80 Actionable Insights From Linklove 2012 #linklove

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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