Tags: linking strategies, organic search, SEO, SES NYC, linking, page rank

here’s a breakdown of this session…

Justilien Gaspard – Search Engine Watch, SEMPO author

• Directories
• • Use ones that are made or people, ones that are the backbone of the web
  • Look for old directories that have been around since the 90’s, they’ve proven themselves
  • Niche & vertical directories – not overused by SEO companies (do search like “travel directory” to find them)
  • Other good niche directories – city directories, local directories
  • Quality Signals
  • • Human edited
    • Static links
    • Older is better
    • High-quality backlinks
    • Bad: no-follows
    • Bad: site-wide links – selling to competitors
    • Bad: few pages indexed
  • Follow guidelines during submission – don’t get rejected
  • Make sure it appears natural, don’t make it look like it’s from an automated program
• Blogs, Wikis & Forums
• • Content and links – get both at once
  • Has user involvement
  • Can use for internal links
• Need to be proactive about promoting yourself, can gain links naturally
• Press Releases, very important
• Find influential media
• • Reporters – newspapers, radio stations, television, bloggers
  • Media Directories – Gebbie Press (www.gebbieinc.com), Burrelles Luce (www.burrellesluce.com)
• Social Media
• • Bookmarking and tagging sites
  • Use for promotion and secondary links – it’s more for promotion, branding
• Press Releases & Social Media
• • Utilize both together, use a separate one for social media
  • Progressive public relations

Jim Boykin – CEO of We Build Pages (www.jimboykin.com blog)

• Links are like currency to web sites
• It’s not the number of links, it’s the quality of links
• Use Yahoo to look at your backlinks
• • Linkdomain:yoursite.com –site:yoursite.com
• Linking own sites together doesn’t work… familiar IP addresses
• Link Trading is dead (in his opinion)
• • Obvious it’s an SEO tactic… link pages are getting filtered
• Buyig backlinks is dead as well
• AGE is a HUGE factor – natural link growth
• Trust Factor is big
• • Unique content
  • Who you link to plays a role as well!!! Link out to highly trusted sites that relate to your business
  • Is your link found within the rest of your content?
• Try to get links to other pages than your home page, looks like your content is empty if you don’t
• Search engines are better analyzing clusters, where the links are coming from, savvy to link farms
• Similar Pages link in search results
• • Similar pages share common backlinks
• Google is getting better at mapping link neighborhoods
• www.touchgraph.com – Google Browser
• Get your links within the content of a webpage
• Add linkbait items on your pages
• Link out to edu’s .gov’s, etc.. helps

Greg Boser – Web Gorilla

• Focus on competitive analysis, see who is linking to competition
• Older sites get leeway when getting 1000’s of links at once.  New sites, this will kill them.  Bad to have a link-baiting frenzy
• Contextual relevance is coming, not long before that is very important with links (beyond anchor text)

Q&A

• Interlinking within a network?
• • Fine with a few sites, different backlinks, but bad when 1000 sites built on same IP
• Acquiring a site, you can then own and inherit backlinks from that site, can combine age with new backlinks, backlinks become more efficient.  But… make sure the anchor text will still match well for your content