Stephan Spencer

Stephan Spencer is an internationally recognized SEO expert, Internet entrepreneur, sought-after professional speaker, and bestselling author. He is the co-author of The Art of SEO, author of Google Power Search and co-author of Social eCommerce, all published by O’Reilly.

The Art of SEO, weighing in at nearly 1000 pages, is considered THE bible on search engine optimization, and is even used as a textbook at universities.

Stephan founded the interactive agency Netconcepts in 1995 and grew it into a multinational SEO firm, with dozens of staff across three countries. Netconcepts was acquired in 2010 by Covario.

His clients have included Zappos, Sony, Chanel, Quiksilver, Bed Bath & Beyond, and CNBC, among others.

Stephan also hosts the podcasts Marketing Speak and The Optimized Geek.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Stephan’s success

Link outreach

Result if you follow the steps in Stephan’s session

A big lift in organic traffic and sales

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

You need link analysis tools that will help you determine if they have a lot of trust and they have a lot of authority. So I use a range of different tools. I use ahrefs and majestic and link Explorer, the new replacement from Mas of open Site Explorer, and linkresearchtools.com, it’s one of my favorite tool sets, in fact, for link analysis, so I’m using a range of different tools.

SEM rush and search metrics, as well for some of that more competitive intelligence type things. But just to look at the authority and trust levels, I’m primarily looking at a ahrefs, linkresearchtools.com and majestic and link Explorer.

So that tells me if I’m on the right track or not, if they’re going to be a waste of time in terms of getting that link because their trust flow is only a five out of 100. It’s not worth my effort. So I need to go after those links that are going to be worth 1000 lower quality or lesser quality links.

I don’t want any low-quality links that’s going to happen just by the nature of you know, being out there on the web.

Low quality sites will link to you and you have to keep track of that and use a triage tool like link detox to determine if you have low quality links that needs to be disavowed. And you need to do a request for removal of that link from the website honor.

You just have to keep a clean profile being in a nice link neighborhood. And if you’re not, you need to address it. So you use outreach tools that will tie in with the link analysis tools that have these metrics. Like, for example, I use pitch box that will tie in to these different link metrics from the other tools.

Like for example, I want to know what the websites trust flow is and citation flow based on majestic or I want to know about their DR and UR of their homepage, which is in Ahrefs set of metrics. I want to know how good this site is before I outreach to it and then just set a minimum threshold.

Anything below that I won’t even outreach to with the tool, with pitch box. So yeah, it’s the 80/20 rule. The Pareto principle, but on steroids.

Because one link could be worth 1000 just regular links, if you get the right link from the right site.