Link building tends to be viewed as on off-page activity – you’re not messing with title tags or site architecture and you don’t actually have to touch the site itself or write new content. However, if all you are doing is building more inbound links to your site without doing any analysis of on-page factors, you’re selling the effort short. While it’s certainly not necessary to do much more than build inbound links, on page factors are definitely something that you should look into if you want to boost your overall link building effectiveness.

Think about the days when you’d search for a site and see a result in the SERPs that contained your keywords in the description, but when you clicked on the listing, they were nowhere to be found, and the content was not even remotely what you wanted. A nice ranking, if you cared, and a nice bit of traffic, but it wouldn’t convert. There were (and still are) various ways to accomplish this high ranking, but in the end, a user who is actively looking for something that isn’t actually being offered is just going to quickly become annoyed and continue searching.

I remember using cloaking techniques to get rankings for a shop that sold silk flowers. They wanted the rankings for things that they didn’t actually offer, so that they could do the whole “how about this option instead?” bit. While that’s not as far off the mark as some things I’ve seen, it’s still not the best way to grab the attention (and business) of your latest visitor. I got the rankings, the client got the traffic (and of course they wanted to do this for about 100 different keywords), but they got very, very few conversions for these keywords. If someone’s looking for silk roses, they might not want to go to a page advertising the fact that the site didn’t sell them, but could suggest silk daisies.

Link building is just another form of creating visibility for your site. If you build links using anchor text for something that isn’t actually found on a site – that’s not a good thing. It is, unfortunately, a common thing that clients want. It’s also not always an attempt at subterfuge, as occasionally we do encounter clients who don’t control anything on the site and make their case to the people in control, who turn a deaf ear to all of our pleas. Yes, we can rank a site with anchor text that’s not on the page. We’ve done it plenty of times. However, it’s not at all a long-term strategy, and honestly, it’s a bit deceptive.

Of course if you want to optimize for a keyword that is a product that you offer, yet you don’t have a good place on the site to send the user other than a fairly generic page (where, perhaps, you could order silk roses) there isn’t all that much that can be done. I’d like to think that if you’re actively pursuing links for a specific keyword, though, that item is important enough that you could create some content about it. I’m being an idealist though.

So if you’re building links for a site that has no content for the anchor text that the client wants to pursue, what do you do? I’m not limiting this to link buys, either, as there are many ways of getting your link done just the way you want it without the exchange of money.

3 tips to help link building with on page efforts

1. Speak up. Yes, you’re the link builder and maybe the client thinks that’s all you know how to do, but actively being engaged in the overall process of optimization makes you a better link builder, and makes the results more targeted. Many times, you’d be surprised at how receptive clients are when you say “hey, we think this keyword actually might work out really well, and this one…not so much.” Clients like honesty and straightforwardness, just like anyone else. If you notice that there’s no mention of the keywords in the page you’re trying to build links for, say something and press to get some changes made. You don’t have to write the content…just point out how things could be done in a better way.
2. Learn more about SEO. If you’re building links and that’s all you know how to do, you really need to start learning more about everything else. While I definitely don’t think that you can’t be a good link builder without knowing basic SEO techniques, I do believe that you can’t be a great one until you do.
3. Social media is big, so use it. Remember that link building doesn’t just happen via email or press releases. Get on Twitter and use your keywords in your tweets about the newest blog post or bit of content. Submit the link to niche social media sites that seem relevant. Tell people about the site in any way possible, trying to get the point across that you have what they want.

Even though you may be able to successfully raise the visibility of a site with what you do off-page, it could easily stop working so well with the simplest algorithm change. Building a truly solid on-page SEO foundation in conjunction with link building will definitely be something that you won’t regret. That’s not a common thing in marketing, so why not go for something that is so easily within reach?

One of my link builders recently had the brilliant idea of putting together and sending out a questionnaire designed to gather information how the other link builders in our agency perform their daily link building tasks. We’ve always worked on the assumption that each link builder will naturally be drawn to using certain specific tools and techniques. We’ve also found that overall, our clients benefit from working with link builders who all do things a little bit differently from everyone else. If someone gets stuck, so to speak, there are many other favored methods that can be tried.

The results of this survey were extremely enlightening for me, as I realized that the majority of my link builders were having difficulties in one major area: discovery of ideal linking partners. Considering link building is all they do every day, I can’t imagine that this is a problem that’s limited to my agency. That’s why in today’s column, we’ll talk a bit about the major methods we use in our discovery phase for clients.

Now, a caveat: while I do believe that it is your content that will encourage people to link to you in most cases, I do not believe that any link building campaign needs to ignore the actual, intentional pursuit of quality links. Therefore, as you can see, discovery is a very, very big deal. There are many good ways to conduct discovery, but there is really no one right way. That, I believe, is why the majority of my staff identified discovery as an area in which they’d like to improve. We simply have not given them any absolutes, as we don’t feel that there really are any.

Methods of link discovery

We identified 6 major methods of discovery: random searches, relevant searches, directories, blogrolls, referrals, and other. It’s interesting to note that the vast majority of our link builders use a combination of random and relevant searches as their main method of discovery.

1. Random searches. Random link searches are not exactly what they sound like. We call this a random method, but it should be noted that only the method is random…the topic for the search is not, as we don’t want to find sites that are irrelevant. You can find particularly interesting sites geared towards a very specific interest, by using an organic thought process in which you have no major agenda. This all sounds very New Age but it has led us to some of our best inbound links.
   
   

   I’ll give you an example for this one, since it’s the only method that isn’t exactly what it sounds like. When working for a site that sells punk rock concert videos, we may search for “punk videos” to start with, then we’ll see a long-tailed search phrase somewhere down in the SERPs on page 3, so we’ll then type that phrase in, then click on the first result, see something on the site’s homepage that triggers an idea, and we’ll end up on a fan site that is devoted to the music of Stiff Little Fingers.

   We see that this site seeks to list all online stores that happen to sell Stiff Little Fingers items, and our client has one of these sites. Therefore, it’s a great place to get a link, and it was a somewhat random method of discovery. It’s also relevant but we still go about it in a slightly more haphazard way.




2. Relevant searches. These are exactly what they sound like. If the client sells clothes, we’re going to do some searches for clothes, clothing, apparel, women’s tops, men’s coats, and so on. We may not drill down and get as long-tailed to the extent that we would during a random search, however. This method is a bit more structured, and we might use keyword suggestions from a variety of sources in order to search this way.

   Many clients come to us with keywords of their own, which we’ll use, along with keywords generated from the usual suspects (Wordtracker, Google Adwords, etc.)

   In addition, don’t forget that niche and vertical search engines exist. My personal favorite is Able Grape, which is a wine search engine. The results returned by a niche search engine can be much more tailored to your topic, but if you’re going to use one, make sure you understand how the search should be conducted. Otherwise, you may not get the results that you want.




3. Directories. Sometimes-maligned, the good ones serve a purpose for anyone seeking quality sites. Link builders are no different. We try to concentrate on the more well-known and higher-quality directories, but we don’t ignore niche or local directories.




4. Blogrolls. These are useful at times, especially if you find good blogs that are out there for the sake of promoting good content. The great thing about high-quality blogs is that they’re built by people who have a serious interest in their niche, and they tend to attract other like-minded people who will hopefully take part in the community. Some people eschew blogs, thinking they’re worthless, but we’ve found that they tend to be very, very good for traffic, if you’re careful. If someone takes his or her blog seriously, the blogroll will most likely contain other quality sites.




5. Referrals. These happen for us both online and offline. The online referrals are occasionally offered to us, but we’ve found that many serious bloggers in a niche know other serious bloggers in that niche and most of them don’t mind being asked for referrals. Offline, it’s easy to see how you can get a referral from casual conversation with someone. You’re waiting in line and start chatting with a lady about what you both do for a living (or at least we do this in the South) and it turns out that she has a neighbor who has a son who runs a website that’s in the same niche as one of your clients. You get the name, find the site, and make the contact.




6. Other link discovery methods. Last, and probably least according to our survey, there is the category of Other. For the purposes of this piece, and our survey, the category of Other meant anything that was not specifically defined, but the answers for this one were all different variations of Google Advanced Operator Queries. Another route I recently noticed, was Ann Smarty’s great piece on how to do non-SERPs searching, so I’ll add that to our arsenal.

To conclude, in case you’re still awake, discovery of quality linking partners is a lot trickier than you might think. There are a variety of ways in which this can be done, with none of them being the perfect way to find the perfect site that will link to you. However, as with many things, a balanced approach will probably serve you best. If you have any discovery methods that we haven’t covered, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

What should you do, as a polite and plucky link builder, if some of your inbound links just aren’t up to snuff? Do you risk alienating a well-meaning webmaster by pointing out that he’s linked to an old page that no longer exists? That he’s spelled your company’s name incorrectly, or, even worse, your URL? Do you ask for a link where your site is mentioned, even if it’s an unfavorable mention? How will making changes to your existing inbounds affect your site in the future?

If it’s broken, why fix it?

Current inbound link analysis often gets overlooked in the promotion of new content and the quest for new links. Most people simply don’t have time to poke around in the dark recesses of their inbound link profiles, even though they should. As you may know, the biggest issue with making any sort of changes to your current inbound link profile is the risk that you take in sending out signals that something fishy is going on. After all, why would a three year old link suddenly change from your home page to a new landing page? If the content that the original link was on has itself not changed in two full years, how weird will it look when it’s suddenly updated?

If you’re changing inbound links that have previously been pointing to 404s, that should be ok. If Google can easily identify links going to 404 pages, and we know that they can based on the information in the Google Webmaster Tools, then they should logically be able to determine that a link change to a non-404 page has now been made and is thus ok. You could of course throw in some 301 redirects here, but why not just contact the webmaster of the site that has the incorrect link and ask for it to be changed? Point it out nicely, of course.

Pumping up your link profile

What about if you see a link pointing to a page that really isn’t the best page for the anchor text/content? Maybe you started your site with just a few pages, and everyone linked to your home page, but now you have hundreds of pages of great content and there are links that could go to more relevant sections? Well, if that’s the case, you have to decide whether it’s worth the effort to contact the site owners and point them to the more relevant page. That can take a lot of time and, after all, nothing’s broken.

Depending upon whether your deep link profile is any good or not (and with many sites it’s not, sadly) you may want to simply shoot an email to the webmaster, alerting him or her to the more relevant page, and say by the way, thanks so much for the link. If a link still goes to the same basic URL but goes to a different page on the site, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Common linking advice will tell you to look for mentions of your site/company that do not currently link to you, and ask for a link. I think that’s sound advice. It’s a very natural thing to link to a site or company that you’re mentioning, but not everyone has always done it, so if you can, ask the webmaster to add in the link for you. Most will, from my experience. If the anchor text matches the link URL, again, I can’t see why this would produce any negative effects.

Not all links are created equal

However, what if you find a negative mention of your site or company? View it as not only a chance to get a link, but also a chance to make amends, something that always tends to be good press. If the mention has to do with something you can fix, by all means contact the person who wrote it and try to work it out. This type of situation isn’t limited to major corporations who do bad things. Many people, for whatever reason, will become upset with you and blog about it. They’ll get on Twitter and call you out (and also blog about it) so it can easily become a public relations nightmare for you.

The other day when I was at Starbucks, a customer wearing a suit asked to speak to the manager so that he could complain about someone who had been in the same Starbucks the previous day, and seemed to not like men in suits. Yes, I am serious. There’s always someone who’s going to get upset about something. If you see a mention that you can somehow change to make it better for you, take the chance and do it. All that can happen is that the person says no. And maybe blog about it…

In summary, yes, by all means check out your inbounds, and if they don’t look as great as they could look, take some time (or make your intern do it) and reach out to those people who have been gracious enough to link to you, and nicely ask for the change that you want. If it’s not going to happen, at least you’ve made an effort, and you’ve again made contact with someone who has somehow been affected by your site and what you represent. If that isn’t interacting with your community, then I don’t know what is.

I’ve noticed something interesting on Twitter: the #followfriday craze has spawned loads of users saying “that’s great, but tell me WHY I should follow this person.” In the interest of cramming in those precious 140 characters, many people choose to just fill the space with people to follow, rather than explaining the reasoning behind saying that this person is just the bee’s knees.

As usual, social media is teaching us a valuable lesson: as we become more ingrained with time-consuming activities, we want more efficiency. We want a rationale. We want someone to tell us, without us having to ask, why we should participate in absolutely everything. Otherwise, we might simply be too busy to take notice.

Click and link relevance

Let’s face it. Many times, inbound links are pursued almost 100% for ranking increases, especially in very competitive niches. If that works, things are peachy keen I suppose, but what happens when it stops? You’re going to need to start viewing links as traffic builders, as brand builders, as something more than simply a few spots higher up in the SERPs, and to do this in such a chaotic age, you’re going to need to be able to tell people why they should click on those links.

If you’re depending upon great content in order to get people to link to you, you need to be able to phrase your message in a way that will ensure that those who do link to you will do so in a manner that gets someone’s attention. How do you do this?

Offer people something they want

I like iTunes downloads, and if I see anything offering some for free – I’m clicking, and I’m sending the link to everyone else I know. Nylon Magazine had 22 free indie downloads recently, and not only did I send the link to everyone, I also subscribed to the magazine. My fellow columnist Debra Mastaler had a great article about current topics that are on the minds of the American people. All it takes is a bit of research into what people want to see (and share) via links.

So how do you do that? Google Trends, Google Insights, Twitter trending topics, as well as news headlines and pop culture topics, to name a few.

Google Trends

This is a great tool that immediately shows you what today’s hot trends are and lets you get a snapshot of what’s going on in different regions, cities, and languages. You can narrow down the data to specific regions and timeframes if you like.

Google Insights

This is a fantastic tool to use for what’s hot in your niche, your area of the world, etc. You can select the region where you want to search, enter your keywords, select a time period, and get the information. You can also choose to search images, news, or products in addition to the web. You can see top searches and rising searches that are related to your keywords as well.

Twitter

The Trending Topics are a good way to tell you what’s hot on Twitter but, unfortunately, it’s an easily manipulated bit of information so it may continue to lose its appeal for finding out what people are actually interested in currently.

News media

This is pretty obvious, of course, but it bears repeating that you should view anything in any form of media as news. If you look at everything from magazine covers to commercials with an open mind, you can probably figure out what people are talking about.

If you can’t offer something someone wants, then by all means, be meaningful, clever, funny, and/or intriguing. Be the copywriting equivalent of Dan Rather. Interesting content will garner interesting anchor text for your inbound links, hopefully. If not, well, remember that a natural link profile does contain those rather boring “click here” and bland keyword anchors too.

Keep in mind that this mindset is really no different than anything related to web usability in general. Give people what they want and do it in a form that makes sense and remember that people do get to your site through channels other than the SERPs.

If you use Majestic SEO’s Compare Domain Backlink History tool to view the link growth profiles of a few sites, you’ll most likely notice at least one link spike somewhere. A link spike is exactly what it sounds like it would be: a point in time when backlinks go up sharply, backlinks go back down sharply.

Link spikes are of particular concern when you realize that they can, in some cases, serve as a red flag to a major search engine. They aren’t exactly trends, of course. Well, not most of the time…you would definitely expect to see link spikes as a trend with certain types of sites, such as sites that only sell Christmas decorations or Halloween costumes for example, where on a somewhat regular interval, link spikes would occur that are quite easily explainable.

What causes link spikes?

Something happens. Yes, it is that simple. Whether that something is a flurry of paid links, a juicy piece of linkbait, news trends, brand PR, etc. can be completely irrelevant if there are no other trends to correspond. With the recent death of Farrah Fawcett, for example, we should expect to see link spikes to sites like www.farrahfawcett.us and the wikipedia entry for her. These link spikes will, however, correspond with search trends of course, thus making them seem a lot less suspicious. On the other hand, if we saw link spikes for a site that sells those animatronic fish that sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” we might be scratching our heads.

Types of link spikes occur naturally

• News: if it’s in the news, it’s only natural to assume that you’d also see some link spikes for it.

• Social Media: witness the Trending Topics on Twitter and the Digg Homepage for two good examples. These are especially easily manipulated, as we saw recently with the Jeff Goldblum death rumors.

• PR: whether it’s a new bakery opening in town, the hottest new kids’ movie, or anything else that generates buzz, whether it be big or small, PR of any sort can be expected to produce some link spikes.

Many times, these three will overlap. So what types of link spikes are red flags?

Ones that correspond with nothing of note. These basically look a bit dodgy. Without any other corresponding trends, they really stand out. See above for the animatronic “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” fish.

Linkbait is commonly thought to create link spikes, which can be a bad thing. This is why, when reading about linkbait creation and execution, you will see loads of advice about how it should never be a one-time only event. If you’re going to do some linkbait, planning to do more than one piece is critical in avoiding link spikes that don’t look natural. Spikes on a regular basis are usually ok, though, as they form their own sort of expected trend. If a company does loads of PR at the beginning of each month, over time you’d expect to see a trend of link spikes corresponding (roughly) to those periods.

Determining whether a link spike is organic or non-organic is difficult, which is an issue. How can you tell them apart? I’m not sure that you truly can, actually, which is part of the problem, and yet another reason to always plan out a long-term link development strategy. You can’t think of link building as something that goes on for a few weeks then stops, although plenty of people do. If you do, you could see improved rankings for a period but then they’ll most likely fall back if you don’t keep moving forward.

What exactly is the long tail? Individually unimportant, but collectively significant according to Chris Anderson, who coined the term in 2004.

Why is the idea of the long-tailed keyphrase so critical to your link building campaign?

(Besides the obvious reason that is its very definition, of course.) It’s mainly because these keyphrases (which have been quite well tested in both PPC and SEO) tend to be niche enough that they can give you more conversions. When people get very specific, they mean business.

Before I move on, let it be said that when we’re talking about long-tailed phrases, I am not in any way suggesting that you try and bring in traffic for anything that you do not actually have. That would be foolhardy.

Ways to identify long-tail keyword phrases

1. Analytics software. Whether you use a proper package or you’re wading through logs on your own, you can identify the long-tailed keyword phrases that searchers are using to find you. You can also do basic extrapolation on these if they’re not too numerous (or if they are numerous and you’re just either highly productive or very, very bored), adding relevant modifiers, for example.
2. Keyword research tools. These abound in both free and paid versions, and I’m not tied down to one or the other most of the time. These can be used to create long-tailed keyphrases by simply entering in a few generic terms, or they can help out with the aforementioned attempt to find decent long-tails by adding some modifiers. They are particularly useful in helping you identify common misspellings, something that makes me shudder, but hey, lots of people can’t spell and they will indeed use misspellings when searching. Google Suggest, while not specifically a keyword research tool, can also give you some amazing ideas for long-tails, and it uses data from the most popular searches, so that’s a win-win situation.
3. Checking rankings for primary keyphrases. Search for a primary keyphrase and take a good look at the content surrounding the keyphrase in all the SERPs. Just now I searched for “shirt” in Google, and the very first result gave me the content of “new graphic t-shirts.” That’s not a bad long-tail. When I search for “new graphic t-shirts” I see one that says “new limited edition graphic t-shirt.” Neither is that one. Just be careful not to spiral out of control here.
4. Brainstorming. I have found that Excel is quite a useful tool when trying to come up with good long-tailed phrases. I may be overstating the obvious, and apologies if so, but it’s quite easy to put together a list of generic phrases that you know you want, and a list of adverbs and adjectives, etc. Talk to anyone you can about this, as people who sell the products know them well, as (occasionally, if you’re lucky) do people who designed/coded/maintain the site. Every SEO has dealt with someone who will not listen to reason when it comes to keywords, since there’s always that one guy who is absolutely positive that searchers will search using a phrase that, in reality, mainly just that one guy uses to search. Try these out as long-tails! Maybe there are more people out there like him.

Identify good landing pages for the long tail

How? Two ways:

Find existing content. if your site has an internal search functionality, make us of it. Search for the long-tailed phrase plus your site name (or do any one of a variety of Google search queries, whatever is your preference) and see if you have something suitable. If so, you’re set. If not, see below.

Create new content. if you’re sure that you either have no relevant landing pages or that you have no content for the long-tailed phrases but you do, in fact, offer this item/service/whatever, create some new content. That’s never a bad thing, in any case. Don’t create a full page for every insanely specific niche phrase, of course.

*Again, please, please don’t intentionally try and bring people into a page or site that actually is wildly irrelevant. I’ve had this happen to me, and I no longer trust those sites.

Build a few links with long tail words as anchor text

Take a baseline. The baseline is a simple and oft-overlooked thing to do when link building. If you’ve used any form of analytics referrals in order to identify the phrases you want to work on, you should be able to easily get a baseline idea of how much traffic is currently coming in. If you’ve used another method and you’re not currently getting any traffic from the phrases, there’s nowhere to go but up, right? If you’re watching rankings, get an idea of where you stand with those. Just make some notes, basically so that you can later see if your efforts are paying off.

Monitor progress. As mentioned above, you want to monitor this to see if what you’re doing is worth it. If you spend months linking to niche phrase x and you never see more than 2 referrals per month, it might not be worth it. If you see that niche phrase y initially brought in 15 referrals but now, thanks to your amazing link building, it’s typically bringing in 50 referrals per month, you’ll be able to expand on this, whether it’s through additional links or some other form of optimization.

Adjust as necessary. The good thing about long-tailed optimization of any sort is that it tends to show results quicker than usual. Generic phrases, especially the more competitive ones, can take months to show any decent results. Long-tailed niche phrases, which are also commonly used to test different theories, can show results almost overnight in some cases. Just don’t be afraid to admit defeat, but don’t do it too quickly, either.

To conclude, long-tailed keyphrases tend to exist as afterthoughts, as something such as rankings or traffic that arise from the pursuit of the more traditional generic keyword phrases, but they can jazz up your link building if you’ll just pay a bit of attention and not treat them like the red-headed stepchild. Yes, you’ll get some residual long-tailed rankings and traffic, but you’re missing out on a huge opportunity if you don’t make some sort of concerted effort to capitalize on this phenomenon.

** For more information, SEL has an excellent older article on the long tail of search.

Can you apply standard metrics to link development?

We measure what’s going on in our PPC campaigns very easily. Metrics we have available include cost per click, cost per conversion/acquisition, total spent, number of impressions, number of clicks, etc. These numbers give us a good idea of how well our ads are performing, and we can quickly look at data that’s updated within 24 hours to see that yes, this new keyphrase is already converting or that no, that landing page is not doing well right now.

We have a variety of ways to measure our SEO efforts, many of which depend upon who happens to be interested. There’s the traffic, of course, but there are also conversions, increase or decrease in keyword positions and referrals.

Ah yes, referrals. That’s where link development metrics can finally enter the picture.

While it’s safe to say that not every referral you notice in your analytics will be from a link that you happen to be somehow responsible for, it’s likely that, at some point, you will indeed see referrals from your links. Whether you gained those links by writing great content or paying for them, unless they are truly completely irrelevant and terribly placed, someone is going to click, come to your website and maybe even perform whatever act you deem as a conversion.

The clicks themselves are valuable, of course, as it’s always nice to get eyes on your site. Are you, then, tracking link conversions appropriately? Wouldn’t you like to know if your links are actually producing? Wouldn’t you like to learn how to mimic that positive behavior for other existing links as well as future ones? I can’t think of anyone who would say no to that.

It’s very difficult to tie an action further down the road to the initial link that brought the visitor to you, of course, unless you’re using cookies that never, ever actually expire (or you’re a technically brilliant human being). You may get conversions from links at a later date, of course, but accurately tracking those could easily take years off your life. However, if you have it in you to figure it out, you’ll gain a ton of valuable information that will help you make the best of ALL of your links.

As a link builder, I can tell you that not all clients are willing to offer access to their analytics, which can be problematic if there’s no other SEO type involved in some way. Currently about a third of my clients actually give me the keys to the castle, so to speak. The rest? They either don’t run any type of analytics, they use something but don’t give me access to the data, or they have someone else involved who sorts it all out and may or may not communicate with me. As much as I’d love to be involved in tracking conversions, I’m not always asked to do so.

Let’s focus on clients who do provide you with the data that you need to measure conversions from the links that you build. What should you be focusing on here? Obviously some of this will depend upon which analytics package you’re working with, but any of them will give you referrals, of course. With Google Analytics, for example, you can then set Goal Conversion Rates and Per Visit Goal Values. This will allow you to get an idea of whether your inbound links (referrals) are functioning as you’d like them to, for whatever goal you set up.

Careful, though: Sometimes you’ll get a latent conversion that did not come immediately from a link into your site. Someone can easily come to your website through an inbound link, then return to the site at a later date and begin/complete the conversion process. You also face issues when someone enters a site through a link, converts, and keeps converting. In this case, one conversion (according to your analytics) could actually be worth much, much more than you might think. This is where more advanced measurement needs to happen, looking at visitor behavior, loyalty, tracking return visitors, even working outside the analytics packages to place appropriate values on a link.

If you’re not allowed access to analytics, you should seriously be pursuing an open dialog in order to gauge the effectiveness of your linking efforts. Links are good for more than just improving rankings and traffic, and it’s time that we all started to pay a bit more attention to how to properly measure and maximize this fact.

Is link building becoming harder as brand identities become more blurred on social media sites?

Go search for a big brand on Facebook and try, in less than 5 seconds, to correctly identify the official brand page. Try to determine whether a Twitterer is the “real” one you want to follow. It’s not that simple anymore.

As everyone on the planet becomes savvy about using social media, brand identities could be in danger. How will this affect link development for those brands? When you spend loads of time using social media to build links and traffic for your brand, it’s a bit disheartening to see how easily you could be losing out to someone who may not have an official representative voice.

We’ve seen this happen with content scrapers in the past, as people have written great content that’s been scraped and, at times, ranked higher than their own for various reasons. The original does not always triumph, sadly. We’ve lost links to scraper sites in some cases. We’ve also seen all the uproar over the use of brand names, by competitors or unofficial sources, in paid ads. Now, we’re poised to witness a major issue as official brand representatives lose out to non-official brand representatives on the hottest in the emerging online spaces.

Let’s take an example: Brand X is a coffee company that is sold in stores all over the US. They have a Facebook page with 500,000 fans, maybe 2,000 of whom actually regularly interact on the page. When an update is published, maybe 10,000 people like it and thumb it up, on average. 4,000 people might comment on it. That’s a decent amount of people viewing this content and potentially linking to it, whether it’s from their own site or from another social media platform. Forget improving your rankings; these links help you with traffic. Brand X has a special Facebook-only promotion that goes live, and, due to the amazingly rich content/fantastic deal of said promotion, it has the chance to garner a decent number of new inbound links and traffic.

However, let’s also say that there are a fair amount of unofficial brand pages that represent your brand, ones that have as many (or maybe more) fans as the official page does. As you can imagine, this is highly possible. When someone is looking for your official brand page, in order to become a fan and thus see all your lovely content that you post, he or she could quite easily be confused and become a fan of the “wrong” page. Let’s say that, for this example, there are 5 “competitors” that look official enough to grab what should be your own fans. Thus, your brand page has lost a potential source of links and traffic. (I’m assuming that there is no intention to do anything negative, here, for the record; it’s the simple fact of not actually being able to control your official brand in terms of building links and increasing your traffic.)

This could happen on Twitter as well, with followers. The good news is that, with Twitter, users tend to be a bit more reluctant to follow and interact with unofficial representatives. In a worst-case scenario, though, an unofficial brand representative could gain loads of followers and be sending out content to people who should, technically, be following the official representative. Again, a nice way to lose the chance to gain new links and traffic…

As other methods of link building seem to fall out of favor, link development through social media is becoming a mainstay of how many people go about bringing in fresh blood to their sites. Due to its ease of use, however, it’s ripe for abuse. What can be done to counteract this?

• Create, maintain, and monitor your brand
• React to attempts to sabotage your brand
• Push forward with new ideas for your brand

First of all, the creation and maintenance of a brand identity is not something to be taken lightly, especially on social media sites where anyone and everyone can proclaim to be a guru, an expert, or a representative of something. I have zero expertise in brand creation so I’ll leave it at that. On the side of the people creating/maintaining the brand, there should be an immense amount of monitoring that occurs. If you’re doing a good job of watching what should be your space, you should be able to catch a lot of this as it starts to become a nuisance. If you’re not, and you’re surprised by something, you should make plans to take back your space.

It is for this reason that you’ll read about how you should try and rank for your name/brand, buy your brand name domain in the .com and the .net (and more, of course), go ahead and secure your Twitter name even if you aren’t yet tweeting… the preventative maintenance list goes on and on. You want to be poised to capture your links, not let them leak to someone else. This is all covered in basic reputation management strategy, honestly. You just have to apply it differently according to the specific medium.

Secondly, as you’re monitoring your brand, you should be able to react to any attempts from an outsider to hone in on your territory. A while back, people got very excited thinking that Matt Cutts was following them on Twitter. The only problem was it turned out it wasn’t really him. This became a big issue, as it happened to more and more high-profile people in our industry. The targeted individuals reacted very quickly, issuing statements that brought this to the public’s attention. Celebrities who were spoofed on Twitter became fodder for the news. If you’re monitoring your brand on Twitter, for example, set up some alerts for any alternative names that you can think might be used to fool people. Be proactive in letting your followers know about this if something happens.

The last step is to keep pushing forward with new ideas for your brand. People currently look to social media for innovative ways to interact, so it’s the perfect place to try something new. The most recent US presidential election was partially played out on Facebook, which attests to the power of using social media followers to gauge the general public’s response to certain ideas. The immediate feedback that you will receive can let you know how your new product/idea/widget is being received so that you can react to it, either by pulling it (if it falls flat) or boosting it, if you’re being inundated with praise. In a successful case, you stand to gain a lot of new links, as people see your new ideas being promoted on social media sites and check them out. Everyone likes to be the first to get on a nice new bandwagon…

Overall, it’s key to remember that social media sites are not the only way in which your brand can gain recognition. However, if you do use social media for branding purposes, and hopefully you do, you really should keep a close eye on your own brand and others who attempt to represent it so that any links gained will be yours.

I recently came across a post explaining why Twitter isn’t great for SEO. This quote in particular really got to me:

“In addition to being a nofollow vacuum, Twitter has the danger of becoming a linking vacuum. In the ideal scenario, people will find a link on Twitter and then link the post in their own blog – page rank gold.  But Twitter is becoming a kind of fishbowl where people merely link to a site from their Twitter account, not from their personal site.  It’s just easier and users can still feel as if they’re part of a viral meme.”

That whole bit about it being “easier” to just tweet than to go to the trouble of adding a link from a person’s site is kind of scary, because I have no doubt that it’s true. I’ve done it myself. As the article points out, there is an ideal scenario, but what in this industry actually functions in an ideal manner, all according to plan?

If you are using social media of any sort in your link building efforts, you should think carefully about all the ways that it could fail, whether that failure is as mild as not getting any increased traffic or as harsh as a reputation management nightmare. The reality is that as something like Twitter becomes an everyday part of the lives of people who don’t have a clue about how social media should work, we’re going to see that we do need a variety of alternative plans and realistic expectations.

For example, if you are using Twitter to actively build more inbound links to a URL (and by that I mean that you, for whatever reason, are tweeting a link and hoping that your followers will love the link so much that they put it on their own sites), you may indeed increase your traffic, but you may garner no new inbound links from sites other than Twitter. While tweets can be indexed by Google, the links are still nofollow. This may or may not be fine, as everyone has their own ideas about how to measure success. If you just want increased traffic, social media links are fantastic, if done well, but if you’re looking for an increase in inbound links, it may not happen the way you’re hoping.

What about Facebook? I’d think that the same scenario could apply. Facebook users post links, and their Facebook friends repost the links from their own profiles. That’s at best, too, as you’ve probably realized that you don’t get thrilling results every time you post a link in any social media setting. I seriously doubt that the 100 family members I have in my Facebook circle pay attention to my posted links, so there’s no way they’re reposting them.

If you do happen to be focused on using social media for more than just traffic, what can you do? Here comes that same old solution: make sure you have good content. Make sure you have exceptional content, just to be on the safe side. If your content is good enough, it’s going to have a better chance of garnering an inbound link and not just a few retweets. (The community aspect of social media can help here, too, of course, as if you’ve built up a quality network, you can always just ask people to link to your content.)

And don’t lose hope…there’s always Digg! There are other platforms as well, but the key point here is that if you do plan to heavily rely on social media for links, you need to do some cross-channel promotion. Tweet your Digg URL and not just the main URL, for example. Just make sure that you cover all your bases and know what to expect.

What if you have a client who wants SEO but simply does not want you to do any link building even though, over and over and over, you’ve told this sweet client that link building is a key component of doing well online? I’m not talking about the outright purchasing of links here either. I’m talking about any effort at building links. Yes, these clients exist, and I know because I’ve dealt with them.

There are many reasons why some clients feel that link building is a scary proposition. Most notable is the belief that any sort of link building will get you banned by Google, but there are also worries about the lack of control over who links to a site and fear of having their name on sites with which they do not wish to be associated. Then you have your clients who believe that there’s no way to build links without purchasing them. Whatever the rationale, the fact remains that links are very, very important. Therefore, what options do you have when faced with this type of situation? Let’s talk about three big ones that will hopefully make sense to even the most reluctant clients.

Good, Relevant Content

Even though people get tired of hearing it, content really is the only thing that matters on your site when it comes right down to it. You can build links like mad, you can throw loads of cash at paid ads, but if your content isn’t good, no one’s going to stay on your site/come back again/link to it. Unless they think it’s bad enough that they’d like to show the rest of the world what not to do when they’re in a particularly funny mood. Having good content does not mean that you should repeat your keywords every few sentences, nor does it mean that you need to channel Tolstoy. Good content does contain your keywords, but in a way that actually makes sense to your users. If you have good content, you’re going to get links, period.

Better Internal Linking

I’m not talking about the use of nofollow for PageRank sculpting, I’m talking about simply changing the way your site links to its pages. The benefit of better internal linking is that it helps you determine which are your most important pages, which is good for users and good for search engines. Controlling internal links is simply a good usability practice, as wildly tossing out internal links can easily confuse your users. Confused users might not be so quick to find your site link-worthy, as you can imagine.

Even the most skittish client shouldn’t object to enhancing the user experience, right? There is usually no need to have each page on a site link to 100 other internal pages. Sitemaps were created for a reason, so use them.

Use of Social Media

Go ahead and post a link on Twitter, Digg and Reddit a story, Stumble it, etc. Your goal here is get people to read the site’s content and, if they so choose, they can link to it all on their own. If the content is good, and it should be if you’re throwing it out there for everyone, then you can expect that links will, indeed, fall into place. Social media is not as easy to conquer as it seems, though, so keep that in mind, as you cannot simply expect to post a link to a site on Facebook and have the world rushing to link to it. This takes a lot of patience, and it’s easy to overdo, so be cautious but still make use of your networks.

It’s our job to educate our clients, of course, but it’s also our job to figure out the right approach in doing so. Some people are visual learners, others can just hear you say it and they understand it. Some people have had bad experiences that color how they view current marketing practices. It’s very important to understand this when you’re making your case, as you can’t expect to simply tell a client that he or she needs links and have your opinion accepted. If you take the time to investigate alternative methods of improving visibility (and usability) and you’re willing to be flexible, however, you probably won’t hear too many complaints when your clients start getting results.