Ever since I started doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at my internship, I couldn't stop wanting to learn more about it. It became a new challenge and a new skill to learn.
But just as everything else in social and online marketing, ways to do SEO are always changing, especially with Google's new Panda Update.
After spending countless hours optimizing a client's website using old, proven SEO techniques that still work, including keyword research and meta tags/descriptions, we got some great results and multiple #1 rankings.
The SEO success made me feel like nothing is impossible, and the next step, i.e. building links, seemed like a piece of cake.
Of course, I was using White Hat SEO techniques, so I wanted to get as many high quality inbound links as possible. So, I focused on relevant forums and communities with active everyday participants, created legit user profiles and started participating in discussions and posting questions about customer service, companies' websites and social media, trying to organically fit a link into a post (ex. "..what about companies like www.clientsite.com, that use __?).
Out of approximately 10 forums where I posted...I got banned on 6.
Banned for life sounds a little hardcore to me. Obviously, this search engine optimization technique doesn't work that well anymore. Or maybe I just wasn't doing it right.
If you have any successful link building experiences with forums, please share them in the comments :)
I also found an interesting study that talked about link building being the most difficult SEO tactic. No wonder.
Thankfully, posting on forums is not the only way to build links, but I had to browse a lot of search engine optimization resources to find others that work.
Here's a list of my go-to sites for SEO knowledge:
- http://searchengineland.com
- http://searchenginewatch.com
- http://www.seomoz.org
- http://seo-hacker.com
- http://www.seroundtable.com
- http://www.searchenginejournal.com
One of the resources I found helpful was The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors from SearchEngineLand.com. Great breakdown of main SEO factors, including link building, and how they work together.
After the forum fiasco I decided to go another route - blog and news article comments and social bookmarking.
Solo SEO helped me find a lot of good blogs - regularly updated sources of relevant info where my comments weren't being deleted...and in some cases even got a few responses.
Some of my fellow SEOs also recommended using tools like Open Site Explorer and Yahoo! Site Explorer (unfortunately the latter is shutting down pretty soon) to research competitor's backlinks. That, I would say, is one of the best working tactics for link building, but you gotta invest your time into actually reaching out to website managers and creating link-building relationhsips vs. just spam-commenting on their forums, blogs, etc.
Side note: Using Twitter and Focus.com for crowdsourcing and asking questions was essential in my search for link building info!
Since I was just doing phase I link building and wasn't spending time on writing actual articles, link baiting and blogger relations, one of the things I did was comment on the news articles about our client that didn't already have embedded links. Speaking on behalf of the client, my posts were along the lines of how excited we were to *whatever the article was about* and included a link. None of those got deleted.
Social bookmarking was my favorite part. This search optimization strategy is known to not be as effective as link baiting, forum posts or links from .edu and .gov sites, but nevertheless, a good way to get some links. Especially if you are using StumbleUpon, that recently started driving more traffic than Facebook.
Besides the site mentioned above, I also used Digg, Delicious and Reddit. After bookmarking a variety of pages, including some product pages from the client's website, news articles and several other sources (all with backlinks to the website), I got a bit over 100 links total.
Next search engine optimization phase will be more serious and will involve more competitors' backlinks research, blogger relations and other tactics that I have yet to learn about and explore.
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