SES London: Linking Strategies

Speakers: Chris Sherman (executive editor at searchnginwatch.com), Mike Grehan (Smart Interactive), Ken McGaffin (LinkingMatters), Nathan Wood (ask.com)

Mike Grehan starts off (great voice, like yesterday ) by advising to get as many links as possible from inside your community (your topical community that is). You should especially pay attention to:
- quality content so that people will want to link to you
- anchor text in links
- do a link:competitor.com search
- don’t dilute quality content by spreading it out over a lot of pages
- affiliate programme with links pointing to you
- be choosey (no linkfarms or FFA!)
- don’t fake linkage data
- know how to ask for links, make personal contact.

Ken is next with ‘How to get links without asking’. Answer: by creating great content. The basic foundations for a good strategy are to get yourself listed in the main directories, publish good content, use keywords in linking text, participate in trade forums etc, publish articles on external web sites, write and distribute press releases, interlink between your sites, buy links for traffic, not PR. Concentrate your link building efforts on difficult web sites because they are worth much more. Understand who are the experts in your industry and how to get them to write about you (bloggers, journalists).

Examine your inbound links from your server logs and ask yourself:
who is writing what
who could you partner with and build a relationship with
how can you get more sites like this
what niche markets do the results suggest

In other words: be proactive in using the information that the marketplace has given you.

Last speaker is Nathan Wood of Ask.com, who stresses that the quality of inbound links outweighs by far the pure numbers of inbound links. He explains how Ask establishes subject specific popularity for a web site and how it creates local subject communities of sites.

His rules to link by:
- become an authority on a subject and a respected member of this subject community
- same subject links are most powerful
- encourage other sites to link to you using text links (as opposed to for example javascript links, oh horror)
- optimise pre-existing links (i.e. if someone links to you with the famous words “click here”, politely contact them to ask for something more descriptive)

Be cautious of and / or avoid any or all of the following:
- reciprocal linking programmes
- purchasing links
- link farms
- doorway / gateway / hallway pages
- cloaking pages: he says that for Ask legitimate cloaking is okay (be ware: for Google it’s not)
- invisible or hidden links
- anything that artificially boosts link popularity.

Rules of thumb:
- get included in pertinent editorial directories
- review and understand top referrals to your site
- devise efficient site structure
- think about visual relevancy

Technorati tags: ses - search engine strategies - search - linking strategies