Link Building Training by Kieron Hughes (PushON)

Link Building Trainingby Kieron Hughes
Monday, 16 August 2010

What is Link Building?
The process of improving the number of external links to a given website, from relevant and authoritative domains.
Links are seen in the eyes of the search engines as ‘votes’ – the better the links you have, the bigger the opportunity for a website to gain increased search engine visibility (dependant on other factors).
Link building usually accounts for the majority of work carried out on an on-going search marketing campaign (along with CRO, reporting/analysis and on-page optimisation).
Links represent around 67% of what drives search engine rankings.
(2010 SEOmoz survey)

An Analogy
Jeff owns a Jamaican restaurant in Johnstone, and needs an accountant. While on a night out, Jeff asks a number of his business-owning friends whether they could recommend an accountant to him – to which many of them say ‘Thomson Accountancy’.
Later on, after overhearing the conversation, a stranger approaches Jeff and tells him about a great accountancy firm called ‘Williamson Accountancy’.
Which firm is he most likely to use?
This is similar to how the search engines assign ‘trust’ to websites. If a site has many authoritative inbound links, it is more likely to be ranked highly within the search results, and thus visited by more people.

Why Links Matter
Although not ideal, it is one of the many contributing factors that is difficult for people to exploit (effectively) – bar some time-consuming exceptions such as content networks.
Establishing a link on a relevant and popular page could mean more than just search engine benefit, as it is likely to send potentially converting traffic to your website.
Having great content is useless if it isn’t being found in search, so external links can be an effective means of improving indexation and visibility for pages which may struggle to perform without.

Baselining & Analysing

Metrics – What Makes a ‘Good’ Link?
Non-Existance of Nofollow Attribute
Relevance of Linking Domain/Page
Age of Linking Domain
TLD of Linking Domain(.ac.uk <> .tk)
Authority of Linking Page
Destination URL (canonicalisation, etc)
Anchor Text
Link Positioning (on page)
Google PageRank
Potential Traffic Gained

Baseline Link Profile (Part 1)
Understand your link profile – where do you currently stand?
Via Open Site Explorer – further tools will be listed at the end.

Baseline Link Profile (Part 2)
Analysing the data – where are improvements needed?
DOMAINS
ANCHOR TEXT
TOP PAGES
EXPORT
LINKS

Competitor Benchmarking
Use the available data to understand positioning vs. competition.
Compare key metrics with competition for top-level view of positioning.
Use the data to visualise metrics (both good and bad) – which can form the basis of a link building strategy.

Competitor Opportunities
Having analysed key competitors’ backlinks, data in the profiles can be used to your advantage.
Are the competition ranking well in search without many external backlinks? (understand the competitiveness of an industry or specific keyword)
Are the competition relying heavily on one method of link building primarily? (ie. are there a lot of niche directories in the industry you are working with?)
Are the competition distributing their link equity to lots of key pages on-site? (ie. do you need a content strategy or further targeted pages?)
Is the main authority in the industry using a specific tactic to dominate search? (ie. should you be doing anything specific to get to their level initially?)

Acquiring Links

Types of Links
The many types of links can be categorised, in order to understand how a link profile can be improved.
Links aimed specifically at improving visibility – keyword targeted links via anchor text, and deep links.
Brand-targeted links – high authority branded links, either with URL or brand as anchor text.
Traffic generating links – links on social domains or highly popular websites.
Links for local benefit – local business listings, review websites or web profiles.

Example Methods of Link Building

When & Where
Quick-wins may be available at the beginning of a campaign:
Generic Directories
Niche and Specific Directories
List Websites (Similar to Directories)
Leveraging Current Assets
Partnerships (Clients, Suppliers, Providers, Accreditations)
More advanced methods are needed for on-going success:
Guest Blogging Opportunities
Content Creation/Syndication (Note: different to article marketing)
Press Releases
Thinking Outside of the Box
Link Bait
External Opportunities (Setting up Micro-Websites, etc)

Link Building Tools

Tools
Open Site Explorer: Backlink & Competitor Analysis
Yahoo! Site Explorer: Benchmarking/Backlink Overview
Majestic SEO: Link Discovery Over Time & Visualisation
SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty: Competitor Data
Raven SEO Tools: Link/Relationship Register
SEOmoz Labs: Various Usage

Summary

Take-Away Points
Building links isn’t just a process of acquiring any types of links, it’s about understanding the links that will help.
Before trying to acquire a link, think “why should this person link to me?”, and if you can’t answer that, on-site changes may be needed.
Effective and high-yielding link acquisition takes time and commitment – and shouldn’t be done without being fully embedded within the campaign or without strategy.
Use all of the data available to save going in to a campaign blindly. Baseline, analyse and understand the opportunities available.

Remember
Link building is about quality not quantity.

Link Building Training by Kieron Hughes (PushON)

by PushON Ltd on Aug 23, 2010

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Link Building Training by Kieron Hughes (PushON) — Presentation Transcript

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