In the past, many marketers took a shotgun approach to link building, sending out a massive number of generic requests to trade links. This was (and still is) very typical for affiliate marketers and small businesses hoping to get some traffic and (more importantly) an improved PageRank for their Web site. There are several major flaws in this link building approach:

- The format for directory-style listings on “link pages” provide little opportunity to use custom anchor text (linking to the URL instead)
- Trading links no longer offers the SEO benefits seen in the past
- Results in the formation of “link farms”, which are now looked down upon by the search engines and will not help improve rankings.

Instead of focusing merely on the number of backlinks to your Web site, prioritize quality and diversity in your link building efforts. Quality links come from credible Web sites relevant to the products or services you offer.  There are several quality-related questions you should consider when developing a link building strategy:

- Is the link on a Web site related to my product or service?
- Does my link use keyword-rich anchor text?
- Is the link on a credible Web site?

In addition to quality, you should ensure you’re developing a diverse link profile, sourcing links from a range of Web sites (including blogs, articles, social media, bookmarking, etc.) instead of putting all your eggs in one basket.  Links from various types of Web sites, especially sites viewed as credible resources, result in the links appearing to have been acquired in a more natural manner to the search engines and enhances their effectiveness. This is because the goal of the search engine algorithms is to provide improved rankings based on what their users link to, not links that are acquired through link building campaigns – so the more ‘naturally acquired’ your link profile seems to be, the better the results.  By including quality and diversity in your link building campaign, you ensure the highest probability of success for this aspect of your marketing program.

Developing quality content and a syndication strategy is critical for link building success. First, you need content seen as valuable to a Web site’s users (often referred to as “link bait”). This content can take several forms including a blog, case study, a tool/application and technical information. After developing the content, it is very important to develop strategies to syndicate the content to interested users, Web sites and the community in general. Quality content has no value from a link building perspective unless people are able to find it (and link to it).

The shotgun approach is no longer an effective link building approach, and marketers must develop more elegant content-based strategies to create quality backlinks to their Web site in order to maximize the benefit to their program.

1. Determine Where to Host Your Content Based on your Goals

If you want to use the video to bring customers to your site, and increase search referrals you should host it on your site. A properly optimized video can improve your search rankings for the right content. If you host the video on a third-party site like YouTube, the top search results for your video will probably be for the external site where your video resides instead of your own site, and you could miss out on the potential ranking.

If instead you want to show your video to the most amount of people you should host it on sites like YouTube. Mass-upload services can be used to get your video out to multiple video hosts. You can read more about the value of mass-uploading to determine if it will be worth pursuing for you and your company.

Popular sites that can host your videos:

• Youtube.com
• Metacafe.com
• Revver.com
• MySpace Videos
• Vimeo.com
• Dailymotion.com
• Viddler.com
• Yahoo Videos
• Google Videos

2. Optimize the Title and Description

The title and description should be aligned with the keyword strategy you have for your Web site and include key phrases from the video content. The description should be written in sentence form using keywords within the body of the text instead of just using a long list of keywords.

If you were going to write a description for a video about SEO in general, you want to write something like this: “In this video we discuss how to create a keyword strategy to improve your site’s rankings in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). We go on to describe why it is critical that the title tags, URLs, and copy are in alignment. You will also learn where else search engine crawlers look for relevant information after watching this video.”

What you don’t want your description to look like: “Video about optimized keywords, SEO video, title tags, URLs, good copy, Google bot.”

3. Utilize Transcriptions for Your Videos

Because search engines cannot understand the content in a video, you should include text transcripts for each video wherever you decide to host it. This should help improve your rankings and value to the search engines and video hosts because now they will have more information with which to determine your relevance.

Having transcripts for videos hosted on your own site will also increase the amount of textual content on your website giving you more opportunities to call out the key words and phrases that you want to rank for based on your keyword strategy.

4. Create Video Site Maps

A site map is used to help search engines index all the pages on your Web site by providing a short path (one or two clicks) to each page from one location. A video site map can be included within the site map for the whole site to help search engines index the videos you are hosting. Without this tool search engines may only be able to see the page on which the video resides, but not its content.

The video site map guideline from Google will help you get started.

5. Use Optimized URLs

Just as you would use URLs based on your overall keyword strategy for every other page on your site, the pages with the videos are no different. Try to incorporate a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the video within the URL.

This is a poor URL: http://www.yoursite.com/video123.html

Instead use something like this: http://www.yoursite.com/video/search-engine-optimization-tips.html

6. Less is More

The average length of the videos that are watched is just under 4 minutes. Watching a video is a time investment, and if the content isn’t interesting or relevant people will lose interest. If you’ve created a longer video presentation, try to break it down into a series of videos. You can then post videos on a schedule which will generate fresh content on your site or channel (if you’re hosting it at a third party site), and give you a boost towards your SEO each time you post.

7. Share the Video

Push the links to your videos out to all the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Also involve your employees and tell them to spread the word via their own social media and LinkedInaccounts. Include a link to the videos in your email blasts and newsletters that you send to your subscribers as well. If the content is useful and relevant, the viewers will appreciate it.

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Have you tried some of these techniques for your own videos? Have you noticed any change in traffic and/or conversions after posting your videos on either your own site or on a 3rd-party host?

Some of the ways you can add value to them are:

-Give them money
-Exchange links so that you can provide them traffic and improve their positioning in the search engines
-Enhance the user experience for their Web site visitors by:

-Developing content for their site
-Providing a link to content on your site
-Providing access to a tool

Once you understand this, you can start determining your strategy on how to acquire the best links. Check out a more detailed post on link building and its benefits on our blog for more insight into this topic.

The following details link building best practices and the steps one needs to take to implement a successful campaign.

Create a natural incoming link structure

Search engines value the natural acquisition of links to a site and strongly devalue links that they perceive as being acquired artificially.  If a search engine determines that one is gaming the system through the artificial acquisition of links, the site risks being penalized, hence losing its ability to rank well for targeted keyword phrases.  Therefore, it is extremely important to recognize the difference between what is perceived as an artificial versus a natural link.  If the anchor text (the text displayed in the hyperlink when linking to a specific site), varies from link to link then search engines are more likely to identify the link acquisition as natural, whereas if the anchor text is identical in each backlink, then one risks being perceived as acquiring artificial links.

Additionally, the percentage of reciprocal links versus one-way links to you site is an important factor to consider. A high percentage of reciprocal links will trigger a red flag that links have been acquired artificially, suggesting the site is not adding value to the search engine user.  To ensure a site’s increasing link volume appears natural, it is important to maintain low percentage of reciprocal links.

Lastly, the rate at which links are acquired is taken into account by the search engines.  Increasing link volume must appear as a natural progression, instead of happening all at once.  Placing 10 quality inbound links to your site a week is a better strategy than placing 2,000 links in one day.  The search engines will notice link volume spikes that were unlikely to have happened due to Internet users’ true interest in your site’s content and deem them as unnatural.

Get quality incoming links from quality sites

Establishing inbound links are not useful unless those links come from reputable, popular sites. Because some links may hurt your site, or have no effect on it at all, it is extremely important to properly evaluate the quality of links so that your SEO efforts are maximized.

For starters, be sure that links to your site are listed on other high quality Web sites. If a Web site that is ranked highly in the search engines links to you and has many relevant inbound links to it, it will share some of their link juice (ranking power created by quality and volume of links) with your site. This is more powerful than having an incoming link from a Web site that only has one or two inbound links and is not recognized by the engines. Furthermore, try and identify Web sites that share a common content theme with yours and avoid Web sites that may be offensive to readers, such as sites that feature adult content or those that slander public figures.

Get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links

Descriptive anchor text gives the search engines clues as to what your site’s content consists of and makes them more likely to crawl and index it.  As an example, if you are selling computer software, it will be exponentially more valuable to have the anchor text of an inbound link read “computer software solutions” than simply listing “click here.”  It is also important to closely match a link’s anchor text to the targeted keyword phrases of the page you are driving traffic to. 

Go for deep links

A deep link is defined as one that points to a page other than your homepage.  Make sure that some of your incoming links point to sub-pages within your site, instead of only directing traffic to your homepage.  This allows one to optimize for more pages and provides an argument to the search engines that the whole site is of value versus just the “front door.”

Ensure that the URL format of your referring links is consistently identical

Do you know that…
your-site.com
your-site.com/
www.your-site.com
www.your-site.com/
…are four different URLs even though they direct the Web visitor to the same Web page? If this is the case with your site and those linking to you are using different links, you are diluting your page rank—not good! Do everything possible to standardize your incoming URL structure in order to help produce the maximum relevancy-boost possible from incoming links. This topic is further discussed in a previously posted blog: What is URL Canonicalization?

Remember that improved rankings are your goal

Focus your time on building a link strategy that will generate the highest rankings in the engines. Be sure your title tags match the anchor text of offsite links and focus on targeting high pagerank sites that can share some of their link juice with your Web site. Be patient! Though this can be a slow process a focused and steady approach will yield long term success.