Step 1:  Evaluate Your Existing Content

Take a look at what you have on your site. If you didn’t work on the site or have an interest in buying the products listed on the site, would there be any reason to visit? If you answered no, than why would anyone link to your site (without payment or reciprocal linking)? At this point, your next step is to create content that people would actually find interesting! In other words, you need to differentiate your product! However, if you answered yes to that first question, than…

Step 2: Research

So you have great content that you think people would link to, but who are those people? Where is the best opportunity, so that you’re not wasting your time and effort reaching out to sites that will never link to yours? Researching your link target market allows you to allocate link building time more efficiently. There are two great ways to do this: social media monitoring and competitor analysis. Competitor analysis involves investigating who’s linking to similar content (i.e. the content on your competitor’s sites) to find opportunities. Social media monitoring allows you to find people who are participating in relevant conversations online, segment them based on the topic of conversation, and then either reach out to them with your existing content or…

Step 3: Create New Content

After you’ve done your research, identified relevant opportunities, and reached out to them to gain links, you may make an unfortunate discovery: you’re not getting any links because your content is subpar. Fear not, all is not lost. By re-thinking the content you’re putting out on your blog (or creating a blog if you don’t have one), putting company resources in an online database, or building out new informative/entertaining content, you can better serve your content market, and get links!

Step 4: The Pitch

The pitch is the key to any good sales push. In link building, the initial email is the first, and often times only, chance you have to pitch your target. The challenge is to reach a large number of opportunities, while still maintaining a personalized feel that will encourage your target to respond positively. The best way to do this is to create multiple templates for the multiple target markets you identified in your research. This will allow you to send out a large mass of emails, but still easily add one or two sentences about the site you’re reaching out to for personalization (Rule #1 of outreach: if you’re not personalizing your email outreach, you’re wasting your time).

Step 5: Rolling in a big pile of money (links)

By now, most professionals and many students know about LinkedIn— the professional social network.  With more than 120 million users, it’s your online resume and networking all in one place.  But while many people are currently using LinkedIn, a good number aren’t using it to its full potential.  Yes, it does have an Update function that allows for posting and of course, it’s an easy way to connect with other people for professional purposes.  However, if used correctly, LinkedIn has the potential to do the networking for you, helping other professionals get to know you without you ever saying a word.  Here are 5 easy ways to maximize your LinkedIn potential to help you find that perfect job.

1. Update Often

Of course, anytime your experience or specialties change, this should be reflected in your LinkedIn profile.  But even making minor changes is enough to bump up your profile in the search results for relevant terms.  Take the time to look back every week or so and see if there’s a word or two to be tweaked, or entire experiences to be added.  It will help you to be found and make you look better when you are found.

2.Complete Your Profile

Maybe you don’t think that your high school experience was important or that your unpaid internship 4 summers ago was useless, but others may not.  To increase the probability of being found in searches and to provide more information to those looking at your profile, make sure all the sections are filled out completely (yes, completely).  This means you may have to think long and hard about what you were doing those times to pull out relevant and useful experiences to list, but it’s worth the time.  The more terms that are on your profile, the more ways you can be searched and the more people can find you.  LinkedIn has a smart job recommendation function that recommends jobs for you based on what’s in your profile so you can make the job hunt a lot easier (the jobs are presented to you) by ensuring your profile is filled out with special consideration to keywords (as discussed in my next tip).

3. Optimize Your Profile Specialties

In reality, your entire LinkedIn profile is an opportunity for optimization, as discussed in the point above, but the Specialties portion of your profile acts as a kind of keyword depository for your professional life.  Anything that you consider a skill, talent or specialty of yours should go in here.  Give this optimization an extra boost by taking the time to really think about how other people might search for this.  Don’t just put in “SEO”, put in “search engine optimization (SEO), marketing and internet marketing”.  Don’t just say “healthcare”, say “patient coordination, insurance billing and hospital scheduling”.  This is THE place to be sure you add in anything you can do that may or may not be covered in the rest of your profile.  Don’t ignore it.

4. Get Recommendations

Without a doubt, LinkedIn should be used for connections, so be sure to check often for new people to connect with.  Don’t be shy either; connecting with others is as beneficial to them as it is to you— so get out there!  These connections can be expanded on by asking for recommendations wherever possible.  Ask co-workers, classmates and colleagues to leave you even a brief recommendation when appropriate.  Bonus tip: Take link-building strategy to the professional world by offering to write them a recommendation in return.  This can really help you stand out when people you don’t know view your profile because the personal recommendation is already there.  Now people who may be connected to people you know (as well as those who aren’t) will have added reason to be interested in you, because your resume just became personalized.  It’s quick, effective networking without much effort.

5. Make It Personal

Recommendations are a great way to make your LinkedIn profile much more personal, but there are many other opportunities to expand on this.  At the bottom of your LinkedIn profile is a space for hobbies and interests.  Many people avoid filling out this section because they feel it’s not professional, but as long as your hobbies or interests are not wildly inappropriate, they have a place here.  After all, companies want to hire human beings with personality, not robots.  Perhaps the recruiter looking at your profile loves yoga, biking and coffee.  If you do too and they can see that, they’re more likely to feel a connection with you and view you on a more personal level.

LinkedIn also has widgets that you can take advantage of to give your profile a more personal touch.  For example, LinkedIn has a ‘ReadingList by Amazon’ widget in which you can list books you’re currently reading or have read, much like Good Reads.  Take advantage of this to show people in a more interesting way who you are and what you’re all about.  It also gives potential employers a touch point with you that they may not otherwise have had.

6. Make It Easy on the Eyes

Simply put, don’t clutter up your profile with long paragraphs.  Use bullet points and short, easy-to-read paragraphs to succinctly convey your experience.  This will improve the chances that people will actually read all of what you’ve written and it also will help them to remember the important points.  If there are points you feel are more important, relevant or most accurately describe your abilities, put those at the top to make it easy for people to learn about you, whether it’s at a glance or in a full-read.

Whether you’re an active job seeker, one who has lost his motivation, an employee looking to change jobs or just someone who likes to take advantage of technology, these tips should help make your LinkedIn profile the best it can be so you can spend more time enjoying those hobbies and experiences you’ve just lovingly added to your page.

Spyfu:

If the name doesn’t give it away, this is a great tool for competitive analysis. Spyfu allows you to check keywords that you currently rank for along with your competitors’ keyword rankings and provides a comparison. The unique piece that Spyfu offers is that you can look into what your competitors’ top organic words are, as well as get an idea for what they are doing in paid campaigns.

SEO Tip: Use this tool to come up with blog topics! Spy on your competition to learn what words they are ranking for. Then, run the same report on your own site to cross-check and find words that you don’t have anything ranking. Once you have a set of words that your site doesn’t rank for, get writing!

SEOMoz:

SEOMoz has TONS of resources for search engine optimization (it is hard to even know where to start). If I were a business working on my own SEO and could only have one tool- this would be it. Overall, SEOMoz has a wide-variety of tools to help be proactive in your SEO efforts, as well as to address any problems you are having in your optimization efforts. My favorite offering of SEOMoz is the campaigns. You can set up a “campaign” for websites that you need to monitor regularly. Using this campaign, SEOMoz sends a crawler (RogerBot) to crawl your site on a weekly basis. RogerBot reports back on any items that could raise a flag with search engines. You can even download these reports whenever you want.  Another valuable (but not very unique) tool that SEOMoz offers is the keyword tracking ability. You can upload a list of keywords that you want to track positions on and it will check positions on a weekly basis and keep historical positions.

I am very much looking forward to their social media tracking (currently in Beta). That is another really nice part about SEOMoz- it is always improving tools and capabilities.

SEO Tip: Link your Google Analytics account to view organic traffic, number of URL’s receiving organic traffic and the number of keywords sending organic traffic on a weekly basis. (We know you could just login to your Google Analytics account, but it is sure nice to see this all in one place!)

Yahoo Site Explorer:

Yahoo Site Explorer is nothing fancy or new- no bells and whistles. However, it is still my go-to for checking back links to a site. While you can only export 1,000 back links, it still gives you a good idea of the number of back links that a site has.

SEO Tip: Use Yahoo Site Explorer in conjunction with SEOMoz’s Linkscape Visualization Tool. This will give you a good idea of whether your site is falling short on authority of links or link count.

Screaming Frog:

Screaming Frog is a really fast site crawler. It crawls a website and returns all URLs, page titles, response codes, headers, meta keywords, meta descriptions, canonical tags and much much more! This site crawler is the most comprehensive crawler that I have found to date. In addition to being the most comprehensive, it is lightening fast!

SEO Tip: Use Screaming Frog to find 302 (temporary) redirects. Use Yahoo (above) to explore these URL’s to see if they have links. If so, switch these to 301 redirects so that link juice can be passed through to the new URL.

1. Communicate to cut the red tape

Getting something done in a corporate environment can be worse than pulling teeth. Clearly and thoroughly communicating what your link building efforts will entail—before they begin—to anyone who could possibly be affected by them is a crucial step to take. Upper management needs to be on board and in the loop from the start so that there won’t be any unpleasant surprises. Otherwise, any outreach efforts could end up stalled behind a wall of red tape.

2. Get Creative with your Content

Many big brands will have a team of graphic designers, researchers and web developers already in place that will hopefully be at your disposal, (if you executed step 1 well!), and using that team to create linkable content will be a major boost to any link building effort. In this scenario, your job as a link builder is three-fold: First, since a good link builder is constantly monitoring what topics relevant to the brand are being discussed out on the web, you can advise on what kind of content people might link to. Second, a link builder needs to identify the influencers in the client’s space who are leading the discussion. Third, a link builder needs to make sure these influencers see the content and are willing to distribute it through their respective channels. If you’ve successfully leveraged the creative capabilities of your corporate backer, these three steps shouldn’t be a challenge, considering that you’ll be able to produce outstanding, topical, shareable content and incentivize influencers to distribute it.

3. Making It Rain… for GOOD

Paid links, in the traditional sense of submitting to paid directories or throwing a webmaster a few bucks for an anchor text link, are not only increasingly useless, but also increasingly hazardous, as Google and the other search engines are constantly seeking to discover and penalize these kinds of activities. However, there are still plenty of ways in which a corporate link builder can utilize the well-lined pockets of his employer in a white-hat way. One example would be that anytime your client sponsors a community event, gives a scholarship, donates to a charity, etc., why not request a link on the recipient organization’s page as evidence of that generosity? It’s good PR, you’re supporting a good cause, AND you get a quality link out of it! Word of warning: I wouldn’t get too pushy when asking for a link in return though, since you don’t want it to seem like you’re contributing solely for the link.

4. Throw your weight around

Corporations occasionally get a bad rap for pushing around the little guy—for taking advantage of their heft. While living up to this stereotype might not be such a good PR move, it can be beneficial to your link building efforts. The most extreme example of this tactic I’ve ever heard was including a clause requiring an anchor text link as part of a business contract. That might be taking it too far, but gently prodding smaller vendors and other dependents to link is definitely fair game.

5. Utilize Your Employees

This is one of those painfully obvious tactics that should probably be the first step in any corporate link building program. Odds are that some of the company’s employees have blogs or websites of their own and the odds are even better that they have social media accounts. As part of your initial communication phase (remember step 1?), the client should encourage employees to link to the company site from their own personal sites, as hopefully they enjoy working there and thus don’t mind providing some easy, free publicity for the company. Encouraging employees (maybe providing some sort of incentive?) to share company news on their own social media accounts is even easier and might even be more important as social signals become an increasingly important factor in the SERP’s. Even a medium sized company will have hundreds of employees, so this tactic can have a big impact!

These ideas are only a few examples of how to leverage the size and scope of a large client. I’d love to hear any other suggestions or feedback in the comments section.

I’m sure you are wondering what infographics are and how it can benefit you and your website.  Infographics are a way for the webmaster of any company to transform a boring block of text into an eye catching image, giving your user an entirely new visual experience.

This image engages the reader’s curiosity, which is one of the best emotions to captivate as a company. An image on how traffic is formed, followed by bits of information sprinkled throughout is a great plan of action.

Developing infographics on your homepage will allow your company to convey superiority and relevance, letting your visitor know that they’ve come to the correct place before they’ve made the conscious decision to read the text.  Our world is based on speed, as some of our most profitable companies are based on this very concept i.e. McDonalds. Fast and useful information well help captivate your users, persuading them to stick around long enough to process the valuable information.

Infographics are an innovative way for you to reach your customers—whether through a graph with your data or an image with text.  Furthermore, with many companies, infographics are not used to their utmost potential on their home website and often many may not have conducted the necessary research to determine how to optimize their use.  Don’t let this become your best undiscovered secret.  This tool, when utilized correctly, will set your company apart and drive major traffic to your websites.

Link building is believed to be responsible for driving additional traffic to your website, as it is one of the most effective methods for improving search engine rankings.  Info graphics are sure to make the “pre-historic” black & white text soon succumb to new technology.

This is a different approach when referring to SEO, but how does one benefit from being a sheep, when being the shepherd is an option?

Text is great, but info graphics reigns supreme. Decide where you want to be.

Does this tactic really work?  There are many myths surrounding the link building strategy.   Let’s debunk a few of these:

1)  Links that are built are ALWAYS permanent…WRONG!

Link building should never end.  Links cаn and at times will be removed.   Furthermore, sometimes websites will cease to exist.  These are all reasons that you need to be diligent in your link building and select highly reputable sites to link to.  Also, websites that are frequently updated are typically a good choice to link with, as their webmaster is more likely to keep the website current with any regulations changes.

2) Never link to a site that has a lower Google PR then yours…WRONG!

Only Google knows your actual PR.  The PR we see is old.  Link to content you like and pay less attention to PR.  It is essential to have both high and low level links to ensure that the links appear natural to Google.  Ignoring the lower ranking pages altogether is not recommended. 

3) Link Building alone will get you to the top of the Google ranks…WRONG!

It is true that link building is very important to the success of a website.  Organic links display to Google that your website is popular and a good resource for information if other reputable companies request to link with it.  However another key component to this is Optimization.  Optimization of your website allows you to rank for a specific desired keyword, by placing this keyword throughout the website, it proves to Google the sites expertise.  Therefore Link building coupled with Optimization are simultaneously responsible for your website’s growth.     

In the end, follow link building best practices and you can’t go wrong! Now get out there and LINK!

Relationships

For the Link Builders of past “old school” algorithms and updates, it can be a difficult to leave behind the hours of solitude, Pandora, Google queries, and espresso shots. Alas, as SEO grows and changes into a new era, so must we. Relationships are crucial in moving towards the new era of quality link building. Below are the three most important relationships to any link builder:           

Relationship 1: The Client (this should be a no brainer)

“I can’t forget your face, cause everywhere I go, I see you everyplace, you’re always, always, always on my mind” – Sam Cooke

Follow, like, retweet, link in, comment, read blogs for every single one of your clients. The more you get to know EVERYTHING about your client, the better you will pitch their links. This, additionally, allows you to identify opportunities that you may not have thought of before. Does your client have an awesome blog? Are they running a sweet social media contest? Become an expert on your clients and you will be surprised how easy link building can be.           

 Relationship 2: Coworkers

“Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends, Mm, Gonna try with a little help from my friends”- Beatles

It seems that in internet marketing agencies everyone basically knows what each department does—except SEO. All the Google updates, the mysterious link building, and constant optimization of a website…what do they even do all day?

This is the perfect opportunity to find links for your client! Educate your company on what link building is and how they could potentially have a link opportunity and not even know it. Does your Sales Team know of a link lead? Can your Display Team request a link to sweeten a deal? Can your Account Management Team communicate the importance of connecting with partners to gain links? Is your intern a freelance writer with link tips and leads? Educate your peers and links will just fall in your lap!       

Relationship 3: The Experts

Hello, I love you, Won’t you tell me your name? Hello, I love you, Let me jump in your game –The Doors

Shameless compliments, sweet-talking, persuasion—people LOVE to hear nice things about themselves and their company! Find out who is writing articles, blogging, interviewing, and talking over lunch about your client’s industry. Link building has become less about submissions and emails and more about PR and sales.

Network with the experts, post how amazing they are on their blog, ask to be a guest blogger. SELL why they should link to your client. This is where you are going to get the most valuable links that will win over your current and future clients. Once you have built a link building relationship network, reconnecting with new and exciting clients becomes a breeze!

Are you ready to be a new era link builder? Leave me tips and thoughts and we might just start a brand new link building relationship!

“Don’t just stand there let’s get to it. Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.” -Madonna

Internal links serve various functions. They serve as navigation on your site, they help determine usability of your site, they help search engines understand what your site is about and the size of your site, and they also help distribute link juice throughout your site.

When search engines crawl your site, they send spiders through your site to find all of your pages. If there is a page that exists on your domain, but does not have a link to it, how do search engines find it? The answer is, they often don’t.  Search Engine spiders need to be able to go to your site and crawl it to send that information back to the index of websites that the search engines have. If the spiders can’t navigate to the page, it will likely not get added to the index of pages in the Search Engines. If it isn’t in the index of pages that the Search Engines have, that page will not be in the list of search results. Basically, you aren’t able to compete for positions in the Search Engine Results Page because the Search Engines do not know that page exists.

There are a couple of easy ways to ensure that all of your pages get indexed by search engines. A good place to start is by making sure you have a keyword-rich, anchor text sitemap.  View our sitemap as an example here: http://www.riseinteractive.com/sitemap.php.  This sitemap ensures that all pages located on your domain can be easily reached by spiders (and people). Another way to ensure that your pages are all indexed by Search Engines is to include them in your site navigation. From a usability standpoint, by including a link to your pages in the navigation, users are able to travel around your site without frustration.

Wonder what pages of your site have been indexed by search engines? An easy way to check which pages have been indexed by Google is to go to Google.com, in the search box type in “site:yoursite.com” where you insert your domain. This will search all pages that Google has indexed that are located on your domain.

1.   Quantity versus quality:  The number of links to one’s website is only one factor.  More importantly is the source of the link (the number of qualified links to that source, and the relevance of that page to your keyword) and the anchor text of the link. 

2.  Link Spam: Recently, a number of notable brands such as J.C. Penney were on the receiving end of negative press for “black hat” SEO practices.  While guaranteeing a quantity of links does not automatically imply spam links or other black hat practices, these package deals should be carefully scrutinized to ensure that the methodology is sounds.

3.   Resource Intensive:  To properly manage a back link program, the following steps should be followed:

 -  Analyze Current Links: Are the current links leveraging the right keywords/anchor text?  Are my links coming from sites that are adding value? 

-  Research New Link Sources: What are the link sources that my competitors are leveraging?  Which customers or partners can I leverage for back links?  What industry hub sites can we contact?

-  Outreach:  Once the questions above can be answered, actually acquiring the links becomes more or less a sales and marketing effort to contact these strategic partners.  This effort is conducted by email and phone, and may even require a CRM system to manage this massive amount of data.

-  Management: Lastly, once linking relationships have been established, it is important to continue to monitor your link portfolio.

With consideration to these factors, how is it possible for a company to provide this strategic value at the level of quantity promised?   Even if these firms point out their cheap labor costs (offshore) or technology solutions, our experience is that in most cases even if the quantity is delivered, the quality is not there and in fact can be detrimental to your SEO efforts.

Volume is No Longer King

Use your favorite link checking tool and take a look at backlink volume of the top few search results. One thing should become clear – it’s not merely a volume game anymore.  Thanks to advances made by the search engines, a site with less than 5,000 links can rank better than a powerhouse that has over 30,000.  And frankly, that powerhouse can actually hurt its SEO program if the links fail to consider all the factors at play.  The rules have changed and it is due time some of you get back into the game.

Remember Relevance?

Rise has always understood the importance of link quality and stressed its importance to our clients.  While the creation of links can be automated, the quality of those links is quite low, and the search engines are believed to view much of this as spam, yielding little benefit to your program.  When determining the amount of link juice a page should receive through a link, the engines are looking at the relevance of the linking site to your content, whether your link is within the on-page content as well as the relevance to your site.  Always make sure you’re placing links on relevant sites/pages (and within content whenever possible) to get the most benefit.

Crunch Those Numbers

As link classification by the search engines increases in complexity, it is more important to look at your links through the eyes of the engine.  In the past, you could “blast” the Internet landscape with a large number of links focusing on a few keywords of interest.  This is no longer the case.  Remember that the search engines, as a guiding principle, want to serve their users with the results most relevant to their search query.  In other words, they are more interested in the natural links (created organically because someone thought it valuable to link to you) as opposed to artificial links (purchased or obtained through less natural means, including link building efforts).  For example, if 90 of the 100 links to your site include the phrase “internet services”, engines are now recognizing that those are likely artificial in nature and largely ignoring them (and possibly penalizing you) in related searches.

The numbers game goes far deeper than that.  In addition to looking at keyword density within all anchor text, you’ll also want to look at your branded/non-branded anchor text ratio.  If you (and similar sites) typically have a certain branded/non-Branded ratio (let’s say 5:1), a significant deviation from this (such as an increase in non-branded anchor text) will be suspicious and may be scrutinized more closely.  Bottom line – include branded terms as part of your link building program.

It’s All About PageRank, Right?

One of the underlying factors SEO professionals consistently include in link building is PageRank (PR).  The more authoritative (higher PR) a site, the more valuable a link from that site.  And if you can get one of your target keywords in the anchor text, it’s time to take a long lunch.  Before you head out, take a few moments to consider the search engine’s perspective.  When left to “nature”, links tend to be dominated with Branded terms in the anchor text (this makes intuitive sense).  Therefore, if a site suddenly starts getting a substantial number of non-branded links primarily from high PR sites, you may be penalized if the engine decides the links to be artificial in nature.

To combat this, make sure to include Branded keywords in a reasonable proportion within high PR sites.  This way, you maintain the ratio and don’t raise any issue with the search engines.  Also make sure you’re including a variety of sites in terms of PR to show the engines that all types of websites are interested in your content.

What’s the Bottom-Line?

When it comes to link building, don’t play the numbers game.  Focus on creating quality links on relevant websites.  Don’t get tunnel-vision with respect to your anchor text.  Instead, use text that flows naturally that includes non-branded keywords and your branded terms.  By shifting away from a volume focus, you’ll make your link building program far more efficient and see positive results in your rankings!

What other changes have you noticed in your link building efforts?