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SMX London 2009 – Blow your mind Link Building Techniques

20th May 2009 · Paddy · 4 Comments »

My day at SMX London – 19th May 2009

As I posted a few days ago, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend day 2 of SMX London 2009. It was my first SEO conference and it was a great experience and I certainly learnt a few things and got a few ego boosts when “new ideas” were talked about which I’d thought of previously

There were a lot of interesting points that came out of the day, rather than throw them all into one post I’m going to break it up a little. This post I’m going to talk about the link building session.

Blow your mind link building techniques

Starting at 9am was this link building session and this is probably my (and a few others!) weakest point of SEO. It has without a doubt become much harder over the last few years and with algorithmic changes at Google leaning towards the quality of links rather than quantity, it becomes harder all the time.

Why does a site rank where it does?

Rand Fishkin used the “office supplies” query as a basis for some of his presentation and compared the top 3 results. He pointed out a few on-page factors that was helping www.officesupplies.org.uk rank first. Keyword in the URL is the obvious one but there is also the use of the keyword in the title tags, header tags, internal links and copy.

The point I took away from this was the methods Rand used to pick apart why the top three sites were ranking the way they were and organising the findings into a usable table.

Rand also shared a tip whereby you use the “keyword site:example.com” to find out which page Google sees as the most important for that keyword. When you know this information you can focus on this page and build internal and external links to it already knowing that Google like it for that keyword.

Patrick Altoft revealed several tactics for link building, both of which I found very interesting. One was using a javascript tag on images so that when someone right clicked on them, they were presented with the HTML code to copy and paste onto their website if they wanted to use the image. This code could be customised to include a small caption of text including an anchor text link too.

His other method involved building a directory/database style website for each customer or business from a particular niche or industry. This can be populated with content, images, anything the user wants along with a link to the customers website. Once this has been built into a good resource and the individual pages are ranking well, you can then contact the customers and ask them for a link or to put a badge on their website linking to your website.

On a more personal level I started to think about better organising link building campaigns so that they are more focused on deeper pages. Of course we build links to internal pages all the time, but I think a structured method of doing this can pay off – even to the point where you treat each category page as a seperate website in its own right.

Analysis of competitors and why they get links and who gives links?

A very basic step in planning an SEO strategy is to perform analysis of the current industry leaders and see how they are getting their links. This is pretty simple. However have you thought about looking at it from the other angle? Why not look at the industry sites that link to related sites? What makes them give other sites links? What content obviously interests them? It could be videos, images, widgets, interesting articles on a topic they are not specialists in. Whatever it is, once you discover a sites “soft spot” for giving a link, you can craft content that will appeal to them.

If someone does link to you, why not do something to say thanks? Twitter about them, talk about them in a forum or just say thank you! A small gesture can go a long way in establishing a long term relationship with an industry leader (or future industry leader!).

Using low quality links pointing to an established site

When this was talked about by the panel, there was a visible change in them and there were a few mumbles in the crowd as if someone had just revealed something big.

The basic idea was that if you have a website that is a fairly well trusted brand, then you can afford to point some lower quality keyword focused links at the site to give it a nudge up the rankings. As its a trusted site already, you are unlikely to trigger a penalty. Although caution should be exercised here! I had a quick chat with Patrick Altoft after the presentation to find out a little more about what he would define as a trusted site – in my opinion this is a subjective thing.

Patrick explained that he would probably look at a current link profile of a website and the anchor text already used. If the main anchor text being used is the brand name, with target keywords further down the list, then you can probably afford to throw some lower quality links at the site.

I can see how this could work very well but caution is needed. If you do backlink anchor text analysis and find your main anchor text is your main keyword, with your brand further down the list – it is probably not a good idea to point a load of low quality links to your site using this keyword. Instead you should try to build links using the brand name.

I’m sure there was more than that which I’ll be blogging about soon but for now thats enough!