Link Building for Highly Competitive Markets – Jane Copland

Key Speaker Jane Copland gives us a sneak preview of her session: Link Building for Highly Competitive Markets and shares a useful survival tip for a4uexpo.

1. What is your session covering and why is it important for our delegates?

My session is covering some of the fundamental errors that people make in link building campaigns, including issues surrounding anchor text distribution, rate of acquisition, the area of a website from which people mistakenly source links, and the sort of websites people target for links. Websites focused on affiliate marketing often do not have a strong brand on which to fall back. Search engines, especially Google, tend to place a significant amount of value in domains whose brands are strong, so those sites that do not enjoy the brand equity of an internationally recognisable company need to compensate with very high quality, cautious link building. Often, the viability of an affiliate site rests on its links, and it is especially important not to make mistakes with link building in the early stages of a campaign.

2. What can delegates expect to learn? Why should they choose you? And what will be the key take aways?

The majority of my marketing experience has been in competitive markets, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the most experienced people in the SEO community. I think that one important thing regarding link building is to dispel myths surrounding the practice, such as the idea that you need many hundreds of thousands of links in order to even make a dent in a competitive industry. It’s important to understand that myths like this can hurt you more than they help, as they often lead to gross over-optimisation and obvious foot-printing.

3. During your session what question would you ask other panelists or yourself if you were in the audience?

I think there is a lot of contention around what constitutes a useful link. For example, obtaining unoptimised links is part of a good link building campaign, but what counts as an unoptimised link? If a site obtains a large number of links that are images, do these “count”? Do they hurt? Do they help? I think this is an area where we should do more testing. Although we know that text links are best, little research has been done in the helpfulness or harmfulness of alternative forms of linking. In addition, Google is now executing javascript: how does this affect link building? Do links within javascript help / hurt?

4. If you had to pick one other session from the agenda, which one would you choose?

Disable wifi during sessions. I have a bad tendency to be distracted by email, IM, Facebook, etc. Don’t let the Internet get in the way of learning about the Internet.