With all this talk about
the Trustbox, Sandbox and Trustrank many times we get
overwhelmed. One begins to wonder just how they
go about building all these links from high quality
authority websites.
In this article I look at
one such tactic. One that may surprise you at how effective
it is yet one that is sure to drive large volumes of
quality links to the site in question.
It was a year ago that I
attended my first search engine strategies conference.
It was also at this conference that I became a speaker.
Search Engine Strategies
and PubCon are undoubtedly the two largest SEO/SEM conferences
out there today so of course there’s huge attendance
and lots of big industry names attending.
There’s also a guy there
who you may have heard of. His name is Barry Schwartz
and he’s from Search Engine Round Table.
I bring his name up because he’s found one of the best
ways to not only build an ever expanding content base
up, but also a way to build quality relevant links.
And it’s so simple one begins to wonder why others don’t
do it.
Before I get into what he’s
doing let me give you a little history. He started
covering SES a few shows ago and would post summaries
of the various seminars he attended at the SearchEngineWatch
forum.
His posts were some of the
most read posts during the conference. He soon
also began posting longer summaries at his own site.
Also very well read by those of us who couldn’t attend
the show.
Now he’s become “the” reporter
for the SES shows wherever they are. He even went
into this one with a plan to cover as many of the sessions
as possible, between himself and others known in the
SEM industry. Some of the posts end up at the
SEW forums but he also posts many on his own site.
Step one – there’s that
ongoing content development.
You see, what the folks at
SEO roundtable are doing is creating very long, but
very detailed summaries of every seminar they attend.
They then post these to their website daily or more
often. Each post occupies it’s own static page,
and most pages are well linked within the site.
Step two – relevant quality
links and lots of them
Now here’s the great part.
It is because of this coverage that people have come
to realize that this site is the site to go to for SES
coverage. Between this site and the SEW forums
you can pretty much get your fill of SES in a very compact
version. (Trust me for some of the sessions, a
light summary is much better than sitting through 90
minutes of dry explanations of how ranking algorithms
work :) ).
And because people rely on
these summaries of the show that they begin to refer
others to them. Either through word of mouth or,
more importantly, links.
This is where the relevant
quality links kick in. What is a link to an SEM
site from another SEM site worth? What would you
pay to have your competitors link to you with lots of
one way links, many from high authority sites?
Because of this article, they even have a link from
here.
Plus they get links from
Searchenginewatch, in both the forums and the blog entries,
not to mention other high profile industry sites.
What’s link from Matt
Cutt’s blog with a photo worth to this site?
You see, this site is building
its online reputation the way everyone needs to – by
posting relevant timely information that others want
to see. Then the others link to that content in
a natural way.
Let me put it to you another
way – of the over 3,000 links this site has, how many
do you suppose are from content? More specifically,
how many are due to the site’s summaries of the various
SES shows they’ve attended? Links may not be directly
to the topics in question. In fact many are not.
In fact, if you scan through
the top 100 links or so listed in Google you see a virtual
who’s who of the SEO industry. Let me point out a few
of the more notable links: Links from Yahoo Search
Blog, as well as the MSDN MSN search blog. Of
course there’s many from Searchenginewatch, but also
from other industry sites like searchviews.com, seomoz.com
and searchenginejournal.com just to name a few.
So what has the site accomplished
by attending all the SES shows since late 2003? Well,
they’ve built lots of good content which helps relay
their authority status to engines like Google.
Further, they’ve gotten lots
of quality inbound links from high profile related sites
that are also considered authorities. Plus they’ve
also built a reputation for being the place to go to
find out about SES which means increased traffic to
the site. Not to mention that they’ve now probably
got a well known brand.
In other words, if someone
doesn’t already know how to find the site, but they
know the name of it, a the person will search on an
engine like Google looking for the domain name.
Even if it’s ranked #7 or 8 for the search term the
site will get the click because the searcher is looking
for that brand.
How’s that for building quality
content and links at the same time?
Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant
and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com |
