The Key To A Stellar Link Building Campaign Relevance: Whether you’re a seasoned CMO looking for serious SEO results or you’re a business owner sick of paying big bucks for off-shore link building services with little ROI—the key to a lucrative link building campaign is simple: Relevance If you read our previous article on ignoring the search engines to improve search rankings, then you're in the right frame of mind to begin the link building process. But before you start building a list of sites to target and collecting contact information for their webmasters, ask yourself one important question: Why should anyone link to your site? Merit-based link building is a transparent, two way process. It requires that you approach a target site and prove to its owners that you posses something worth linking to. There is no covert, automated method to gain these strong, permanent links, making this strategy incompatible with darkershaded hats of SEO. More importantly, the strategy will only work with sites of an elite quality.
In short, merit-based link building requires innovative content. If you were to start a new website that sold general novelty t-shirts, you’d have a difficult time distinguishing yourself from the key players who have dominated this industry for years: Snorg Tees, Busted Tees, Threadless, etc. You could, however, follow a bit of advice that Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, posted on his blog in 2006. "Look for a progression of niches so that you start out small or very specific, but you can build your way up to a big, important area over time," Cutts said. Sheldon Shirts is a site that both fits into the before mentioned novelty t-shirt industry and follows Cutts’ advice. Upon initial inspection, this site two glaring issues that present challenges for link building: 1. It is a relatively new site competing in a wellestablished industry. The top websites in this vertical opened for business three to seven years before Sheldon Shirts. 2. It is an affiliate site. Sheldon Shirts offers no original products. It simply links to retail websites and the owners take a small cut when a visitor they refer makes a purchase. E-commerce sites with original products have a hard enough time convincing others to link to them. These are most often the culprits of gray-to-black hat, bulk link spam campaigns.
The reason Sheldon Shirts lends itself so naturally to link building is by disguising itself as an informational resource. The home page states “You’ve reached T-shirt Nerdvana!” and goes on to present itself as a visual database of t-shirts worn by the characters on the popular CBS Sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.” On top of cataloging these garments, the owners also make it easy to find the sites that sell them. By creating a one of a kind resource that caters to fans of “The Big Bang Theory,” Sheldon Shirts has gained some very strong links from the websites of TV Guide, Variety, TV Squad and other reputable publications. With over 1,600 links to its domain, Sheldon Shirts ranks first in Google for the somewhat competitive phrase “Big Bang Theory Shirts” and 43rd for “Big Bang Theory.” This second statistic may not sound too impressive until you consider that this search is dominated by official program news, full streaming episodes and (of course) resources pertaining to the actual scientific theory. The best link builder in the world can’t help you if you don’t have content that is useful or unique. No one links freely to sites they see as run of the mill or lacking value. The best (and arguably only) way to approach a merit-based link building campaign is with a site that will excite or inform visitors… perhaps even develop a fan base among a certain segment of people.
Once you think you’ve got your demographic nailed down, keep digging. The key component to a successful link building campaign that will maximize your ROI consists of knowing (microscopically) who your audience is.
That segment could be anything, from scientists who study silt in urban rivers, to musicians looking to learn about circuit bending, to fans of a particular CBS sitcom. So long as you are delivering value to these people, you stand a fighting chance of gaining links from top websites related to the topic.
Rocket Clicks is an online marketing agency specializing in Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization and Quality Link Building