Linkbuilding
What is linkbuilding?
Your website is clean and tidy. You’ve got rock solid SEO in place. You’re updating the site with regular,valuable content. You’ve got fans,commenters,a twitter feed and retweeters. 
Your PPC campaigns are running smoothly. Your conversion rate is climbing,your CTR is improving and your CPC is going down. Your SERP’s are in top shape and best of all,you’ve got really high quality metrics in place.
So what’s next for your site marketing campaign? Link building.
Link building is just like search engine marketing,but now you’re trying to get links,not clicks. And just like SEM and SEO,there are valid,laudable,and organic ways to go about getting links. And then there are the tactics that are cheaper and easier,but possibly damaging to your website’s good reputation.
Once you’ve committed to linkbuilding,it becomes obvious that you’ll need a way to manage your efforts. Sure,you can use Excel to track your linkbuilding progress,but even if you’re using Google Docs or Open Office,it gets old switching between applications. The cloud just isn’t there yet.
Linkbuilding tools
For my linkbuilding campaign,I need to know 3 things:
☆ Where am I now?
- How should I measure it?
- What kind of link is it? Blog? Review Site? Directory? Free? Paid?
- How many links do I have coming in and how much are they worth in common terms,like Page Rank and MozRank.
- What is the status of the link?
- Is it followed or blocked?
- How many of links are reciprocated?
☆ Where do I want to be?
- For a small company,it’s okay to say,“I want to be more popular.”A more sophisticated site might specify the quantity and quality of their link acquisition measurements.
- Broad goals are fine:“I want more blogs to talk about me.” “I want at least 25 product reviews by year-end.”“More photo sites.”“More social media sites.”
- Other tactics to investigate:reciprocal link campaigns,affiliate referrals,press release tracking,news alerts
☆ How can I get there?
- Do it myself?
- Outsource?
- Have the client do it?
- Can the data be shared?
Linkbuilding Software
- Raven
- SheerSEO
- Advanced Link Manager (read review of Advanced Link Manager here)
