Every Link Builder Needs To Know

Like it or not, link building has been and still is big, big business. Doing it well takes a lot of time and resources, which means that many webmasters/site owners can’t or don’t want to do it themselves. Many agencies that handle other aspects of search engine marketing want to outsource it simply because of the massive resource drain.

That’s great news for people like me who specialize in link building but the intense supply and demand nature of links coupled with the ease of promoting yourself through social media have led to a frightening increase in people who build bad links and really have no idea what they’re doing.

As link building is considered an offpage tactic, to actually sell yourself as a link builder, you don’t have to do very much. People are desperate for help.

However, it’s better to build no links than it is to embark upon a link building campaign that is full of nothing but spam that you will pay for twice: once when you put it up there, once when you have to remove it. If you’re shopping for link builders, make sure that the one you go with knows most of the following.

1.  Why Links Matter

There’s no way to describe that quickly here but if you don’t know why links are important, you shouldn’t be building them alone. Links are how users and search engine spiders move around the internet and they give clues to what the linked-to content is about.

2.  HTML Code For Text & Image Links

For a good reference you can visit http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp but generally, it’s pretty darned easy stuff:

3.  How To Read A Robots.txt File

These can be tricky and you’ll see a lot of robots files that are coded incorrectly, so if you’re unsure of how to read one, there are a few good validators that are online. (I usually gravitate towards http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml.)

Robots files are always named robots.txt and are always found at the root, which means you can always access them at yoursite.com/robots.txt. If one doesn’t exist, well, you just won’t see one. That’s not a problem, but if one is there, make sure it’s valid.

Here’s the code you want to really watch out for:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

That tells the search engines to go away when they show up. People commonly use this when they don’t have a development/test environment so that they can code live but not have the site get indexed. That’s ok if it’s how you want to work, but remember to remove that exclusion when you do want the engines to index you.

If your site has recently disappeared, check the robots.txt immediately. You can also block engines using the method listed below.

4.  How To Check For Robots Blocking Outside Of The Robots.txt File

There are some intricacies involved with using this method so it’s a good idea to read what Google has to say about blocking robots here.
If your site has just disappeared and you have checked the robots.txt file and it’s all fine and dandy, check to see if this line is in your code:

5.  How To Use WordPress

As one of the most common blogging platforms, you should familiarize yourself with it. It’s quite user-friendly in my opinion but there are tons of tutorials out there. However, like with many things, it’s something you can learn best by actually setting up a site and using it.

If you don’t want to use WordPress, that’s fine – just learn how to set up a basic site on a popular platform. Here’s why I think this is so important for link building: once you are intimately involved in the innards of a site, you do start to think more critically about SEO, content creation, and usability. Those are all aspects of marketing that aren’t always involved with link building, but they should be.

6.  How To Do A Link Audit

Don’t wait to audit your links until you get a warning letter from Google. Check and see what’s there right now. There are some great free tools that will give you a list of your back links so use them. You won’t always get all the functionality that you need from free tools and free versions of tools so if you’re doing a decent amount of link building, you should probably invest in at least one major paid link tool.

Grab your data and start to analyze it whether you can export it or you have to copy and paste it. You need to know how to look at your profile as a whole, break it down into different parts (like percentages of sitewides, money keywords, etc.) and actually look at the sites in the report and evaluate whether or not that link is a good one.

7.  Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Located here they’re something you should be familiar with, especially if you plan to violate them.

8.  How To Do A Basic Link Check In Various Tools

Don’t limit yourself to one. Some databases are refreshed more often than others, some give you more information that you might ever need, some give you less, etc.

9.  How To Analyze Anchor Text

You need to be able to grab your information and sort the anchors into categories like brand, URL, money keywords, and noise at a minimum.

10.  How To Do Competitive Analysis

I truly don’t think that there’s a better post about this than one written by Jane Copland. Whether you always perform competitive analysis or not, you need to know how to critically analyze your competitors and figure out why they’re doing better than you when they are. Sometimes people only do this when things go wrong, so I suggest you do it when things are going well so you aren’t trying to think critically when you’re in panic mode.

11.  How To Negotiate A Link

Whether it’s through an emailed link request, a phone call, a guest post, a connection on social media, etc. you need to know how to deal with people. Just people this is all online doesn’t mean that you can ignore basic manners and politeness. If you want something specific, lay it out and don’t take 10 emails to say so. If you don’t get what you want, either speak or or shut up and deal with it.

12.  How To Keep Up With Algorithm Updates

If you’re involved in SEO and pay attention online, it’s pretty obvious when a big algorithm update happens. However, if you’re not that involved, SEOMoz has a good list and the Google Webmaster Central Blog does an excellent job of explaining changes. If you notice something odd, just search for “algorithm change” and if there’s anything notable, you’ll see it.

That's all for the day...Will be back with more on the issue..till then Enjoy with lots of fun n music coz it's time to go ahead forgetting all the past failures to retain success.... Happy New Year2013.