expertSEM

Chris Silver Smith, KeyRelevance — Chris started off by saying he wasn’t going to talk about super flashy link building strategies (opposed to his super flashy shirt! great choice, I love it!). Instead, he focused on somewhat more mundane strategies, but ones that really work. Here are a few key points from Chris’s section:

• Get .edu links
• Get links from public domain content — fed and state government, wikimedia commons, Gutenberg
• Get private domain content links — copyrighted works (fair use, of course), Open APIs
• Get links from blog bling (I usually call these things flair, but I think I’m going to start using this from now one. Yea, alliteration!) — create useful widgets and gadgets, badges and ratings

Keep in mind the widget dos:

• provide widget on same site it’s linking to
• create widgets thematically related to site where possible
• provide clear legal terms stating that links are included
• provide layout/color options
• keep branding minimal
• provide easy to instal code
• promote widgets

And widget don’t:

• hide links
• bury mention of links in legalese
• include ads/pop ups

Hamlet Batista, RankSense — Hamlet titled his specific session “Covert Link Building Tactics,” highlighting  his advice to use outside the box approaches. He offered four tactics to get valuable links:

1. Forget the toolbar page rank; now it’s all about the Google cache dates — since the engines only have a limited time to crawl, they must prioritize crawling and ranking; the sites they crawl first and most often are those that are updated more frequently
2. Inform your subscribers (don’t spam)
3. Share interesting video content — don’t overlook that link building is PR/branding effort
4. Include links inside other docs–PDFs, Flash, other media types–these are treated the same and most people don’t think to use them

Arnie Kuenn, Vertical Measures — Always start with a joke. Not everyone can pull off this adage, but Arnie did. Asking the audience how many hated link building, he took a photo of his hot “prospects.” We all had a laugh, then got serious to discuss Arnie’s helpful link building strategies. He named four categories of sources for links:

1. Video — convert PPTs to videos (free or inexpensive); YouTube — make sure you add “http:”
2. Content & Profiles — many free places to create profiles, and many do allow dofollow links
3. Clients & Suppliers — (requesting links) exchange for gift cards, discounts; ask through snail mail letter (it would stand out since no one mails anymore), use the phone (man, this guy’s so old school!); get involved with local/national organization and ask for link
4. Contests & Promos — make prize valuable, something reasonably innovative, set a reasonable time frame, create buzz, optimize every page

That’s it for the recap of day one. Off to Matt Cutt’s keynote and then (finally!) happy hour. Check back tomorrow for more info about sessions.