Europe 2010

1. Preparing Link Building Campaigns forCompetitive Markets Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing| a4uexpo Europe, Munich, May 2010

2. About this Session I’m Jane Copland I work at Ayima, an Internet marketing agency in London that specialises in organic SEO Prior to that, I worked at SEOmoz in the United States. This session is about planning link building campaigns Q&A starts now This shouldn’t be me standing lecturing for an hour! Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

3. Five Most Common Link Building Mistakes This morning, I’ll cover the following… Building links too quickly Building too many links to competitive internal pages Creating an over-optimised backlink profile Not creating a diverse backlink profile Focusing entirely on one method of link building Not thinking of Google as if it were human Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

4. More pre-link building research I will also cover… Researching a site’s existing backlinks What to do if a site’s previous owners were spammers How much can you rely on a site’s old links? Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

5. Building Links Too Quickly How do you get Google tocredit your site with the benefitof all these new links but notnotice the unnatural rate of growth? If this sort of growth did happennaturally, you don’t need to worry inmost circumstances. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

6. Building too many competitivedeep links It’s usually unnatural if too many competitive links point to internal pages and not enough point to the home page / root of the domain. There are notable exceptions, but most commercial sites aren’t an exception. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

7. Creating an Over-OptimisedBacklink Profile This is not the backlink profilefor creditcard.com. The first “brand mention” is the34th most popular anchor text. Smaller sites usually make this mistake far more often than bigger brands. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010 Source: SEOmoz Linkscape

8. Do this instead… This is the backlink profile of egg.com. Egg.com is the highest ranking root domain (not domain.com/file.html) for [credit cards] in the UK. The best part is, this is easier to create! Why? Because it’s what happens “naturally”. Source: SEOmoz Linkscape Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

9. Creating a diverse backlink profile “Diversity” covers a range of different things… People tend to look at this column Google tends to look at this column Site-wide links have their place, but you can’t rely on them for link building Google also notices when a large number of you links come from sites hosted on the same server as your site. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

10. Use multiple methods of link building Relying on only one method can severely limit your success The most successful link building campaigns make use of every avenue available to them. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

11. Who created Google? Who works at Google? (Actually, they probably don’t. But let’s pretend) So who does Google think like? It thinks like a person. What you can’t fool a person with, you may not be able to fool Google with. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

12. Link building differs depending on the domain How you build links and what type of links they are depends on what has been done tothe domain in the past. Backlink analysis is vital BEFORElink building commences . As with types of link building, use all the options and resources available for backlink analysis. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

13. Oh, crap. The person responsible for building links to the site before you was an idiot. Some ofthese are yours Or maybe a competitor bought loads of awful links for your site? Ask for removal! Although some people will ask for money to do this. Getting nowhere? You may find that Google has already discounted the links. Find yourself penalised / not ranking as well as you should and think it’s these links’fault? File for reconsideration. This is not an admission ofguilt! However, be aware thatsomeone might look at the site closely… Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

14. How much can you rely ona site’s old links? Google wants to be able to “reset the clock” for a domain when it sees thatit has been purchased by a new company or individual. Google is a registrar and thus has access to domains’ histories. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

15. If you haven’t been doing so already… Please start asking questions! No hands up:This makes me sad Please look more interested than these guys. Please. Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010