Semify execs Chad and Adam discuss how to outsource link building. Link building, as you probably know, is still an effective road to boosting your rankings in the search engine, so long as it's done properly and as part of a greater strategy including quality content. Most small businesses don't have time to build their links, as it can be tedious and exhaustive work! Nevertheless, it is of the utmost importance if you want to be found by Google and other search engines! What a busy small business owner can do is outsource link building to a firm who knows link building and other white label seo practices. Watch the video to learn more from Adam and Chad! TRANSCRIPTION: Good morning, Chad. Fascinating SEO stuff today, as always. I spent some quality time on the Warrior Forum last night, and I came across this fascinating statement that I really am dying for your input on. It said this-- if you outsource link building services usa, you will get penalized by Google and be dropped out of the SERPs. What do you think they were talking about? This was an actual post in a forum thread I read. Wow. Scary stuff. Fear always sells well, right? I think what that means is that clearly, links to your website still count, but the tactics that you use to build links to your website have changed. And so yes, in many respects, the minute you talk about link building people immediately start getting worried because of a lot of fear mongering that's going on there. But a lot of it is true. So I think really the main thing is that when you talk about outsource link building services, what you really need to be shifting from is outsource link building to content marketing, right? So you need to be thinking more about-- and it's what Google has always talked about-- they want to be doing things for the user, providing value, useful content to the user. And so rather than the days of going out and doing-- where people were engaging in blog commenting and other things that had very little value, I think what's here to stay in 2012 and going into 2013 is that when you are looking for ways to build the authority of your website, through links being one of them, you need to be writing useful content and doing content marketing. And what that means is starting with your keywords, thinking about what is a piece of content that would be useful for someone in this keyword space, and then having a writer write that and review it from that standpoint and then putting it on a website, or putting it somewhere where the likelihood that a user would find that and create value, so on a site that's category relevant, is very important. So I think that's what really the shift from outsource link building to really it should be outsourced content marketing, or content marketing. I think that's really where we've gone. I think you're right. I took it as, this is someone who hired-a cheap SEO reseller, and particularly offshore you can find them in abundance, and a lot of them use the same tactics-- you just described them-- that are now several years old and particularly in 2012 Google has really cracked down on. So they went to one of these outsource link building service usa or SEO reseller firms, they ended up with a lot of trashy blog comments and very thin content put on very poor sites with low domain authority, and maybe even over-anchoring without really thinking about the diversity of the inbound anchor text. And this guy probably got bounced out of the SERPs. And so he's generalizing that if you outsource link building, you get penalized. I don't think that's a true statement, but I think the way he went about it is probably true. So really, and I know there are more updates coming from Google-- we have one on our forum today that everyone was buzzing about, that Google has been pretty tight lipped about, that's an extension of penguin and panda-- but more and more, quality wins over quantity, and you really shouldn't be thinking about link building services usa. You should be thinking about content marketing and syndicating good, useful output that users want to see, and that will turn into link bait. And of course you prime the pump, right? The Semify strategy on SEO outsourcing is create excellent content backed by a research team, surround it with beautiful artwork that makes it engaging, put it on sites with high domain authority so it will get read and will also be syndicated through the internet and attract other links. Of course, that's our practice. But my guess is this guy in the forum didn't go for one of those quality outsource link building services. Right. And so, Adam, I think one of the things that is interesting is that you and I know that because we talk about it every day and we can sit down with other people who have spent a lot of time thinking about it. But how does someone out there when they are looking at outsource link building and trying to decide, was this 2010 tactics or 2009? Or is this the way to do it today? What are some of the telltale signs? Obviously you mentioned quality and is there a process around writing, but is there anything else that comes to mind that you should watch out for? Well, that's an excellent question. I mean, the first point is transparency. If you can't see what's going on, you have to assume it's not going to be excellent quality. Because things that people do that they're proud of they very rarely keep secret. So any firm you consider when you start looking for a link builder or an SEO outsourcer, you need to be able to see what's going on. Secondly, ask probing questions. How do you generate content? Do you have a research team? What does your keyword research process look like? How do you generate the themes and the facts that go into that content? In short, how do you ensure that this will be engaging for readers? And if the answer comes back, well, we try our best. Our writers just know how. I think you should be dissatisfied with that answer. What you should hear back is, well, we have a team of folks. Here's where they do their research. You can see that research here. There should be some sort of editorial document that's developed. There should be a direction for that content. And then, a fully transparent firm will be showing you where that content ended up. You can actually go look at it to evaluate the content, and secondarily to evaluate the sites that it ended up on. Those should have a domain authority at least, according to SEO models, in the 20s or better, so that that's going to get indexed. You should look at that site and make sure it's geared towards end users. It shouldn't be just a site that's built only for link building. That's the number one no-no if you talk to Matt Cutts. Everything has to be geared towards the real audience. And you can usually get a pretty good feel for it. Matt Cutts says he can smell the spam. I don't particularly like that statement, because I think there are objective things you can look for. But does the site have rankings? Is its purpose clearly identified? And is it good looking? Can you tell if it's modern? And those things usually are pretty objective, and again, if you can't get that out of the firm you're thinking about link building outsourcing to, you should stop right there and keep looking until you find the link building outsource agency that does show you that. OK. There's been some great points for people to look at, and feel free to give us a call because I think also having a set of options to compare to will also bring that to light as well, right? The ability to actually see different options and see what different people are calling content marketing or outsource link building. And you'll get a very good sense pretty fast of what the people doing the old tactics are doing and still talking about versus what people are doing that are a little bit more, as you said, modern or current on what's going to get you the best results. Cool. Talk to you later.
UPDATE TO THIS POST: On 1/19/2016, we switched from Moz to A h r e f s for domain metrics in the dashboard. Please see our Moz to A h r e f s system update post.