Things might appear effortless and straightforward for me at present, but this hasn’t always been the case…

Even after dedicating months to crafting articles and establishing my initial website, I was aware that without securing backlinks, achieving a rank would remain elusive.

The Music Business

I come from the music business and have run a successful mastering and duplication company for 15 years in the nineties and the beginning of 2000.

After mastering over 9,000 albums, it became clear to me that the Internet would become a major enabler for businesses. I was one of the first to have my own website.

Many record companies got into trouble because of all the illegal music downloading. Those were my customers.

Meeting SEO Gurus

Through my duplication company, I came into contact with the then well-known SEO “gurus” who had their course duplicated on DVD by me.

Often those DVD courses consisted of 10 or more DVDs and I spent hours watching all those videos. A world opened up for me.

I saw the potential of internet marketing and fully immersed myself in it. I learned to make websites but started making Apps. That was a whole new market at the time.

I received many customers who all wanted their own app. These were restaurants, insurance companies, musicians, in short, many different types of companies.

But I knew that the App market would also saturate, which happened a few years later. In the meantime, I watched a lot of videos about SEO and link building. I learned to use SEO tools and of course, I regularly bought the latest SEO gadgets.

The Dutch SEO gurus didn’t make me much wiser. I discovered where she got all that knowledge from. Those were English and American SEO people. But they also got their knowledge from others. One of them was Jimmy Kelley. I also learned the most from that.

Link building Tools

I started working with special link building tools and was able to rank hundreds of websites with them. Soon I started working with SEO people not only in the Netherlands but also in English-speaking and Spanish-speaking countries.

Now we do more than 10+ link building campaigns per day and because Google is changing we also put a lot of emphasis on on-page SEO. Of course, this gave me a lot of experience with link building and I also know what works and what doesn’t work.

Onpage SEO and Rankbrain

Link building is still an important factor, but Google has changed significantly in the last six months and now makes much more use of its own AI modules such as Rankbrain, BERT, and Spambrain.

This means that I do link building very differently than I used to. The articles that I post for link building are also Rankbrain proof. The links are certainly no longer always with a keyword and a link below it. Google’s spam brain can therefore quickly see whether a link is spam or not.

My Rankbrain Strategies

I therefore use a number of important points in my link building strategy.

1. Keyword research with a very special tool that is unknown to most SEO people but used by a select group of specialists.
2. ensure traffic, which is only possible with thorough keyword research.
3. on-page SEO based on Rankbrain.
4. internal linking structure
5. link building based on Rankbrain

Currently, I operate a link-building agency dedicated to elevating website positions through strategic backlink acquisition.

But not only link building, also on-page SEO based on Rankbrain has become an extremely important factor for me to help customers rank their websites.