Get More SEO Juice for the Link Building Squeeze

I’m a huge fan of Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly podcast that discusses both new and classic marketing, co-hosted by Christopher S. Penn and John J. Wall. During more than a year, I’ve learned so much from these guys and so, as a thankyou note to them, a link to the show is always visible on this blog in the Alma Mater section – find it in the right lower corner.

MOC just released a new episode – “New Donuts and the Big Man” and after checking the show notes I got a little bit excited.

Earlier this week, on Wednesday morning, when I had just finished a link building strategy document for a client, on LinkedIn I started brainstorming ideas regarding creating several versions of a press release, targeted to different audiences and distribution channels.

It was exactly the time when I noticed that Chris twitted about the opportunity to submit some questions to them:

At that moment I had a melting pot of ideas on link development and press release customization. So I pushed the Tweet button, a few times:

Now you can understand my excitement when in the MOC’s show notes I saw “12:23 Best techniques for inbound links, Press Releases still work” – I was expecting to hear some answers to my questions.

Here‘s a rough transcription I did for the “link building” part of the episode (download it in .mp3).

Christopher: Grechanowski from Twitter asks: “what’s your latest techniques on getting quality links” and followed “how many version of a press release do you distribute”.

John: Quality link tactics… One thing I’ve heard people are doing. You know, fighting for .orgs, setting up content specifically for college professors that they can use in hopes of getting some .org links to tie things in.

Another thing is quality content, just doing it as a PR stretch, recommending multiple articles – some of them being on your website, others not.

It seems like a lot of the stuff has played out. Say, 2000 links set-up for $100 by somebody from India – it seems that that stuff has finally started play out a little bit – it does not drive the kind of traffic it should.

Christopher: Interestingly enough, we actually just fired our social thing press release thought PRWeb, paid them $200 for it, (Alex: it’s the price a PRWeb’s SEO package). The number of links that generated in 24 time period is pretty substantial – 300 or so links – and most of them clean – news sites, social media sites, just copying and pasting the entire release, completely with the inbound links, pre-defined and pre-set. That was worth it and was not terribly hard to do as long as you have good link strategy.

[pullquote]Getting people recommend you back and link back to your site makes your site very important and it makes it very credible.[/pullquote]

The other thing that is useful but it’s going to take some time. But it has worked very well for me, and continues to work very well for me, is get yourself in your personal site to become a very highly ranked authority in something, somehow. One of the way you can do this – budget 10 minutes a day, you don’t need a lot, go on Flickr, if you’re active on Flickr, and start favoriting people’s photos. Go on Facebook and start liking some people’s content. But get active out there, your network activities is up and running, depending on where your users are. If you’re on LinkedIn write recommendations as appropriate, connect and pass along everything. It takes 10 minutes a day to do some social stuff. Do it in your lunch break. Make sure your site is prominent in all those profiles. Doing that and getting people recommend you back and link back to your site makes your site very important and it makes it very credible. Then you will need to add some juice to campaigns you’re doing. Again, it’s the same link strategy – you become a highly ranked site and then you’re starting passing that authority…

… And another thing is make sure you’re working on building your network particularly on socially enabling sites like Facebook and Twitter – make sure you’re buiding a network– pick a network where your customers are really built it out, blow it out as much as you can, use as many different ways as you can. So when you have to push the button … One thing that search engines, particularly Google… they count real time search now – say, what’s been re-tweeted – it’s an asset there, it’s much more impactful than trying to build it on the fly after you’ve launched your product and realizing nobody is talking about it.

Thanks John and Chris for sharing the great tips on quality link building. I glad I could be a part of this week’s episode. Until next time… Enjoy the coffee.

Tagged as: Marketing Over Coffee