Understanding offsite SEO is the area of ambiguity for marketing professionals. Coupled with technical elements of SEO, there is the whole black art perception. This post is all about what you need to know when getting link building assistance and the right way to view link building development.
Generating high volumes of low quality links is not something that Spike do and a long term, brand led strategy is spending more time researching highly relevant sites that have history and authority in Google’s eyes. Ask yourself this: “What link building would I do if external links had absolutely no impact on search rankings?” My answer would focus on 4 core areas:
– Driving purely organic links through interesting content that has a high propensity to be shared.
– Sponsorship of high traffic, highly relevant sites: Get traffic from aggregators or popular blog/review sites
– High, high quality directories and local ‘citation’ type directories: Getting basic online visibility is important
– Blog comments: participating in relevant internet communities builds brand awareness and shows that you are knowledgeable in your area.
Your SEO consultant or agency shouldn’t be trying to game Google. There are admittedly lots of examples where websites are still benefiting from spam driven SEO activity but if there is one thing that Google has taught the internet world in 2011 is that they will defiantly fight anyone who tries to beat the system with bad content/bad links.
So don’t be apprehensive about link building and the technical jargon that can surround it. If a site seems genuine to you for a vote, then go with your gut instinct. Simple stuff.