We are kicking the guest post series about Integration off today with no other than Julie Joyce! Julie has been ‘a friend’ of State of Search for a while now, with her background of being an SEO Chick. And we couldn’t think of a better person to start this off with than Julie. She will be writing about integration and link building. Enjoy!

Now that we’ve all diversified, now that we’re link building experts or guest posting gurus or forensic SEOs or branding evangelists or PPC maestros, it’s time to stop specializing in Caribbean women’s menopausal health science and start being general doctors again, able to diagnose any issue or at least find somewhere to put you until we find someone to fix your problem. We need to become integration masters.

From a link building perspective, integration makes a lot of sense. As I’ve said (too often, I’m afraid) link building can only do so much. I’d be a crap link builder if I didn’t realize that. I’m lucky enough to have had a background that let me learn many pieces of the puzzle so that probably gives me a different perspective on all this, as when I started doing SEO I had to do it all from site architecture and coding to running the PPC ads. That isn’t the case with many people starting out today, as they can come in and quickly get slotted into an area, not needing to do anything else. If you’re specializing in building links, or any other specialty, while I don’t think you have to know how to do everything else, i do think that it’s critical that you at least recognize the need for integration and that you familiarize yourself with the basics of both what needs to be done, and who can do it if you cannot. (more…)