10 experimentally proven ways to build links

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

1. identified top 3 competitors for “online marketing Calgary“
2. ran all three of them through Yahoo Site Explorer (inbound links from outside domains)
3. saved the TSV files for each of those competitors
4. merged all three files and added two more columns (links to, type of link)
5. went through the list to remove duplicate domains
6. ended up with a list of over 400 sites linking back to my competitors
7. 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.

Website SEO: Keyword research, step 2

Now that you have a list of terms gathered by brainstorming, talking to friends, customers, looking up online, let’s look at a few major components of the keyword research process.

Filter the keywords

The bigger the initial list the better. This will give you more variations of terms that refer to your product. Before you go into grouping the terms first make sure you eliminate all irrelevant terms. You can do it by running your list through tools like Google Keyword-based Search Tool.

It’s very likely that your initial bulk keyword list will be significantly shortened by the tool you use. That’s ok, just make sure that the keywords that are left are relevant to your business. Some tools like Wordtracker will give you suggestions on other relevant terms. Make sure you get through the list of recommended terms and only keep the most relevant to your product. Keep in mind that those terms should also have at least minimal approximate monthly searches number.

Group the keywords

By now you’ve cleaned you your initial keyword list. It’s the time to group the terms. In most cases your product has several variations / types / sub-products, etc. It’s helpful to divide your list into logical groups. For example, here’s one way of breaking the words into groups:

• SEO Services: seo, search engine optimization, organic search, natural search, etc.
• Paid search Services: ppc, paid search, adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, SEM, etc.
• Email marketing Services: email templates, email management, email marketing, etc.

Once you have these logical groups, it helps to run those through a keyword research tool. This will allow you to determine the terms you want to focus for each product. For example, for SEO Services page, the focus will be SEO Services Calgary instead of search engine optimization Calgary.

Implementation document

Finally, once you have the focus terms for the pages, it’s time to prepare the SEO implementation document. First it helps you to keep things organized. Second, it helps to communicate your SEO strategy to a web developer who will be implementing some of the technical things.

Different SEO professional will have different format for the implementation document. Some will have it as a Word Document, some will use a spreadsheet. I use an OpenOffice Calc to prepare a spreadsheet. Here’s an example of a SEO implementation document I use.

I hope this gives a bit of a shape to your keyword research process. Next up is an article about implementing your SEO strategy on your website.

I can conduct keyword research for your website