Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Interview with a Link Building Expert: Getting Results

Last week I had a chance to sit down with Nicole Valentine, one of the architects of DBE’s highly successful link-building program. Here are some highlights:

Q: What is link building and why is it important for marketers to understand?

A: Link-building is a component of search engine optimization (SEO) designed to obtain links to a website from third-party authority sites. It’s important for marketers to understand that link building is a critical part of a real SEO program – if it’s not being done in-house or it’s not something their SEO agency is doing, that will severely impact how successful their SEO efforts will be.

Q: How does link building impact a client’s SEO program?

A: Real SEO encompasses a mixture of on-site technical optimization, content optimization and cultivation of the kind of inbound links search engines evaluate within their algorithms to determine how high up in the search results a website should appear for various search terms. An expert link-building program works to obtain links from authority sites, resulting in top search engine positions for business-driving search terms.

Q: What are the major components of a successful link building program?

A: It starts with extensive research to identify what the opportunities are for obtaining inbound links that will impact SEO. From there it’s all about building relationships with webmasters and providing them with something valuable, whether that’s the link itself or stellar web content written to include the links we’re trying to place.

Q: So, how do you approach such an intensive research process?

A: We’ve developed a mind map that we use to guide our research. It provides a general framework, but each client requires customized research methodologies, so we’re continually tweaking the process and going in different directions based on the specific needs of each of our clients.

Read more from my interview with Nicole here...

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