By Chris Lee

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and page rank are top priorities for today’s marketers. A whole new industry of search marketing consultants has taken root in the last few years to help companies of all sizes develop their search marketing potential. One of the most well known of these is Brighton-based search marketing firm Site Visibility, which works with a wide variety of brands to help their search marketing and social media needs.

Link building is core to overall website performance and NMK’s Chris Lee met up with Site Visibility’s creative director, Kelvin Newman, to learn more.

Link building: What is it in a nutshell and what impact does it really have on your traffic?

There are two sides to SEO: There’s what you can do to your site – that’s where you put your keywords, making sure your site’s not all in flash so Google can’t read it and all that sort of thing. But really that’s only a ticket to the race, that doesn’t mean you’ll win it. Link building determines who will get to the top of the pile.

In the simplest of terms, the more people who ‘vote’ for you via giving you a link – their vote of recommendation – the better you tend to do in the search engines. That’s what link build is - getting those trusted mentions, hopefully getting more traffic on the right terms which leads to more business.

How does one go about a link building programme?

Well, there’s 101 different ways to go about link building and each of those will depend on the organisation in question. It’s good to look at your competitors who are doing well in search results and see what areas of strength they’ve got.

There are four things you really need to achieve in a link portfolio and different links will fulfil a number of the four.

The first one is authority links: a link from the BBC is better than a link from my blog, for example, but a link from my blog is better than a link from a spam website and it’s a descending scale from there.

The next thing we look for is anchor text. There’s the classic example of the Google bomb ‘miserable failure’, where hundreds of thousands of bloggers linked to George W Bush’s biography on the White House website using the words ‘miserable failure’ and because Google judges what a website is about based on the words that people use to physically link to you they made that site rank for that. [Google has] turned that down in the last couple of years.

There are two other things. ‘Volume’ - the site with the most links tends to do better than those with less links, but Google’s also looking at the ‘velocity’. Say you’ve got 100 links but you’ve only been around six months and there’s another site that has a thousand links but haven’t got any in the last four years, Google is going to want to return your site because you’re growing in popularity. They’re looking for what’s topical.

Is it time consuming?

Different tasks take different amounts of time. One of the things that we find that works well is just producing good content and seeding that to people. For example, if you sell holidays to South Africa and there’s a blogger developing a guide to the World Cup and you produce a guide for them on the best hotels to stay near the stadiums and then work with them to put that live on their site, then that’s a link back to your site that’s about South African holidays. That’s anchor text, but the perfect link sends traffic as well, it’s not just for search engine purposes. That’s content exchange.

There are more straight forward things such as directory submission and article syndication. I really like back link analysis. So if you’ve got a big competitor down the road then look at who’s linking to them and ask them if they’d like to link to you as well.

How do you measure results?

That’s one of the biggest challenges in link building. It crosses over with PR (public relations) in some ways, but there’s the simple sense of ‘is your website doing better in the search engines’, but there are cleverer ways to measure.

There’s a great tool from Yahoo called Yahoo Site Explorer, if you just put in your Web address there you can see who’s linking to you. Google Webmaster Tools also give you an account of your links. You can look at them on a month-by-month basis and see if that number’s going up and if those are links from people you trust.

Alexa and Compete make similar tools but Yahoo’s is the easiest and most reliable to use.

Let’s talk about ethics. A lot of people use mass article publishing sites to generate links. Do Google penalise you? What should you avoid?

The biggest mistake that people can make is trying to find a quick fix to this. Sites that promise you a thousand links for $20, that’s never going to work. Another thing is link buying where people say; ‘no one’s going to link to me, I’m going to just bribe people to link to me’. Quite a lot of money changes hands over this and Google hates it, it’s against their guidelines. Sites like Go Compare have been banned for this in the past. ‘Don’t do it’ is the safe option. Buying links is a no-go for Google.

Any other hints and tips?

There are some great blogs out there. We try to do our best at Site Visibility, but also there’s SearchEngineLand.com and SEOMoz.org, they do some great posts on SEO generally but also are really hot on link building side of things as well.

To hear the full podcast interview please visit the author’s RunMarketing blog.