Welcome to another episode of Live SEO Support!
Live SEO Support is an hour-long Weekly Livestream where our founders, Nicholas Altimore and Chris Tzitzis, take questions from the audience on anything related to SEO.
It’s 100% free, and anyone can join us weekly in our Facebook Group or on Youtube.
But in case you missed us live this week, here’s the full episode:
Watch This Week’s Full Live Stream:
Live Stream Summary:
[05:53] What are your thoughts on the ideal keyword density when optimizing a page?
There is no ideal keyword density, but you want to be looking at the keyword density of whoever is ranking number one for that keyword. Keyword density changes based on content length, and Google doesn’t really give it much importance. We look at tools such as Surfer SEO and POP. Check out our favorite SEO tools at https://sirlinksalot.co/best-seo-tools/.
[09:27] How can I get traffic? I am getting 20 users per day. But I wanna make some money out of it. My SEO score is above 95. I don’t want to spend on backlinks.
You’re getting 20 users per day, which is pretty awesome. But getting money from traffic is completely different from SEO. You need a completely different skill set called CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization. Even if your SEO is perfect and you’re ranking all of these articles and getting a million traffic to your website, if your site’s user experience is off, you may not get any business at all. If you’re using Yoast or Rank Math to get your SEO score, I’d ignore those completely. It’s hard to tell you how to optimize your user experience without seeing your website, but you may want to look at your content, the value you’re offering visitors to your site, and your internal linking (or lack thereof), which funnels visitors to your money pages. Learn how to generate free high quality backlinks at https://sirlinksalot.co/high-quality-backlinks-free/.
[17:52] Is it better to use naked URLs or anchors of the titles for the html sitemap?
I’m not too familiar with HTML sitemaps. I just use Yoast or Rank Math.
[18:42] What are the best free ways to build backlinks for EMD micro-niche sites?
Refer to https://sirlinksalot.co/high-quality-backlinks-free/. It’s very difficult to get free backlinks. In 2023, almost everyone is charging for them.
[25:29] Have you tried any of the cheaper alternatives to Ahrefs and Semrush?
I played around with Ubersuggest a while back, but it’s been a while since I’ve really tried any of the Ahrefs alternatives. I know that Ahrefs has a free trial, but other than that and Semrush, I can only recommend Ubersuggest as an alternative.
[30:06] One of my competitors is building too many profile backlinks (2000+), and he is ranking number one. Just unbelievable!
I’d like to see your niche and competition. You can rank with just profile backlinks, but it’s not something I’d recommend you do. They could be powering those profile backlinks with tiered link-building—spamming backlinks to the profile backlinks to power them up. They might also have a hidden PBN powering the website.
[38:47] I’ve been looking at various outreach/link options, and I see lots that have been hit catastrophically hard with all the algorithm changes. Sites that are priced in the $400+ range that had >100K traffic are now sitting at 10K. How do agencies approach this? From what I’m seeing, it looks like Google is targeting affiliate sites and “magazines” that may appear to sell guest post spots. I get that manual outreach is best, but even manual outreach eventually gets you to a webmaster that says, “Sure, but there’s a fee.”
Manual outreach is really no different from what we do as a link-building agency. You’re paying us to do the outreach for you instead of you doing it yourself. Most of these sites want money because they know that backlinks are valuable in 2023. You can get free backlinks, but it takes more time, better content, higher numbers, personalized outreach, etc. In general, there is a lot of volatility for everybody.
[42:50] Do you recommend buying from your PBN? Is rental better than rolling?
Rentals are better, but rolling is cheaper. However, it’s hard to make a recommendation without seeing your website. As someone new to SEO, I recommend starting with pillow link-building: social profiles, Web 2.0s, blog comments, etc. We sell packs of 20-30 pillow links on our site. Concentrate on getting links from real websites—either guest posts or niche edits.
[47:48] I would like to start implementing tier 2 links to power up my existing guest posts, but since I’m not a link-building expert, I have a couple of questions: 1) Is it okay if I use PBNs and niche edits as my preferred type of tier 2 links? 2) In case I use PBNs/non-relevant niche edits, is it okay if I use this structure: PBN→Guest Post→Money Site, or is it safer if I do PBN→Low-Quality Guest Post→High-Quality Guest Post→Money Site?
Nick and I are not really big on tier 2 link-building because Google can probably look back 5 or 6 tiers and see what’s natural and what isn’t. A lot of people are building them in a spammy way—cheap backlinks instead of quality backlinks. We do like tiered link-building, but not as a main part of our strategy. We do them for our primary social profiles like our main Facebook page, Pinterest, Instagram, or YouTube channel. We stay away from spam. We use low-authority niche edits as PBN links. The lower the quality and the more spam you use, you might want to do more tiers. Again, we don’t do this, so we don’t recommend it.
