For some time now I’ve been trying to systematize the process of link building. I just ran a quick experiment on some of my friends / competitors: Anduro, Foundpages and Vovia. As they say, “check what competition does and do better”. This post shows a process I used to define link-building categories as well as a list of these categories. This should help people who’s tasked with on-going link building.
My link building research methodology
- identified top 3 competitors for “online marketing Calgary“
- ran all three of them through Yahoo Site Explorer (inbound links from outside domains)
- saved the TSV files for each of those competitors
- merged all three files and added two more columns (links to, type of link)
- went through the list to remove duplicate domains
- ended up with a list of over 400 sites linking back to my competitors
- identified the links in one of the following categories
Link building categories identified
- Clients and Partners: this one is self explanatory. Whenever you do a project or partner with somebody ask if they could place a link to your site on theirs. Make sure your anchor text is in order. You can event cut some cost of the project to get that link. However, if you’re thinking of doing it, make sure their site has a significant pagerank (anything above PR4 is good).
- Offline participation: Take part in industry events (as a speaker) or organize your own. Either way there will be link building opportunities. For example, bigger events usually send out an email blast with speakers bio. Ask if you could include a link in that bio, especially if you can anchor link to your site (text “Online marketing expert” linking to your site).
- Online participation:
- join industry forums, ask questions, give answers, comment, participate. Building links form blog comments has worked well for me. Just make sure you provide quality feedback in your comments. Use StumbleUpon to find relevant blogs to comment on. Don’t overdo it though. Balance with other link building practices.
- do guest posts: there are plenty of group and individual blogs in your industry. Come out as an expert and write an article in an area of your business. Approach the blog owner and as to contribute with an article. Don’t forget to include properly formatted anchor text in your article. Don’t overdo with the number of links to your site inside the article. 2-3 links is plenty.
- share your content: if you’re blogging on regular basis, make sure you 1) make sharing your articles easy, 2) you share those article with your network on Twitter, Faceook, StumbleUpon.
- General directories: these are directories like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, etc. Some are paid, some are free. Just make sure that a listing has an option of linking to your site. Linking with anchor text is ideal.
- Geo-specific directories: Google values local connections. There’s probably a lot of directories in your locale. Make sure you are there. I’m looking at my competitors and they’re in most of the local directories.
- Thematic directories: Doing a quick Google search for ” “your indsutry” AND “directory” ” will probably give you a list of directories in your specific industry. They will be from all over the world but they will be theme specific. Engines like when your site is on the list with other relevant resources.
- In the media: One of my competitors got mentioned in a very powerful news source. Think industry specific (Mashable, TechCrunch) and geo-specific (Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun). If you have a news worthy story, I suggest you connect with your local reporters on the topic. Even if you don’t think you have a story, still connect, find out what the trends are and what the reporter is writing like. Make this connection! (courtesy of Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi).
- Link-bait and quality content development: It’s a great sign when others link to specific posts on your site. Engine love that and they thing that your site has developed natural authority among like-minded people. Having a link from a relevant site is worth a lot, so I suggest you invest time into quality content development.
I hope that all makes sense. Feel free to let me know what other proven ways you found useful.
Once your site has a solid base: clear understanding of your product and the audience, strong keywords, proper SEO implementation, etc. it’s much easier to build on it. This article is about being consistent when we talk about online marketing and SEO.
Content development
Content development is about creating original and fresh content. This is exactly what shows search engines that your site is growing, contributing to the universe. This should be the key element of your SEO maintenance strategy. A few things to note:
- Articles frequencies: frequency of new content is important. Often it does not matter how what the time interval between updates is, as long as it’s regular (i.e. weekly articles is usually a good way to start). Once you’re comfortable with this frequency (and you start getting returning visitors for new portions of knowledge), you can start increasing the frequency to twice a week, three times a week and daily articles.
- Article length: there are many different perspectives on it. The average number of words in a good article varies from 400 to 700. Make sure it’s not too long (people have different reading behaviours online as opposed to reading books, magazines and newspapers). Make sure it’s long enough to convey your points with an intro, body and conclusion sections.
Content distribution
Once your article is written, it’s time to get it distributed. Yes, Google will eventually pick up on new content. However, distributing your articles once they are written make your content index even faster (usually within a matter of minutes / hours). There’s a few things that will help you:
- Ping services: ping is kind of like a “poke” on Facebook. It’s about letting search engines know that you’ve got new content. There are many services (paid and free) that will ping search engines for you. Here’s a list of ping sites I use in my WordPress. This ensures that every time there’s a post, a ping is sent to all those 40+ services. To learn more about pinging Google: ping services.
- Share + bookmark: If you’re using Wordress to produce and manage your articles like I do, you should have a AddToAny plugin installed. This plugin adds sharing / bookmarking button to the end of your articles. This way readers can save / bookmark or share the article for later review or to share with friends. Other blogging platforms should also have similar plugins. If you don’t have a blog platform like Wordress, Joomla, etc. you can use their non-plugin service at AddToAny. I use this sharing button to manually bookmark and share my new articles with the network of my social profiles.
- Online press releases: There is a few different services aimed at distributing your press releases online (PRWeb, Marketwire, Google: online pr distribution for more options). Your PR release is your new article. Before sending it in, make sure you follow all the guidelines (usually on a vendor website) as well as keep an eye on proper anchor formats to get the most out of those releases. This way of distribution will not only get you indexed fast but also will generate a number of links to your site. And, as a bonus, if your article gets published in a quality publication, you get the bragging rights.
- Guest posts are a good practice to have. Pick a few sites / blogs in your area of expertise, ask if you can send them your weekly articles. They’re usually looking for content and will be happy to feature yours. Then, start sending your articles to them on weekly basis. Not all of them will get published but the ones that do will be worth it. IMPORTANT: make sure each of your articles includes properly anchored link to your site.
Link building
Link building has to be periodic. It’s not enough to bulk-link-build in the beginning. It’s about gaining authority with search engines and the process is continuous. Search engines need to see that there’s consistent increase in the number and quality of sites linking back to you over a period of time. That is why gradual link building is much more important than one time. There’s a few things you can do here:
- Engage in link bait: Link bait is about creating quality content on your sites in hopes that the community finds it useful and starts linking back to it. In other words link bait is creating link-worthy content. There are a few things that characterize a good link bait article.
- Read and participate: As you read industry periodicals make sure you share your opinion (if you have one of course, don’t just leave a comment for the sake of link building, they will get deleted) and engage in conversation on blogs. Ensure that every time you leave a quality comment you get a quality credit in a form of a good anchor.
- Hire a link builder: I know, this is controversial. And many SEOs will disagree with this. Although I’m a firm believer in quality link building through articles and community participation, I still think that the number growth in links matters. At the end of each month I’m tracking both links I generated as a result of my community engagement as well as links that were generated for me by a lower cost provider. Time and experimentation will tell, but for now let’s leave it at that.
Website analytics
Analytics is super important, especially in the age of it being so affordable through Google Analytics. Establish goals (usually done at step 5 of my process. Use Google Analytics to check how you did this month. Make adjustments to your efforts as needed. Sometimes it’s better to leave things as they are for another reporting period. Some results may take time to show.
A few other things:
- Avoid drastic changes to your site structure (category / directory changes, page name changes)
- Read SEO resources to stay up to date on the industry of search engine marketing
This concludes my 7-step SEO process. I hope it was helpful in defining the key stages of SEO for your new website. One thing to remember: it’s all about creating quality content consistently. I encourage you to comment and add your observations to each of the articles in this series.
Link building is important because the more sites link back to you the more authority your site has in the eyes of a search engines. It’s like “it’s better when people tell good things about you, than when you go and talk about yourself”.
Not all links are created equal. These are some of the key things that differentiate links:
- dofollow and nofollow links. In other words, links that transfer
- one way, two way and even three way. You should be interested in one way links.
- links from directories, social bookmarking sites, blog articles, blog comments, etc. The more diverse your links sources are the better.
- links from quality, trusted, authoritative websites. These links you need! Although it may take awhile to get a link from an authority website, but it’s definitely worth it. For example your article gets published in TechCrunch. Or your product is cited in New York Times.
- links from general resources and industry-specific resources
Without getting into too many details, there’s a few things to keep in mind when linkbuilding:
- Pay attention to both quantity and quality, having said that quality of links is always more important. It’s way better to have one link from New York Times and a hundreds thousands of links from questionable directories.
- Make sure links that you are getting are from relevant resources (for the most part).
- Anchor text is super important. Anchor is linked text. A good anchor for an SEO Service company is SEO Service. Also make sure to differentiate your anchors. For example, instead of using just SEO Service use multiple anchors like SEO company, SEO Service, SEO Reports, etc.
- Take a snapshot of your current link profile (sites that link back to you). There’s a section on how to do it in my previous post on taking SEO performance snapshots. Once you have that base number you can track your month-to-month easily.
There are tools available that will help you discover sites to link to, monitor your link building activity and manage your link building process. Below are only a few options for link building tools.
- Backlink watch (Free): helps you monitor who links back to you, what anchor text is used and if it’s a dofollow or nofollow link.
- Link Builder tool from Wordtracker (Paid): I have not used it but for some reason I trust these guys. This is supposed to be a multi-purpose tool to help you run your link building program.
- Linkscape and Open Site Explorer tools by SEOmoz (Free): these two are free link building tools from a reliable vendor.
- List of tools at Search Engine Land (Free and paid): this is a comprehensive list of solid tools by a solid publisher.
This list should be sufficient. You can, of course, search Google to find more link building tools but I recommend you get to work of actually link building and NOT looking for better tools and evaluating alternatives. Believe me, I spent countless hours looking at tools only to find out that the link building work was not happening.
Link building is hugely important in promoting your website because relevant links increase authority of your site. As authority goes up, so do your search engine rankings. Not all links are created equal. Some have “nofollow” attribute, some “dofollow”.
“dofollow” links are generally better because they pass Google Juice to the site they are linking too. The more Google Juice flows your way, the higher authority your site gets when it comes to search ranking. More about what Google Juice is.
“nofollow” links are still great to have but less desirable because they don’t let the Google Juice flow through. Nonetheless, “nofollow” links add balance and should definitely be part of your link building strategy.
Most of the links today are “nofollow” because site owners don’t want to let go of the Juice from their site. At the same time there’s the whole “dofollow” movement happening… But this is a totally different post about Social Media, Sharing and Value transfer…
To conclude this post, here’s a list of useful resources to find sites with “dofollow” links:
Scanning through Twitter yesterday I bumped into a link to a new service called knowem.com. It allows people to protect their online brands by offering to register social networks profiles on over 380 networks.
The tool checks your brand presence on a variety of social networks. The lists are arranged by category of social networks like Photo, Video, Business, Blogging, etc. See a complete list of Social Networks. The service offers a number of plans including personal and corporate. You can register each profile yourself or you can pay and your brand profile will be registered for you.
Advantages of using the tool:
- Once you register those profiles, your brand name is preserved across major social networks.
- If the name is already taken, you can see who owns the name.
- It’s a good tool to keep track of your social network profiles.
- You can export your social networks lists to a CSV file to share with a client.
Disadvantages or things that are missing:
- Lack of proper list management interface where I can track social networks I own.
- As the product is still new, there’s a few bugs.
If you know of any other similar tools or have a comment on this one, please leave in the comments to this post.
Let’s connect!