We quickly acknowledge the fallout from the Kevin Smith is Too Fat to Fly on Southwest Airlines controversy we had discussed on the last episode of The Bella Buzz, recognizing that social media has the ability to generate headlines in all forms of media now. The story was covered everywhere from ABC News to Entertainment Tonight, spreading loudly and rapidly.
Should we be concerned with how much power does someone with many followers hold over a company? Could it be that someone who grows a following (for whatever reason) might decide to use that voice for negative purposes? A blackmail opportunity? Fortunately, Desiree points out that in a straw poll regarding the Kevin Smith situation 58% of respondents said they were on the side of Southwest. So maybe that points out an interesting development. It might be considered that social media does actually portray a "wisdom of the crowd" mentality, and the greater good or the best opinions might actually win out in the end over sheer numbers.
Our main topic for this episode is Link Building. It was instigated by a thread in a Webmaster World forum that is one person's live link building process. He actually lays out his process in step by step detail that gets the topic flowing in regards to the value of the effort.
Without a doubt, the early days of the Google algorithm required that links point to a web site so that the search spiders could discover and index the site. The higher authority of the site linking in, would pass along some of the relevance "weight" so the Google could get a signal about the importance of the site. However, as the algorithm has become more robust, should the focus be more on creating incredibly powerful content and let the links come naturally?
Desiree describes that process and service that she uses with clients as a way to get a site useful inbound links. A valuable link must be looked at two ways. There are links that bring value through actual visitor traffic, and there are links that bring the Google Bot and page rank value.
With her search specialist, a client's site can require up to 40 hours of intensive research and submission looking for sites to link to. A Google search within a particular niche will uncover potential sites to inquire. She looks at all of the many directories out there as valuable targets for inclusion. This is a regular monthly task to address to some degree, since there are many new sites cropping up all the time.
There are also consumer review sites such as Kudzu.com or Yelp that would have quality link value.
A service like Link Popularity can provide some information for measurement regarding the number of sites linking to your web page, or the Google webmaster tool using the parameter "Link:www.yourdomain.com" to see where the links are coming from.
Of course as we have said many times, creating quality relevant content is the best link building strategy for the long term. It might be a short term effort to grow organic search engine ranking through link building efforts, but it takes quality, evergreen content that will provide long term inbound links.
Be aware as well .. the 40 hour commitment that Desiree shares does not mean that the listing will be at the top of the search results at that point. What she means is that the foundation is set for the links to start appearing on other web sites so that the search spiders can crawl and index the link in the first stage of getting a good ranking. It will take many months and years to achieve the highest ranking possible.
We are still in a Link Economy.
How do you do your link building? Can you share with the rest of the Bella Buzz community how you go about getting others to link to your web site? Share in the comments.
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