Link Building

You know how important inbound links are for your website. Last month, you even dipped a toe into the ocean of link building when you used the search engines to find out how many other sites are linking to your landing pages.

Surfing Is Not Slacking

Way back when, when we were SEO consultants working for a small web development firm,we were lucky to have an open-minded boss. On any given day, you might have seen five other workers knee-deep in HTML edits or up to their ears in database code, but what was on our monitors? Movie fan sites, Florida vacation sites, and sports nostalgia sites.We remember the day we had to send an e-mail around saying,“Don’t worry:We’re not looking for new jobs.We’re just researching career sites for a client!” But it was all part of the SEO job, and an important one at that.

If you’re in a corporate culture where personal e-mails and web surfing is frowned upon or prohibited, it is essential that you get the clearance you need to access the Web in the same way that your customers and competitors do. Likewise, if there are no actual restrictions on web surfing in your company but you just feel like a slacker when you’re surfing the Web, just remember what surfing does for your company:

• Surfing helps you find and assess the quality of sites linking to you and locate new sites that may want to link to you.

• It helps you find new search products and opportunities that may be useful for promoting your organization.

• It helps you to think like a searcher, using a variety of techniques to find important information.

• And it helps you get familiar with the wide range of available search engine and directory listings.

Every SEO expert has a favorite generic search term to use for testing, one that’s broad and popular enough to be represented by the full gamut of paid and unpaid listings, directory listings, and text snippets, not to mention official sites, unofficial sites, and misspellings. Ours continues to be “Britney Spears.” Have fun finding yours!

Your Existing Links

Today, you will assess your website’s existing listings and links with an eye toward improvement. We have created a worksheet to help you in your link-building efforts.

Last month, during your baseline site assessment, you determined the total number of sites linking into your landing pages. Now you will take a magnifying glass to these sites and document them in your Link Tracking Worksheet. Here are the steps you’ll take:

• Document Inbound Links

• Assess Existing Link Quality

Document Inbound Links

On your Link Tracking Worksheet, you will see a section for existing inbound links. Today you’ll identify the URLs of the first 10 or so sites that are linking to each of your landing pages. Ten should be plenty to work with for now.

Find the URLs using one of the following four methods:

• On the search engine of your choice, perform the special search You know how important is finding inbound links. (We prefer using http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com because it’s so easy to export the list and dump it into the worksheet.)

• If you have access to a website statistics program, review it for referring URLs.

• Use a backlink analysis tool, such as the one found at www.backlinkwatch.com. This tool provides backlink URLs and also the text that the linking sites are using to link to you. Fun stuff!

• If you have verified your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you have access to a much more complete list of links than you’ll get from the Google search engine.

Perform this step for each of your landing pages, ignoring links coming from your own site. If your site has no incoming links from other sites, you can skip the rest of today’s tasks!

Assess Existing Link Quality

Search engines care about the quality as well as the quantity of inbound links. And you care, too, because a link is a direct pathway for potential customers to get to your site. Today you’ll ask a few key questions about your linking sites that will help you determine if each link is going to help the right audience find the right page on your site. Later this week, we’ll show you how to write to site owners to request changes to any problematic listings you discover.

The following key questions will help you assess the quality of your inbound links. It may seem like a lot to think about, but once you get a feel for it, you won’t need the checklist. In fact, you’ll probably be able to assess each link within 30 seconds of opening the page.

Starting with the first inbound link URL on your list, open up the page and think about the answers to these yes or no questions:

• Is this site related to the same general subject matter as mine?

• Does the linking page content speak to my target audience?

• Are my target keywords included in the text that links to my site?

• Are my target keywords included elsewhere on the page?

• Does the link work?

• Does the link go to the best landing page choice?

• Is the link up-to-date?

• Is the link flattering, or at least noncritical?

Although numerous factors can contribute to the quality of an inbound link, these are the most important. The more yes answers, the higher-quality link you have. If there are any no answers, flag this URL with a note of the problem. Obviously, some problems (like a link being from an irrelevant website) can’t be fixed. And if a link is coming from inside a forum post or blog comment, it’s good to know about, but there’s no point trying to modify it. But others, especially links that don’t work, are red flags that need to be addressed.

Get into the habit of asking these questions anytime you review a website, and it will serve you throughout your campaign especially later this week when you are looking for new links.