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Two heads are better than one. How many times have we all heard that in our lives?  When having a brainstorming session, it helps to bounce ideas off of one another to generate the best possible solution. Even when saving the world, is it always important to have a sidekick. Or a team of sidekicks.

The same is true of link building teams. It can be considered a general rule of thumb to say “the more, the merrier” when it comes to the size of a team working on link building, social media and content promotion. An experienced team working together will generate far more inbound links and traffic to the target website than just one person – bent over a desk, Red Bull in hand, click-clacking away on the keyword.

When it comes to link building for clients, there are two important questions:

Q: Who knows the client’s business best?

A: The Client. Hands down.

Q: Who knows link building and online promotions best?

A: The SEO Agency. Hands down.

One popular misconception is that some companies think it is a good idea to take their SEO and link building 100% in-house. On the surface, this might seem logical. However, the cost of hiring an entry-level person to take on this brand new role, learn and experiment with it on company time is just as high as pulling a seasoned marketing pro away from their traditional marketing job and training them up on SEO. Training seminars and conferences offer robust information, but without experience, the practical SEO knowledge won’t be there until months or years down the road.

Hiring an experienced agency to tackle SEO content promotion and linking needs is roughly equivalent to  one or two entry-level employees’ salary. With a SEO agency, the client will receive years of SEO, link building and online marketing experience from a team of experienced professionals.

The company also benefits from the knowledge SEO agency staff gain by working on many different clients in many different industries. Agencies (like TopRank) are prone to allocating budget and staff to staying up to date on current trends and tactics. The output of that experimentation is information passed along to the client to benefit their SEO and online promotions campaigns.

By conducting training sessions with clients on fundamental linking efforts, the client gains a bit of experience and appreciate. Feeling involved in what is working from a linking perspective reinforces that they are getting their money’s worth from their SEO agency.

“Two heads are better than one”: When both client and agency are working their link building and online promotions magic, everyone wins!

As an example, recent training sessions with one of our clients has measurably contributed to the number of inbound links and online brand awareness achieved. Sites we’ve targeted with online promotions have become the top referring sources of traffic and have stayed there for months.

In another example, we conducted link building and content promotion training with a large client, who was very grateful to have the knowledge and to understand the backbone of what our agency were doing.

When it came down to it, the client was wearing too many hats to take on linking and content promotion.  After budget meetings, presentations, product updates, traditional marketing and advertising, the client was all too happy to turn the link building efforts back over to us and we were more than willing to complete it. Client meetings go a bit smoother as the in-house team better understands exactly what we are doing for them and what it takes to complete.

By overseeing all linking efforts, the SEO agency brings in unique experience and the up-to-date knowledge of what is hot in the online marketing industry. The client gains knowledge and a bit of experience themselves. With our powers combined, client and agency can tackle most any linking obstacle.

Sponsored By: Start a Career in Search Marketing Announcing the best online SEM courses from SEMPO Institute.

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Agency + Client = Superhero Link Building Team

Yesterday, Junta 42 announced their latest list of top content marketing focused blogs (Online Marketing Blog came in at #2 in between Copyblogger and PR 2.0) and it reminded me yet again of how important content is for SEO. It used to be when discussing search engine optimization services 5-6 years ago, we’d focus on keyword optimization of content and getting links as independent tactics. Today, it’s a different story.

Of course many of the basics of SEO still apply, such as keyword research, on-page optimization of existing content and solving crawling issues. But attracting links and creating new content are no longer separate tasks. They’re interdependent.

The success formula for content centered link building is simple:

• Establish distribution channels such as blog/RSS, email list, social networks, social content
• Plan content creation with the audience and keywords in mind
• Promote the content socially, via email, RSS or other outbound methods
• Watch the links roll in

It’s also important to monitor interactions with the content being promoted in order to secure additional links either through commenting on blogs or participating in discussions that have been instigated by what you’re promoting.

There’s a lyric from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” that reminds me of the interplay between content and link building. “If you don’t create useful content, you won’t attract any links. How can you attract links if you don’t have content worth linking to?”.

Take the desire for higher search engine rankings and traffic out of the picture and it still makes sense to focus on content that’s good enough to share and to inspire others to link to. Whether you drive traffic to the site from offline marketing programs, paid search advertising or social media promotions, you still have to “deliver the goods” once visitors get to the web site.

At the same time a site is evaluated or “scored” for search engine readiness, the opportunity to create a content promotion program tied into the marketing plan is what gives a web site a competitive advantage for both promotion and link building. Planning, creating and promoting content of particular use and interest to a target audience is a far cry from sprinkling keywords on web pages and submitting to directories.

Companies venturing into the SEO world are in fact, venturing into the content marketing world. It’s the reality of how both search engines and consumers will best respond to web site marketing efforts. Great content is an essential part of effective link building and even more so if you have content distribution channels established.

In other words, creating useful content should be followed by promoting that content to facilitate distribution and awareness. Publishers (MSM, blogs, web site owners, etc) aren’t going to link to content they don’t know about. Seems pretty logical but many online marketers seem to be stuck like a record on “create great content and links will come naturally”. Good luck with that in any competitive category.

Focusing on a success formula that ties new content creation with the advertising/PR/communications that are part of a normal company marketing plan into SEO, social marketing and content distribution channels is a link building win all around: consumers, search engines and the company.

Sponsored By: Learn SEM Secrets - SMX Advanced Seattle, June 3-4, 2008

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Tips on Content Centered Link Building