FREE SEO Backlinking Charts

[searchnology]

There's a lot of information floating around about SEO and backlinking strategies. If you have been a member of this forum for a while you know what I mean. Well, it's a lot to take in and since I am a visual learner I thought I would put together a chart as a visual reference for virtually EVERY BACKLINKING TACTIC YOU WILL FIND ON THIS FORUM for myself and thought it would be useful to some folks here as well.

You can use my backlinking chart as a sort of "visual checklist" for things you have or have not implemented or maybe use it to brainstorm and come up with your own ideas.

Basics #1: You can get backlinks to a website in 3 ways.

1. Link bait: This is content on your site (in any number of formats) that is so informative, entertaining, and/or interesting enought that people naturally link to it from other sites including their own, thus building backlinks to your site. These types of links are considered the best backlinks since they are targeted, natural, dofollow, traffic generating, and often you can get them from high pagerank sites. Examples of link bait include: how-to content, games, tools, reviews, data/research, top 10 lists, etc. You won't find much information about link bait (sometimes called viral content) on this forum because it can be a high effort method but some of the best examples of this type of content can be found at Digg.com

2. Forced links: These are links that you create yourself on other sites. They are usually considered lower quality than link bait links and are often times considered as "backlink spam" from an SEO standpoint because they don't occur naturally. You can often times find high pagerank sites using this method and you can also proactively create lots of them. Examples include, social bookmarks, link directories, blog comments, link exchange, purchased links, forum profiles. You can also purchase or exchange backlinks on other sites. This is where most of the offers(at least in the past) on this forum have been associated with.

3. Syndication: When you freely provide/distribute the content on your site for other sites to use this is called syndication. This is typically accomplished by other sites using your site's RSS feed(s). RSS feeds can be used to publish your site's content to Facebook , Twitter, blogs, RSS aggregators, etc. You can also distribute software programs, press releases, and videos from your site to other sites. These types of links are usually the lowest quality in nature because lower quality sites tend to use other site's RSS feeds instead of their own content but once again you can generate a ton of backlinks. This can also be considered "spammy" if you over do it.


Basics #2: The ability for your backlinks to increase your SEO rankings depends on 4 primary factors.

Though the ranking of their importance can be debated the utilization of the factors below are fairly consistent across all search engines. There are other factors as well but these are the most prominent.

1. The competition for your keyword(s) - It goes without saying that if the target niche/keywords is highly competitive you will have a harder time ranking your site on any search engine.

2. The number of backlinks to your site - The number of links to a site is considered the "popularity" vote. The idea being that relevant sites with high quality content should naturally receive a high number of backlinks.

3. The authority of your backlinks - This is similar to link popularity but it focuses more on "which" sites are giving the vote with a backlink. The idea here is that highly reputable sites will only link to other highly reputable sites. Taking this factor into consideration is also a way for search engines to counteract link spamming which usually entails proactively building lots of low authority links to artificially boost link popularity.

4. The relevancy of your backlinks - Sites linking to your site should be relevant to your site's theme/niche. This can be achieved either at the link(anchor text), page(content), or site(site theme) level.


Basics #3: A simplified SEO backlinks strategy workflow is as follows:

1. Research the themed keywords in the target niche you desire. (see my sig for a great niche/keyword discovery tool)

2. Create original, high quality content around your target keyword(s) and repurpose that content continuously in various formats for onsite and offsite use. See my SEO chart for all available content formats.

3. Create backlinks to your site from various types of 3rd party sites using your target keywords(s) in the anchor text of the link. Some backlinks will count to improve SERPs, others will contribute to bringing traffic.

4. Syndicate your site's content (and even content from backlink sources) to even more 3rd party sites using various tools like RSS. You can even re-syndicate the syndicated content.

This entire SEO backlinks strategy revolves around constantly generating and repurposing content and building backlinks. You hear a lot of people saying that backlinks are the key to SEO and others say that content is the key but in my opinion if you want a site that will stand the test of time, you really need both to improve SERPs and increase traffic. Quality content takes resources to produce so there is no free lunch but content generation is something that can be outsourced.

You can download both off-site and on-site SEO charts below.

Off-site SEO/Traffic Chart - This chart is now a free bonus with my Keyword tool WSO
On-site SEO Checklist - This chart is now a free bonus with my Keyword tool WSO

No, you can't have the original docs but I am more than willing to make additions or edits based on community feedback.


Some important items to note based on my own experience and observations:

1. You don't have to have a Wordpress website to make this strategy work but Wordpress is highly recommended given it is SEO optimized out of the box, the ability to easily add content, as well as the plethora of SEO friendly plugins available to automate or semi-automate things

2. I didn't include a category specifically for hub pages such as Squiddo on the chart as they are somewhat of a special case but I recommend just including them in your "proprietary link network".

3. I did include blog comments as a backlink source but be aware that most blogs use nofollow tags these days and also if you spam them your site URL can get blacklisted. Still, even if you don't get the SEO boost from some blogs, comments are a good traffic strategy from relevant and high traffic blogs.

4. I have yet to see any traction myself or a good case study on this forum for video marketing. I included it on the map but just a disclaimer there as well.

5. Also, link directories have lost some of their punch as far as Google is concerned but they still give you results with other search engines.

6. There are some sneaky tricks to learn for article marketing. (especially ezinearticles.com) and forum backlinks. You can find information on this by searching this site.

If this information was helpful to you just click the "Thanks" button at the bottom right of this post.

Enjoy!

[Bob Montgomery]

I did find the list of tools helpful and the diagram helps one visualize how all of this fits together. For someone fairly new at SEO. this helps make sense of it all.

Good Job!

[searchnology]

Thank Bob, your comments made the effort worthwhile.

Originally Posted by Bob Montgomery

I did find the list of tools helpful and the diagram helps one visualize how all of this fits together. For someone fairly new at SEO. this helps make sense of it all.

Good Job!

[preatorian]

by using a diagram well help us visualize how all are working together when it comes to seo.

[searchnology]

Thanks Preatorian, I agree. I just added a new tool to the list. SEO Link Dominator. (Sorry I missed you Steve!)

Originally Posted by preatorian

by using a diagram well help us visualize how all are working together when it comes to seo.

[adddirectoryp]

Thanks for the good article.

[ap09.com]

Thanks for the article.Its really helpful to me.

[sjedwardz]

thanks I'm a visual learner as well!
Anyone have any recommendations on the best way to chart your site structure and what seo you have been doing on various parts of it? At the moment I'm doing it in excel but it gets quite messy.

Would be handy to keep track of anchor texts, outsourcing of profile links, social bookmarking etc...

[sarah_may]

Well, I have downloaded the chart and will go through it soon and hope it will be useful.

[searchnology]

Here's a quick checklist for onsite SEO....still thinking of doing a chart for this as well.

1. Use keywords in Title tag. Fewer words the better as more worsd will dilute the primary keyword. Use keywords in description tags as well but write these more as a marketing communication since they aren't referenced as much by search engines.

2. Use keyword in H1 tags. You keywords in H2, H3 tags as well. Search engines expect these to appear in a nested fashion as you go down the page.

3. Use keywords in ALT text for images and include keywords in image names but make the naming seem natural. i.e. keyword_image_logo.gif instead of just keyword.gif.

4. Use "nofollow" tags on external links to other sites. You don't want to bleed link juice from your site.

5. Sprinkle your primary keyword throughout the site but don't keyword stuff. Bold and underline whenever possible.

6. Use keyword in domain, directories and page names whenever possible. I actually have done this in all three.

7. Include a valid XML sitemap and submit to Google and Yahoo. Ping the search engines whenever this is updated. (You can use Google webmaster tools to manage this and the next item below)

8. Ensure that you 301 redirect domain.com to www.domain.com to ensure you get credit for both domain versions. This can get really involved such as redirecting www.domain.com/ to www.domain.com but the basics will go a long ways.

9. If you have a Wordpress blog use permalinks and include keywords in the category name(s)

10. Include a robots.txt file and ensure appropriate files/directories and allowed to be indexed

11. Add fresh content on a regular basis. Either by writing yourself or by auto-posting of some type. (NOTE: I am not a huge advocate of always adding new content. My site has had a static homepage for 6 years and it still ranks on the first page of Google for 10 keywords.)

12. Ensure that all internal pages have a link to your homepage and DO NOT use nofollow tags

13. Use CSS whenever possible for formatting. This allows all of your content to be read more easily.

14. Use these tools to check for more onsite SEO optimization
Website SEO Tool | Website Grader
Free SEO Report | MetaFever

Others can feel free to add to this....

Originally Posted by sjedwardz

thanks I'm a visual learner as well!
Anyone have any recommendations on the best way to chart your site structure and what seo you have been doing on various parts of it? At the moment I'm doing it in excel but it gets quite messy.

Would be handy to keep track of anchor texts, outsourcing of profile links, social bookmarking etc...

[dburk]

Originally Posted by searchnology

4. Use "nofollow" tags on external links to you don't bleed linkjuice from your site..

Hi searchnology,

Nice post!

I have to say that number 4 on your checklist is no longer valid and hasn't been for the past year and half.

See Matt Cutts' blog post where he clarifies this:
PageRank sculpting

[searchnology]

Thanks, this was worded incorrectly (fixed now) but the principle of not sending link juice to exernal sites (but keeping it in your own site (see #12) still applies in my opinion.

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi searchnology,

Nice post!

I have to say that number 4 on your checklist is no longer valid and hasn't been for the past year and half.

See Matt Cutts' blog post where he clarifies this:
PageRank sculpting

[dburk]

Originally Posted by searchnology

Thanks, this was worded incorrectly (fixed now) but the principle of not sending link juice to exernal sites (but keeping it in your own site (see #12) still applies in my opinion.

Hi searchnology,

So you are saying you don't believe Matt Cutts of Google when he says:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Clearly he indicates that using nofollow will not prevent the PageRank from bleeding. It will not pass PageRank to the page that is linked to, but it still dilutes the PageRank the same as if you did not use the nofollow attribute.

[Dr Livingston]

Very cool map. I love visuals

[searchnology]

I guess I am not following...from what I gather, he is not saying that external links DON'T pass pagerank, but rather he is saying they are not passing pagerank equally as in the past. No?

At the end of the article he reiterates this again.
[*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi searchnology,

So you are saying you don't believe Matt Cutts of Google when he says:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Clearly he indicates that using nofollow will not prevent the PageRank from bleeding. It will not pass PageRank to the page that is linked to, but it still dilutes the PageRank the same as if you did not use the nofollow attribute.

[searchnology]

Thanks Doc!

Someone brought up the idea of cross promoting the external posts (the whole "backlinks for your backlinks" idea)

...I suppose you could but to me it makes more sense to spend your precious time promoting sites you own and control. I haven't seen any case studies yet the impact of building backlinks for your backlinks so I'm sticking to that opinion for now.

Originally Posted by Dr Livingston

Very cool map. I love visuals

[dburk]

Originally Posted by searchnology

I guess I am not following...from what I gather, he is not saying that external links DON'T pass pagerank, but rather he is saying they are not passing pagerank equally as in the past. No?

At the end of the article he reiterates this again.
[*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results

If you read his entire post you will see that he is saying that originally using nofollow would prevent the dilution of PageRank as it flows through your site, what you call "bleeding PageRank". After they changed this you still dilute, or bleed, Pagerank when you use nofollow. So nofollow no longer prevents bleeding of PageRank.

PR sculpting or building PR Black Hole sites no longer benefit you in anyway except removing the incentive for contributors to post spam.

[searchnology]

Hmmm....I guess I would argue that for the same reason spammers want "dofollow" links, I don't want to use "dofollow" for links to external sites. The article does seem to make sense for internal linking.

At any rate, thanks for that link and the feedback. It adds value which is the entire purpose of this post.

Originally Posted by dburk

If you read his entire post you will see that he is saying that originally using nofollow would prevent the dilution of PageRank as it flows through your site, what you call "bleeding PageRank". After they changed this you still dilute, or bleed, Pagerank when you use nofollow. So nofollow no longer prevents bleeding of PageRank.

PR sculpting or building PR Black Hole sites no longer benefit you in anyway except removing the incentive for contributors to post spam.

[searchnology]

I updated the SEO/Traffic Chart with a new tool called Web2Mayhem. I haven't tried it yet but it looks very interesting and supports posting to software directories which is very unique.

I have also created a nifty on-site SEO checklist based on an earlier post.

Here are the download links:

Off-site SEO/Traffic Chart
On-site SEO Checklist

Enjoy!

[roxstar]

Very nice! I love it, man =) I'm saving myself a copy, and probably gonna use it for quick reference.

[stellamary]

Your chart is useful for us...The development of the back ling will create the development of the website also..This is possible by your post.thanks for this nice post ..keep sharing.

[searchnology]

Here's a few free backlink checking tools

Site Explorer - Yahoo! Site Explorer
Free Back Link Tracker Tool / Search Engine Backlink Tracking Utility / Track Back Links
Link Diagnosis - examine your link competition


Link diagnosis is really cool because it identifies the strength for each backlink.

All backlinks are not created equal...even those with the same pagerank so having the most backlinks isn't always the best approach to higher rankings.

I hope that helps.

[dreamer111]

very helpful tips and really working. thanks!!!

[eibhlin]

Thank you! You've shared very generously in the original post as well as your comments in this thread. I hope people take the time to read all of them.

For anyone working with a "systems" approach, it would be easy to create actual checklists -- one for each site or product -- to be sure that every possible on- and offsite SEO point is covered.

I'm a visual learner, so these two pages are tremendously helpful!

Thanks again!

[Agnel]

Informative thread. Learnt more about backlinking chart. Thanks for sharing with us. All the information provided here are very useful.

[searchnology]

Like I said previously, I have yet to see a good case study of video marketing and how it improves SEO or traffic but here is a great list of all of the major video sharing sites which is sortable by Alexa rank as well as pagerank and language...very handy.

Video Sites like Youtube - List of Video Sharing Websites - ReelSEO

[Mandy Swift]

Love the visuals. Such a newbie that I don't even understand what 'resyndicate the syndicated items' means, but looking forward to it when I get there!

[searchnology]

Hi Mandy,

Glad to hear it is helpful.

Syndication is just using original content (maybe already on your site) and posting it on other 3rd party sites. Re-syndication is just taking the content posted on 3rd party sites and having it posted again on even more 3rd party sites.

An example is as follows:

1. Make posts of content to your Wordpress site.

2. Take your Wordpress RSS feed and post it to Twitterfeed.com

3. Twitterfeed.com will post it to your Twitter account or a number of other sites. This is syndication.

4. You can then have your Twitter posts sent to other sites such like stocktwits.com automatically. This is re-syndication.

There's all kinds of variations to the above but that is how it would generally work. The idea is to get as many links (for SEO) and eyeballs (for traffic) on your content which points back to your website.

I hope that helps.

Originally Posted by Mandy Swift

Love the visuals. Such a newbie that I don't even understand what 'resyndicate the syndicated items' means, but looking forward to it when I get there!

[Goodworker]

I am not seeing the thanx button, but did want to thank you. THANK YOU!

[searchnology]

It's in the list of black buttons on the bottom right of all posts....but no worries.

Originally Posted by Goodworker

I am not seeing the thanx button, but did want to thank you. THANK YOU!

[TheDebtEliminator]

This is a great thread

I appreciate this information on SEO ... some nuggets have been learned

All the Best

[Kim Davis]

Just when I thought you were done giving us great information... I would scroll down and there was more... Thanks a ton for your help

[searchnology]

Thanks Kim and TheDebtEliminator...

I will be posting a revised version that is more of a flow chart that includes new tactics such as autoblogging, classified ad links, building our own authority backlinks, and creating RSS feeds from your backlinks.

Originally Posted by Kim Davis

Just when I thought you were done giving us great information... I would scroll down and there was more... Thanks a ton for your help

[shop2002]

Thank you very much. I will do it.

[MarkAse]

Thanks for the reminder on software creation. It's been on my to-do list for quite some time, but I have never taken the time to actually give it a try. It's now on my weekly to-do list.

[seoevans]

yes very nice its really helpful but can abyone provide more information in this regard...

[jamessol]

like it... very helpful.
see practical application here.

thanks a lot. this will keep me busy for the next 3 days hehehe.

[hypes057]

searchology - your charts are awesome, thanks for the great resource!

[searchnology]

Okay, the off-site SEO chart has been completely revamped! (See link in original post)

This is more of a flowchart version that includes practically EVERY BACKLINK CATEGORY you will find on this forum. In addition, I have included non-SEO specific traffic sources for reference. I figured it would be handy to see everything on a single page. Let me know if i missed anything.

More importantly, the chart visually shows how the backlink sources work together with your money site as well as with syndication.

I didn't include the resource list in this version (yet) as they really need to be categorized and you can still search the forum for most solutions. I may add it in later or if someone is willing to assist me with this free community project, I welcome the help.

Enjoy!...and don't forget to rate this thread so that it is more visible to others.

[thebarksmeow]

Thanks.. I definitely printed this out.

[lolawanda]

Thanks for sharing this awesome charts....I'll be using this in my seo campaign

[max922]

Cool! I like Visual Charts .. Thanks For Sharing. Keep it up

[mrfuong]

thanks for information

[jisoft]

searchnology thanks alot for information and providing the pdf files...<br>

[Reuben Kitrit]

Thanks for the charts!
I will be putting these up in front of me whenever I build a new site. Cheers...

[nitrospawn]

thank you that info was helpful

[usearchme2]

Pretty good post, I found this of use to myself, nice to have some visual aids and some good clear pointers when your mind can sometimes go blank lol !

Woc

[miellas]

Searchnology, thank you very much for this wonderful information that you have provided for us. Especially the visuals. We can all sit here and read but you made that extra effort to really put the picture in words. Many thanks.

[searchnology]

Thanks for the shout out Miellas....still looking for volunteers to help me with categorizing solution providers for each backlink source

Originally Posted by miellas

Searchnology, thank you very much for this wonderful information that you have provided for us. Especially the visuals. We can all sit here and read but you made that extra effort to really put the picture in words. Many thanks.

[david-forer]

Very nice charts. It helps to visually see them as opposed to just thinking what needs to be done next. Hopefully you will keep updating with suggestions as SEO changes on a daily basis it seems.

Thanks again