Matt Cutts
Building links to your website is one of the major strategies in getting your website to rank well in the search engines. Google and other search engines need to determine somehow what content is relevant to the user and what is not. In order to establish this relevancy, one thing they look at is the amount of links to your site.
Google assumes that every link is a vote for the value of that content. To determine why someone linked at you, the look at the topic of the webpage that links to your site and the topic discussed in your page that received the link. It then runs an elaborate computer program that determines why you got the link (for what topic material you received the vote) and matches that with the topic the searcher is trying to get information about (Google determines the topic by looking at the user’s search phrase.)
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, discusses some techniques to get links from others.
Below you’ll see his video, followed by a discussion and summary of his advice.
Build great content
Content that is valuable has a better chance of getting linked to. In other words, post something that people care about and adequately satisfies their thirst for information on the topic. If you effectively solve the problem or provide an education, your content will be seen as useful and ‘linkable’.
Types of content that gets linked to are:
Build a blog
Matt Cutts says there is no excuse for companies or even individuals not to have a blog. It is great way of having authorative discussions about a subject you know a lot about. Create tutorials that solve problems or educate.
Controversial posts
Matt Cutts isn’t to flattering about people who use controversy when writing their content. His main issue is that it is part of an anti-culture, where people define the world in a negative way, by emphasizing on what is bad and should be hated.
Saying that, if you truly believe something controversial and can back up your claim, it is worth sticking to your guns and try and convince your readers of your position. It might get you lots of posts linking to yours decrying what you wrote, but it is still a link.
But Matt Cutts is right in pointing out that there is a responsibility towards our culture as well. We don’t want to promote a culture that defines itself in the negative or creates controversy without basis, as a sort of knee jerk reaction against the prevailing attitude which one finds uncomfortable and attacks without proper examination or merit.
Humor
People love to laugh. Add some humor to your post and you can get lots of links.
Originality
Research and write about topics or issues related to a topic that nobody ever talked about. By doing that, your site will be the only site anyone could possible link to to further explore the topic.
Originality will truly help you if it is related to your overall search engine strategy (if you write a post that is far removed to the overall topic of your site, the links to that particular post will carry less weight in terms of helping you with your overall ranking in the search engines.
Building lists
“10 ways to do x” is a popular form of content writing on the web and are articles that get linked to often. It is part of our fast-food approach to knowledge.
Matt Cutts acknowledges the effectiveness of top 10 lists, but warns against a dumbing down of culture. Do create lists where appropriate, but make sure it isn’t all you do.
How to’s and tutorials
A great way to establish authority is by taking on an issue a lot of people struggle with and create a tutorial on how to solve it.
Have great site architecture
Matt Cutts is surprised at how many people ignore this. Make sure that your site is easy to link to: it must have linkable URL’s, your content should stay in one place (if you build content that moves around, it will be impossible for someone to link to that post) and have a site structure that makes sense both to humans and search engines.
Participate in communities
Join forums and leave comments on blogs that offer valuable insights. If you can help someone understand a topic better through your contribution, they will remember you, and might even be willing to link out to your site that discusses similar topic material.
It also spreads awareness: people who receive valuable feedback from you will start to regard you as an expert, and if they ever have a need for your services, they might just pick up the phone and call you for some business.
Social Media
Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook are all great tools to reach people where they hang out. Join discussions and groups and help them out in the same way you help out people on Forums. Again, this enables you to build authority. Once your authority on a subject is established you could be invited to conferences to speak on your chosen topic, and live bloggers could be linking out to your site – or people might simply remember you as an expert and give you a call to take on a project.
Newsletters
By allowing people to subscribe to your content, whether through RSS or email, or sign up for a newsletter enables you to deliver content more effectively. You don’t rely on the content consumer visiting your website, they can be notified of your content in their inbox. That heightens awareness of your content, and providing your content is of interest, might inspire someone to write a blog post about your discussion and link to your content.
Create tools and services
Create free tools that people can access to solve their problems, such as a knowledge database, plug-ins for Wordpress, clickable lists that solve problems in interactive ways, calculators (e.g. mortgage calculators), etc.
Create videos
Don’t just write, create videos as well (and provide transcripts). Video is a popular way to connect with a demographic that rather watches you talk than read your blog posts. It allows you to tap into a whole new demographic.
Conclusion
Matt Cutts adheres to the philosophy that content should be valuable, and that we have a responsibility to our culture not to clutter the web with spammy information or fast-food blog posts (such as mindless top 10 lists). He argues that backlinks are created by creating good content across platforms (e.g. blogs and video), networking and participating in the open source solutions.
There are many more link building strategies, and we will be discussing his suggestions and others in next months SEO tutorials.
2010 Predictions for Google and SEO
For a summary of Matt Cutts’ predictions and some extra’s, visit the related topic in our forum: search engine predictions for 2010.
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