Link Building Tactics That Work

I was reading Debra Mastaler's blog and it struck a cord with regards to link building. She talks about strategically placed blog comments that, can be construed as comment spam.

I do a ton of different tactics to get client (and our own ventures) sites inbound links. And in reality, its not that difficult to do so.

THE PROCESS:
Go through your keywords you're wishing to rank for. Make it a tight list of about 5-10 keywords. Go to Google, Yahoo! and MSN and type in your keywords. Go through each page up to page 10 and see what kind of results you get. Of course, you'll get forums, blogs, community sites, social sites and other independent sites, including competitors.

Blogs and Forums: When you run across these within the SERPs, go ahead and create a profile or make a post. I never even think twice about "spamming" or if its inappropriate, its marketing and I'm spreading their brand awareness, plus a little link juice back to the client site. Like in Debra's post, ALWAYS take the time and write a compelling response to the forum topic or the blog post. Make it informative and rich. Don't take 2 seconds that says "Great post, I like "Keyword" too!". Take the time and write something others can read, relate to or think about.

Going through the SERPs, you'll also find sites that might have a way to advertise. In my experience, don't send an email. A LOT of the time, these advertisement forms either don't work or go no where. And emailing the email that is listed on the site always comes back. So, what should you do? Call them. Go to WHOIS.sc (I know, its owned by domaintools, its just easier) and find out who owns the site. Call 'em up and see what they can offer you. Talking to an actual human being goes a long distance in the online world. In a lot of cases, they own other sites that may compliment the site you're trying to advertise on, which they might throw in a deal if you advertise on a couple sites.

By going through the SERPs of the top 3 search engines, you'll get a decent amount of targeted incoming links to the site. Some will have good anchor text, some might be just the URL of the site your advertising and some might just be the company name. All, in which, is fine because

a) Having a variety of anchor text is the right path to a natural looking link structure
b) Achieving targeted, industry-related incoming links is the right path to top rankings

There are a ton of other tactics that I use, but when starting with a new client or website, this is the first set of steps I follow to get a decent amount of incoming links. And most of the time, the site is ranking excellent for 1st and 2nd tier keywords.

Scoreboard Media

I have to say, I thoroughly enjoy reading the posts over at Scoreboard Media. I spent the last 45 minutes going through awesome posts about Internet Billionaires, Opportunities, Baseball Analogies and SEO Consulting. All great posts and really made me think about my own personal investments in ventures outside of my company.

If you haven't gone there, do it, put it in your blog reader and hold tight.

My First Digg - Test Study

I've been really interesting in doing more and more testing with the social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and I finally had some time last week to do a test. Here's the process and results:

Goal
To get on the homepage of Digg for our article.

Process
We used a 3rd party to help with the digging. The site is pretty good (I will not be giving out the company) and did everything they said they would do and more. It was a great investment. But using the 3rd party for diggs wasn't the only portion that made the campaign. We had to make sure we had a reasonable article to submit. I had my content developer write a piece about the "Top XX in History" with pictures and videos. It was a good piece, a little short for my liking, but good nonetheless.

Result
We did not achieve homepage status, but we did get on the frontpage of the video page. That resulted in about 10,000 uniques for the day. Also resulted in about 15 new links to that individual page.

Conclusion

It was an interesting test. I don't think the piece was as good as it could have been and since my content developer hadn't worked on a topic like this, it wasn't as "tight" as I would have wanted it. I have a couple other ideas for other clients and I'll be trying all of them in the future.

My biggest quip with using Digg or Stumble is that you don't get links that are in the same industry, especially for manufacturers or commercial clients. If we get on the homepage of Digg because of funky car images for a used car client, would they get a lot of links from car-related websites? More then likely not. On the other hand, a one-way link is a one-way link and you can never have too many of those, off-topic or not.

I plan on gaming StumbleUpon and seeing what type of traffic levels come from that. I'll also be doing more Digg projects to see if I can get a few posts to the homepage.

Domainer - Who me?! A quick 5-minute study

This morning, I was going through my normal route of blogs, headlines and SEO news when I stumbled upon Frank Schilling's speech on domaining. Andy has been talking about it for the last few months and I'd become more and more interested, but to be honest, I thought that I was a little late to the breakfast table.

Well...I might just be wrong.

THE PROCESS
After watching the hour speech from Frank, I did a little digging, just to "see" what's available. I pulled up Keyword Discovery, punched in a couple one work, very broad keywords and drilled down on the first page of keyword and even the 2nd page. Most of the results were in the range of 5-10K monthly unique visitors. I started plugging the 2-word and 3-word keywords into the address bar and just adding a .com to the end of them. If they didn't resolve to a page, I then plugged whois.sc/ in front of it to see if it was available.

WHAT I FOUND
After about 30-40 minutes of searching, I purchased: MacadamiaNutPie.com. Now, this domain might not get too much unique traffic, but it will more then likely get enough traffic to pay for itself.

One of the interesting things Frank talked about was talking his domains and building them out into actual business. That intrigued me a little bit. I've always thought about it, and I'm more use to searching through various back corners of the web to find sites that have been online for a while, have a decent amount of trust and links and them building them out into a large brand online. But buying a domain that generates a little bit of targeted type-in traffic from the get-go is something that never "clicked".

Now that I own MacadamiaNutPie.com, should I sell Macadamia Nut Pies from this website? Should I sell advertising to other pie companies at a premium? Or should I hold onto this domain and see if I can get a few thousand to a pie company that wants the domain? We'll see. :)

I'm going to be on the hunt the next few weeks for domains that not only get type-in traffic (or at least the possibility of it), but also domains that can be build into companies serving a specific niche.