You’re wasting your money on SEO and what you can do about it, Part 2

In part 1 of our series You’re wasting your money on SEO and what you can do about it series, we told you that if you don’t know how to talk to a Search Engine Optimization specialist, you’re probably throwing your money away paying one.

We defined and outlined paid search and explained its position within the broader topic of Search Engine Marketing.

In part 2, we are going to look at another sub-topic of Search Engine Marketing, called link building.

While many SEOs would argue that link building should be bundled under our next topic, Search Engine Optimization, we disagree.

Most of link building has nothing to do with actually optimizing your site.

Yes, your site must have compelling content and load quickly so other sites will want to link to you, but that is tangental to the main goal of link building, which is getting other sites to link to specific pages within your site.

Before we dive it, let’s make sure that point is clear. At the most basic level, let’s say you have a page on your site about sharpening knives. The keyword for the page is “how to sharpen knives” and the url for the page is http://mysite.com/how-to-sharpen-knives/.

What you want is for other sites, meaning sites other than mysite.com to put a link on one or more of their pages that, when clicked, sends the clicker to http://mysite.com/how-to-sharpen-knives/.

So, how do you do this?

There are numerous methods to link building and some are better than others.

Buying Links

This is simple. There are many companies out there, in fact, you’ve probably gotten emails from some, that will put links to your page or pages on their site in return for cash payment.

Do. Not. Do. This. Some of our clients really want to take this route because link building requires effort, and it’s easier to throw money at it and see quick returns.

But it is extremely risky.

If Google finds out that you are purchasing links, the company may delist your site from its rankings, and that’s basically a death knell for your site.

Link Swapping

Link swapping is where you agree to link someone else’s site in exchange for a link from the other site back to yours.

This also is a bad idea. When Google crawls the other site, it will see the link and follow it to your site. It will then see your link back to the other site, and say “Wait. These sites don’t like the content. They’re just trying to trick me! I’ll show them.” And your page rank actually will end up decreasing.

This is tough because there may content that you really like on the other site and vice versa, so what can you do?

One option is to triangulate. Let’s say that the other company owns two sites. theirsite1.com and theirsite2.com. You can email them and say “Hey, I was going to put a link to your site on my site. I was going to link to http://theirsite2.com/how-to-sharpen-knives/. If you find our content compelling, would you mind linking to our page from theirsite1.com and not theirsite2.com?”

If you have a strong social presence, you can also agree to Tweet (Twitter) or Like (Facebook) a link of someone else’s in exchange for a link to your site.

For example, if you have 2,000 Twitter followers, you can email a company and say “We really like your content. We can Tweet a link to it if you wouldn’t mind putting a link on your site to http://mysite.com/how-to-sharpen-knives/.”

Social Sharing

Continuing on that trend, links on Twitter and Facebook help your site out, too. So you should share and encourage your visitors to share you content via these networks, which will produce links back to your page.

Article Submission/Bookmarking sites

Sites like digg.com, reddit.com and stumbleupon.com will let you submit your content to them. From there, the best content rises to prominence based on how well these communities rate the content. If your content is submitted to one of these sites and gains traction, it could produce a very high quality link to your site.

Be careful not to spam this sites as they often view people who submit their own content without submitting others’ content too frequently with disdain.

Guest Publishing

Guest publishing is when you agree to lend your expertise in the form of an article, interview or speech to another site. Guest posting or guest publishing should be given great consideration especially when other web publishers are actively looking for content. This will allow you to have your content appear on other sites with links back to your site.

Niche Online Communities

Find forums and social networking sites related to your niche to get a picture of the online community in your keyword market. Discussion forums and blog comments are a great venue for exchanging ideas, interacting with other experts and target audience, and establishing your link. Remember to not just join these communities to drop your links. This can harm your reputation among the other members of the communities.

So, for example, you would find forums and blogs about knives and leave comments on them. We suggest a 10:1 ratio, meaning for every 10 posts you make, one can contain a link back to content on your site.

Old Fashioned Networking

The last way is to use your rolodex. Start contacting friends and contacts and asking them to link to your content. You can try cold-calling or cold-emailing, too, but that is never as effective.

What are the best links?

The best type of links are links that have your keyword in the anchor text and come from a reputable site that is within your topic.

Let’s take that piece by piece. A link to your site that looks like this: My Site is not as effective as How to sharpen knives.

Why? Because Google looks at the text inside the link to determine what the content is about. So, in the second example, Google would say, here’s a link to a page about “How to sharpen knives,” which is good, because that’s the keyword you chose.

Secondly, the more reputable the site linking to yours the more effective the link will be.

For example, a link from Bed Bath and Beyond will carry a lot more weight than one from Joe’s Knife Emporium.

Finally, the link is more effective if it comes from a site that is within your topic. For example, if ESPN links to your page about sharpening knives, that is great because ESPN is a very reputable site, but it’s reputable for sports not knives.

Why is link building important?

Links are the number 1 thing Google uses to determine where it will list sites in its search results.

This is because Google views a link as a tacit endorsement of content. Meaning, if someone links to your content, they must like it, therefore, it must be good content that others will find useful.

And that what Google’s search results are all about: Returning the most relevant, most useful content to the people using Google Search.

Next time, we’re going to get into search engine optimization, so check back, and let us know if you need clarification on anything in this article.