Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Outreach for backlinks – how to get quality links that Google will love

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I’m thinking of redirecting my Virtual Assistant work to other tasks as the generic LinkedIn work I instructed them to is not really fruitful.
Part of an admittedly AI suggested strategy is to redirect her work to include outreach for back links. Is this an advisable strategy and do you have a recommended approach/template for her to use as part of this process?

That’s been something I’ve recommended a few times myself. 🙂

“Outreach” needs to be quite specific though. It’s not buying links, or paying for them (there are a very, very few exceptions to this). It really is about contacting people you probably already know. For a start, anyway.

It’s about getting in touch with clients, suppliers (which applies to you less than other people given the nature of your business – but for a lot of people suppliers are more likely than anyone else to give them links, simply because of the nature of the supplier/purchaser relationship) and just really leveraging your real world networks to ask for links. Sometimes it might behoove you to offer those reciprocally too.

Those very few exceptions I mentioned above is for things like payment in kind. Perhaps in exchange for a link from a well known client of yours you offer them a discount on their next service. That sort of thing.

Links generated through real world interactions have value. Automated processes don’t. You’d think Google wouldn’t be able to tell the difference but they can – it’s not a technical difference it’s a relational one. And one thing big tech is excellent at (think Facebook and other social platforms) is working out the nature of relationships.

I don’t have a generic template to share with you on this – simply because this interpersonal (inter-business) type of relational question isn’t really well served by generic emails or questions. But I can work on something with you that would help with your specific need.

Peter Mahoney
SEO Specialist of waaay-too-many years

SEO doesn’t shouldn’t your site’s front-end

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On my SEO Emails section (where I share helpful responses to commonly asked queries) I recently shared a not uncommon occurrence, where a site owner gets the SEO work delivered and then blames the work for causing problems with the front-end of the site.

It’s actually very rare for that to happen. On-site SEO has two main components:

  1. site wide SEO work. For example, default settings for social sharing, sitemaps, robots.txt files, all manner of things.
  2. page specific work. This includes title and description tags, social sharing meta tags, image alt and title tags, things like that.

When clients do suggest that SEO has somehow changed their site’s layout or display, it’s usually related (to their mind) related to that second part, that certain pages don’t show like they should, or used to, etc.

But the information output there is all very standard. Title tags are ubiquitous, descriptions, social tags and the like are all just meta content. They live in the head of the page’s code – meta head tags of this nature are there to be read by search engines and browsers – they don’t impact the display or front-end of the site at all.

And image tags like alt and title tags are added to the code that makes an image display – it was showing anyway, so again there’s no change to how the page looks.

So what’s going on? Why do clients occasionally worry search engine optimisation work has impacted how visitors will see their site?

Quite simply – and when you think about it this makes perfect sense – the problem were already there. A lot of website owners don’t check their site thoroughly regularly. They might just preview new blog posts, or see the homepage fairly often. So they’re not always going to notice errors.

But after paying an SEO professional for a service as vital as organic search marketing, or indeed paying any web developer for a service, they’re much more likely to flick through their site to see if anything has happened to it.

And that’s when they notice the historical problems.

Fortunately from my perspective as an SEO expert who works in this field full-time there are ways to illustrate that. Google has a recent cache of the last time they scanned a page (so as long as that’s not been updated in the meantime, it can be used to show the problem existed before any SEO work was done) and the Wayback Machine (from the Internet Archive) can fulfill the same role.

So it’s usually fairly easy to prove.

When I complete an SEO task for a new client I usually get a great big thank you in my inbox. But when something like this happens the email will usually be quite accusatory and aggressive, not allowing for the the possibility something else could have caused the problem – even quite a long time ago.

I suppose the moral of the story is quite simple. Website owners, keep an eye on your websites and make sure they work. This is important for a whole host of reasons; I really recommend checking your contact forms work too. My SEO work brings extra visitors (consistently) but if they can’t get in touch with you because something isn’t working it’s a tragedy. And if you do notice a problem be open to a variety of causes and reasons before placing blame. (Quite often problems with sites are caused by updating your theme, plugins, the WordPress core – those things can even auto-update which means you might not even know there’s been a change).

From my end of things I’ll keep doing my best to explain things to anyone with a question, matter-of-factly and politely, knowing full well when someone else is wrong it’s simply because they didn’t know something.

And who could blame someone for that?

Identify rubbish clients

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I use a site called People Per Hour rather a lot.
I’ve been on there for some years, and have found a pretty good way to isolate people who are going to be poor to work with.
100% of clients who write to me three times in a row without a response have been crap. Now, I suaully get back to all message son there within a couple of hours, so that gives you an idea of how quickly they’re trying to chase me up, even before I’ve had a chance to say hello.

Some people

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I’m just finishing up with one of those clients who buys your service, but it transpires has no awareness of IT at all. Queue screenshots, videos, phone calls, documentation, repeating the same information several times over…
I pride myself on my patience, and being able to explain technical jargon in useful terms.
But when someone struggles to even use fullstops in their own correspondence, well, that should be a sign to stay away.

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