Promoting a Website - It’s ALL “Link Building”

I am inspired to write this post today because of all of the misguided suggestions and over-the-top spam warnings I come across when webmasters, bloggers, experts and bashers discuss link building.

Links are merely the Web’s version of a relationship, a publicly announced relationship actually. Pretty much like a marriage. The wrong people get married all the time, but that usually doesn’t work out. When the RIGHT people get married, great things happen, a family grows and the community benefits. Quite the opposite when the wrong people get married.

When the right links are built, with the proper motivation, intention and execution. Great things happen.

Eric Ward knows its not about how much or how fast, its about how natural. He is referring to motivation and intention here, as he and other great link builders usually do. If your motivation is to identify popular, targeted websites with users who would appreciate yours or your clients website - you have the right foundation.

Ensuring there is content on yours or your clients website that those users will appreciate, however, is paramount.

Most of this is common sense, but there are many marketers out there trying to do whatever it takes to rank in search engines. They are willing to do things that might not be based on providing users with great content, or developing marketing strategies that form smart relationships with popular relevant websites. True, sometimes it is just about getting the damn link, but in a world full of noise and robots competing against spam, the Linker (or Linktress?) with the most relevant (topical), trusted (authority), natural (varied) and keyword focused (anchor text) links - wins.

Links are an outcome of successful relationship building with influential players in your industry. Your customers, vendors, peers, associations, industry journalists, bloggers, conferences, college professors, webmasters, forums… who is influential in your industry? Who is already linking to your competition? This is your list. Now you have to prioritize it. Who do you contact first? What do you do first? This is what separates the Amateurs from the Players.

1. Make sure the website you are promoting has content your users would consider valuable. You can think like your users right?

2. Make your list. (This is about 37 sub topics and requires an article for each. There are some great places to start, I’ll be providing more insight in future articles.)

3. Always ask yourself, who is going to help me build my audience? Who is going to have the most impact to my Audience Bottomline? Don’t ask yourself who has the highest Google Page Rank or Alexa Score. Sure these are signs of a popular website, but is that site going to contribute to your Audience Base or not? To determine this I assign a “relevancy” score to each Link Prospect. Then I use a formula that factors in aspects such as PageRank and Alexa Score, as well as # of posts in Techorati that mention the Link Prospects URL, how many websites link to your Link Prospect, and finally…. the “Hub Count.” This is a theory that Competitive Link Builders must know, and it is a simple one. Out of all of your Link Prospects, how many of them link to your competitors, and how many competitors does each link to? If the Link Prospect recevies the highest overall score (relevancy + popularity factors) and is linking to more of your competitors than any other prospect - this is the first to approach, and the list is sorted from there.

There are many sites where you have an oppurtunity to add content yourself, such as Article Directories, Forums and Wikis. These provide an engaged audience who hate spam. So long as you actually offer a useful contribution you are cool. Remember, even if the Wikipedia Spam Cops tell you you’re spamming - “as long as you can find an opportunity to add your site where it will make a useful contribution, do it.”

Link build carefully. Some do it for Traffic and others for Rankings. Don’t be tempted to buy links unless they are relevant advertisements you would otherwise purchase for the traffic (and you agree with Jim).

Balance your activities wisely between being a “Link Ninja & a Link Baiter.” Why the hell can’t we just call it Business Development and Public Relations? And is this actually the first time I have linked to Brian Provost in one of my posts?!? Sorry Brian, you are FAR too cool for this to have happened.

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