Whitehat Linkbuilding Strategies Beginner To Advanced

Changing the way we get links Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive

My personal bout w/ link buying

Everything in moderation!!

I have to start w/ a story

Who hates the sun?

Seriously who’s hatin’ on the sun?

No Moderation

Moderation

I worked with 2 direct competitors one on all out SEO – 2005 – 2006

“ Big Project”

Another for 3 months In 2008

“ Small Project”

Big Project

Regular link building – guest posts, blog comments, a lot of directories, top lists, DIY tips, etc.

NEVER got over #4 for their biggest term (fine)

Small Project

SEER: Tech. on page SEO only

Other SEO:

Aggressive link buying on 100’s sites,

Pattern, typically on geocities-esque sites,

Easily discernable pattern

#1 for 2 years

Big Project

Today: Top 10

Been Top 10 for 2.5 years

Haven’t touched the site in 18 mo.

Small Project

Held #1 for 2 years

Recently dropped from #1 to #50

Haven’t come back from #50+ in 3 months

My personal bout w/ link buying Link buying should always be evaluated and implemented based on ability to assess risk. Did small project make enough in 2 years to make it worth not being visible for the next 6 weeks, 6 months, 2 years?? Does big project make out in the long run even though it didn’t get to #1?

Questions, Questions, Questions

If you are buying links and still have rankings all is not lost, listen up to what you are learning here, get your “ratio” in check and prepare for harder work – moderation!

The basics

Directory links still work

Use directorycritic.com to keep up with the best / newest ones

Sort by

PR

Points

Added date

Niche

Deep link opp

What I like about directory link building

Obvious

If the directory is high or low value, there is no “hiding”

Easy to evaluate

PR

Age of Domain

Sitelinks

What I like about directory link building

Obvious

If the directory is high or low value, there is no “hiding”

Easy to evaluate

PR

Age of Domain

Sitelinks

Cost

Acceptance policy

Sitelinks

Quick Question:

When you type in your domain name (w/o .com) do you see sitelinks?

If not, you may have some problems

You can influence which sitelinks show by using Google Webmaster Tools

The basics (Industry)

Search for your industry + words like:

Add url

Submit release (Christian PR sites)

News

Directory

Blogs

Bloggers

Lists

Don’t come up with all of them yourself

Here’s a Tool

http://www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html

Do Ego / Industry searches

Yahoo Pipes (social media firehose)

Google Alerts (RSS)

Yahoo Answers (RSS)

Twitter search (search.twitter.com)

General rule of thumb

Industry Links are more valuable than generic ones

So

Go get your industry specific links first then backfill with generic directories

General rule of thumb

Industry Links are more valuable than generic ones

Why?

Harder to get (no adsense directories)

Build a theme

Use Twitter to fix people’s problems

This summer – Adam launched an idea:

Set up a twitter search for people typing in:

Broken A/C

Broken AC

AC Broke

Broke AC

Set up a bi-weekly contest for a free AC unit for our AC selling client

Those w/ broken AC write how horrible their day is w/ pictures post it to their blog, link over to a voting section for the funniest story

“ Office Freezing”- Portable heaters

“ Car overheated” – National Auto Repair Shop

“ Dropped iPhone” – iPhone glass repair

“ spyware deleted” – Software provider

“ Loud office” – Headphones manufacturer

If you find 500 people for a contest but only have time to contact 50 use twitter grader to see who is most influential / worth putting in your contest?

Use the API to pull their followers (or Mturk) & external links to a twitter profile:

Yahoo search -linkdomain:http://www.twitter.com/briancarter

Use Twitter Grader to find influentials

Asking the right questions to find link opportunities

Do you have a Female, Muslim, Af. American or Asian exec?

How long have you been in business?

Startup competitions / sites

Any developments in Macromedia Flex / Silverlight / SCRUM?

Who are your vendors (Tech, Marketing, HR, SEO, Web Host, PBX)

Do you have a company charity? Do you do charitable matching?

Do you use any API’s / do any mashups? (Get highlighted by the sources you are mashing up: Yahoo Search Monkey, Yahoo BOSS)

Do you offer your service as an in-kind donation? Are you willing?

Do you offer any version of your product / service for free?

Who are the thought leaders in the company? Where do they speak?

Do you hire stay at home moms / dads?

Who provides your on site search tool?

Do you have an intern program?

Do any execs sit on any boards (profit or non-profit)?

Do you have venture / angel investors?

What is your city / zipcode?

Is your publicly traded company’s stock price bucking an industry trend?

If yes – interviews on stock picking forums (bank)

Is your publicly traded company’s stock price bucking an industry trend?

If yes – interviews on stock picking forums (bank client)

Not successful yet, but we are testing angles like this daily.

Has your company decided to insource vs. sending work overseas?

The race / gender card

Testimonials

Testimonials pt. 2 Testimonials pt. 2

Charity Pt. 1 Charity

Charity Pt. 2

Get interns to be your in-kind donor as part of their training

In Kind Donations

How many of you are working with an SEO Agency or an In-House SEO?

How many of you have been asked questions like that as part of their link building efforts?

This is that LONG term view of the industry that SEO’s (in house and agency) should be taking to protect your rankings for the long term.

2 weeks

2 months

2 years

IT’S COMING!

Why Delicious is your best friend

Categorize (private)

Extremely strong:

Tagging

Filtering

Discovery

API API API

Get smart on queries

Get intern help on categorizing your best queries, like

“ Software developer” resources

“ Tech companies in”

SaaS directories, “Top” SaaS bloggers

“ Company list” Philadelphia, NYC, LA

Mommy bloggers = NOT NOW, Later

(resource lists that are easy to get on)

Use the API to dump the tags and sites locally

Create your own algo to order the list based on other relevancy factors (ajax-sliders)

If you are REALLY good you can scrape results from directory lists, blogger lists, etc and have them automatically dump

When you get ready to start linking you have a list to go after in priority order

Use other APIs / “sources” to score each site you tag

Alexa (Domain age)

Inbound links / .edu

Aiderss (frequency)

Linkscape (come on Rand, how much we gotta pay?)

Technorati (cosmos)

Feedburner

Pagerank

edu links

in yahoo or open directory

Get Smart about API’s

Aiderss – Frequency of blog posts

Feedburner - Subscription stats

Technorati Cosmos – Blogs linking to a given URL

Friendfeed API

Plugins to allow you to easily bookmark = fast work

Delicious Plugin for FF

Note feature in Google Reader (drag to browser window)

Delicious Complete* for FF

- allows for multiple accounts (very advantageous)

Subscriptions – Auto Notified

Social Networking – Find delicious “librarians” people who index a LOT of quality content on certain subjects – eco friendly, poker, women, video, etc, Arizona.

Finding “Librarians”

Subscribing to tags

1 – Find Sites & categorize sites

2 – Tag sites for your linkbuilding efforts into delicious

3 – Score each link you tag with the above factors

4 – Order your list (testimonials / tech company lists / publicly traded) by importance based on the factors you pull

5 – Now you know the most valuable links, develop strategies to go after them

No Programmers, No Problem

If you are light on programming resources to pull data via API’s / Scraping – all is not lost!

Use Mechanical Turk to have people pull subscriber #, PR, Alexa Rank, inbound links, .edu links, (whatever you think is valuable) etc - .15/per action.

Have Turkers put data points into an online DB tool like ZOHO DB (which has an API for you to pull data from later when you have tech resources)

Google Advanced Queries keyword "suggest url" / "suggest * url" keyword "suggest site" / "suggest site" keyword "suggest website" / "suggest * website" Keyword companies in “city” Keyword companies list Keyword companies directory (ies) inurl:forum / inurl:forums Wildcard “ Top * firefox” extensions – misses top extensions for FF “ Top * firefox extensions” – misses top 10 firefox extension top * firefox extensions – could bring back too many results Blogsearch link:www.competitor.com Search for sites linking to several competitors but not you: linkdomain:copounsite1.com linkdomain:copounsite2.com linkdomain:couponsite3.com

Queries + SEO Quake

10 Ways to get .edu links

Ok here’s my quick and dirty ways to get them!

Guest speak at a class/club on Internet Marketing

Participate in the career fair at the schools who link out to participating companies

Post your internships on schools sites that link out, make friends with the career services people so you can BEG for that link if need be

Find professors who post and link out to the authors of publications in their syllabus. If you can add value e-mail them and see if your case study or whitepaper could be used in their class

Offer employee discounts to professors, develop an “education” license or version

10 Ways to get .edu links

Sponsor a marketing / technology or advertising club’s event make sure the club’s site is on the .edu and that the university links out to sponsors, there are 1000’s of university groups, from frats to golf club to Spanish club to linux club!