Link building is often described as a type of sales, where the product is your site’s content and the currency is links. The best link builders, like the best sales people, are said to possess a competitive drive and “hustle” that keeps them going until an opportunity is secured. And just like in sales, if the product you’re trying to sell (your site) is dated or useless in the eyes of your link opportunities, any link building efforts will waste a great deal of time without much to show for it. (more…)

Link building can be hard; link building for big brands can be even harder. Traditionally, link builders are at their best when they can quickly move around the web, reaching out to bloggers and web masters and looking for that perfect opportunity to make a connection. When link building for a big, corporate client however, this freedom disappears. The link builder is restrained by branding restrictions, employees looking to protect their online turf and perhaps a not so web-savvy executive or two. Even with these restrictions, a link builder who knows how to handle the situation can leverage the massive corporate structure and really move the needle. Here are five examples, though there are many more: (more…)

In the world of SEO, Link building is the path less traveled.  With web analytics, social media, and link building on the online horizon, link building has become an intricate part as it is ever-changing.   The idea behind the concept is improving one’s keyword authority within the Google search engine algorithm and SERP (Search engine results page). (more…)

You’ve done your research, analyzed the architecture of your site, researched high volume, low competition keywords, created fresh new content and fully optimized your site—now for the link building.  It’s the unglamorous side of such an up-and-coming profession. Spending tedious hours with minimal results can be more than frustrating. So, what is important to the new-era link builder? (more…)

Link Building is a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization.  External links (links on other sites that point to your site) are vital to any SEO efforts, after all it is one big popularity contest. Internal links (links on your site pointing to your own site) are often looked over, even though they also serve an important function. (more…)

I recently read an article through my custom Google News Feed about a company touting a link building service.  The service offered several packages of links that we will call bronze, silver and gold.  Each package had a corresponding number of links (in the hundreds or thousands) and price.   I believe this to be an irresponsible way to market link campaign services for a few key reasons: (more…)

There appears to be a general consensus among SEO’s that the incoming link profile for a website has a significant impact in how the site ranks in the search engine results.  The school of thought alluded to in the title (now outdated, as I will show you) believed that quality was important, but that volume could make up for what you might be lacking in quality.  This might have been true at some point, when search engine technology was a bit more limited, but the landscape has changed entirely.  In terms of relevance to the search query, it’s definitely a positive shift.  However, for Internet marketing managers, link building will now require some additional planning and thought. (more…)

In our previous blog, we discussed why a blog owner might utilize the NoFollow attribute (to help reduce spam comments). As we mentioned, using NoFollow prevents the PageRank from flowing to the destination page, a barrier to the shotgun approach to link building used by some SEO’s. However, commenting in blogs is a typical part of any link building program. If part of your job entails leaving blog comments (and links in directories, social network pages, etc), finding a way to avoid NoFollow blogs is a good way to improve the efficiency of your program. Below, we highlight a simple series of steps to determine if a blog or other page utilizes NoFollow links. (more…)

Most of us that manage blogs understand the potential volume of spam associated with them. Blogs are often bombarded by comments that add no value to the topic, comments added only to create a link back to someone’s website. One method utilized by many blog managers to curtail this is the use of the nofollow attribute on outbound links. This method, in theory, removes the value of spam comments. However, the effectiveness of this method is somewhat limited. In today’s blog, the first of a three-part series on the nofollow attribute, we’ll introduce nofollow tags and discuss their inclusion in outbound links from a blog. We’ll also discuss a more complete strategy for controlling spam comments. Later in the series, we’ll show you a quick way to determine if a blog is link-worthy (i.e. you’ll get PageRank flow) and look into “PageRank Sculpting” as a way to control which pages appear in search results. (more…)

Digital marketing managers often suffer from an onslaught of emails from owners/managers of Web sites that want to “trade links”. Simply, another site is willing to put your website URL and a short description of your services in exchange for you doing the same on your site. Reciprocal linking, as it’s more formally labeled, was a fairly successful method of building link juice to elevate a website’s rankings in natural search results (many years ago). Reciprocal links now have little to no value to Search Engine Optimization efforts and managers have to be more strategic in developing backlinks to their website. (more…)