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Today the 2nd Linklove conference was held in London with eight speakers. All giving up their most prized link building secrets From Rand Fishkin to Mike King, Will Critchlow to Wil Reynolds (and more!).
We came away with loads of great advice and it was another fantastic year for the show.
To help get your link building off on the right track we’ve compiled the best tips from the show below:
Rand Fishkin – Content Strategy vs Link Building
Black hat link building is always short term and always at risk
The linkerati is now a much bigger group compared to before with almost anyone able to give you links
Use Google social connection to show people you have contacted or apps you have used
Social signals are on the rise while link signals are decreasing
Inbound marketing is at much lower cost per acquisition than paid
Content build links automatically if you have trust and brand loyalty
Write content to service your target audience
Use Builtwith.com to see what technologies are used on top websites
Charts and graphs gets embedds and linked to
Add your blog posts to Google news so they get seen easily (this slide also had a nice shout out to @Koozai Mike)
Mike King – Quantifying Outreach
Mike shared lots of tips based on his analysis of 100,000 outreach emails:
Women get a higher response rate but men have higher chance of getting the link
Personal emails have a higher link rate. Use rapportive or rap leaf to find personal details
Saturday gave the best link rate than Friday than Sunday
9am had the best response rate, then 2am
Be persistent – 2 emails get good response rate but 5 or 6 also worked well
Longer emails do better than short emails
Reach out to people via social before outreach
Logo in email get much higher link rate
Branko Rihtman – Which Social Sharers Actually Get Links
A page with only social interest can rank in SERPS
Use Topsy to discover all the users who shared an article you are targeting
Retweets is the most effective social media for getting links
Identify power user who tweet content of interest to you and follow them
Identify relevant users with keywords on Followerwonk
Creat a pools of relevant domains for future outreach
Jane Copland – Getting Golden Links
Golden links cannot replace traditional links, you still need volume and link strategy that goes beyond golden links
Think about link building as an investment, good links take time
Even when you go after high profile links don’t forget about other links too
Invite journalists to your events in the hope they’ll write about them
Push real content as well as link bait
Get attention for your activities to get links (e.g. invite journalists to them)
Outreach to people if you have an amazing product or content, don’t be shy
Don’t lie to try and get links when doing outreach
Use your previous success as a hook and tell people where you were featured
Wil Reynolds – Building Targets, Relationships And Links
Use iGoogle to set goals and to do lists so you can keep track of outreach efforts
Add twitter feeds to igoogle
Add rss feeds from google news to see what is trending and stalk content generators
Follow their blog
Follow them on google plus
Add quora on igoogle to see what questions influencers are asking
Help the people you are looking to interact with, answer questions, research, introduce them to people who can help them
Adding all the platforms to iGoogle will save time by not having to go to the sites
Find journalists of publications by searching twitter bios, communicate with them,
If you cant help influentials you are trying to reach retweet their question to show you are trying to help
Use mozenda to scrape out authors of content
Make your recent tweets about of Interest to the person you are trying to connect with
Use Inboxq.com to get more followers – it allows people to send you questions
Helping people will help to create relationships
Tom Anthony – Putting The Love Back In To Links
Links have decreased as part of Google’s ranking algorithm over time
Google can identify spam sites by looking at link profile compared to others, but the results could mean sacrificing white hat sites, even if just a few to have a clean index
Google is willing to sacrifice some white hat sites to remove networks of black hat. I.e. Panda update
Look out for a links version of panda update
Rel author is a way for Google to make links more trust worthy and improve CTR
Without links social sharing is very limited, but author data can help attribute Links with social and integrate them into rankings
Become a trusted author, use rich snipets and author markup
Target trusted authors for links
Martin MacDonald -Tips, Tricks And Secrets From The Trenches
Build a community and create a way for them to link back to you
I.e. Drop box incentivised students to link to them for more space
Use someone else’s community if you don’t have one or cannot create one yourself
Contribute something to the community when targeting them
Spider sites and use a macro to find which page you can put a link on
Get existing affiliate to build links for you by offering them a better rate of comissions than competitors
Use tools to find the most semantically related websites, find sites not linking out and target them
Will Critchlow – The Critchlow Hierarchy Of Needs
The main problems of not getting links are; not doing anything, not doing enough or the right things, not acknowledging weakness
Focus on spikes (things you do well) to go from good top great, fill gaps to go from mediocre to good
Create a self assessment for your website work out your strong, exceptional areas
Score on an exponential scale, design, content, permission, investment, usp
Work on improving your weaknesses to bring yourself up the exponential scale
If you are getting low links per visitors look at who your content is targeted at
Content on your site is like physical real estate
A good conversion rate is like an efficient supply chain – pitch it this way
Run through other business cases to discuss problems to solve
Pitch a big idea and a small step – the smallest thing you can launch to test the biggest risk factor in your business
mMake a checklist, can you find 10 target sites in 10 minutes? If not then don’t do your content plan
Make activity plan with activity targets and testator assumptions
Discover what you need to win
Pitch big visions and small steps
Experiment to find ways to improve and to persuade
invest with evidence and experience in hand
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Thanks guys, glad it helped!
I remember when Will was talking about that Pieter, Great tip.
Thanks for sharing, Arnold.
I also remember this one, and I think it was from Wil Reynolds: the more you help people, the more great things come to you.This has been a God Send on this cold Monday morning – Thank you very much!
Great wrap on Linklove. I’ve linked to your post from mine, which is just my personal notes from the event.
They complement each other well, so maybe other readers will find useful?
http://www.alextanner.net/2012/04/01/linklove-london-2012-notes/
Great advice gathered here, Arnold- a lot to digest. And kudos for being so quick off the mark!
What do you think?
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