Identifying the best audience for links — Cyrus Shepard // Moz

About the speaker

Cyrus Shepard

Moz

Cyrus Shepard is an SEO, online marketer, content publisher, speaker, and writer. He has several years experience building highly qualified traffic through SEO and content marketing. His experience leading SEO at Moz and teaching others has introduced him to 1000s of top online marketers across the globe.

Part 1Link-building tactics from Moz — Cyrus Shepard // Moz
Part 2 Identifying the best audience for links — Cyrus Shepard // Moz
Part 3Educating the SEO Market — Cyrus Shepard // Moz

Show Notes

·01:21 : How to figure out the best audience for your links that youre building ·Ben and Cyrus talk about the importance of getting your links from reliable and trusted sources as one of the pillars to white-hat link-building. When searching for where to put your link, you want to find the relevant crowd. So find people who are already interested in what youre talking about. ·02:58 : How to promote your content ·Ben and Cyrus talk about how both competition and collaboration can help you to advance your ranking. While you must bump off those performing better than you to take their spot, you can also collaborate with those who rank higher as a way to build organic links. Ben and Cyrus discuss the collaborative approach to organic link-building. Before even creating the content, the first step to the collaborative approach is finding out who will share it. ·05:26 : How else can you syndicate your content to drive links? ·You can generate organic links by engaging in guest posting. Cyrus explains what guest posting is and how you can use this strategy to build both links and collaboration as well as expand your audience. Cyrus and Ben discuss the guest post methodology. ·06:50 : Is it good practice to use forums where you submit your link yourself? ·While Cyrus does nor normally recommend the approach of just submitting your link yourself, there is one exception to the rule. According to the Moz SEO Strategist, submitting your link yourself is only acceptable in the areas of niche directories. This bias is based on some younger SEOs getting spammy with their link-building ambitions. Ben and Cyrus discuss how you can determine where your content will be valued by finding where your audience is.

Episode Summary

·“What matters the most when you're link building is getting links from the right place.” ·“So I think when qualifying your link building outreach targets, you want to make sure of two things. You want to look for people who are already sharing content around your topic area and people who already talk about your topic area.” ·“I think what you're trying to accomplish with any piece of content, you have to understand the target market.” ·“One piece of advice I always give is before you create any content for link building, make sure you know who's going to link to it ahead of time.” ·“So there's two strategies right there, you know, collaborating and creating content for other people, that's kind of the guest post methodology.” ·“So I'm not always a huge fan of just submitting the link yourself, except in the areas of nice directories.” ·“I think about where there are communities centered around the content that you're creating. If there is a Reddit board where your content might be relevant and valuable, share that content.”