I’ve spent the past few days in the motherland (Norway for those of you that don’t know I’m a Viking…how could you have missed it). This is the second time I’ve spoken at SEM Konferansen and it’s fantastic to see the growth in the search market both from an interest in search and number of agencies popping up since the last time I was here. It’s such a great conference to attend and INMA (the Norwegian IAB) does a great job at organising a really good quality conference, in fact I believe a few of the larger conference series could learn a thing or two from these guys. Well done Ola!

Norway is relatively new onto the SEO scene and for me, as a proud Norwegian, it’s very important that my fellow Norwegians gets it right from the word go. So this time I chose to speak about Successful Link Development. I actually changed the title to Successful Off Page Optimisation in the end as I wante to include social signals, as in my opinion this will be more and more important going forward, we are not only building links but mentions. As a self proclaimed white hat, I do white hat link development (maybe the occasional grey) and although my black hat friends might say this is naive, it works, we’ve done very successful link development with the techniques showed in this presentation. Link development doens’t always need to be shady, it’s simply a way of marketing your site with the purpose of generating links as well as traffic. Unless you do SEO for one of the 3 P’s, or insurance keyterms for example, where I think it’s difficult to get top rankings without maybe buying a link or two.  In the presentation below I’ve shared Verve Searches most used link development techniques, given a few examples and given a picture of the results. To contriary belief, link devleopment doesn’t need to be difficult, often there are opportunities to be had that are quite easy to negotiate. (more…)