Off-Page SEO &

Link Building Automation

In previous lessons, we’ve talked about on-page SEO for the most part.

In this lesson, I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about off-page SEO. 

Let’s start with a little refresher 

Today we’re going to focus on off-page SEO and automated outreach for linkbuilding.

The philosophy behind Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO is all about increasing your authority in search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) their “eyes”. 

The more authority search engines think you have the easier it is to rank high in search engine result pages without doing too much. 

The key to raising the authority of your website is showing Google “proof” that you provide value to others. 

This can be done in a lot of ways but the most effective way is to get other websites (preferably with a lot of authority) and social platforms to mention your website and link to your website.

The act of proactively getting people to link back to your website is called link building. The links you receive are called backlinks. 

Google sees backlinks as votes from other websites that your content is “legit”. 

The more links you get the more your authority increases in Google’s eyes and the easier it’ll become to rank your content.

Does this mean you can’t rank without link-building? 

No. Dependent on how competitive your niche is you could get by without building links but link building speeds up the process significantly and can earn you a lot more money.

How do you measure the authority of a website?

You could count the number of links directed to a website but since some links are a lot more valuable than others it’s hard to judge websites this way. 

Luckily, a website called Moz came with a simple rating system that gives an idea of how much authority a website can have based on its capability to rank on search engines.

They called this metric domain authority or in short DA. This is a metric that goes from 0-100. The higher your DA, the higher your capability is to rank on Google.

You can use Mangools SiteProfiler to find the Moz metrics of all websites. 

Just type in the URL you want information about and Mangools will provide you with the information you need.

I also recommend using the Moz toolbar (which is free) because it immediately gives you the DA of every website you’re on. 

You can download the toolbar by clicking here.

I also like it because it also shows the Moz metrics of every website shown in the results pages of search engines.

Aside from the DA, Moz also rates individual pages on a website with their PA rating which is short for Page authority and they also have a metric called spam score for calculating how spammy your website is.

What’s important to know is that these scores aren’t absolute but they can help get an idea of how much authority a website has.

I have seen countless websites with lower DAs have pages rank higher than websites with higher DA because of other factors such as quality content but I think it’s a great metric to use.

In the image above you see the search results for a keyword I targeted in the past. As you can see, I rank higher than Trustpilot which has a DA of 92. 

8 of 10 times because of its higher DA it’ll outrank me but that’s okay because I don’t need a lot of pages to rank #1.

This page alone ranking second has me earning $72 a month on average in affiliate earnings. 

The traffic from these types of pages eventually starts stacking until you start earning a decent amount of money every month.

Linkbuilding: How to get people to link to your website.

When I first heard about link building it sounded intimidating but it’s simply a matter of asking websites to link to you in exchange for something you can offer.

The most common way to do this is by doing email outreach.

Most websites have at least 1 way to come in contact with the owner which often is a company email address. 

Email outreach is a big part of building links so I’d advise you not to neglect it.

The mentality behind link building.

Not all backlinks are created equal. Depending on what website they come from, how much they’ll contribute to your ability to rank high will differ. 

Every website that links to you will transfer link equity (aka link juice) to your website. This link juice determines how much authority you’ll receive. 

The higher the authority of the website, the more link juice will be transferred.

This means ideally you should target websites with a high domain authority but this often isn’t realistic for a brand-new website. 

Most website owners know the value their links provide so they rarely link to random people without getting something in exchange.

I consider websites with a DA of 45 and higher in the category of high authority websites that are going to be hard to get links from.

So instead of doing that focus for now on quantity. Target websites between DA 20 and 45. 

This doesn’t mean when an opportunity to get a link from a higher website shows itself that you should ignore it but if you spend all your time reaching out to websites that say no you’re wasting a lot of time in which you could’ve gotten other backlinks.

Something you should also keep in mind is that most people you contact for backlinks are either going to say no or not react at all.

In my case, 1 of 10 attempts tends to result in a backlink so be prepared to email a lot of people.

Luckily, there’s software that can automate this process but we’ll discuss this later.

Email template for outreach

On the internet, a lot of gurus advise you to send personalized emails but email outreach for backlinks is more of a numbers game in my opinion. 

So basically the email I send to everyone contains these elements:

• My name and the website I represent [ Maybe also talk about my skillset if applicable]
• My request for a backlink or a guest post
• Some of my previous work 
• Ideas for topics
• What I can offer in exchange for the backlink [ optional it depends on whether the website states they accept guest posts.]

In the end, it’ll look something like this:

I might personalize it more if I’m targeting websites with high DAs but for the most part, basic emails like this tend to work well for me.

What can you offer to earn links?

In Google’s ideal situation, you create high-quality content and people will naturally link to it if they find value in it. 

While I have seen many websites take this course it often takes a very long time to get to this point because people need to see the content in the first place.

This would mean focusing on other marketing methods and getting backlinks as a result of that. 

We’re not going to do that.

We’re going to proactively target websites and try to get links.

When you’re proactively building links to speed up getting ranked the most common way to earn links is by offering to create content for websites. 

Here are some methods that people use when creating content for backlinks:

1. Guest posting

Guest posting is an excellent way to get backlinks from other websites. To this day, it’s the most popular method for building links.

While it isn’t as potent of a method as it was in the past I advise beginners to take full advantage of it.

What’s important to know about guest posting is that Google has a love/ hate relationship with link building through guest posting.

In the past, a lot of low-quality websites would write low-quality content for websites in mass to get links. 

This is why I’d advise treating guest posts as if its content that would be posted on your website. 

This way Google won’t give you “penalties” that prevent you from getting traffic and at the same time, you can make a name for yourself.

2. Niche edits

Niche edits are very similar to guest posts but instead of making a new post or piece of content, you add content to an existing post of a webpage you’re targeting.

What I like about niche edits is that they guarantee that it’s easier to negotiate to get an editorial link in the main text instead of the author box.

3. Infographics/ video’s

Another great way to get links is to create infographics or videos for websites. You follow the same process when it comes to outreach as with guest posting but offers to create videos or infographics. 

You don’t even need to know how to make these yourself.

I know a lot of people that hire people from other countries that don’t charge a lot of money to create these videos and infographics.

There are many more methods to build links such as the skyscraper technique or resource page link building but I have noticed that the 3 strategies above exist the longest and are used by some of the authorities in my niches. 

That alone gave me enough reason to try them out.

If you want to know more about other techniques I have a post from Backlinko that shows you how to perform other types of techniques for link building.

External Blog Post: Link building for SEO

Pre-requisites for good backlinks 

Earlier I said not all links are created equal and because of this, you need to know exactly what types of links you should target. While links can do wonders for your website there are also link types that can hurt your website. 

Let’s first take a look at the characteristics of links you should target and after that, I’ll show you the type of links you should avoid.

Unique Links 

Search engines see backlinks as votes for your credibility so it’s beneficial for you to have as many of those as possible. 

That being said, just as in real life only 1 person talking about your competency the entire time carries less weight than multiple people talking about it once.

You can see this when measuring how much link juice is being transferred to your website through a backlink.

After acquiring a backlink from a website every new backlink you get from that same website will transfer less link juice than the original backlink.

This is why you should aim for acquiring 1 or 2 backlinks from a website and carrying on to the next. 

It is better to have 10 backlinks from 10 different websites than 50 backlinks from the same site.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t accept them if they’re offered but the energy and time you put into acquiring these links shouldn’t be equal to those initial backlinks.

No-follow vs Do-follow links

Links directed to your website are either no-follow or do-follow links. The difference between these links is a piece of code that is attached to the link. 

Normal links are always do-follow but the moment you attach code to a link to make it no-follow it prevents the link from sharing authority from the linking website with your website.

The Moz toolbar application is also handy for determining whether a link has a “no follow” code attached to it. 

Here’s how you do it

You log into your Moz account.

On the toolbar is a pencil icon. 

After clicking on it you’ll see 4 dashes with different colors with the words follow, no–follow, external, and internal above them.

When you click on one of the dashes, every link that’s defined by the word above the dash will be highlighted in that color.

In the picture below, I’ve clicked on the dash that showcases all the “follow” links on a page. You can see that all the “follow” links are highlighted. 

When you start your outreach for backlinks you’re going to aim for do-follow backlinks.

Links from websites with traffic

Links from websites without traffic still have value but ideally, you should go aim for websites with as much organic traffic as possible. 

Why?

Because these websites have been approved by Google. 

The fact that Google directs traffic to them is proof of that. Getting backlinks from websites that are approved by Google weighs more than those that aren’t.

Links from countries you’re targeting for traffic

Preferably you want to get links from websites in the country you’re targeting or at least share that language. 

Links from other countries will still have a lot of value but the more precise you can be with your link building, the better it is.

I won’t advise fixating too much on this but at least make sure the links come from websites with the same language.

Links from websites that are relevant to your niche

Let’s say you started an architecture firm and you were looking for testimonials to build some credibility when it comes to your skill. 

Who’s testimonial would sound more convincing? That of someone that doesn’t know anything about architecture or that of a world-class architect?

Anyone would say the opinion of a world-class architect would hold more weight than that of a random person in that instance. 

Google operates with that same thought. Links coming from websites that are relevant to your niche will do much more than those coming from websites that have nothing to do with your content.

This is why you should mostly target websites that are relevant to your niche or make at least sure that the page that is linking to you is relevant to your content.

The location of the link directing to your website

The location of your link is very important to Google if you’re attempting to pro-actively increase your website authority.

Google has brought out multiple articles on their webmaster blog that talk about the links they prefer. 

Google prefers what they call an editorial link. This is a link in the main content on a page.

Links in the header, footer, and sidebar have no value from an SEO standpoint so if anybody offers you a link like that it’s best to deny the offer.

The only exception is the author box in guest post links.

Although they don’t contribute to your ranking capability as much as in the past, they can do wonders if you have enough of them from high-quality websites.

Links from websites with a low spam-score

Spam websites are websites that don’t provide anyone with value. Despite not providing the value they can have a high DA as a result of having backlinks from other spam websites.

Often you can recognize them because they tend to not rank for anything and the only thing they have on the website are offers for products to buy. 

Some spam websites are harder to recognize than others this is why Moz created a rating called spam score. 

Spam score showcases the percentage of websites sharing the same characteristics as the website you’re on that are penalized by Google.

Backlinks with a relevant anchor text

The website that links back to you will add a link to the text on their page. We call this the anchor text. 

For example, let’s look at the link right here. 

For more information about affiliate marketing take a look at my “pros and cons of affiliate marketing” post. 

The anchor text in this example is “...pros and cons of affiliate marketing…”

The text they attach to the link must be relevant to your content. 

It doesn’t have to be an exact match but it has to be relevant. 

Some examples of other anchor text could’ve been:

• affiliate marketing post
•  advantages and disadvantages
•  Realistic affiliate marketing post
• etc.

Blackhat SEO

Blackhat SEO is the act of optimizing your website in a way that goes against the guidelines of Google.

In short, Google doesn’t like links that aren’t created naturally so when it encounters a large volume of these links a manual check will be done to judge if the website should be penalized.

Examples of black SEO strategies could be:

• Paying for backlinks
• Link exchange
  Exchanging backlinks for backlinks with websites is considered blackhat. The moment Google notices this happening (in mass) they’ll start letting these links cancel each other out.
• Creating a private blog network
  Creating multiple blogs that all connect in an attempt to increase your domain authority. This is often done with web 2.0 subdomains from Blogger because their new sub-domain has the same DA as Blogger.com itself.

There are more black hat techniques and SEMrush has made a great article about them.

How to find backlink opportunities

Using Google operators

Most websites that accept guest posts have pages specifically designed to show people interested in guest posting the guidelines for writing a guest post.

Luckily, most of these pages have the same name so they’re very easy to find using Google Operators. Operators are text or symbols that help target specific pages in your searches. 

Most guest post pages are named along the lines of “write for us”, “Contribute”, or “guest post for us” so they’re easy to find by typing in operators in the search bar such as:

• Niche “want to write for”
• Niche “submit blog post”
• Niche“write for us”
• Niche “guest article”
• Niche “This is a guest post by”
• Niche “contributing writer”
• Write For Us — Guest Post Submission Guidelines
• Niche  Write For Us
• Write For Us — Niche Blog
• Niche “submit blog post”
• Niche  “suggest a post”
• Niche “guest post”
• Niche “write for us”
• NicheBlog “guest post”
• Niche “contributing writer”
• Niche “want to write for”
• Niche“guest article”
• Niche “This is a guest post by”
• Niche Blog | Write For Us | Niche Tips Guest Post
• Write For Us — Niche News
• Niche + “write for us” + guest post
• Niche write for us guest post
• Niche blog “Write for Us”
• Niche articles write for us
• Niche business “write for us”
• Niche blogs write for us

Here’s a really handy article from Ahrefs with Google operators that have helped me over the years.

Spying on your competitors

Another possibility is taking a look at where the links of your competitors come from and targeting those websites. 

Mangools LinkMiner feature makes it possible to find the backlinks of every website. Earlier in this course, you learned how to find your competitors. 

You can type the URL of the competing websites into LinkMiner and get access to all the backlinks they’ve acquired. 

You could even get the backlinks from page competitors by looking up the exact URLs of pages targeting the same keywords and putting them into Linkminer.

You can find more information about LinkMiner in this blog post:

External blog post: How to find and replicate competitors backlinks

Paying for backlinks

For the most part, I wouldn’t advise paying for backlinks because most backlink opportunities that require you to pay are websites that don’t pass on authority. 

Google also penalizes websites that pay for backlinks. 

That being said, if you decide to pay for backlinks it’s very hard for Google to discern which backlinks are getting paid for and which aren’t.

So in most cases, unless you make it painfully obvious that you’re paying for links it should be alright.

There are only a few instances where I think it could be beneficial to pay for backlinks such as:

• SEO agencies
  In this case, you aren’t paying for the backlinks but the manual outreach. Agencies also make sure that these links seem like they were acquired naturally.
• Links from websites that authorities in your niche link to.
  Most of the authority websites aren’t going to link to just by asking them. In most cases, you’ll either have to build a relationship with them or pay.

SEO agencies 

When you hire a good SEO agency they’ll perform manual outreach for you and vet the websites before building the backlinks to your website. 

It’s often hard to find good SEO agencies for example on my podcast I had Alex from WPeagle as a guest and he hired someone to build links and his website got penalized because he was building black hat links. 

This is why if you’re going the route of letting SEO agencies handle building links I’d recommend going with Stanventures. 

I have worked with them in the past. 

They have a good balance between price and quality. 

Take a look at what they have to offer by clicking on the link below. You'll also receive a 55% discount on your links if you use the link below.

>>> Click Here To Build Links With Stanventures

How to Perform Automated Email Outreach Campaigns

In my first 2 years as an affiliate marketer, I’d email every website posting content related to my niche one by one. 

It gave me some great results but it took an insane amount of time to find these websites, craft the emails, find out if the email addresses were still accurate, and create content. 

It was very hard to perform outreach campaigns and create content for my blog at the same time. One day I came across a YouTube channel from an SEO by the name of Chris Palmer.

His philosophy was that link-building was a numbers game.

Instead of doing this one by one, he’d use software to send the same outreach email to hundreds of website owners all at once and see what sticks. 

This isn’t essential for you to earn money as an affiliate marketer but it’s a great way to start scaling your organic rankings after getting some initial success with manual link building.

I’m now going to share with you the 4-step process needed to perform an automated email outreach campaign. 

Keyword research to find prospects 

The first thing we need to do is find prospects that we can contact to get backlinks. 

To do this we’re going back to Mangools its keyword finder and looking for some keywords related to our niche.

We’re going to take a different approach this time when it comes to our keyword research. 

We’re looking for high-ranking pages with a lot of backlinks and we’ll go after the websites that are linking to these pages.

To do that we’re going to look for keywords with great difficulty for ranking anything above 50 should work.

The metric keyword difficulty is based on competing websites and the number of backlinks the top-ranking pages have.

This is why it’s the perfect tool for finding a lot of backlink opportunities.

Besides the keywords having a high difficulty we are purposefully not going to target money keywords. 

The perfect keywords to target for finding link-building opportunities should be information keywords. Preferably, keywords that are questions, guides, or statistics

After finding the keywords, we’re going to type them into Google to see what pages appear in the search results. 

Now we’re going to put the URL of these pages into Linkminer.

Not all links directing to these pages will be of value to us so we’re going to filter some backlinks out of the Linkminer results.

The links need to be active.

We want the minimum DA of the websites linking back to the pages to be at least 30. We’re also filtering out all the no-follow links that don’t transfer link juice.

Put the filter to 1 link per domain. 

Now that we’ve all the websites linking to the top pages we’re going to export them into a CSV file. 

We’re going to find all their email addresses and send them emails offering something in return for a backlink.

You can do this same process by putting your direct competitor's website or page URL into Linkminer and targeting all the people linking back to them.

Create backlink-worthy content 

Now that we have found the targets we’re going to email our next step is creating content that they can link back to. 

Every website that is worth linking from is not going to accept any mediocre content. 

You wouldn’t believe how many people email me daily for a backlink to the content of which the quality is so low I’d be embarrassed to even recommend it to my readers.

Create content that’d provide value to the readers of your targeted website. This content should be informational just like the keyword we targeted in the first step. 

• Informational content 
• case study 
• statistics
• how to’s
• etc.

This should be high-quality long-form content preferably without affiliate links and opt-in forms for your email list.

Otherwise, website owners might think it’s an attempt to steal their traffic. 

Find email addresses

Now that we have the content and a list of websites that we would want a backlink from we’re going to find their email addresses. 

In the past, I’d do this manually and it would take forever to get through all the websites I found. Luckily, we have software now that can extract email addresses from websites. 

The most popular software application that does this is called Hunter. 

It’s an email scraper that extracts email addresses from websites and also verifies them to make sure the email address is still active.

Once you’ve logged into Hunter.

You can insert your CSV file with all the websites on it and it’ll look for all the email addresses and verify them. 

Blog post: How to find and validate emails in Hunter

Send out bulk emails

The final step is to send out emails to all the email addresses. 

Getresponse can send multiple emails at once but unfortunately, they can only send them to people that have agreed to sign-up for your email list. 

This is why we need a program specifically designed for automated cold emails. 

The most popular option for this is called Woodpecker. 

It comes with A/B testing functionality, email list verification and validation, analytics, and more. 

You can send out the same email to all the email addresses at once and start negotiating for backlinks from there. 

Blog Post: Quickstart Vol. 1: How to set up a cold email campaign

Linkbuilding expectations

Linkbuilding is simple once you get the hang of it but I always recommend people lower their expectations. 

I remember emailing people to see if they’d link back to my website and a lot of them wouldn’t answer. It’s easy to get discouraged especially when you’re just starting. 

I didn’t know that the majority of them would say no. 

After discussing it with some people I found out that this is pretty normal. 

Now I assume that 1 in 10 interactions will lead to a successful result. This is why I recommend reaching out to as many websites as possible. 

A lot of affiliate marketing and SEO YouTubers don’t want to admit it but email outreach for backlinks is indeed a numbers game.