Organising Your Link Building Campaigns

For me link building is one of the most time consuming and important aspects of an SEO campaign. This is because as SEO’s we have to spend considerable amounts of time identifying and approaching relevant link targets.

Many people find link building frustrating and laborious. This is often because there approach lacks direction and organization. A well-organized link building campaign improves both efficiency and performance. In this blog post I hope to share some ideas as to how to effectively organize a link building campaign.

The first step of a link building campaign is to identify potential targets. This can be achieved in many different ways. I personally like to start by using tools such as SEO Spy Glass to analyze my competitors back links. I can then look at which ones link to several competitors and which provide real value. The next step would then be to store this information.

Now most people like to store this information in spreadsheets and apply filters and sort mechanisms. This approach makes good sense however it takes careful planning and you need to know exactly what information you will need to store. The setup process can also be lengthy. I personally recommend using a tool like Raven SEO. This organizes your link data for you, lets you categorize and tag it and provides active monitoring. It essentially provides a more complete solution.

Of course link building is an ongoing process and SEO’s need to find ways to regularly identify new link targets. One great way to do this is use RSS feeds. You can use these to monitor mentions of your brand name and sites talking about your sector. RSS feeds are great because you will often find sites that are talking about your brand but are not linking to you. Once you identify these sites you can drop them a quick email. Social mention and Google Reader are ideal for such activities.

Ok, so now that you have some opportunities for identifying new link targets you need to think about how you organise and approach links. Some links are more valuable than others. So do you go for the low hanging fruit first or approach the big players? Whichever you decide you need to record the approaches you make. You don’t want to make an approach twice and you will want to record the outcome of your approaches. If you find a large number of them are failing then you might want to re-think your strategy.

Having good contacts is also an important part of link building and social media. Building up a network of people who can help you share your content can be extremely valuable. For example if you release an article and it’s picked up by some really good sites you could try and develop a relationship with them. You could then provide them with any content you create and generate new relevant links. Storing the information in one easy to access place can make life much easier. A central spreadsheet can be good for this.

Alerts and reminders can also be used to good effect in link building campaigns. You could set completion dates or reminders of when to send approaches. This why you can ensure that approaches are made in a timely fashion and you can see how many link attempts you made in a month.

Above I have described a few ways in which you can generate new link data however storing that information can cause problems. This is because there is so much of it and you need to be able to track where you are up to. In the past I have used spreadsheets to do this however I found it was sometimes difficult to keep track of different tabs and activities. I like the automated approach where I am reminded when certain activities should be carried out.

There are some great tools out there which not only track your link building activities but also many other areas of your SEO campaigns. Having a central repository can be extremely useful and save a great deal of time. As mentioned earlier I like Raven SEO Tools but there are plenty of others out there. What ever approach you take make sure you have a clear plan and maintain your data well.

Mark Mayne

Mark is the owner of Mayhem, a UK search marketing blog, and works for a UK-based SEO company PushON. Mark has been in the industry for over two and a half years and runs a multitude of websites.