google+ Integration

Google+ for Business already enriches your AdWords campaigns by letting you add an HTML mark-up that links your ad to your business page. Google takes this to another level by integrating AdWords Express functions into your Google+ Local dashboard. In addition, you can interact with your followers, circles, and groups on your Google+ profile straight from your G+ local dashboard. You can grow your fan base, interact with your audience and monitor your paid campaign performance in a single platform.

This integration means it will be easier for our partners to monitor and manage their Google+ presence. We’ve already anticipated this upgrade and have successfully integrated G+ optimization into our local packages last year. As your listings are transferred to G+ Local, your local online presence will not waver, because we have already set a strong foundation through our local SEO services.

Talk to your account manager today to learn more about this upgrade. Log into your dashboard or sign up for a free account to get our local SEO services. Keep checking back for the latest news and updates on SEO!

Reputation Building, Not Link Building

Many marketers still fail to see the difference between reputation and link building. Link building is essentially building your reputation online, but it is an exploitable process. Over the years, the practice of link buying has been prevalent. It wasn’t until Google began refining its algorithms to mimic user experience that this bad practice started becoming a liability. The release of Penguin served a harsh lesson for those who were still exploiting the system until then.

Google has always maintained that it will give credit to links where credit is due. This, according to Matt Cutts, is when they see either of the two:

1. That the link is a genuine endorsement of the website receiving the link, and that it passes Google’s quality check, or
2. That the link is a relevant citation, and is cited in the third-party content as a relevant source of information. These citations should be similar to citations in a research paper, where the writers only mention their most relevant and significant sources for the research.

Google has consistently put emphasis quality and not on the links itself. Expect Penguin 2.0 to implement this more strictly. Cutts said in a separate interview that as long as marketers focus on branding by improving their reputation, they are on the right track. You can do this by implementing practices approved by Google, such as:

• Creating and publishing relevant, informative content in trusted information hubs and websites.
• Building your network of online publishers and influencers, and maintaining a working relationship with them.
• Checking the quality of the pages where your link will be published before submitting your content contribution, especially in the case of guest blogging.

As leaders in the industry, it is our job to stay ahead of these updates and improve our methodology continuously. I’m glad to let all our partners know that we already prepared not just for Penguin 2.0, but also for future Google algorithmic updates. Our methodology focuses on building reputation naturally and getting relevant links from relevant and trusted publishers.

The Link Building Checklist

We still encourage you to check your backlink profile initially before coming to us. This will help you give us a better idea of how much work needs to be done to clean up your profile and ensure the effects of our SEO methods are maximized.

Use this checklist as your guide, and bring your answers to us. We will evaluate your websites further and let you know what actions need to be done. You may choose to implement the changes on your own or have us do the clean-up work.

Is the link you receive a genuine endorsement of your brand?
If your answer to this is no, or if the endorsement sounds unnatural and unrelated to the content of the website linking to you, it’s best to have the link removed. It will harm both your own and the publisher’s rankings.

Would you build your link in that website even without Google in the picture?
Remember what I said earlier about links being citations – make sure you are only mentioned in the most relevant pages. Thinking of building links without search engine rankings in the picture helps you evaluate and choose appropriate publishers more meticulously. This ensures you are building quality links and not just building links for the sake of rankings.

Are your backlinks something you can be proud to show?
Think of links as more than votes – think of them as online awards. If you have second thoughts bragging about your backlinks, you know the links you have are low quality. Doubt usually means there is room for improvement, and you can rid yourself of a some links that may be hurting your standing with Google.

If you answered no to any of these questions, you need to evaluate your backlink profile and see what links you can do without. You will need to clean up these links before launching your search optimization campaign.

Cleaning Up Your Link Profile

Cleaning up your link profile begins with fixing your internal linking structure. Make sure that all your links are working, all redirects and error pages are in place, and your pages are arranged accessibly. You may need to reorder and restructure your website in the process.

Next, you will need to clean up your third-party backlinks. This is more difficult, because not all webmasters will be cooperative. You can contact the publisher of the low-quality link directly and ask that they take down the links built on their site. Expect to encounter uncooperative webmasters who will ask you to pay to have your link taken down.

You should use Google’s Disavow Tool after you’ve done all you can to have the most number of unnatural links removed from your profile. This is where you can indicate what links not to consider in your profile, including the websites of webmasters who will refuse to take your link down. Make sure to follow Google’s guidelines on using the Disavow Tool – improper use may discredit your quality links and affect your rankings dramatically.

Talk to your account manager today if you need further help with evaluating your link profile before you start your project with us. You may also log into your dashboard to request a website audit. Sign up for a free account if you’re not yet our partner to get started. Keep checking back for more updates!