First up in this session is Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link. She is going to go over some good tactics that you can use today to build links to your site. She talks about directories first, and says there are about 30 good ones out there, the rest aren’t worth bothering with. She recommend to avoid directories hosting excessive search engine ads (takes away from your listing). Check pages for no-follow and robots.txt. Steer clear of directories with a lot of site wides. Look for directories with RSS feeds. A couple of other tactics that work for finding information about your competitors. Look at Marketleap, PubSub, Bot A Blog, Backlink Analyzer. Other traditional sources include BBB OnLine, Chamber of Commerce and so on.
Build content she recommends, a lot of people are saying this and it really helps with gaining links. Create a corporate blog to support/complement your main website. Blogs generate links, attract press coverage, etc.. Debra also mentions that corporations are using wiki’s to promote there business. She gives the example of Ducati motorbikes and a blog they created to promote their brand. Her next tip is to find influential bloggers, taggers and media contacts. Use the term “popular” in searches on del.icio.us to people that are tagging and will possibly review your website.
Next the good stuff, she goes into getting links from MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr. Each of these sties allow clean HTML links in the profiles. Those links accrue PageRank. Flickr does allow comments and allows urls in there. She goes into an interesting example about Beer For Dogs. It was a business that they started in their garage and had no money. They eventually figured out they needed a website and needed to reach people with dogs and money. They created promotions to display on YouTube, which got some press and earned them a premier video ad on CBS worth a substantial amount of money. They have only been online four months. Debra recommends to use the basics as a baseline. Very well researched presentation.
Up second was Eric Ward, he does a great presentation about Link Reclamation and since it’s rather thorough, I will point you to his site instead – http://www.ericward.com/ses/linking_strategies.html or your can get a copy in the conference handbook. Great stuff there, I would recommend checking it out.
Greg Boser was up third from Web Guerilla, and starts to talk link building strategy. He recommends to identify competitors in your industry first, select the top 5 and then reverse engineer their links trying to find out where they are getting their links. What are their tactics? He says that web tool distribution is very popular and attracts a good number of links. Greg says that people something focus to much on anchor text links, but you can also get some help from working on the ALT text of an image link. Software distribution is very helpful, many software download sites will allow links in the software/company profile. Affiliate programs are another area that works but often overlooked. Develop or use a system that enables you to get credit for your affiliate links. Awards and contents are great for building links. Seomoz did Web 2.0 awards and reviewed a lot of sites, did extremely well. He also talks about buying links brielfly. Only purchase links from sites that have pagerank that is similar to the average sites in your space. Contact sites that sell advertising and ask if they can provide straight links. Don’t use identical anchor text across all your sites. Search for non-profit organization with sponsor pages. Great links for very little money. He also talks about blogging is the quickest way to develop links. If the blog is new, consider turning comments off. “Pre-blog” on domain of upcoming projects. Learn the art of “link baiting”. Good information from Greg.
