Hey guys,
Just down here at the Hilton Melbourne for SEO, Dejan Petrovic from Dejan SEO did a great presentation on Managing Large Link Building Campaigns.
Topic: Managing Large Link Building Campaigns
Managing large-scale link building campaigns and coordinating a team of thirty link
builders is not a simple task. Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO introduces a link
building framework designed to streamline workflow and team efficiency. This
session will reveal an amazing amount of technical detail and theory around
link building you never considered before.
Speaker: Dejan Petrovic – SEO Strategist, Dejan SEO
Here are some of my notes from the session:
How do you compete with people that:
– spam edu forums
– buy expired domains
– have a blog network
Tools – Open Site Explorer, Majestic – scan links
If links from casinos etc may want to do clean up session, ask webmasters to remove links, change anchor text, maybe move links to different page so looks less dodgy
Multiply linkworthy assets
Research:
– Offline Content – what data/knowledge do you have that you could put onto your website that people would link to? What is laying around the office you can utilize
– Relationships – who suppliers are, customers, physical location, presence in local business community, speaking opportunities, alumni relationships with universities, how your CEO is integrated with the business world
– Data
Relevance Dampening
– the more steps you can away gets further from your subject gets less and less relevant, Dejan found about 4 steps is about as far as you want to go
Competitive Analysis
Unrealistic competitors vs Realistic competitors
If you are that small, and your competitor is amazon who is that big, you can’t compete, understand your strength and go after a different market
Links aren’t best value if they are too many steps removed and not relevant to your core industry
Come up with each one of the competitors backlinks
Remove duplicates so you have one nice clean list to give your link builders
Competitive Analysis: Likelihood assessment
Link value / Likelihood = Target score
E.g. One of your competitors has business partnership with another company, going after that link is a waste of time
Another scenario where link value small (directory) but easy to get, likelihood of getting it very high
Look at Conversion Rate CR (%) and Goal Value GV ($) and arrange your link building opportunities into a list, sort them in order of potential, can try at this calculator: dejan.com.au/potential
Also work out what phrase points to what page, you don’t want two different people in your link building team going after the same term for different pages.
Avoid at all costs – having same anchor text,
Sterile, monogonous, same anchor text across the board = big red flag pushes you into red area
When link building, give them choices of phrase variations they can use. Different phrase variations all point to same url. E.g. Instead of “Car Insurance” everywhere, use “Best Car Insurance”, “Car Insurance Quotes”, “[Brand] Car Insurance” etc
Equip your link builders with good content, so they can say to people “hey link to this”, then the likelihood of getting links is much higher, use your link builders to distribute this content
Coordinate
you don’t want two different people contacting the same person for a link, make sure people coordinate. Also if you want links in future you can re-use contacts.
Link Building Software
You can record for each link opportunity the status of your process, e.g. “asked for a link” etc. Use Tools to held keep track like Raven, Linkdex, Ontolo
Also have created a toolbar – chrome extension
Also get to know your people and their skills, maybe some go to conferences, some are occasional journalists
Slides at dejanseo.com.au/smx
During Q & A: Someone asked can’t you just point evil links to your competitors to get them penalized?
Dejan says you would have to help them first in order to penalize them so it really would not be feasible and not something they see. Google wants to see a steady pattern of cheating over a prolonged period of time, they say this is starting to look spammy, we will penalize the site.
