Search Engine Journal

Allan Dick of Vintage Tub and Bath is moderating the session on Link Building with Debra Mastaler, Dixon Jones and Degrelle.

Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link:

Understanding link popularity :

• What is link popularity, why links are valuable.
• Links are the core to the Internet, ARPA created in 1958, then WWW in 1989
• Search engines were born : Archive, Gopher, in 1991 Excite, WebCrawl in 1994, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves then Google in 1997
• Google PageRank Algorithm is a link popularity based algorithm
• All search engines NOW use link popularity to produce better results
• Links popularity measures the quanity and quality of links to a site

4 Factors of Link Building

1. Quantity : Number of Links
2. Quality : Authority passed to the site
3. Anchor Text : Query Ranking Factor : Power in the Anchortext
4. Link Relevance : Links from thematically related sites, links to your site should come from other relevantly themed sites.

Links from Authority Sites:

• Authority Sites rank well in your industry
• These links are golden
• They have great visibility in the vertical community

How not to get links?

• Don’t get too many links too fast (don’t get several thousand links all at once with same anchor text)
• Don’t get too many links with the same Anchor Text : Mix in Natural Links. Try to use all of your terms, not just one.

Importance of Linking :

• If you link out to sites like yours and authority sites in your neighborhood, you’ll then become an authority
• Need to be a player in the community
• Place links in content areas, not just navigational and footer areas.
• Nothing wrong with reciprocal linking : Just do not use it as an exclusive practice, it’s part of link building
• If the site looks spammy it may be reported by someone in the future, if it looks spammy then try not to link
• Exposure is sometimes more improtant than linking, all links have value even if they use nofollow
• Concentrate on Authority Sites

Summarize :

• Link slowly and natrually
• Link from Authority Sites
• Natural Linking Pattern
• Use lots of different tactics
• Try deeplinking into the site
• Stay in your community

Dixon Jones of Receptional Linking

Dixon is not here but he’s still speaking. Is he a ghost? Is this a recording?

What is going on here? Here he is, he was hiding in the crowd.

“If you’re an accountant in Ohio, don’t get a link from a site in Australia”

Get Links from these Directories :

• DMOZ
• Yahoo Directory
• Business.com
• Best of the Web

Then market to the directories within your verticals.

Dixon then discusses internal themeing in link building, building several links into web pages with relevance. This helps Google or Yahoo understand the links and context with associated pages.

How can we link?

• In a word document
• PDF file
• Email
• Yahoo Answers
• Web rings
• FFA links
• Banner Ads
• Videos
• Free downloads
• Paid links
• Blogs
• Affiliate linksing
• Widgets

But the best strategy are those that others cannot copy, such as joint partnerships between companies. Also, think of the quality of the traffic.

Look at the incoming links your competitors are obtaining. Do they have .edu links? Is it because of a university sponsorship? Have they got government links? How did they do this?

What are they doing offline that’s contributing to their inbound linking online

Other link tools :

• Building blogs
• Build branded blogs
• Tagging
• RSS
• Digg / StumbleUpon
• Blogroll and pinging
• Linkbaiting headlines
• Search friendly headlines

Yikes, my battery is dying, I’ll link to SERoundtable and Top Rank’s coverage later :)