Link Building Strategies for 2013 from SES Chicago

Of course black and gray hat SEO work still continues, and people will still try to sell you “1000 links for $20,” but the experts in the industry have gotten the message. The main concept that all the link building experts delivered at SES was: stop building links and start earning them. If you can pay someone $50 or $100 and get a link, or if you can submit your URL to a directory, so can your 15 year old neighbor with a teen fashion blog with little to no effort. The easy-to-get links will be worth less and less, but the hard-earned links from high quality websites that require creative thinking and planning will be well worth the effort.

Use these link building strategies from online marketing experts to grow traffic to your site the right way:

1. Build Links as if Matt Cutts is Sitting Next to You

For the non-SEM folks, Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team. When Matt speaks, everyone in the online marketing world listens. Every time you’re trying to do something to increase organic traffic to your website ask yourself, “would Matt Cutts approve of what I am doing?” Try your best to abide by Google’s webmaster guidelines to avoid getting penalized by their ever-increasing algorithm updates. I know it’s tempting to try things, but do so at your (and your company’s) own risk.

2. Create A Natural & Diverse Link Profile

Good websites will naturally acquire links from other websites as people share things that are useful and good, but most of the time people use words such as “click here” as the anchor text, not things like: “the best widget company in Chicago who also supply gizmos and doodads.” Consider the following – a natural link profile will have both:

• Paid and unpaid links – everyone said to avoid paid links because they’re addicting and will eventually burn you when Google [inevitably] discovers them. Just make sure you’re earning many more unpaid links if you’re paying for some links. If you sponsor an event that’s relevant to your industry and they link back to your site, that’s a valid paid link – so in some cases it does make sense.
• High and low quality sites (avoid risky sites) – Your site is not going to have all of its inlinks from the best sites in the world because anyone who wants to link to your site can link to it, and there’s nothing you can do about it (besides ask them to remove it).
• Followed and Nofollowed links – You shouldn’t actively pursue nofollowed links, but you shouldn’t avoid them either. Links from Twitter and Pinterest are not followed (they don’t pass “link juice”), but it’s still a citation to your site from a reputable site. This is a natural link, it won’t hurt you.
• Targeted keywords or brand names, and general anchor text – Websites that succeed in organic rankings do have a large percentage of anchor text links in their profile, but they also have many links pointing to their site with their brand name and generic words such as “click here” and “view now.” It is easy to spot targeted anchor text links, so diversify the keywords and use similar keywords. If you’re going after “chicago style pizza” – then also go after links with the text “deep dish pizza,” “chicago pizza restaurant,” and “stuffed chicago pizza.”
• Incoming and outgoing links – “share love to get love” is a quote I remember from Pageonepower’s presentation regarding this topic. Linking to other sites that are relevant to your content and industry is natural, it makes sense. You don’t need to avoid outgoing links like the plague – embrace them and link to high quality resources that will help your readers.

3. Use Link Building Tactics that the Experts Use

All of the tactics listed below came from the speakers at SES Chicago. These speakers included: Brent Payne (@brentdpayne), Chuck Price (@chuckprice518), and Jon Ball (@pageonepower) and others. I’m just going to provide a quick list here, but reach out to me or the others cited here to learn more.

• Improve on competitors’ popular content – if you find a piece of content that has received a lot of links, re-create it only better. Then reach out to everyone who linked to the first content and show them your new and improved version.
• Replace broken links on other sites with your content – when you find a broken link on a website (link that takes you to a 404 error page), produce content that could replace the link or simply suggest one of your existing pages as a replacement to the webmaster.
• Guest post – websites want traffic >> good content brings traffic >> if you have good content, websites will accept it. Finding opportunities is quite simple, making the content is the difficult part. If you have the latter down, then start publishing 30% of everything you create via other sites and blogs.
• Ego-bait individuals – I like talking about myself (I created an entire website about myself) and so do you. Everyone does! Praise people’s work and efforts and interview them about their accomplishments. They will feel validated and give you great content – all you have to do is ask. (UPDATE): Need more convincing? check this out: This post was featured on MeasurableSEO.com to prove this very point – I didn’t even directly ask for that link! (Thanks Chuck!)
  
• Donate to charities to get links – Take some time to find charities that support causes you believe in, give them money or services, and ask for a link on their site or blog. The last part is important, and it’s okay to do it.
• Give away scholarships to get .K12 and .edu links – this was one of the coolest ideas from the conference. A scholarship for $300 can pay for a semester’s books (if you’re a savvy student) so it’s definitely worth it for students, and that price for a .edu link is not too shabby.
• Create awards & badges – have you ever heard of the Inc 500? Of course you have. Everyone who makes that list and the Inc 5000 list puts that logo on their website and links back to their company profile on Inc’s website (that’s 5,000 linking domains for those of you who aren’t paying attention). Copy what they do.

4. Create a Link Bait Strategy

This is somewhat related to the first bullet point in #3. After you’ve figured out what type of content is getting links, make a plan to create your own original content that you can use as “bait” for new links. If you don’t feel like taking the time to figure that out, Evan Bailyn (@ineffable111) has already done that and kindly shared it with us at SES Chicago. Here are some types of content that you should create:

• Viral content– yeah I know what you’re thinking “you can’t just make something go viral.” While this is true, you can create content around themes that do go viral often. Here are the themes that are shared often:
  1. Best and worst <insert item> in a category
  2. Uncomfortable situations
  3. Scandals
  4. Precious things (animals getting rescued)
  5. Money
  6. Overcoming the odds

• Top 10 lists
• Compendiums = total resource on any topic (dictionary/glossary) – Become the authority on a specific topic
• Widgets – see widget examples on Mashable                        
• Contests – these should be appealing to a large audience
• Infographics – Large paragraphs of information are hard to digest, so people like seeing that information in a simplified graphic.
  

5. Build Relationships & Online Connections for Links

There was an entire session titled “Screw link building, this is relationship building” at the SES conference this year lead by Erin Everhart (@erinever – who promised to link to me during the conference 😉 ) and Katherine Watier (@kwatier). The message was simple: you get links from people (not websites) so build relationships with the people long before you need a link. Then when you’ve added some value to their life, you will have earned the right to ask for a link – from a real person, who likes you (okay the last part may be a stretch). Here are some great pointers from that session:

• Curated links are best – as I mentioned above, links granted by humans are much better than “automatic” links that anyone can get via form and article submissions.
• Listen and follow influencers in your niche – see who is talking about your industry on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social sites, then comment on their content and provide them with resources that they’ll find useful. HINT: get a jump start on this by following every Twitter handle I mentioned in this post.
  
• Create a relationships database – record what you learn about people so you can reach out to the appropriate persons for your content when you need people to share and link to your content. BuzzStream was one of the tools that was mentioned for this task.
  

6. Promote Everything That You Do Well

The idea here is that, if you’re not proud enough of the piece of content that you’re about to put up on your site to your share it, then why bother making it? The next thing to remember is that the idea “good content will speak for itself and people will find it on their own” is a myth. Use all of the connections you made and share your awesome content with them directly and via social media. If you’re really proud of it, then don’t be afraid to use some PPC advertising to promote it as well. This will get easier over time after your readers see that you produce high quality content on your website and start returning on their own.

Thanks to all the great speakers at SES Chicago who shared their link building strategies that will help us move forward with our SEO efforts the right way in 2013!
 

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