Posted by MikeCP

There’s no such thing as a free link. Whether it was the time taken to craft that blog post, the cash used to film that viral video, or even just the opportunity cost of thinking about how to build links, there is an investment involved. For my first post here at SEOmoz, I want to talk about how a small business might approach the investment into link building.

To make this post a little less hypothetical, we’re going to set a budget of $2,000 and/or 60 hours. This isn’t to say that one needs $2,000 to build links, but for the purpose of this article it helps to keep things in perspective. And for those big business readers out there, I’m sure you could just ratchet up the investment by whatever order of magnitude you’d like.

The Budget is Set

So let’s imagine your client or boss (if you’re in-house) has promised to commit some time and money into a link building campaign. Huzzah! Finding yourself in a position to invest in SEO both financially and resourcefully is a great place to be, and these opportunities don’t grow on trees. So it’s tremendously important that this sum of money (and time) is invested wisely and provides a return, or else that “crazy SEO wizardry” might never make its way into the company budget again.

♫ If I had $2,000…I would send Matt Cutts some flowers ♫

So how best to go about spending this money? That, of course, depends on a lot. There are different kinds of link building strategies for different kinds of businesses in different stages of their SEO development. Answering some of the following questions may help with the “Who am I?” questions your website is surely asking itself (your-site.com/existential-crisis).

1. Have we done any link building in the past? In other words, how low are the “low hanging fruit”?
2. What is a reasonable goal here? Increasing overall domain authority and maybe increasing long tail traffic? Or boosting a specific page in the SERPs?
3. How does the competition stack up? How much work needs to be done to overtake the competition?

Directory Submissions

We COULD invest $2,000 pretty easily with directory submissions and it wouldn’t have to take anymore than 5 hours. The better strategy would be to invest a bit more time into the research phase before throwing $2,000 into a bunch of spammy directories.

Some of the big paid directories are a given; Yahoo!, Best of the Web, Business.com and JoeAnt have established themselves as strong, link juice-passing options. Assuming our web site is not found in any of these directories we’re looking at almost $800 already, and that isn’t considering the annual renewal cost of most of these top-tier directories. This leaves us with around $1000 for submissions to niche and local directories that are deemed worthwhile; Rand discussed the litmus test for identifying these worthwhile directories in a recent Whiteboard Friday.

Who should do it?

In most cases, anyone that is not currently listed in the top-tier directories should make the investment. You do NOT want to be submitting to directories if your site is of low quality, as your site could be declined and you won’t get that money back.

Investing in directories is a good idea early, but I wouldn’t suggest shelling out $2,000 in directories and declaring “mission accomplished”. The better plan would to be to submit to paid directories slowly over the course of a few months, supplementing directory submissions with some more creative link building strategies. Also, don’t forget that a sudden spike in backlinks followed by a lull of no new links is sure to set off a red flag or two.

Outreach (PR for links)

Outreach can be an inexpensive undertaking in terms of cash spent, but the real cost is in the time it takes to do it right. Commissioning under-worked call center staff or interns to call or email relevant site owners can be a great use of “found” time to generate links, but they’ll still need some guidance. I find its a great idea to craft a quick “SEO 101″ document, including bits about how search engines value links, anchor text, and other best practices. You might do well to give a primer on how to quickly evaluate a potential linking partner (say, only target sites with a domain authority over 55?), so your minions don’t go wasting their time on spammy worthless links.

Where outreach can get costly is in offering products, discounts, or other financial incentives to acquire links. Of course, we’re getting a bit close to grey-hat SEO here, but is there really anything wrong with offering free product samples to generate interest? I suppose the white-hat method of product samples/discounts/etc. is to not require a link back, but if you ask me this is where the whole distinction gets kind of silly.

Can you spot the difference? Regardless, I am infinitely clever.

Your odds of acquiring links through outreach get a lot better when samples or other incentives are involved. B2B? No problem. Incentives could include a free trial, a demo or white paper. If you do your homework, you’ll know who to approach to make sure your not just giving away hundreds of dollars of product without any hope of acquiring new customers.

Your overall outreach costs could get a bit fuzzy, and measuring a return will require some serious tracking in most cases. Some tracking ideas include:

• Utilizing separate coupon codes for every outreach target
• Sending visitors to a mini-site, landing page, or tracking URL
• Making use of custom variables in Google Analytics to track the long term value of the campaign

Who should do it?

There’s not much of a disadvantage in spreading the good word of your company around via public relations, so really every business should do it. Your SEO mileage may vary, however, if your business’s website is not finished, a complete mess, or an otherwise unattractive linking partner. No matter how attractive your pitch, no one will want to link to a one-page or “coming soon” site.

No matter what, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got all your tracking ducks in a row, so that you can report good things to the big boss (wo)man.

“But what’s the lifetime value?!”

Buying Links

Buying links is sort of like the elephant in the room. In one hand, we have 2,000 dollars, in the other, we have a mouse that can easily point its way off to a link broker network. We can spend 10 hours max and lock down $2,000 worth of links and have them all live by COB. Do those links lead to better rankings? They might. BUT! The likelihood of these links ceasing to pass value in the near future is extremely high.

Who should do it?

Almost no one. Investing $2,000 into paid links, especially from a link broker, is not liable to provide a long-term return on that investment. While I agree with Rand in his post about the somewhat discouraging amount of webspam making its way into the index, the optimist in me is hoping Google’s just working on some super spam detector and soon all the white-hats will be rewarded.

Linkbait/viral marketing

Call it what you will, but the name of the game here is content. Whether its a blog post, an infographic, a widget, a video, a funny 404 page, a comic, and so on, if its done well, there’s no greater way to invest in link building.

There are tons of great examples of linkbait that have cost less than $2,000, but the most recent campaign that went hot was the whiteboard HOPA girl. After conceptualizing the project, theChive put out a job listing for a “girl next door” model at a rate of $400 per day. Even if the shoot took 2 days, theChive probably paid no more than $1,000 to make it happen.

This image brought to you by Comic Sans™.

Who should do it?

Most anyone. With a great idea, $2,000 is plenty of money to build some great links via content marketing. Of course, the important part is the great idea. This is where your 60 hour allotment of time may come in handy for brainstorming. If the idea can’t be executed in-house, tap your network for a good resource to help, or use services like oDesk, guru, and eLance to find a freelancer.

One caveat here is that your link building campaign can only go as far as your (social) network will take it. Before hitting “publish”, make sure you’ve got a good seed of retweeters, rebloggers, and likers standing by.

Reporting Your Results

This is arguably the most important part of your SEO campaign! Keep an eye on your website’s organic traffic and mark any upward trends. Can this be attributed back to your link building campaign? If so, this is no time to be shy.

Best of luck!

And now a quick introduction! My name is Mike Pantoliano and I work for Distilled in the US. I would love your feedback on my first post and I hope you get something from it! Follow me on Twitter @MikeCP because my complaining about having to wear shoes is absolutely vital to your SEO success.

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Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Following on from my debut SEOmoz blog post on How to Get Links in Tough Industries, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the processes you can use to find people who are likely to link to you.  Using the right processes to identify the leaders in your industry can give you a much better return on your time spent link building.  This is for two reasons -

1. You are finding people with a genuine interest in your industry who are more likely to reply to you
2. You are finding people who are influential which can lead to more links from their audience

We all know that link building is hard, it takes time, patience and an uncanny ability to handle rejection.  I often like to talk about improving your link building conversion rate, if you can do this then you are making your life a lot easier.  This post is designed to help improve your link building conversion rate by reaching out to the right people.

Here is a quick visual to show you the basic process of what you are doing:

This is the process I like to work to when getting links from specific targets.  It is very simple but from experience, many people struggle with finding the right people to get links from.   Here are some specific ways you can find these people.  I’ll probably cover the other areas in more detail in a subsequent post.

Getting Inspiration

I like to start the process by brainstorming a few ideas of what type of people are interested in my topic, luckily I’ve got some great colleagues to bounce ideas off and help with this process.  If you tend to struggle with this process, Spezify is quite a nice tool for visualizing a topic and seeing what is happening online related to that topic.  This can often give you some links to places you may not have previously thought of to reach out to.

Find Influential Tweeters

Although strictly speaking, Twitter is not good for building links,  finding people on Twitter who have a large number of followers and have a lot of influence can be very useful in spreading the word for you.  These people usually have their own websites outside of Twitter too that may be of help to you for traditional link building.

So how do you find people on Twitter who are influential?

WeFollow is a nice little tool for this, a quick test of “SEO” as a keyword proves to be pretty accurate to me:

You now have a list of influential people from within your industry.  What next?

• Follow them
• Make a note of what they like to tweet about
• Check their personal websites for more info
• Look at what type of stuff they retweet
• Retweet their stuff
• Interact with them constructively
• Ask for their opinion on something

By doing all of these things, you are building a relationship with this person and finding out what it takes to get their attention.  You are also learning about what interests them and what type of content you need to create to get them to tweet about it.  You are also opening a channel of communication with them which you can use to push your own content when the time is right.  Once you have built up a rapport with this person, you are in a good position to send them a link to your content and ask for their opinion on it.

Find Local People

This is something that I’ve found to work very well when doing outreach.  If you’re fortunate enough to live quite close to someone who you can get a link from, mention it when you contact them.  This works very well if you are a small local business who is trying to get some attention and help from local people.  It can be a little difficult to find these type of people but here are a couple of ideas -

Search Twitter Local

You can find people who are tweeting about your topic within a certain number of miles of your location.  Just head over to Twitter Advanced Search and look for this section:

Local Directories

Dmoz has section dedicated to listing websites because they are based in a certain area.  For example, if I’d just launched a website which was for my music DJ service in Stratford-upon-Avon, I may want to contact a few people on this page to let them know about it.

There are literally tons of local directories where you can find people to contact, here is a UK list and here is a US list.  These lists were originally designed as places for you to get links from, but there is nothing to stop you getting creative and getting links from the places on these directories too!

Foursquare

Whilst you are following influential people on Twitter, you may notice that they are using Foursquare to check-in to various places.  If these places just happen to be in your local area, then there is the possibility of contacting them and seeing if they want to meet for a coffee.  This is probably more useful for finding business contacts and networking as it is for link building but it is worth mentioning as a method of finding people who are local to you.  Even if you don’t meet someone, you can still get an indicator of what area they are in and use this as a hook in your opening email or phone call.

Survey your Customers

I’m a big fan of getting your customers to help you with link building.  The idea in relation to this post is to find out from your customers who they follow in your industry and what sites they visit for information.

This is incredibly easy to setup and can provide you with real, actionable data.  If your website has a big Twitter following, you can even ask the question in a Tweet or send out an email to previous customers.  You only need to ask a couple of questions along the lines of -

• Are you active on Twitter?  If so, who do you follow for information about your topic here?
• Do you frequently visit blogs and websites on your topic here, if so which are your favorite?
• Are you a member of any forums on your topic here, if so which ones?

You can get all of the replies together and see which sites or tweeters or mentioned the most.  Then you have a quality, targeted list of people to go after to get links.

Forums

Noooo!  Forums are no good for link building I hear you shout.  For the record, they can be good for link building, but thats a discussion for another day   What we are interested in is what makes a forum active and who the key leaders and influencers are.  There are ways you can use this information to your advantage and get links from places outside of the forum.

First of all how to find the forums which are active.  We just use a couple of simple Google search tools:

All I’ve done is searched for my keyword which is link building, clicked on discussions on the left hand side, then selected from the past 24 hours.  Nice and simple and I’ve now ended up with 50k + results.

Now where this helps us for link building is being able to find which people on these forums are moderators and ones which are active contributors.  This is the equivalent of finding people who are influential on Twitter which I described above.  Most forums will have this easily accessible although you may need to register.  You are looking for a list of “Top Posters” or “Top Contributors”.

Once you have found these people, see if their profiles or footers contain links to their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or personal blog.  Then you can see if they may be interested in your website, hopefully they are which makes them a primary candidate to get a link from!

The one big advantage of this approach is that if they talk about you on their blog, its perfectly reasonable for you to ask them to mention it on the forum which means even more exposure (and links) for you.

Facebook

I love this one!  Using the Facebook Ads system, you can carry out research into the likes and interests of the gazillions (ok millions) of Facebook users.  So within a few minutes you can have a list of people who you know are interested in a certain topic.  From here, you have a couple of options -

• You could then start a PPC campaign on Facebook which aims to grab their details in exchange for some kind of incentive, for example you could try and target users who have their own blogs.  You can ask them to submit a story, blog about a topic, upload a picture, loads of stuff to try and capture this type of user
• Join the group with the other members and interact with them and the admins of the group.  This is a similar approach as you’d take in forums to try and work out who may be in a position to help you push your content on the group and external sites

Advanced Search Operators

We are getting more into “traditional” SEO here as opposed to market research but this is another favourite of mine but with a bit of a twist.  Firstly though I’d advise you to go take a look at the SEOmoz Guide on Advanced Search Operators.

Another great place to start is the SEOmoz Link Acquisition Assistant (PRO Only).  This tool does a lot of the hard work for you and can find lots of places to get links from as well as making you think a bit more about how you can tweak the operators to your own needs.

Here are a few of my personal favourites when it comes to advanced queries.

This will restrict results to only UK Universities which mention blogs.  If you are in the US, just swap out .ac.uk and put in .edu:

keyword here inurl:.ac.uk +blogs

Same as above but this will only show results with blogs in the URL:

keyword here inurl:.ac.uk inurl:blogs

This one is designed to help you find blogs which are active, therefore giving you a better chance of getting a link.  This query only shows me results which have published posts in July 2010.  This isn’t perfect as all blogs work differently but you will still get some good results.

keyword here inurl:2010/07

My best advice here is to just go and experiment and keep tweaking queries until they give you the results you need.  By doing this you are filtering out all the websites which are not right for you and therefore improving your efficiency and link building conversion rate.  Here is a useful reference guide for a ton of Google advanced operators.

The Twist…

Don’t do what everyone else does and start at page 1 of the search results.  These guys get link requests all day long!

Start at page 10 of results.  These guys are less likely to get link requests if they are not always at the top of Google, so you could have a better chance of getting their attention and getting the link you want.  The websites may be of a lower quality but as long as you use your due diligence and analysis, you will still get some good quality sites and valuable links.

Bonus Random Tip

I’m often asked about finding people who can guest blog for you on a particular subject.  This advanced search query may help a little to find these people.

keyword here inurl:author

Because of the way that some blogs work, they often put “author” in the URL of pages which contain all the posts by a writer as well as contact details.  Here is an example using Danny’s page at SEOmoz.

As always I welcome your feedback and additional ideas in the comments below.  I’ll do my best to reply to any questions.

This also seems like a good time to shamelessly plug the Distilled & SEOmoz Pro SEO Seminar in London.  I attended this event last year, before I joined Distilled.  Of the conferences I went to, it was one of the best in terms of actionable tips and quality of the talks.  I’d highly advise you to take a look if you are looking for some advanced SEO strategies.

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Posted by Seoteric

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work.  Content is important, page and link structure are important, and the url is important, but for competitive search terms, great on-site optimization will only get you so far.  I have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with link building over the years, and I have really started to be a lot more analytical in how I go about building incoming links.

This love story begins at the beginning of 2006.  I was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, but prayerfully enough it turned out to be a large non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma tumor which was treatable. For over six months, I was stuck in a chair and didn’t have the energy to get up an do anything so I spent that time teaching myself about websites and marketing.  I started reading SEO blogs (like SEOmoz and others) to learn what I could.  I figured I might as well put the time to use, right?

Over the coming months, I started my first SEO campaign for my newly built car accessories website.  My target keywords were stupidly competitive – car accessories and aftermarket auto parts and a lot more keywords like them.  I figured if SEO really worked, then I could do it.  I could get ranked for some ridiculously competitive keywords.

I had a good understanding of on-site SEO such as titles, meta tags, content, URLs, and link structure so I built the site to be highly optimized for my keywords.  I found creative ways to get a lot of content on the homepage using ajax and javascript tabs but still keeping the website aesthetically pleasing.  Once the changes were indexed, I made sure that the content in the tabs was indexing properly.  After trying some long tail queries, I found my site’s tabbed content was indexed very well.

The on-site SEO bumped the rankings into the top 100 for car accessories.  It had previously been ranked around 350 or so.  With everything I had done to beef up the on-site SEO, it was still a long way from where I wanted it.  That’s when I started the link building process.  In 2006 I found a lot of info about directory submissions, article marketing, reciprocal linking, buying links, DMOZ, and blogging so I did a little bit of everything.  A little of everything turned into a lot of everything over the next six months, and slowly but surely the rankings began to rise.

The directory submission process was done with a combination of manual submissions, semi-automated submissions using software, and even some automated submissions.  I used a few directory submitters plus doing a simple Google search for relevant directories and submitted to any and all that didn’t require a payment.  During this process I also started writing how-to articles and submitting them to article directories, blogs, online magazines and journals.  After a few months, the site made it to the first page and traffic started coming in.

Not long after that I started getting reciprocal link requests, so I exchanged a few links along with way as well.  As traffic picked up, I started getting sales on the website for the first time and my attention was being directed towards sales and customer service instead of SEO.  For about a year, I didn’t do any marketing on the site except write a few articles and syndicate to whoever would publish them.  Sometime in 2008, I checked the rankings and found this.

It had climbed to #1 out of 92,100,000 results. I could not believe it.  Traffic was up over 1000%, and the site was getting literally thousands of unique visitors a month just from this keyword.  I checked the analytics and traffic was up and down and all over the place.  After monitoring this for a few days, I experienced the “Google Dance” with rankings ranging from #1 to #4.  Surprisingly, traffic amounts from positions 2-4 were not even HALF of the amount generated from position #1.

Jump ahead to June 2010.  The website is ranking between #2 and #5 from day to day for car accessories.  The surprising thing about this case study is that there hasn’t been any additional marketing done to the site since around November 2008.  Even with the low quality nature of directories, article directories, and even some reciprocal incoming links, the ranking has stayed top 5 for a really competitive keyword.   I did take the time to get the website listed in DMOZ, the Google Directory, and a lot of other “good” websites.  Some of the syndicated articles landed on sites like DIY, ehow.com, and other car enthusiasts websites generating some great inbound links.  The site doesn’t get credit for a lot of the low quality links that were acquired early on but I did do a few things right that had some great results.

I mentioned earlier that I am taking a more analytical approach to link building, and after reading a lot of articles, seeing this video about article marketing, and getting a better understanding of how much better Google is at identifying low quality links and websites, I have really changed the way I think about link building.  Much like in the world of content, quality is better than quantity when it comes to obtaining links.  After analyzing my own link building path from 2006 until the present, I came up with a list of best practices to guide my link building moving forward:

• It is well worth the time to write great content as opposed to lots of decent content.  Some of the best articles I wrote are the ones that attracted the most links and landed on good websites, and one or two were even highlighted in a breaking news story that brought a LOT of referral traffic while it was on the site’s homepage.
• If you figure out something cool or unique, like getting Pandora to play through a mono bluetooth headset, write about it and keep the content on your site and create a buzz using social media.  Links will surely come.
• Write content for your own site first.  As Rand points out, you will get the links pointing back at your site for having the original content.
• Here is one of my favorites – syndicate your RSS feed, not your article content.  This is a philosophical change to the approach I used to have in article marketing.  Instead of publishing your duplicate content everywhere, keep the content on your site and ping services like technorati, twitter, facebook, and anywhere you can publish your site’s feed. Get visitors on your site and then give them an opportunity to bookmark or share your content via social media.
• Quality directories are still valid.  I have still seen good success from getting listed in the top human-edited directories, especially local and regional ones.  Avoid the free-for-all sites and focus on the ones that add value to users.
• Guest Blogging is a new hot-topic which is also worth doing.  As Rand mentioned in this weeks WBF video, finding relevant websites to post content to is a good way to get quality inbound links and brand awareness.  In many cases, you can get content for your site as well if you establish a good partnership with a complementary website or blog.
• Patience is a virtue.  It is hard to not check rankings every day, but there are a lot of other things to do with your valuable time than checking rankings.  I schedule a time once a week to check up on how things are progressing. This keeps me from wasting time each day, and gives me a reason to measure results and dive into analytics at the end of the week.
• Reciprocal links are not all bad.  It is natural for complementary websites to link to one another, so the emphasis is on relevance.  I will exchange links with relevant and complementary websites, but not with just any site.  You want to make sure you are linking to reputable websites too.
• Don’t Spam.  Search engines (like Google) mostly update their algorithms to do one of two things: to increase the relevance of the search results and to battle spam in their index. If you keep things relevant and avoid spam tactics, your rankings should remain intact as long as their isn’t a fundamental shift in how websites and pages are ranked.  Up until the recent “May Day” update, all of our sites have actually improved over the past few years with Google updates (The May Day update gave us about a 14% drop in the number of indexed pages, much like with SEOmoz and others).

Four years later, I have a much different approach to marketing, a different approach to life, and a lot of sites doing well in the search results.  Marketing gives me an outlet for my competitive edge which is why I tend to climb the keyword mountains that I do.  I would like to hear how your link building tactics have changed over the years and see how far we have come.   I plan to keep a student’s approach SEO, which continues to prove itself as one of the most frustrating, rewarding, and elusive things in life.  It is (after all) a love story!

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