SES Amsterdam: Link Building with Dixon Jones

At the SES Amsterdam Receptional and MajesticSEO Marketing chief Dixon Jones talked about Link Building. After talking about the basics only a few minutes, he gave the audience some actionable insights in link building.

The basics of link building
First of all you have to decide if you need links for traffic or for seo. Social media are very good links, no matter if they are nofollowed or not. The best link for SEO is:
-       An „in content“ link
-       With a relevant anchor text
-       On a good page which has Backlinks itself.
-       The link is followed by Google
-       The Link is not redirected
-       The Link is cached by Google

Actionable insights
After these general basics of link building Dixon continues with some tricks and tools he uses:
1. Visualizing Anchor Texts
Dixon suggests to use TagCrowd to visualize your anchor texts

2. Link reclamation
Many site owners make the mistake that they are not using existing linkjuice in the right way. To find this free available linkjuice you should find all your url’s that have backlinks. You can use a tool like MajesticSEO to do so.
When you have all your url’s, take them and check the headers. You can use Dixon’s free tool to do so: http://labs.receptional.com/bulk-http-status
Now take all pages with a „wrong“ redirect 302 or 404 pages and redirect them in a proper way.

3. Analyze your competitors
Put all your competitors’ backlinks in a database filtering out deleted links, framed links and mentions. Then filter out all pages with no inbound links themselves. In the next Step bring your data up to date by validating each link reported if it still exists and split the links in SEO links and affiliate links (if there are any). Now sort the SEO links you get by quality and do a write up of the main links.

4. Targeting link intersects
Linkhubs are very important for your link building. First of all probably your competitors have a link from these hubs and second of all in general it’s more easy to get a link from a hub. To find a hub Dixon suggests to use MajesticSEO and Excel, SEOmoz Linkscape or Hubfinder.

5. Prioritizing tasks
For Link Management Dixon suggests to use Lotus Jump or Raven Tools.

6. The short url dilemma
Short url’s are getting more and more important. With „hosted“ url shorteners you don’t have control over your anchor text and you are not the owner. Use your own shortener if you have the possibility.

Related posts:

1. Linkbuilding Tactics, Tools and Traps: Wise Words from Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO
2. Live interviews from A4UExpo: Kevin Gibbons, Dave Reynolds and Dixon Jones
3. How Building your Social Connections is like Link Building
4. SES San Francisco 2010: Link Building Basics
5. Link building do’s and dont’s: when to Hold and Fold