Garrett French is the founder and chief link strategist of Citation Labs, a link building agency and campaign incubator. He’s also the founder of ZipSprout - Citation Labs’s sister agency focused on local marketing. He’s developed multiple link building tools, including the Link Prospector and the Broken Link Finder. He also co-wrote The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Link Moses himself, Eric Ward. Garrett and his team lead monthly webinars on enterprise content strategy and promotion from the Citation Labs Blog.
Need to supplement your PR efforts to capture the parts of your audience you're not yet reaching? Columnist Garrett French shares his company's process for testing content and expanding into valuable niche publications.
Columnist Garrett French explains how local businesses can improve their online visibility by becoming a part of the local ecosystem, both online and off.
Columnist Garrett French notes that in many verticals, content resources have gone missing over the years. That's where you come in.
What does an enterprise link-building team look like? In his final piece in a five-part series on the topic, columnist Garrett French describes the Outreacher.
In the fourth article of his series on creating the optimal enterprise link building team, columnist Garrett French discusses the role of the Qualifier.
In the third installment of his series on the makeup of an enterprise link-building team, columnist Garrett French discusses the role of the content designer.
Enterprise organizations that want to get serious about link building may be well served by a dedicated team for link acquisition. Columnist Garrett French outlines the five roles that comprise this team and focuses today on the opportunity prospector.
Enterprise organizations that want to get serious about link building may be well served by a dedicated team for link acquisition. Columnist Garrett French outlines the five roles that comprise this team and focuses today on the link strategist.
A little over a year ago, we published a guide to qualifying link prospects. That method still holds; however, in the past year, we have adjusted our thinking, honed our processes and most importantly created a few simple, free tools that will make your link qualification phase much faster. Before getting to the tips and […]
Welcome to the third and final installment of our group interview of 30 link building experts. In part one, we asked about backlink analysis as it applies to link building campaign design. Then, we followed up with the technical factors which our experts analyzed within the backlink graph. In this third and final installment, we […]
Welcome to part 2 of our 3-part group interview series on backlink profile analysis. Part 1 covered backlink analysis for link building campaign design. Part 2 covers the more technical aspects of analysis, and what elements that link building experts look at to gauge the overall strength of a backlink profile. 14 URL factors in backlink […]
We asked 30 link building experts 9 questions about backlink analysis… and got 20,000 words of response. This article is part 1 of a 3 part group interview series on backlink analysis. Part 1 covers how backlink analysis – of your site and your competitors’ sites, as it applies to link building campaign design. You’ll […]
In 2009 we found that visitors from our two blog interviews converted to inquiries 3X more than visitors from our SEL articles. We also discovered, in the link building query group interview we conducted with 21 link builders, the “share-power” that interviews can have. That piece received 443 tweets, 238 Delicious saves and over 4k […]
What is it about your website (or your organization) that is truly linkable? What’s the most effective way to structure a link building campaign? What is the most effective first task for a link builder? By creating an inventory of link building assets, you lay the foundation for a sustainable link building campaign, whether you’re […]
Advanced link building queries, for the link builders who use them extensively, remain a closely guarded secret. It’s easy to understand why. For one, they want to protect a valued link source from getting flooded with link requests from the general link-seeking public. Secondly, there are some choice opportunities out there that would lose their […]
A single highly-linkable article can attract tens - sometimes hundreds - of links from relevant and valuable sites. Make that article *sell* and you'll drive a similar number of leads that come pre-qualified and ready to talk business.
Extensive backlink prospecting and qualification, even with automated research processes and crawlers, can take days. Creating highly-linkable content can take even longer. Because of this significant investment, we often recommend conducting your organic link building outreach in a way that maximizes conversion rates, grows relationships with both linkers and link decliners, and ensures that any […]
Without an ordered approach, careful research and custom tools it can be difficult for link builders, writers and content strategists to know what content will attract links in a target market. This article provides a process and tools for developing and distributing linkable content based on the content that's proven to attract links in your target keyword space.
This article walks you through the tools, processes and strategies for identifying the most powerful players in your keyword space and then analyzing their link sources and link building tactics.
"Get More Links" is not an effective goal, even if it's the directive you've received from clients or management. This article proposes ten different goals for your link building efforts, along with suggestions on tactics and ways to find and qualify link prospects for each.
The core problem of link building - assuming you've maximized your site's linkability - is not prospecting for sites that may potentially link to yours. The problem lies in rapidly identifying - within 1,000+++ lists the link prospects whose links will provide the fastest and largest impact on your search marketing goals... We wrote this article - and created a free, downloadable worksheet - to enable motivated link builders to quickly identify the most relevant, valuable and likely-to-link prospects from thousands of potential link targets.