When you start working with a new client, sometimes you have to educate their internal marketing teams about the value of link building. If done correctly, there is potential to create a link building machine inside the core of a savvy marketing department.

It’s key to educate your clients moving forward, but what about all that press from before SEO became a priority? There may be sites out there that have interviewed your clients, hosted them for events, written about their products – and they aren’t all linking over.

Image via Flickr User DavidShutter

This methodology, although intricate, will allow you to:

• Automate prospecting for all unlinked brand mentions and any C-level write ups.
• Automate determining which prospects are most likely to link over.
• Track high level influencers who have featured your client before and are likely to do it again. 
• Reach out to mid level sites that are likely to link over. 

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Building links on sites that publish content on a regular basis is easier than having someone change hard coded content. Blogs need to publish on a regular basis or they will lose their audience.

Luckily, you can find most of the blogs linking to a competitor using Screaming Frog. [Read more...]

Giveaways are a solid deep link strategy for e-commerce that helps raise brand/product awareness, and my preferred method of moderation is Rafflecopter. With Rafflecopter, people that sign up for your giveaway earn points by sharing information about your brand or product through their social channels or blog. Those shares are tallied up by the widget and it automatically selects a winner for you.

When I build links, I try to be as efficient as possible. Nothing slows you down like explaining how a new piece of technology works to a blogger. If someone approached you with a free product and said, “Hey add this thing to the post that will change how people interact on your site,” you’d want to learn more about its ins-and-outs too. That’s why when I do large scale giveaway and contest prospecting, I look for bloggers who have used Rafflecopter in the past. But the actual Rafflecopter widget isn’t indexable, so how do you find it?

Here’s How to Find and Wield the Rafflecopter Footprint.

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Here’s a step by step process to cut down Link Prospector exports to just the meat and potatoes

Image via Flickr user Paul Keller

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I have a tool crush on Screaming Frog. I consider it one of the keys to scalability and I don’t know what I would do without it. Dan Sharp deserves a medal because his tool has saved SEOs countless hours of manual work. Screaming Frog can be used for a variety of things, but my new favorite use is for identifying  internal link building opportunities.

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I am not a fan of directories. They don’t feel like something Google would want you to do, but – they aren’t against the rules (yet) and they are a valuable provider of anchor text, so I’ll use them. Many agencies have coveted list of free and cheap directories that they will submit their clients to, but since Google has deindexed numerous directories in the last year you can’t rely on dated internal lists of once valuable directories.

Image Courtesy of Flickr User xrayspx

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Everyone makes typos, including respected webmasters and journalists. If you are link building for brands you need to be two things – scalable and efficient. You can’t spend your time emailing individual sites who may or may not be interested in your content – you need wins. You can either create engaging content and make people want to link to you… or if you are a big enough brand you can find the people who meant to link to you.

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