Search Marketing Sage

The Link Building Fundamentals session at SMX East was presented by Debra Mastaler, President of Alliance-Link, an interactive marketing company focused on providing custom link building training. This session provided insight into how to reach out and get quality links, how to craft anchor text to build authority, and how to avoid common mistakes that can hurt your web credibility and search engine rankings.

First of all, without effective keywords, you can’t have effective links. Link building is an extremely important search engine optimization tactic because links are a driving force of the Google algorithm. Debra Mastaler mentioned that if there is one thing you should remember at the end of this presentation it is that link popularity is key to your online success!

Link Popularity measures the quality and quantity of links pointing to a webpage. You may here fellow search engine marketers refer to this as link love or link juice.

The four factors that determine link popularity include:

Along with thorough keyword research, content editing, social media participation and inbound linking, link requesting is one tactic to consider as a part of a holistic search engine optimization strategy. Since I’ve been requesting links, I’ve gathered a few pointers to keep in mind before I click Send for any request. Especially if you’re just embarking on your link requesting strategy these 10 tips should help you at least get started. 

1. Monitor use of your name or brand.

With tools like Google Alerts or Trackur you can be updated when you or your brand is mentioned in a post. Those are the posts you should pursue.

2. Search specifically for your press release titles.

You press releases already SHOULD have targeted keywords within them.  When press releases are republished on blogs your links might be stripped out. Go ahead and ask for the most relevant  link to be added back into the release.

3. Coordinate with your search team.

If you’re on the social media end, like myself, ask your SEO team members or refer to your keyword list to see if any relevant keywords are mentioned within the article. I recommend asking just for links to keywords that are already within the post. Asking the author to re-word the article for a link is a double favor. Don’t count on that one.

My last session at the first day of SES NY was “The Basics of Link Building” with Debra Mastaler, President of Alliance-Link.  It promised to teach me all I need to know about link building and why it’s so important — and it delivered.  The description specifically denoted that the session would explain how to build links in an “appropriate manner”, which alluded to the certain black-hat practices that have been in the news lately.  SES New York is also sponsoring an open mic unconferenced session on black hat vs. white hat practices that I’m excited to attend later this week.

But now to the topic at hand – link building!  You can buy, sell, and give away links, and they have tremendous value on search engine rankings.

Day 3 of SES Chicago began with a keynote speech from Maile Ohye,  Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google. This was played out very similarly to a Question and Answer session. A few of highlights were:

What is Google TV? This is something that has occupied Ohye’s life for the past several months. It is a combination of a TV and a computer. Everything is going to be blended, so if you do a search for a TV show you will get results for when it is on TV and what channel it is on, the show’s information page, and where you can stream it (immediately for Google TVs).

What is the effect of Google Instant? Google Instant is having more of an effect on the end-user. Impressions have been increasing for the end- user because there are now 5-7 queries for what used to be 1 query before Google Instant launched. Ohye feels that Google Instant is going to make the end-user more search savvy. Google Instant uses auto complete (previously Google Suggest) which has been around for several years, so there is not a change to the ranking algorithm.

Should websites focus on getting feedback? User generated content can be very effective for e-commerce sites. If there are product reviews, it will help increase customer purchases. When allowing user feedback, reputation management is very important.