Link Funnels: Not a pay to learn lesson

The before I start always remember this is SEO:
The goal of SEO is to give a user an answer

A lot of people talk shit when it comes to SEO. It normally starts with, “Hey, look at how I do SEO, but if you really want to know what works for me, you have to pay me $5,000 and I will share all of my knowledge with you”. You can tell by the name of our website we don’t believe in BS like this!

Today I’m going to show you step-by-step how I do SEO and, more importantly, how it can be used elsewhere in your business.

To make this easier, I will break this down into 3 stages. Each stage is really key when setting up a long-term strategy. Also, one of the great parts about this strategy is you have the ability to use the resource you build for other funnels. Examples of these are Facebook funnels or even sales funnels.

Tip 1: This is not a cheap easy way to do SEO. If you are looking for easy wins, this blog is not for you. This blog is more for people who have worked in SEO for years and have the budget to spend on building resources.

In this article the points we'll cover include:
01

SEO Framework

02

Resources

03

Links

Let’s get started!

01

SEO Framework

This might seem like the easy part, but it’s really the hardest part. You need to do the basics of SEO before doing anything else. This guide doesn’t go through how to do basic onsite SEO.

The best way to show you how this framework needs to be set up is with an example.

A lot of people in the SEO world talk about content hubs or content clusters. Pretty much what we’re trying to do is build resources on the site to link to.

Sample of a basic framework

The main idea to keep at the back of your mind is that we’re building a cluster. I’m going to use a buzzword—and I don’t want to—but topical authority is a significant key to this strategy, as you want to show Google you’re an expert, but also more of an authority in this niche.

For example, the Cluster you’re in right now on our website is around SEO Strategies. This means all of the blogs linking to this content hub will be about SEO Strategies. Yep, it’s a big topic, but doing small topics makes life harder for when you’re building links.

I’m going to break down some of the main pages you will need in your cluster to get everything going. Not saying this is every type of content you can do, but it’s the basics. Let’s look at them more closely:

I’m going to break down some of the main pages you will need in your cluster to get everything going. Not saying this is every type of content you can do, but it’s the basics. Let’s look at them more closely:

Content Hub – The first part of every framework will be a content hub or pilar page. This is like your go-to location for content. For example, you’re right now on a content hub for nobs.link. Others in the industry would call this a power page. Pretty much it’s a good piece of content that has cool custom-made images and possibly even videos. This page should really stand out and offer more than just 5,000 words or a copy of someone else’s blog.

Blog – Please don’t waste the users’ time with boring blogs. Remember to make something that is useful for the user, not just Google. These still need to be in the same theme as the core content hub. You need to be able to link from these blogs to your content hub or service page. This means that if you’re writing about something off topic, it’s really just a waste of space.

Good Example:

  • Website – Plumbing

  • Content Hub – Plumbing Tips

  • Blog – How To Unclog A Drain

  • Service – Block Drains

Bad Example:

  • Website – Plumbing

  • Content Hub – Plumbing Tips

  • Blog – Kitchen Style Renovations Gone Bad

  • Service – Block Drains

Service – The service pages are easy; just think the bottom of the funnel. These pages are sales pages or normal service pages of a website. For an online shop, this would be your product pages or even your category page. Don’t forget that this page still needs to answer a question. Don’t get me wrong—still sell yourself, but don’t overdo it, otherwise it will backfire on you greatly.

There are a lot of different frameworks. At the end of this blog you will be able to download our booklet of frameworks templates

02

Resources

“Content is king” is a saying that got pushed into my head for years when I first started in this industry a decade ago. You know what? It’s true—more so today than it was 10 years ago.

Now, in saying that, I want to make it really clear there’s content and then there’s useful content. I hate people who just make a blog that’s 5,500 words long because the person in the number #1 spot on Google has 5,000 words. Remember that content is not just words—it’s also images, videos, and design.

In order to build content that is not only useful but aesthetically pleasing and interesting for the reader you need to get creative. Here’s some tips below:

#1. Expand On Your Information

The mistake many people make when creating content is they don’t expand on their information. What does this mean, you ask? Well, let’s just take a look at this example.

Example #1

STEP 2: Understand Power Words

Power words–ever heard of them? If not, you’re not alone. Power words are, overall, general words that give power or life to written content. They’re designed to evoke excitement, danger, curiosity, and other emotions in the reader.Power words come in different categories depending on the emotional reaction you’re trying to gain from the reader.

As you can see from this example above, it’s giving an overview of power words. This was taken from an article about writing good blog titles. The problem with this example is that while it does provide some information, it doesn’t really give enough for the reader to fully understand different elements of what the content is saying.

For example, it talks about how “power words come in different categories”. That’s great, but what are these categories? What are the emotional reactions they’re connected to? This is where expanding your information can provide a much more useful blog post or piece of content that people will love. See below for the updated version.

Example #2

STEP 2: Understand Power Words

Power words–ever heard of them? If not, you’re not alone. Power words are, overall, general words that give power or life to written content. They’re designed to evoke excitement, danger, curiosity, and other emotions in the reader.

Power words come in different categories depending on the emotional reaction you’re trying to gain from the reader. These Categories include:

  • Greed – For triggering the desire for more money or those who want to save money.
  • Curiosity – For triggering the desire to look closer into something.
  • Unmotivated – For triggering motivation for those who are unmotivated.
  • Lust – For triggering the overall sensation for desier.
  • Vanity – For triggering self-imagery of oneself.
  • Trust – For triggering trust in someone.
  • Anger – For triggering the feeling of anger in people.
  • Fear – For triggering the essence of fear.

Some power words you might find useful to add to your titles include the following (beware, though, it’s an extensive list):

In this example the second version felt meatier, provided more useful information, and you learnt a LOT more from it. Expanding your information like this inside your blogs helps dramatically when you want to become more of an authority figure. To see the rest of this article above, you can click here.

#2. Balance White Space Vs. Content

What does this mean, you might ask? Good question. What many people don’t realise is that when you write content, there’s something called white space. White space is the space around your words when writing on a document, paper, web page, etc. The problem is that some people don’t realise that not balancing the white-space-to-content-ratio can make your content look bulky, hard to read, and just unappealing to look at. In balancing white space vs. content, you can utilise things like:

  • Subheadings
  • Bullet points
  • Screenshots
  • Images
  • Good paragraph spacing
Let’s show you a good and bad example of white space balancing.

Creating A Sensible URL Hierarchy

Each time that a new web page is created, whether it be a blog post, an evergreen article that sits on the website or even a product category on an ecommerce website, it’s crucial that the URL places that web page sensibly in the hierarchy. Hierarchy is created by building a parent-child relationship amongest all indexable web pages and it’s actually easier that what you may think, the best guideline to follow is common sense. No BS is a marketplace for matching publishers and clients together. Website Owners that want to have content created and published on external websites use this platform to do so. This makes its very appealing to SEO professionals as they can have contextually relevant article published on a closely related website with hyperlink pointing backat their website(these hyperlinks/”backlinks” are one the most powerful ranking factors for most search engines).As a lot of the current No BS target market won’t be searching for PR solutions, Link Building content must be created.

Rather than having a bunch of articles sitting on the same URL foler level and competing with each other in the search engine results, one parent URL/folder is created for ‘Link Building’, then all related articles/web pages sit off this URL as subtopics. As all of the articles for the sub topics will have a URL starting with https://nobs.link/link-building/, the search engine robot can quickly understand that these are in fact Link Building sub topics and therefore sees that there’s not just one article about Link Building, but a whole bunch of resources on the topic and thus NoBS.link is considered to be more of an authority on both Link Building and all of the sub topics

STEP 3: Utilise Power Words

So now you’ve had your eyes overwhelmed by the exhaustive list of power words — I know, there was a lot there–and now it’s time to put it into action. So,take the crappy titles you’ve had before:

  • SEO Tips for Beginners
  • Content Marketing Tips for Businesses
  • Advantages of Link Building

Now think of the emotion you want to trigger from your title. What is it? For this article we’re going try a few types of power words to generate interesting and creative topics. Let’s take a look below at the topics with different power words needed.

Title: SEO Tips for Beginners
Power Word
Type		 Words Use New Title
Greed Inexpensive, Skyrocket Inexpensive SEO Tips For Beginners That Skyrocket Your Startup
Curiosity Bizarre, Eye-opening Bizarre SEO Tips for Beginners that give Eye-opening results
Unmotivated In record time, effortless Effortless seo tips for beginners that rank you in record time

Do you see the difference between the two? The first sample has bulky paragraphs without much white space between the words. This can make a reader’s eyes tired, especially if it’s paragraph after paragraph. In the end, your readers will just leave the page to find an easier option.

With the second version, you can see that the information is broken into small paragraphs, bullet points, subheadings, and even a table format. You can see there’s plenty of white space around the words, which helps the reader easily see what they’re reading and where they’re at. So don’t forget to try and balance out your content better

#3. Add Personality

Nothing kills a blog quicker than when it has no personality, am I right? Injecting personality into your content is vital to give it life. But how do you achieve this?

Write how you speak. I mean, how many times have you heard a blog say something boring, like:

To gain more traffic, you will need to improve your brand name and promote yourself via social media

Instead, you could add personality and do something like this:

If you pop yourself in the limelight of social media and pour some improvement dust on your brand, you can really drive home your website traffic in your new virtual Mercedes.

Yeah, we know you see the difference in this one.

We actually did a blog on this recently and you can read it here. Overall, though, keep this in mind when trying to write your content. Boring is out, personality is in!

#4. Plagiarism Pass and Spun Content Are a No-No

Plagiarism—the curse of all content writers, and it’s no different when writing blogs or any other piece of content. You most likely already know the spiel of how bad it is to copy and have duplicate content, so I won’t bore you with that. However, it still is an important part of content writing. Always double check using tools such as Copyscape.com to make sure content isn’t copied directly from one site to another.

Spinning Content

Another thing to remember, though, is to avoid spinning content. Spinning content is where you take one blog and pretty much write it anew to pass plagiarism-checking tools. Unfortunately, many people do this, which isn’t a good thing. The reason this is a big no-no is because:

  • People will find out about it or recognise the blog you’ve actually rewritten
  • Long term, it will hurt your reputation and your brand name
  • In the end, no one will take your content if you’re trying to add it to other sites

Some tips to avoid spinning content:

  • Take ideas from multiple blogs but write it in your own words
  • Change the layout and formatting of your article so the information isn’t in the same order as other blogs
  • Utilise your own knowledge to come up with a brand-new blog based on what you know without researching too much

As you progress with your content writing, you’ll be less likely to spin or duplicate your work, which, in turn, will mean more rewards for you.

#5. Dress To Impress

Last, but not least, dress your content to impress with visual impactors. These include:

  • Screenshots
  • Stock images
  • GIFs
  • Videos
  • Infographics

Visual elements provide something more to the reader and give your blogs a fun element. And we all need fun, right?

However there are some rules when adding visual effects, and these include the following:

  • Try to keep your visuals clean and not too sexual in nature depending on your niche. Obviously, if you’re writing in the adult niche, this would be acceptable
  • Make sure the visuals offer great quality imagery. This is essential as no one likes a blurry video or image
  • Appropriately size your images. Don’t place something so small no one can make out what it is, and, on the other hand, don’t add something so big that it really overpowers the rest of the content

If you stick to this, then you’ll be okay.

First, let’s start with choosing the theme your industry is in. In this example, we’ll work with social media marketing.

So then we need to start with, say, a blog you might have written about digital marketing that touches on social media marketing. This would be Tier 2. For this example, let’s call the blog:

How Social Media Is A Digital Marketing Favourite

So next, you would then need to link it to a Tier 1 blog, which would cover more specifics about a topic inside social media marketing, such as:

Social Media Marketing Tools To Try This Year

This would then link to your blog post, which is on point with the same topic thread and it would link to your service page. Your blog could be to a page that highlights a specific tool, like:

Tailwind Making Social Media Marketing Easy

Then from this blog, you can add a link to your service page, which could be:

Social Media Marketing Services

So let’s add them together:

How Social Media Is A Digital Marketing Favourite

Social Media Marketing Tools To Try This Year

Tailwind Making Social Media Marketing Easy

Social Media Marketing Services

Can you see how they relate? In linking to blogs that are the same, it gives you a higher advantage to push more power from blog to blog. This method is what we like to call link funnels.

Utilising link funnels within your link-building and content strategy combined can really help you push yourself as a leader in your industry, as long as the content is useful and you work on guest posting on quality websites. If you’re not posting on quality sites, then your link funnel will suffer greatly.

So how do you define a quality site?

#5.

Before I go into metrics to much I want to make something clear. Metrics from third party tools are an idea of how google MIGHT see a website. Think of it this way SEO metric tools are like a religion, they all have a different hypothesis about what google looks for but they really know as much as anyone in this industry.

 

The metrics of a website are generally the first thing many people look at. The main metrics to look into:

  • Trust Flow
  • Citation Flow
  • Domain Authority
  • Domain Rating
  • Traffic

Let’s take a closer look at these ones.

Trust Flow and Citation Flow

For example, you can have a high Trust Flow of say 20+, this is great, but if it has a citation flow of 6, then that’s an issue. Why? The reason for this is that, generally, Citation Flow and Trust Flow shouldn’t be too far apart, otherwise, in simple terms, it signals a lot of links being build in a short amount of time, which can mean the website owner is up to something. Aim for Citation Flow and Trust Flow to be closer together if you feel this metric is more important to you than the others. An example of it could be TF15 – CF12.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority increases when a website starts to become an authority figure online. The higher the DA rating, the higher in search engines you’ll find yourself. DA was created by Moz and can be easily checked with their DA checker or other free online tools. Ideally, DA 20+ is a good starting point, but if you can score sites that are DA 40+, that’s even better.

Domain Rating

Domain Rating is a metric created by Ahrefs, which measures the strength of the backlink profile of your target website. This is generally measured by a score rating out of 100. Just like the DA rating, the higher the domain rating, the better if this is the metric you want to focus on the most.

Traffic

This one says it all: Traffic is required in order to really make your website worthwhile. If you don’t have people interested or visit it, then there’s really no point, is there? Ideally, look for sites with traffic over 1,000 as a starting point. There’s nothing wrong with linking to sites with less traffic, but it may not generate as much referral traffic as you might have hoped. If you can score sites with traffic of 5k -10k and above, then you’re really going to see an impact in the long term.

Overall, the thing to remember if you’re planning to guest post on sites with high metrics is to have a budget to match. To find out more about how much publishers might charge, click here.

#2. Real Websites or PBN

The appearance of a website also matters. Why? Because you don’t want to be linked to private blog networks (PBNs). PBNs are the underbelly of the link-building world. This is why it’s important to take note of a website’s appearance to see if it has the key signatures of a PBN. If it does, then steer clear. Does it:

  • Only have a home page, blog page, write for us, contact page or about us page?

  • Seem to have stock images reused over and over again?

  • Have poorly written content that looks like it’s come out of a factory?

  • Broken or non-relevant backlink profile to what the site is about now?

  • Was it a dropped domain that has been picked up several times? You can check this with the Wayback Machine.

  • Have a generic overall design?

  • Have its WHOIS information set to private?

  • Have duplicate content?

This gives you an idea of what a PBN looks like. Instead, work on trying to link to real websites like the screenshot below, which either have pages like resources, advertisement, services, and more.

Overall

Overall, when it comes to building link funnels, it’s more than just linking from one blog to another. There’s a strategy that needs to be built out in order to really gain the most from it in the long term. By getting each component right, you have a higher chance of really seeing results from your link funnel efforts. What are you waiting for? Get started!