Future Proofing Your Link Building Campaign in 2013

It is more important than ever before to understand what link building is, what techniques work and the long term impact it can have on your brand.

Since the beginning of the World Wide Web, websites linked to others for a variety of reasons, however many brands have used forceful link-building tactics in recent years to help them dominate their market for the short-term gain.

At Blueclaw, we are proud to say we help build long-lasting relationships with clients that will reap sustained rewards – and much of this is due to our approach to link-building.

First steps…

As a starting point, I believe it is important to understanding your clients profile; its competitors and the niche it is in. I would highly recommended using tools such as Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Link Research Tools, Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools to build this picture.

Once you have a good understanding of the field you can outline a strategy that helps you prioritise actions. Some questions to think about when developing a strategy would be:

• What products and services does the client use?
• Does the brand participate in community work?
• What does the brand do offline?
• Does the brand have a lot of citations, if so, can these be made into links?
• Are there any broken links?
• Can the client offer educational information, training and guides on their site?
• Do they produce videos?
• Do they run or attend conferences and / or other events?
• What tactics do their competitors use?

Participating in the wider online community is more important than it ever has been before. For example, does your client:

• Posts on forums?
• Giveaway products for review?
• Share positive business news?
• Run competitions?
• Partake in Interviews?
• Use Social Media and PPC effectively?
• Answer questions?

Community and influencers

Being active in the community helps the brand become more recognisable and trustworthy.

As the internet evolves it is becoming much easier to communicate with your target audience online. Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are normal ways now to get in touch with your fans, influencers, other companies - so it is highly recommended to keep them in the loop or to create relationships with key influencers in your niche.

Developing relationships with influencers will help you in a number of ways with the campaign. None more so than when you are developing your editorial calendar.

The importance of developing an editorial calendar

When developing your editorial calendar it is worth thinking, how can you egobait them? How can you get them to comment, share or blog about the post?

Sitting down and coming up with creative ideas and concepts will really get the team enthusiastic about the project ahead and what could potentially be achieved.

It is worth thinking about:

• What is happening in the niche?
• What data is out there?
• What have your competitors done that you can use and make better?
• What has been successful on Reddit, Stumbleupon and Digg?
• Would you share the idea with your friends?

To help you with your campaign in 2013 there are so many tools and services you can use. Examples include Group High, Gorkana, Followerwonk, Find People on Plus One and Help A Reporter Out.

Tools aside, many SEOs forget the basics. What do the search engines suggest? And more importantly - what does your brain and gut instinct tell you? If you think something is wrong or doesn’t feel right - then don’t do it.

Link removal is the new link building

With the web ever changing it is important to look out for old tactics that once worked but could have long lasting effects on your brand. For instance in 2005 paid directories, article submission sites, submitting your site to thousands of web 2.0 had a positive impact in the servers. However now this could be highly detrimental to your campaign.

February 20th 2013 saw one of the first big brands to receive a penalty in the form of Interflora. I personally believe this will be the first of many. I would dare to say to suggest that some agencies will be developing new teams to remove the legacy work that they may have done several years ago.

It will be very interesting to see how Interflora overcome their current situation. Will they remove the links that the SEO agency has acquired in an unnatural method, or will they move domains and start a fresh?

As a brand, it is a very testing time for them. For the reason being, they built up many relationships with bloggers that are now positing unsatisfactory citations about them.

ionSearch will have an expert panel in April around link removal, which I imagine will be a very hot topic and one I will genuinely be interested in hearing different perspectives on how best to approach.