Outsourcing Link Development

Outsourcing the entire link development project is potentially dangerous, especially if you don't exactly know what the linkers are doing. An alternative way to develop links is to outsource the manual part of the work while keeping control of the strategy and vigorously monitoring for quality. While there are a few decent link builders, as far as I know, in my opinion, many other people who would like to manage your link campaign are going to mismanage it. And these are the following reasons why:

1. Clumsy approach to link buying
Buying links should take more effort than opening an account at TLA. Anyone can do that, so why pay an SEO to do it? What you really need is a creative strategy for finding paid link opportunities that will either bring traffic or goose your rankings. If your link hunter cannot deliver paid links outside of paid link brokers and their own personal network of friends and clients then find one that can.

2. Interlinking clients
This technique is a huge no-no even if the results are positive. No question that this method can help clients rank even for the same terms. I know one person who is making five figures per month per real estate client for interlinking clients to the other clients, as well as linking them from keyword domain doorway sites. The sites not only rank in the top ten, but many clients share the top ten positions for their same keywords. But is it enough to rank well?

Taking the long view, that method is doomed. It's not a viable long term strategy because it's easy to spot in a hand check. The only thing keeping those link rings from imploding is the competition who may not notice it yet. But do you really want your site walking a high wire? Or do you want it suceeding on a solid footing? Those networks are vulnerable to a hand check.

3. Mystery-meat link building techniques
Some link development firms, particularly cheap ones, may promise one way inbound links but what they are doing is, at best, providing triangular links with a database of thousands of low quality sites and at worst submitting your site to a poor list of directories. Just this morning I heard from someone who made this mistake and was worrying about undoing the links they had pointing to his site. Despite all the link work he had done by those people, his site remains stuck on the second page of results. This is what can happen when depending on someone's link building technique. While I can understand someone wanting to protect their link building mojo, it's not revealing anything proprietary to show what kind of links they are going to provide.

4. Derailed by meaningless metrics
A common pitfall of an outsourced link campaign is to base payment upon meaningless metrics. Forcing link developers to measure success in terms of toolbar PageRank is the top mistake. Toolbar PageRank is so easy to manipulate that it has become meaningless as a metric. Paying on a sliding scale based on PageRank is the worst way to measure the success of a link campaign. For solid measurements, especially in a paid links campaign, use alternative metrics such as the amount of legitimate citations a website has, trust factors, and even traffic levels when they're available.

5. Defining a strategy
An important consideration when outsourcing link development is a coherent strategy. Attaining X amount of links is not a strategy, and a poor goal. Ranking better for particular keywords is a great goal, but a goal is not a strategy. Strategy is concerned with the reasons why certain methods are undertaken and why they are important to the long term stability of the site. It's important to emphasize that ranking or the number of links attained is not the strategy, it's the goal. The goal serves the strategy. A good outsourcing partner will understand that and think along those terms.

Building Links to a New Site

My father in law started a site to support his business and called me up to discuss. His first idea was to submit to directories and exchange links...

and that's
where he
became a bug
on the Internet Highway
Splat!
and hit a windshield.

Welcome to the Internet... now move aside
Hitting the windshield is not uncommon but you don't have to end up there. I then explained several ways (in more detail) how to build links to a new site and start attracting more business. It's easy to think of attracting links to a brand new site as similar to running a marathon with shoelaces untied. It's tempting to believe the task is best undertaken with a mature domain with fully indexed content that's been live for years. However your new endeavor can overtake more established sites if you move ahead with the following ideas in mind.

Unleash your new site's inner superstar
An older site can suffer from a certain amount of inflexibility. A new site has no such hindrances. This is your advantage, make good use of it. A new site is a clean slate and an opportunity to do it right, and along the way outshine older established sites. The advantage of a new site is that you can do many things that an older site cannot or simply will not.

1. Competitive intelligence
Research the top sites in the niche you want to occupy. These aren't necessarily the top ten, but top sites across a range of relevant keyword phrases. Make a set of lists and note their strengths, what they do right, as well as what you feel they don't do well or not at all. This can present opportunities for an approach to help overtake your competition.

For instance, in planning a new forum I noticed that the gorilla owning the space was plagued by rudeness, poor moderation, and not well optimized. Yes it had been around for almost ten years, and yes it ranked for a gazillion phrases. However my opportunity was to engage a handful of experts and mount a new forum whose strength, among other things, consisted of doing better where the competition was weak. That was the benefit I offered to site visitors who were faced with a choice between my site and King Kong. Years later it's quite successful, and we are a strong second to Kong in that space, while leaving others far behind.

2. Plan your site architecture
Planning how many sections you will attempt and leaving room for expansion is important because the more topics you have the more useful and comprehensive it is. As far as attracting links, this gives you an opportunity to appeal to a wider source of one-way inbound links.

You may want to consider designing your navigation along the left or right side as this provides more space for expanding into new areas. Give each topic/section of your site a meaningful name, preferably (in my opinion) one word to two words.

One of the best examples of site architecture I recall is the one used by Red Herring magazine circa 2002. Check it out on archive.org. It's not perfect, but what I admire is, starting with the navigation on the left side you can click through to a hub that shows the latest articles, plus a link to their archive. You can conceivably list a hundred articles in that first section, although for the sake of usability and usefulness you may want to limit that to the latest articles for the month. Link to the rest within the archive the way Red Herring did it. Someone who is thinking of linking to your site will appreciate this approach because it handily displays the breadth of your site, making it easy to impress them with how link-worthy it is.

Choose a decent domain
You can choose a domain with a keyword in it but likely those aren't available so don't sweat it, it's not that important. Really. Try something memorable that says something about the value your site brings to the user, something that will make them click if they see it in the search engine results page. I like a good brandable domain name that is memorable, but more importantly, one that will cause a user to click on it if they see it ranking well for the keyword they are using. For example, what site would you rather visit: CountryFarmsOrganic.com or MyOrganic4U.com? CountryFarmsOrganic is long, but it brands itself as wholesome, a concept compatible with organic produce. Wholesomeness and health is the benefit this particular user is looking for and the domain confers. And at the time of writing, that domain was available. Woo-hoo!

Avoiding the "screw you" response.
Your site has a hyphen in it? You're shooting yourself in the foot in terms of obtaining solid inbounds. In my opinion you look like a spammer. Lose it. Think how that domain is going to look in the editors dashboard at DMOZ. I can see the editor hitting the EJECT button so fast she's knocking over her latte. For even more fun, the hyphen may impress some web surfers as a spam site and cause them to skip over it in the SERPs. However the most important reason to skip the hyphenated domain is that a webmaster may take a look at your domain and say "Screw you!" as she hits the delete button on your one-way link request. Ouch, that's no fun.

Inspiring the look of love
Add a groovy site design that is in synch with your industry. Think of conveying authority. If it's fashion then probably something that is evocative of style. If it's business, then think of the top company in that niche and see how they're conveying their authority. The professional appearance of your website is going to work the hardest in your favor when you are obtaining one way inbound links. Even a drop ship site with a great domain and a clean and cool design can get into DMOZ (I speak from personal experience).

A good site design helps a lot for obtaining one-way inbound links from trusted and authoritative websites. I cannot stress enough how a spiffy design will make people loosey-goosey with their links. Site managers in charge of adding links react positively to a good looking website.