Content Is King

It may sound cliché, but “content is king”, at least for most of the parts. It didn’t really matter to most webmasters that Bill Gates predicted that “content will be where most of the money made on the Internet will be”. At least, it didn’t matter until recently. Google’s relatively recent Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird updates made it painfully clear to webmasters that they needed to update their content marketing strategy. We all know how big of a bite those updates took out of most of our sites’ visitor numbers. Content wasn’t treated with a very high regard until just a little while ago. Black hat SEO reigned supreme.

If Content Is King, Then Relevancy Is Queen

Relevancy has become the chief compliment to great content, making the metaphorical Queen to the Content King. For example, if you’re creating a guest post for someone’s blog, you want to make sure that the content of that blog post will be relevant both to that audience’s readership and for your readers. There should be a confluence, or overlap, of sorts.

Some link-builders will ignore this principle, however. Whether because link-builders are ineffective, lazy, or ignorant (or all three), they will try to diminish the utility of this principle of matching quality and relevancy. What they will do instead of the right thing is to get links with poorly written articles, articles that were written for websites with hardly any relevance.

These unscrupulous link-building tactics will ultimately backfire, and they will be seen as nothing more than ploys to manipulate the search engine rankings, while doing nothing to contribute to a higher quality, richer, and better experience for web users – which is one of Google’s primary goals.

Effective Outreach, Networking, And Relationship Building Are Crucial

If content is the king, and relevancy is the queen, then effective outreach, networking, and relationship building are the gatekeepers, so to speak, of this extended metaphor. These gatekeepers are tasked with turning away the enemies at his majesty’s castle gates. In this content kingdom, producing relevant, high-quality content will do very little good if the outreach is so ineffective and paltry that you never get that royal audience.

The best link-builders know about how to reach out to other webmasters. Great link-builders have learned that to get the most valuable niche links in a community, one has to integrate into that community. A link-builder is not just a link-builder. A link-builder is not just a webmaster. A link-builder is a member of the community. The way to ensure that your page level relevancy and your link level relevancy are aligned is to join the niche communities that are built around your site. Work with the people in those communities.

How To Get These Link-Building Relationships Started

There are several different ways to start building a foundation of great relationships:

Social media: The social media landscape is an excellent place to find new community members. You can even advertise to new people interested in your niche and then make them members of your own social media sphere of influence. You can create your own community. You can also contribute to other Facebook Pages, groups, and communities. Get to know the people who are interested in your niche – and tell them about what you have to offer.
Blog commenting: While unauthentic blog commenting is a bad idea – and black hat SEO agents are almost ruined it by continuously inundating the blogosphere with spam – it can still be done in the right way. Blog commenting can be done to help build a community. It can be done to build relationships.

Source linking: Link to relevant content in your articles. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it can also help tremendously in your outreach efforts.

To Chapter 6: Pitching The Media For Contribution, Get A Link From HuffingtonPost