The Humble Guide To Powerful and Efficient Tiered Link-Building

Let’s face it, everyone could use a little bit more (free) traffic.

There’s no denying that everyone from your neighbor bob who’s interested in learning about affiliate marketing to John Chow (a self-proclaimed dot com mogul) could use even more organic traffic.

It’s been proven time and time again that inbound traffic, people that find you organically through their own searching, converts at almost 60% more than normal traffic. I call the latter, ‘cold traffic,’ to give it a similar phrasing to cold-calling.

Anyway, today I’m going to give you my powerful tiered link-building strategies that are guaranteed to bring you even more traffic.

For the record, these strategies are worthless without calibration. You need to put your own twist on these methods to make them unique, niche-relevant, and targeted to your desired traffic for them to work at all.

Part 1: The Top-Level Links (The Boring Whitehat Stuff)

Yeah, I know, I always talk about wanting to live an adventurous life… but unfortunately, that can’t transfer into link-building. At least for your Tier-1 links, you need to play it safe.

Important aspects of whitehat links… what you want in your first tier

• Blog posts - These are some of the most amazing links. You want high-quality, original content, and your ‘money keywords’ as anchor text on niche-relevant blogs. (I know thats complicated, I will break it down later in the article).
• Personal Social Networking/Media - Another important aspect in your top-tier links should be your personal social media accounts. You want your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. all linking towards your main site, because overtime these grow into valuable links that many people forget about.
• Web 2.0 Properties - A fantastic, free way to artificially inflate your rankings with high-quality backlinks.
• High-end Directories - I’m about 50/50 when it comes to these links. Lots of people still swear by DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory… but idk, it seems like a giant linkfarm that Google could be just waiting to destroy. Right now, they work great, but there’s hundreds of tactics that used to work great which have been devastated by recent Google updates. Use at your own discretion.
• Blog Comments - Only if they are on authority blogs in your niche, that are insightful comments, with your name as a backlink. (Pen name is fine)

Let’s expand on those links a bit more. Blog posts should be self-explanatory… you contact a blogger, ask them if you can make a guest post on their blog, then write some awesome content that has 1-2 links back to your site at the bottom in an author bio.

Social networking/social media is also really basic, there’s not that much more you can do for SEO purposes other than getting as many shares/likes/pins etc. as possible. Just make sure your profiles are reasonably keyword-rich with a backlink to your site for both traffic and SEO purposes.

Web 2.0 Properties

This sector of link building deserves its own post, which I will definitely cover in the future, but for now this will suffice.

The idea for Web 2.0 posts is to create little mini-sites and posts based around your topics that offer niche-relevant content to send traffic and powerful ‘link juice’ to your main site.

Take some serious time to post great content on your Web 2.0 creations and you will profit very well.

Examples Of Web 2.0 Sites

1. Squidoo
2. HubPages
3. WordPress (Free Sites, still great for SEO purposes)
4. Typepad – I think they may have closed their free version, really not worth it anymore if so.

There are way more sites just like that, the idea is that you can get high-authority links for free, other than the cost of your time/writing.

It’s ok to have some lower-quality links pointing to your main domain… but honestly, keep it to a minimum to stay free of Google penalties. (I didn’t mention paid links, or regular ones, from sites because those are typically out of the control of the site owner).

Part 2: Leverage Your ‘Link Buffer’ And Blast Away!

Now comes the fun part, like the sidebar says, I’m a lazy guy and I love to profit from simple work.

From here on out, its all smooth sailing and this is where you begin to really profit. The main whitehat links that we use to power your domain in the first tier are actually more focused on keeping your site safe from Google penalties and driving traffic than benefiting your SEO.

Here’s what to do now:

1. Do some analytics on your pages – Figure out your backlink portfolio, your competition, your rankings, and where you want to be in the future. I LOVE using SEOPowerSuite for that, because it specifically targets those four features, but don’t feel obligated.
2. Load up your preferred set of SEO Tools, this part is a necessity if you want to power your links with an insane SERP-boosting backbone… and today we are going to focus on using Magic Submitter to power up 100% of our Tier 1 links.
3. Track your rankings – This is the only way to know how you are progressing on the SEO front. I mentioned SEOPowerSuite up above, and they do have a module for rank tracking which works great, but another great option is Raven Tools. They are a bit more social media oriented but they have recently come out with some big changes in their software. Your best bet is to figure out which one best suits your needs.

Interested in figuring out my preferred SEO and Social Media Tools? Check out my featured list to get some more insight and comparison between the various tools.

Important specifications for your second tier of link building…

Personally I love setting up a new campaign in Magic Submitter because it is just so simple. It doesn’t take that much time but the results are epic. I’m ranking for a bunch of medium-competition keywords with this software alone, although I wouldn’t recommend directly using it on a money site unless you really know what you are doing.

Anchor Text - Keep your anchor text really low for all keywords other than your brand name, personal name, and even your money keywords. Search engine optimization these days revolves around diversification and safety.

I really focus on this, take a look at a screenshot of my anchor text percentages. This is only the first ~29, although you can get a really good idea of what I’m saying by looking at the numbers. (The big 39% is actually being incorrectly picked up by Ahrefs.. it is a fake sitewide link due to a ‘recent comments plugin’ on a site with 1,800+ pages, so the link technically shows up on all those pages until the recent comments widget changes). 

The 8% and the next few keywords are either ‘Page Rank World’ or a similar brand name keyword. Notice my money keywords are much lower in percentages to stay safe from Google’s algorithmic updates.

Referring domains – Another important part of link-building is that you focus on getting links from high-quality sites rather than millions of crappy auto-accept blog comments on PR0 blogs.

1 high-quality link > 1,000 spammy links

That equation doe’nt even deserve an explanation, its common sense!

But Brandon, How Do I Set Up Magic Submitter Or (Insert SEO/Social Media) Software

I’ll be releasing a bunch of software tutorials in the near future so stay tuned for that, although one thing you need to realize, is that the second tier of link building really doesn’t matter as much as the first. I’m assuming you are like me, so you don’t have a ton of time to spend on creating unique content for anything other than your site, your guest posts, or your Web 2.0 creations, so don’t worry about it.

In an ideal world we would all just use 10,000 guest posts to rank our sites, but unfortunately most of us don’t have that much time to dedicate towards blogger outreach.

For now, use this tutorial and profit from it, if you are willing to put in the hard work it will take.