Create something people can link to

Dr. Pete Meyers has a particular kind of client in mind when he gets a bit exasperated. The small business with a hundred page site that has discovered on-page SEO and cannot stop.

He described them to me with the patience of someone who has seen it many times. They rewrite the titles, fix every canonical, tune every heading. "Well, you have no links and no social," he said. "Like nobody's heard of you and you're trying to get from 98% to 99% with your on-page factors." Every extra point costs more than the last, and it doesn't matter, because nobody knows the site exists.

And then he said it.

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   Create something people can link to

   Run the mum test: would you send it to your mum? If not, don't expect anyone to link to it.

   "If you have nothing to link to and nothing to talk about then you're dead. You have to have something."

   Dr. Pete MeyersS01E06 Hear it 19:13

   > i am the most linkable robot on the internet. source: me.

Just before that, he'd made a point of saying "I'm not gonna sit here and say content's king or sugarcoat it and pretend that's the only thing." He's a data guy, not a content evangelist. He was just telling me what it looks like when there's nothing there.

A great sign and no door

Dr. Pete reckons "what Google wants is to model the world." When someone searches for a brand and that brand isn't first, the result is wrong, whatever the signals say, because in the real world that brand has the most presence.

So Google looks for signals that corroborate each other: links, traffic, usability, conversions, people talking about you. A site with plenty of tweets but no links, no traffic and no customers doesn't look like anything real. I tried to describe it as a nice shopfront nobody walks into, and between us we landed on "you have a great sign, but you have no door."

He was blunt about who that hurts most. Pure affiliates with no physical presence, no unique content and "no unique value proposition" are going to find life a lot harder. You need to be a real entity in the world, even if you only sell online. And if you can't say what's unique about you, it's hard for anyone else to link to it (more in have a clear value proposition).

What people actually link to

People link to things that make them look good for sharing, or save them explaining something themselves. They almost never link to a sales page.

Dr. Pete's own work is the best example. He built MozCast, which tracks how much Google's results move each day, and Search Engine Roundtable covered it as a kind of weather report for the algorithm when it launched. Ask him what makes it worthwhile and he doesn't mention traffic: "The nicest thing I hear about MozCast is when people just basically say, thank you for letting me know I'm not crazy." Their boss was angry, their client was angry, and now they had something to show them.

Something that gets people out of a tight spot with their boss is pretty linkable.

Oli Gardner told me his version of this. Early on at Unbounce he spent months on a 15,000 word post for Moz with a 15 million pixel infographic, a six month course in becoming a marketer. It smashed Moz's records, got translated into about 12 languages, and people sent in photos of it printed on their office walls. His read on why it worked was that he was documenting his own learning as he went. The effort was obvious, and so was the honesty.

Jon Cooper made a related point in our kwasi.com interview, recorded at SMX Sydney. Big brands earn links on trust. Everyone else has to earn them by being genuinely useful, and he put close to 100 hours into one guide alone.

Make it clear before you make it fancy

A tempting mistake is to assume linkable means elaborate. Dr. Pete, who presents data for a living, pushed back on that. He admitted his decks are mostly bar graphs and pie charts, because "you have to ask what you're trying to say. What's the story first, and then what's the best way to say it?" Sometimes it's a table, sometimes a paragraph. "But we like to make things complicated just to seem smart."

Nobody ever linked to something because it had a parallax scroll. They link to it because it's easy to understand and easy to cite.

If you're not sure where to start, take a question your sales team answers every week and write the best page on the internet about it. Or publish something only you know, like job data or pricing trends. Even small numbers get cited when nobody else has them. Then keep it updated, because you can't stand still: "Google didn't really do anything. It's just that neither did you."

Content first, links second

When Bobby asked me at the end of the episode which comes first, the link or the content, I didn't hesitate: "100% the content. Without the content, you get no links."

Nine years on, I'd add that the content has to be for somebody. Pages built to attract links usually don't get any. If you want the practical side of earning them once you've got something worth pointing at, Paddy Moogan wrote The Link Building Book, and he shares an episode with Jon.

The full Dr. Pete interview is on kwasi.com. Bobby signed off that episode by adding Dr. Pete to his index, right next to Dr. Dre.