Hi, Sad Dawson here. Now link building has always been and continues to be a crucial part of the SEO Jigsaw that you need to build authority and drive rankings in Google. And with the emergence of AI-based search like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, the importance of links in getting your site cited in responses means that link building becomes of even greater importance. So I've grouped together all the best episodes of the podcast that touch on link building into a series dedicated to all the many strategies and tactics you can use to get more links to your content. So let's get on to the podcast. Hello and welcome to SEO Is Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordspeopleUse.com, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO, developer, affiliate marketer, and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years, and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome to SEO Is Not That Hard. It's me, Ed here, as usual. Today I'm going to talk about promoting your content to get links. Now this came about from a conversation I had with a listener in the US, Steve, and he was talking about how does he get people to start linking to him. He's not long launched his site, maybe a few months ago, and he started to create content. Although I talk a lot about creating good content based on people's questions, and from that side of SEO, you know, I never deny the importance of links in the big overall scheme of how you rank. It is really important to get links. Um but obviously there are risks with how you do and don't do it. We know Google wants organic links, doesn't want people paying for links, it doesn't want people manipulating the link graph. And by manipulating, that's incentivising people in any way whatsoever to link to your content and try to manipulate things like the anchor text they use to link, all those kind of like um manipulations that you might do to improve your link profile um in ways that Google doesn't want. Now I don't moralise over what people do or how they do it, it's completely up to you. If you want to buy links, all those things, knock yourself out, it's up to you. But just be aware that there are risks. If you get caught buying links, then Google, at the very least, will um just disavow them in terms of not use pr having to provide any um benefit to your site, which means you just wasted your money. At worst, you might get a penalty, uh either algorithmic or a manual penalty for um you know uh link spam. I prefer to um only do organic link building, and that is where I just wait essentially for people to link to my websites. I don't request links, I don't try and um do anything in terms of how people will link to me. But there's a catch 22 to that. If you are not going out trying to um persuade people to link to you, then how do they ever find your content to link to you? Now, once you've got ranking, it becomes a lot easier because one of the easiest link building techniques is to rank number one for your um keywords. That's the kind of situation where people will naturally start linking to you because say they're an author, they're writing about a sort of a related topic on their website that's related to your um website. They will they will find you if you're a good enough resource, they will link to you um because it's useful for their audience to see the content that you've created. But obviously, you've got to get into that number one position in the first place to kind of attract those links on autopilot. So, what you have to do is promote your content, and this is what I do. So let's take Q which people to use as an example. When we started that back in we launched, we probably launched in October 2022. So about you know, it's over 18 months ago. Now, at that time, obviously, it was a brand new domain and no one knew we were doing it. You know, we we we built it and then it was just made available. There it is online. How are people gonna find us? What I had to do was just go out and start making some noise about it. So I went out onto Twitter and made a lot of noise on Twitter. I went out to anyone I knew and just emailed them and said, hey, you might want to check this out, this new site I've launched. But at no point during this did I ever say, please link to my website. I was purely just putting it in people's faces. I found groups of people, um, you know, places like Reddit, Quora, where I could make people aware that this new tool, this new site, was available and what it could do. But again, at no point trying to get links, no point saying I want you to link to me. It was just to make people aware it was there, to try and make some noise about it. We went to Brighton SEO, we sponsored Brighton SEO, um, bought a very cheap sponsor package which just allowed us to put leaflets in the um delegate bags, and we did a little competition on there to sort of to get people to to um interact with it, and there's a whole podcast episode on that. If you just search through all the the back history of the podcast, there's one where I talk about Brighton SEO. But again, that was basically also a piece just to get our name out there to say that to get our name in front of people who might potentially be the right kind of audience for linking to us. And lo and behold, this is what happened. Because we'd made an engaging tool, engaging content, people did start to link to us. And as they started to link to us, we started to rank better. Especially, I think those ki those ki those links were um important because at the time we were concentrating more on the tool than surrounding content around the tool. So we started to gain links, we started to gain users, and then from those users, every user becomes then someone who's on our email list for the for the um for the product, and we can then email those people every time we launch a new bit of content or a new tool. We then have got a bigger audience of our own that we can then start promoting our new content to, and those people we promote to, some of them will find whatever we've promoted useful enough and then will start to link to us. So this promotion is what starts to build that sort of um that that flywheel of gaining links, and then obviously as we start to gain more links, as we started to put more content on the site, we started to rank across more terms, and then we start picking up um bat links from people who find us through Google. But it's getting over that hump of you're not ranking in Google, so people aren't finding you. They can't find you in Google, if they're not finding you, they don't know about you, they're not gonna link to you. So you cover part of the way there with good content, getting that long tail content. That is how you will start to pick up long tail rankings where links are less important. But as you get your site grows and gets bigger and bigger and bigger, links do become more important, links do build um that link authority, that domain authority, sort of site authority that you need um to help push a getting more pages indexed on your site, um, and also then pushing those pages that are indexed further up um the rankings. So my tips are find where the audience that's going to be receptive to your content is living. That could be Facebook groups, it could be Reddit, it could be Quora, could be Twitter, could be LinkedIn, could be a whole bunch of places. Find where people are you know talking about your topic area. So, you know, with keywords people use it's people who are into SEO, into online marketing, you know, and related subjects, and I go where those people are. And as you start to build an audience, strongly recommend you know, getting an email list going, provide some content that people will sign up for. I've done episodes on lead magnets, so go and listen to them on how to do that because then you can start if you build an audience that you can promote content to again, that helps a getting traffic to it in the first place, and B, those people are then hopefully the that's the target audience that might link to you and start engaging with people in these areas. So you don't want if you just come straight along and say, Hey, I've just done this piece of content, go and look at it. Then if they don't know who you are, never heard of you, then it's not going to go as well as if you've engaged in some of these forums and some of these places where people are hanging out online, and just get to be known by a few people, they're then much more likely to listen to you when you do have something to share, do have something to promote. You know, you've got to give before you can ask, essentially. That's that's it's reciprocal. Everything's always reciprocal with people, and the more you give in the first instance, the more likely people are going to reciprocate in the longer term. So, yeah, go find where your audience is, go start interacting, and do that as soon as possible. As soon as you're even thinking of creating a site, then go there and interact with those people. And that's my top tip. So I hope that's been useful. You've got any questions, any comments, do get in touch. All the details on how to get in touch are in the outro to this podcast. And yeah, see you next time. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use, that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I'll show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleuse.com slash demo, where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeople to use.com slash demo, and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener, I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share, it really helps. SGO is not that hard, it's brought to you by Keywordspeopleuse.com, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day, try it today for free at KeywordspeopleUse.com. To get an instant hit of more SGO tips, then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter, or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleuse.com. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SGO Is Not That Hard.