If you read my CV it will say my profession is a search marketer, but when it boils down to it I’m a link builder, sure I can optimise a site, I can spend hours crafting content so that it will rank for as many long tails as possible, I can optimise a site like you wouldn’t believe, canonical, nofollow java links, you name it I’ve done it. But the mantra of build it and they will come doesn’t cut it on the web, you can have the best site in the world but if Google doesn’t know about it chances are nobody else will.
There are 2 simple questions you need to ask yourself when launching a new site, how many links does my competition have and how many links do I need beat them. If the answer is too many, look at a different niche, if the answer is yes time to get to work.
Let’s assume you know your niche, launched your site. Spent countless hours researching and writing kick ass content that you know if it does get picked up, people will see it as useful and openly throw some links at it. But don’t hold your breath on this one. Google has always said produce great content and reap the rewards. This is an idealist notion and doesn’t work on the modern web, every Mommy and Daddy blogger knows about nofollow and link juice and they are just not willing to link out like they used to in the good old days.
As a link builders this is where we earn our wages. Now I’m assuming that you know what keywords you want to try and rank for so I won’t go down that road, this post is about links.
For every site I launch I have a pretty straight forward game plan, start with what’s easy and build on that, this is my sequence.
Article directories: what can I say, they are what they are. I get some cheap articles thrown together and have them published and wait for the scrapers to pick them up, from my experience the best sites to have your content scraped from are ezine articles, articlealley and Isnare.
Directories are next on the list, if I am launching a ecommerce site, I will pay for a listing on the yahoo directory and business.com, as well as some industry specific directories. Everyone has their own favourites and a quick search on Google should return more of these directories then you could ever hope to submit to.
So that is the monotony over with and now things will start to get interesting, by now you should have a much clearer picture of the movers and shakers in the industry and also some vertical industries that complement your industry but doesn’t directly compete. Now it’s time to put some rss feeds together so you can keep up to date on industry news, take the rss feeds from all the players you have highlighted. Build news feeds with Google alerts or yahoo pipes, now sit back and watch your feed reader fill up. Granted most will be rubbish but you will always find some gems which will help to give you some ideas for articles to keep your site fresh but it’s a big help for moving onto the next step on the ladder.
Finding sites that will publish your content. My first step here it to run all the articles I had submitted to the article directories through copyscape, this will return the sites that have taken your article ( word to those who are easily annoyed) chances are you will find plenty of sites that have taken your article but conveniently forgot to add your link, the rest will probably have a nofollow on your links, this is part for the course, but you will always find a couple of sites that are worth shooting a quick email to and of they have published your articles already chances are they will publish another. Be up front about the Nofollow link, if you are giving them quality content that nobody else has I think that is a fair swap for a link.
Now we’re on to the part I enjoy the most. Your rss feed is now full of article ideas, it will just take a bit of reading and some brain storming but once this is done you’ve got some great articles to pitch to prospective sites, now you just need to find them. Time to start the trawling, there are some sites that can help get you started, soloseo, ontolo and seobook all have link prospecting tools These will give you a start but with a little creative thinking you can take things a lot further, remember each search engine will show different results for the same search so it is worth running through each to see what pops up. It’s also worth looking at the Google suggestion wheel along with ask and yahoo advanced search and suggestion options, these can all return some really interesting results.
Now you should be armed with a list potential sites along with some ideas for articles that are relevant and up to date in the industry, if you can pitch an article like this, chances are you will have a higher success rate then if you just sent out the normal drivel of a link request email most of us see on a daily basis, some people say email some say a phone call, try both and see what works for you, what I would say that if their number isn’t freely available on their site don’t bother digging around trying to find it.
By now your grey matter should be full of knowledge and you should be pushing out decent quality, relative content and if you can supply these sites with good content they are going to want more, pretty quickly you will find your self in a position that once you have finished an article send it with a quick email and it will get posted. The only inhibiting factor here is the amount of content you can produce without compromising on quality.
Getting to this stage is a slow and sometimes painful process, but by now it will be clear for you to see sustained rankings and a steady increase in traffic month on month. The steps outlined about are the basics to any of my link building campaigns, different circumstances and different industries will force me to tweak things slightly to adapt to the circumstances I find myself in. Other “special of the day” tactics can work, you just need to know how to exploit the opportunities that arise, for instance, I work for a company that sells bar code scanners, this year the laser beam had it’s 50th birthday, this screams infographic, sadly I missed the boat on that one as it was before my time with the company, but I could guarantee it would of been a home run and this is how I know why, tech related blogs are a dime a dozen and they constantly scream for new fresh content, all I would have to do, is feed it to some of my contacts who run tech sites, ( one has 50,000 twitter subscribers) and once it was in the channels I could just watch it sky rocket and let the links pour in. I’m still kicking myself about this as I can’t see another opportunity like this presenting it’s self any time soon.
Well thanks for reading this long winded post and if you have questions, please leave a comment and I will get back to you.