Can Social Media Affect Your Rankings? Part 4: The Debate (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

Does link building still matter?

The next thing I want to talk to you about is link building. Links and SEO: if you go back five or ten years, it was all about link building — you could rank a site on links alone. And links are still massively important, so you do need to have a strategy for them.

The biggest way you're going to get links nowadays is through PR. PR is amazing — if you can get a really good piece of PR and get it to go as wide as possible, with the links in it, that's going to be brilliant. Manufacturer links, links from your suppliers — they're often hard to obtain, but extremely valuable.

What should your anchor text say?

You also want to think about the anchor text. The anchor text is the text that appears on the page of the person supplying the link. We don't want a piece of anchor text that says "click here" — we want it to say, for example, "buy our rifles here" or "rifle supplier UK". Think about a keyword that relates to your business, that you're trying to rank for.

So when you're talking to people about providing you with a link, think about saying to them: this is the link we want, this is the page we want it to go to, and this is the text we would like linking. Don't just ask. We don't want "click here" — we want some relevancy. The anchor text that appears in the link is really important.

What content earns links?

Content that is linkable — that people want to link to — is going to be your most valuable piece of content. The biggest thing that's searched for on YouTube, for example, is "how to". So if you can produce a "how to do this" guide, people are going to link to it. Make it interesting. Give some knowledge away. Like the video I'm producing today — if it's useful to people, they'll want to link to it and share it. That's how you're going to get the most links.