Welcome to Episode 337! Today, I'm joined by returning guest and fellow friend in the industry who recently became a dad, Jeff Oxford!

Jeff is the founder of 180 Marketing, a site dedicated to helping ecommerce brands with their SEO needs and challenges. Jeff's an expert in ecommerce SEO, and we can't think of anyone else better suited to tell us about link building than him.

In this episode, we talk about how important link building is when it comes to increasing your site's authority and how to avoid penalties from Google by sticking to the white hat tactics.

Specifically, we talk about the following:

• How backlinks affect your site's ranking - 4:00
• What backlinks are - 5:00
• Some statistics for Mike's sites - 6:40
• Sites that tell you how authoritative your website is - 7:20
• The wrong ways to get backlinks - 7:50
• The disadvantages of using black hat tactics to get backlinks - 9:40
• Private Blog Networks and why you shouldn't use them - 10:40
• Strategy #1: The Power of Content Marketing - 14:39
• Strategy #2: Collaborative Posts
• Strategy #3: Building Links through Books
• Strategy #4: The Hidden Value of Resource Pages - 25:55
• Creating a recycling page about your products - 27:48
• Strategy #5: The HARO Method — 28:57
• Strategy #6: Product Reviews - 31:40
• Strategy #7: Awarding Scholarships — 33:30
• Strategy #8: Being a Podcast Guest - 36:35
• Strategy #9: Guest Posting - 38:38
• When guest posting is not a good idea - 39:15
• Sites for prospecting - 42:10
• What 180 Marketing does - 46:45

Want to hear more from Jeff? You can listen to our first episode with Jeff, where he does an SEO teardown for one of our sites. If you're interested in getting an SEO teardown for your own website, or just working with Jeff in general, you can reach him at [email protected].

Link building is such an important aspect of improving your Google ranking, which is why our next Secret Sauce episode will be about it. To join, become a Premium member so you can get to ask Jeff your questions and to get access to the replays of all our past Secret Sauce episodes.

Not ready to be a member yet?

Join us on October 14 at 10 AM (PST) for a FREE Public Q&A webinar. We'll be sharing some general tips and strategies from one of the things we know best: Importing from China.

We've been doing in the import game for several years now, and we've built up a lot of nifty tips for you. From finding the right suppliers and maintaining a good relationship with them, to making sure your products are up to spec even when you're not physically in China.

We hope to see you there, and if you like this episode, please leave us a review over on iTunes.

Happy selling!