Link building continues to be one of the most difficult challenges in an SEO campaign, and this is especially true for enterprise level companies.  Companies who want to play by the rules according to search engine best practices have to compete with sites that buy links, spam effectively and use all kinds of grey to black hat methodologies for acquiring links.  Even in today’s modern search engine landscape in which millions of dollars have been spent by the engines to devalue these techniques, there are thousands and thousands of sites on the Web that use paid links and sophisticated link schemes to game the system.  Additionally, enterprise level organizations usually compete for extremely competitive keywords against sites with amazingly large link profiles.  In lieu of these conditions, I am often asked by enterprise level marketing folks, “How can we ethically get links that will really make a difference in our SEO campaign?”

Of course there is no easy answer or a one-size-fits-all game plan that is guaranteed to work (if there was, I would already be retired and living on a tropical island somewhere!).  But there are a number of strategies and tactics that are useful for large companies to implement in order to give them the best opportunity to acquire meaningful links. And most of those opportunities revolve around better aligning current marketing activities with link building best practices.

In this article I will present the top 3 ways I see enterprise level companies acquiring links that really make a difference in their SEO campaigns:

• Press Release Optimization
• Blogging
• Partner Networks

Press Release Optimization
Press release optimization is not a new concept, but doing it effectively requires more than just an optimized page title, an embedded link and a quick submission to a wire service. Ensuring that press releases are well optimized in terms of title and content, as well as ensuring there are embedded links back to your site, are the basic fundamentals of PR optimization.  But in order to leverage PR for the most benefits from a link acquisition standpoint, it is necessary to tailor the messaging of the press release to resonate with personas most likely to link to you. Most PR is done with one of two audiences in mind: potential clients (or influencers of purchasing decisions) and potential investors.  But there is a third category of folks that should be targeted by PR and that’s the audience that might want to link to your content.

By identifying which groups of people online who have a propensity to link to you based on your content, you can craft a message specifically targeted towards those folks to build brand and links.  Identifying who those personas are and what content is likely to resonate within those persona groups, should be the first step in the process.  Creating a message that is tailored to these groups increases the propensity that these individuals will pick up your press release.  Additionally, you should be building relationships with these publishers as often as possible so that in the future you can contact them directly about your story versus hoping that they find you through the wire.  Targeted messaging and targeted distribution partners are the key to aligning your PR efforts with link acquisition.

Blogging
I have maintained for a long time that SEO is a great tool for social media marketers to show ROI for their activities.  For those companies that have a hard time justifying the ROI of blogging, using SEO based metrics to paint a compelling picture can be very effective.  Growing an SEO campaign is really a function of two things at the most basic level – Links and Content that target the keyword phrases important to you.  An effective blogging strategy will provide both of these.  And the blog format has two distinct advantages to traditional web content in producing both.

From a content perspective, blogging allows you to produce very timely content as it may not require the lengthy approval process that an article or whitepaper on your website typically would. Additionally, that content isn’t constricted by needing to make sense in the context of your information architecture.  It allows you to be more conversational in tone and target any number of potential keywords without having to figure out where it should exist in the current site framework.  And to the earlier point, it is often easier to get it published.

In terms of links, it is a well known fact that bloggers traditionally link more than webmasters.  Bloggers constantly link to third party Web sites as references for their content.  Again, there is usually no problem in the corporate structure for doing this as it is an expected behavior.  But ask a webmaster to link to you from any part of the main site and you will have a completely different conversation.  There are usually multiple stakeholder permissions that must be navigated to get a link of this type and there is no guarantee that it will be there forever (bloggers on the other hand are not prone to change content once it has been published).  Therefore, it is much easier to acquire a link from a blogger (especially one you have a relationship with) than a webmaster which makes blogging a very effective SEO strategy.

Partner Networks
And you thought reciprocal was dead!  Well it isn’t.  It just needs to be done in the right way.  A reciprocal link should represent a valid business relationship and make sense for the user.  In other words, it should have some context given the nature and topic of your website.  If ESPN links to the NFL and vice versa, that is a valid link in the eyes of Google.  If Ford Motor Company was to link to Purina Dog Food and vice versa, it might not make sense.  Now obviously, with the amount of links on the Internet, these types of situations are policed in different fashions.  Mostly likely, the link wouldn’t count much based on the relevancy of the two pages (although trust and page rank may still be a benefit of the link).  But if Purina, (who is just being used hypothetically for this discussion and is certainly not guilty of this type of behavior) was to link to a number of unrelated sites, and were reported for doing so, a Google engineer may determine that these links are unnatural and an attempt to manipulate the index.  That would most likely result in a penalty where the links would be ignored and rankings for the keywords they target could potentially be negatively affected.

There are different mechanisms and penalties that try to discourage this type of reciprocal link behavior because ultimately it serves no purpose for the end user.  However, partner networks that represent a valid business relationship can be a huge driver of search rankings.  You should definitely be leveraging any relationships that your company or business has for increased link connectivity around your most important keywords.  You should have a systematic approach to targeting these businesses and QA these links quarterly in order to make sure that they don’t inadvertently disappear or change.

Conclusion
These three activities (press releases, blogging and partner networks) are the most scalable link building solutions for enterprise level companies because they create systems that produce targeted links on an ongoing basis.  These activities take advantage of existing relationships (Partner Network) or ongoing activities that your company should be involved with anyway (PR, Blogging) from a marketing perspective.  Combining link building best practices with all of your companies marketing activities including PR and social media, is typically the most effective way to build targeted links on an ongoing basis that do not violate the best practices recommended by Google and Bing.

Bookmark to: