How To Take Control Of Your Link Building In 2010
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by Eric Ward
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What are your link building plans for 2010?
Me? Ill be making some significant changes to my business model for
the first time in fourteen years. Ill be training more clients to
become their own link builders. Ive earned 100% of my living by
providing link building tactics, strategies and services since 1994.
While the methods I use have changed, the core principals that drive
my strategy selections are the same as they were when I started. Here
are my top tips for successful link building in 2010.
Respect for people
The Interweb is not a bunch of tubes and wires created for selling
cheap crap. The Internet is people, each with a reason for being
online, some casual, some serious, some young, some old. Through a
plethora of algorithm changes over the course of 14 years, there is a
reason why my site, and for that matter many of my clients, rank so
highly. My approach to links is not based on loopholes, trickery or
deception. My approach is based on merit. Merit of content, and merit
of curator.
Curation is a new concept to many of you, but its simple really.
There are thousands of professionals around the world looking for
great sites to write about and link to. Im not talking about paid
bloggers or some other loophole strategy. Im talking about a
Geologist in Nebraska or a knitting expert in Georgia. A historical
librarian in Michigan or a water quality expert in Colorado.
Laugh all you want, but the Web allows, enables and inspires people
with a passion for a subject to organize and classify it. Its
beautiful really; but many SEOs miss the true beauty of highly curated
topical guides as they spend there time on tactics that dont take as
much effort and time. Its much easier to throw money at a few paid
links than actually seek a permanent merit based link that signals
true quality to Google.
I have curator contact databases going back for years. Many of those
people are gone, but many are still at it today, and they often link
to the sites I tell them about. Many have become friends. Remember
during the dot-com bust when About.com <http://www.About.com>
had to shut down several guide sites? I helped many of those folks
in my own small way
<http://www.ericward.com/guidehelp/relocationdirectory.html>
to get reestablished again. Thats what the Web is about. People.
Passion. The motivations and pathways between them. What Ive
described before as Etiologic Content Linking
<http://www.ericward.com/etiology.html>
.
Invest in you
This past year, I experienced the greatest shift in my business since
I began link building. More people requested link building training
services than in any year before. This tells me some things.
It shows people are getting smarter about what will and will not
work. You can only beat your head against a wall for so long.
People are unhappy with their current vendors.
People are realizing that they need to better understand the
technical and tactical aspects of link building, in order to make
better choices in the future. You can waste thousands of dollars very
quickly with the wrong link building approach. Why not invest some
time and money to understand the many types and styles of link
building? Youll save money in the long run, and youll save precious
time that could have been spent on useful tactics instead of smoke and
mirrors.
Tarnished gold
Ill close this column and the year with a brief explanation of what
prompted this column. There is a website I know of, devoted to a very
popular hobby. This site has been live since 1997. Thats twelve
years. If I mentioned the company behind the site youd probably know
it. This site enjoyed very high rankings for many years, largely due
to having such an early presence on the Web, which meant it also had a
significant and healthy link profile. Their links were all natural,
and they had never engaged in any sort of link building activities at
all. A classic case of an older site with a perfect link pedigree.
A while back, they noticed that some of their rankings were slipping.
Sites that were much newer, and not as robust, were outranking them.
Its a fairly common thing that many older sites experience. Because
they never had to seek links in order to rank well, they didnt spend
much time on it. But the newer sites, knowing what they were up
against, were actively seeking links, hiring link builders, doing all
the SEO/SEM things that new sites do to fight an established brand
site.
The older site responded but made a tactical mistake. They panicked.
They hired link builders who used the type of tactics anyone reading
this column would cringe at. The older site didnt do this on purpose.
They just didnt know any better, because they were content experts,
not search engine marketers or link builders. Not only did their
rankings not improve, they worsened.
Nothing bothers me more than when an old site with a perfect linking
pedigree and outstanding content ends up tarnished due to a simple
lack of information about link building. While the damage can be
undone, it never should have happened in the first place.
In 2010, I urge all of you to take more control of your link building
efforts. There are many ways you can do this, some incredibly easy,
some quite complex. Stop believing you can outsource all link building
problems away. Some you can, some you cant. Learn what you need to
learn, get a few hours of training, seek advice on your strategies
from an independent third party, and a year from now, I promise you
will be glad you did.
Wishing you a prosperous, link filled New Year!
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Eric Ward <http://searchengineland.com/author/eric-ward/>
has been in the link building and content publicity game since
1994, providing services ranking from linking strategy
<http://www.ericward.com/linkstrategy.html>
to a monthly private newsletters on linking for subscribers.
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