SERP Experts

I took a telephone call last week from a woman who was looking to hire a link builder for a new site in a very competitive niche. I’m under contract to a business in the same industry so I passed but we had a nice chat before I sent her along with my standard list of link building referrals.

Several days went by and I heard from her again, this time in a state of panic. Seems everyone she contacted was unavailable, and she was convinced it was because her industry was a competitive one. Could I please give her an honest assessment of her website and tell her if that was indeed the case?

Well, no. I feel for her situation but in this particular field I’m under contract to a competitor and as a result, obligated to focus only on them. But I did refer her to a usability specialist and suggested her situation is probably more a result of link builders being taken rather than uninterested.

Competitive industries tend to be established industries so it stands to reason they have linking staffs in place and link builders tied up. If that’s the case, what can new sites in a competitive niche do to attract links? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s tempting to outsource link development, and there are some amazing link developers out there. Problem is, most are in high-demand and booked for months ahead of time, and those with regular clients rarely take on new work. That is one good enough reason to take it in-house.

With that in mind, link development can easily be integrated into existing marketing plans, or new marketing strategies can be designed with link building as one of the objectives. It’s all a matter of educating the staff on links and how they influence rankings.

What are some key advantages to in-house link development?
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If you are looking to build links one of the easiest ways to do so is to place yourself inside a conversation that is already wildly spreading. Sites like Techmeme and Del.icio.us show what stories were recently hot, and you can find some bloggers who cited those stories using Technorati and Google Blogsearch. Google has a date based filter on news and recently launched a date based search filter for their regular search results which allows you to find fresh content on any topic. If you follow up on a popular story and contact these people you might find a few easy to acquire high authority links.

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Sometimes, you’d love to link to your home page with your keyword as the anchor text, but it just doesn’t look right in the top menu or sidebar. An easy way to make your internal anchor text links reference your content with the anchor text you want while still maintaining the sensibility of your permanent navigation is to:

1. Place your header/sidebar/permanent nav into an iframe that you serve on every page (that also limits the amount of unique content the spiders have to crawl per page - a nice benefit)
2. In your footer, link to your content as you see fit - it makes more sense to use anchor text here and will serve to give you the kind of internal linking you want for both engines and visitors

Obviously, you can overdo this and get penalized, but if employed properly, it’s a great way to leverage your internal link juice in a more optimized fashion.

When buying links from link brokers, don’t just sign up for any old inventory. Call up Text-Link-Ads, Text-Link-Brokers, Linkworth, etc. and tell them your budget and that you need to stay under the radar. Let them put together a custom package for you - just send them your top converting terms and judge the links based on how the other link advertisers are ranking for the anchor text they provide. Ask for a few sample clients, check their rankings and do a linkdomain command at Yahoo! to check out the network. If it looks natural and relevant (and under the radar), you can feel more confident about the service. On rule of thumb I use - I ask myself if a visitor to the page might be tempted to click on the link in the same fashion as AdSense or YPN - if the answer is “yes” or “pretty close,” it’s a good signal.