Online Advertising Specialists

SES San Jose 2008
Link building - the necessary evil?

The 10th Annual SES event was hosted this summer in San Jose, California, home to the largest concentration of successful Internet and high-tech companies in the world.

Fellow marketers, webmasters, SES alumni and executive decision makes have come together to share their knowledge and expertise in Search Engine Marketing, including SEO and paid search advertising.

The most controversial discussion was newly recognised importance of link building. Experts, publishers and SEO companies shared their views on the merits of building link and also their successful link building strategies.

Link building should be an ongoing activity of increasing the high quality inbound links. Starting a link building campaign needs to begin with setting your goals. By increasing link equity you can increase search traffic and improve your search engine visibility. When it comes to building links more is not necessarily better, it´s more about quality rather than quantity.

There are "6 Tenets of Linking Theory" - Quality, Quantity, Relevance, Anchor Text, Steady Pace, Link Deeply. This is the theory. In practice, in fact there are the 4 Ps of link Building: Practice, Purpose & Persuasion, Personnel and Patience and Persistence. Planning your link building campaign includes keyword selection and URL designation. Purpose and Persuasion includes tactics such as link baiting. Personnel means people managing you campaign; they should be persistent, detailed and goal oriented. Lastly, Patience and Persistence means avoiding the temptation of building too many links too quickly. Search engines do not like you to build too many links at one time as this appears as unnatural. Adding too many poor quality links will not help you to achieve your long term objectives of sustainable ranking.

In terms of the best type of links to build; the conclusion was that text links (anchor text embedded) hold 10 times more value than image links.

The importance of landing pages was also stressed. Linking only to your homepage will not get the results you expect. Build deep links to your content pages as search engines see these as relevant links. Linking only to your homepage looks unnatural to the search engine.

Buying links can be a component of your link building strategy. When buying links make sure you place them on relevant content site. Failing to do so, your link may not be seen as valid and therefore may not help your ranking. Place links on directories, popular and frequently visited sites in your sector and most importantly. One very useful technique is to rotate your keywords and anchor text, extracting more value and making the most of your budget. One SEO company, Status Media has an excellent solution for doing just this and can perfectly place "in content" contextually matched links in a variety of different formats, this seems to definitely improve Google ranking even for competitive keywords.

One of the most important things in a link building strategy is attention to detail and quality. Try not to obsess too much about your Page Rank. Trusted and quality links worth much more that how big is your website PR. Build deep links and try to get 10 quality links rather than 1,000 random ones.

In the past companies have been cautious about adding links to their websites, focusing on other SEO strategies often suggested by SEO agencies that have little experience in link building. As time has progressed there are more and more examples of companies who have been using link building strategies and are achieving sustainable top Google rankings.

It appears that the market is slowly accepting that good quality link building delivers high ranking search engine results and where very competitive keywords are concerned commercial link building companies could well be deemed as a necessary "evil".

You can obtain more information about link building from online advertising specialists such as Status Media. Status Media is an experienced SEO company and is one of the most forward thing link building companies worldwide.

You can also find out more about SEO and link building strategies at industry websites such as www.seochat.com and http://www.searchenginejournal.com