Link builders are a strange breed of people. The best possess an almost zen like ability to visualize link opportunities, and turn them into a reality.
Sure, link building involves, what might seem to the casual observer, monotonous grunt work. But to the Link Builder (aka Link Ninja), the hunt for links is thrilling! Each one is a small challenge, and when achieved, leads to a feeling of satisfaction.
Of course, finding great Link Ninja’s is not easy at all. Often times they might be completely disguised as a regular person! Other times, you might be in the midst of a link Jedi, who doesn’t even know the power they possess!
As a guide, there are 5 key personality traits of great link builders. Keep these in mind as you interview candidates for your next SEO gig.
1. Outgoing – some of the greatest links come as a result of personal connections. There are loads of social tools online nowadays, and great link builders can use those tools to foster real personal connections with other people around the world.
2. Strategic – Sometimes, the best links take the greatest effort to achieve. A great link builder has an inate ability to formulate a plan to get even the best of links.
3. Energetic – Link building can be like running a marathon every day. The most competitive keywords require hundreds or thousands of high quality links to achieve rankings. An energetic link ninja never tires of hunting for that next great link.
4. Analytical – There are lots of great tools available to help link builders find their next link. But, often times, these link building tools, like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO present you with a mass of data. A link ninja needs to be able to sift through the data, and come up with a good link building plan.
5. Organized – As mentioned above, there’s no shortage of data and reports involved in link building. Keeping track of link building efforts is key to maximum productivity.
Preparing for your link building project
Of course, when you finally find your link ninja, you’re going to want to make sure they have the tools they need to be successful. With the right tools, an average link builder and be good, and a great link builder can be awesome!
First of all, your going to want to make sure they have a proper knowledge of the link building process. While there are plenty of tutorials and training guides about SEO and search engine marketing, the guides on pure link building are few and far between. But thanks to the awesome team at SEOMoz, there are at least a few guides to get started:
Next, you’ll want to arm your link builder with link data, to snoop on the links of your competition. Sometimes seeing the links of your competition can give you an idea why they were able to achieve the rankings that you’re trying to get. Google used to share this data openly with their link: operator command, but stopped giving that away years ago. A few services of varying reliability have stepped up to fill the void. Here are a few that you should take a look at:
Open Site Explorer – a great free tool from SEO Moz. More data is available with a pro membership from SEO Moz.
Majestic SEO – they claim to be the worlds most comprehensive source of link information. Tons of data available here, with plans starting at about $50 a month.
Yahoo Site Explorer – the old standby, still available as of July 2011. It’s free, and lists lots of useful links data – but it’s also going away soon. Enjoy it while you can.
Finally, before you hire a link builder, you’ll want to make sure that you have a good tracking and reporting system in place. You’ll want to know everywhere your link builder went to add a link, and whether or not it was successful. The simplest way of making reports is to use a spreadsheet. List every link opportunity, some notes, and the status of the link.
If you don’t mind paying for a good tool, we recommend Raven SEO Tools Link Manager system. They have one of the only SEO link building tools we’ve seen, and it’s a good one. It works as a browser plugin. Any time your link builder gets a new link, they mark it with the browser plugin. At the end of the day, their reports are automatically created, saving time, and improving accuracy! In addition, the status of your links are monitored and automatically updated every month.
Remember in the long run with link building, it’s quality that counts more over quantity. You can use some short term tricks to boost up your rankings really fast. But the only sure way to ensure rankings over the long term is to create great online content, and develop links to it from a wide variety of sites around the Internet.
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