How Hunter Got 100+ Mentions in 3 Months With Cold Outreach Google ranking factors are constantly changing, but links remain one of the most critical factors used by search engines. If you want your website's pages to rank in search and attract tons of organic traffic, you will undoubtedly need links. Good links are like "votes", which help search engines identify the best content to show for specific search queries. There're tons of link building strategies you can try depending on your goals and needs. With some strategies, you can get those important "votes" and increase referral traffic and gain more visibility for your company. At Hunter, we're constantly improving our link profile and getting more visibility for our brand. We've tested tons of link-building strategies, and there's one that showed us the best results — link building via "best" listicles. In less than three months, we got 96 new links from 54 domains, were mentioned in 33 new product listings, and upgraded our positions in 17 listings. How did we do it? Read this guide, and I'll show you how we implemented this strategy step-by-step. First things first: What are "listicles"? A "listicle" is an article made of a list — typically with some kind of extra detail below each item. This is a popular format to review products or services as it's easy to skim to find important information. Titles tell you what to expect (e.g., each title could be the name of the product or service), and each...

7 External Linking Best Practices for SEO Content. Links. RankBrain. These are the top-ranking factors Google considers when it comes to showing results on the search engine result page (SERP). Given that much of search engine optimization centers around getting lots of good links to and from your website, it’s essential to learn how to make these links work for you. In this article, we discuss what external linking is and why you should do it. We also reveal seven external linking best practices. At the end of this article, you’ll know how to use external linking to help your content appear higher on the search engine results page. When should you link to other sites in SEO? External links are hyperlinks that direct readers to a website other than your own. On the surface, using external links seems counter-intuitive—these links take people away from your website, after all. However, as we shall see later in this article, it’s one of the most essential sources of ranking power you can ever use. Four Benefits of External Linking Linking to outside websites, when done right, offers several benefits: 1. External linking improves your credibility. When you add trustworthy and relevant website links to your content, it improves the credibility of your website. In addition, valuable external links provide your readers with references, which will enhance your website’s authority. External linking is similar to the way you cite sources in a bibliography for an academic paper—it shows that you’ve created...

How to Find & Add Nofollow Links to Your Website Ever watch those game shows where contestants have to find the designer product in a sea of knockoffs? Watching the contestants squint to examine the products is my favorite part. One, because I love game shows, but also because upon first glance, you really can’t tell the difference. Well, nofollow links are kind of like that. You can’t tell them apart from regular links just by looking at them. As Google continues to prioritize links in its ranking criteria, keeping track of them should be on your SEO to-do list. So, how do you check for nofollow links and add them to your webpages? All those answers, and more, below. This matters because links greatly impact your search engine ranking. And whether you’re linking internally or externally, doing so tells Google the destination page is valuable. This, in turn, may increase the page’s ranking — it’s called "link juice." The better your link building, the better your chances of ranking higher. So, when you tell Google to ignore a link, the destination page will not get any link juice. For instance, let’s say a food blogger uploads a blog post. The blogger can add a nofollow attribute to the comment section to tell Google, "Hey, any link included here isn't associated with me and I don’t vouch for it." With Google tightening up its linking requirements, it’s important that brands understand how they work. How To Tell...

What is a Dofollow Link? The easier it is for potential customers to find your site in search engine results, the more traffic (and sales) you’ll generate. As a result, there’s a kind of constant content competition underway as website owners and administrators look for ways to stand out from the crowd and improve search engine optimization (SEO). Gone are the wild, wild west days of the World Wide Web where keyword spamming and content stuffing were the norm to drive search engine interest. Now, brands need to focus on more tightly-controlled metrics — such as Google’s PageRank — to boost their online appeal and push their site listing closer to the first page, first result pinnacle. While part of this effort comes down to writing relevant, accurate, and interesting content, there’s another key component: Dofollow links. With the right approach, these links can help leverage great content into higher PageRank and better search results. Here’s how they work. What is a dofollow link? PageRank is effectively a weighted score that uses links to assign points — the more points, the better your site rank, and the better your SEO. Often referred to as “link juice” by online marketing professionals because of their ability to “flow” through websites with the right linking structure, getting these points is a priority for any site owner. The problem? Almost immediately after their introduction, getting points in any way possible became the strategy of many unscrupulous marketers. The easiest way to achieve this...

3 Types of Blog Posts That Earn the Most Backlinks, According to HubSpot's Link-Building Expert As the HubSpot Blog's Audience Growth Manager, one of my duties involves developing highly shareable blog posts that pull in non-organic traffic from sources like email, social media, and other websites. Through building non-organic traffic tactics for my team, I've learned that referral traffic -- which comes from other sites backlinking to our content -- can majorly benefit the overall blog site. It goes without saying that having another site highlight your content is great for brand awareness. But, additionally, backlinks can also increase your search engine authority. When high-authority sites link to your content, search engine algorithms take this into account when ranking your content on result pages. This means that the more backlinks you get from credible websites, the higher your search rankings could get. However, although referral traffic can be vital for your blog’s success, it's also the hardest to earn. Here's why: When a HubSpot Blog post gets a backlink, this typically means that a person has found our content, valued it, and shared the post's URL on their own website. Then, when others find and click this shared URL, it results in referral traffic. In short, a person working for a website or online publication has to find our content and determine that it's valuable, credible, or engaging enough to share with their site’s audiences. Because getting referrals can be challenging and complex, I've worked closely with Irina...

25 Stats That Prove Why You Need Link-Building in Your SEO Strategy You probably already know how crucial SEO is for your website's traffic. One of the most important sub tactics within an SEO strategy is link-building. Not sure what this means? Here's the quick explanation. When websites link to your website, search algorithms determine that you have "authority" in  your industry because other brands are referring to you. The higher your authority gets, the better your search rankings could be. Additionally, linking to other posts within your site can also help to boost your authority as its a sign to algorithms that you've thoroughly covered a topic you're discussing. But, here's where it gets a bit more tricky. When a more credible website, such as a notable publication with a high search ranking links to you, that link counts for more than an internal link or a link from a site with less search credibility. Also, if you link a blog post or page to a site with no or poor search authority, your ranking might go down because you aren't linking to sources that search algorithms deem as credible. These are just a few of the nuances that make link building difficult and time-consuming for many marketers. But, research shows that taking the time to build a solid link strategy can quickly boost your search rankings. In fact, in 2019, most SEO experts said external links were one of the three most valuable aspects of their search optimization...