Mel Carson and Michael King discuss link building strategies

Last week we were at the Digital East conference in Washington. As busy as it was, Mel Carson, our US Brand Ambassador, managed to catch up with Michael King.

Together, Mel and Michael discussed the best marketing tactics and approach to making your website visible. Looking at the big picture, they mentioned how link building has progressed over the years with Google Penalties, and offered some consumer insights into how best to achieve a higher Search Engine ranking; whether it be by link analysis, PR coverage, guest posting and so forth. They also touched upon how to judge the quality of your link profile.

Check out their discussion via the video below –

Transcript

Mel Carson

Hello everyone, Mel Carson US brand ambassador for Majestic here at Digital East, with a gentleman that should need no introduction… Michael King!

Wearing a Moz t-shirt, how ironic is that? How you doing mate?

Michael King

I’m fantastic, how are you?

Mel Carson

I’m good thanks, this is such a great conference. We were commenting how you were doing your SEO track yesterday, we’ll talk about that in a minute, but Digital East is really fabulous from the point of view of its kind of different from all the traditional search conferences and there’s a little bit here for everybody.

Michael King

Sure, absolutely, it’s more of a broader digital conference so there’s a lot more conversations around bigger picture ideas than just search, so it’s cool to get out of just search and discuss how we play in the bigger picture.

Mel Carson

So you were telling me yesterday that you’re a paid-up subscriber of Majestic.

You have obviously used it over the years, when we’re thinking about link building now in 2014, with Google penalties and all that kind of stuff, what should be the approach that marketers look to for getting visibility and getting links to your site, because they’re still important right?

Michael King

Absolutely – links are always going to be important. It’s the main measure that separated Google from the other search engines in the past. They’re not going to abandon that ever and I think that realistically at this point it’s more about having multiple tactics, like everybody put their eggs in one basket on the guest posting thing and then as we expected it eventually backfired, so it’s really about having a collection of ways to get links, so if that’s just pure outreach, if it’s getting some PR coverage, if it’s even still doing guest posting but being focused more on the higher quality websites getting placements on.

But the bottom line is that you need to come up with a variety of tactics and again broken link building is a really good one that’s probably the only one that truly scales at this point, and Majestic is a great tool for uncovering those broken links, but ultimately it’s about figuring out multiple ways that we can use to get links so that we’re not just ‘at scale’ buying terrible copy from some of these writing providers and placing it on really bad sites.

It’s more about figuring out what are the best quality sites that are relevant to your space that you can then get a link from using a variety of tactics.

Mel Carson

So when you’re using Majestic how do you use it specifically and what for?

Michael King

One of the first things I do whenever I get a new client is download their entire link profile and then crawl all the linking link targets to make sure that those are all 200’s. If they’re not 200’s hundreds or 301’s then we definitely want to make sure those get updated because they’re that means they’re leaking like link equity that they already have, so fixing that is the first thing that we do.

From there we’ll do a lot of competitive analysis. I really love the Clique Hunter tool to see the different sites that are linking to your competitors that aren’t linking to you, then those are relatively quick hits.

Then we’ll also pull the competitor link profiles and do the same thing for all their link targets to see where their broken links are as well, and then see where we have opportunities to either create a better piece of content or create using existing content on the site, and then reach out to those sites and say ‘hey why don’t you link to us since that other site no longer has that resource’.

Mel Carson

So that helps with analysis and link building, but I find somebody again today at this conference came to us saying ‘you saved our life we were slammed by Google’ and so Majestic is being used in a positive way when the likes of Google is slamming people as well?

Michael King

Absolutely and you know the Citation Flow and Trust Flow metrics are really great to take a quick look to see where you think your issues may be.

So you can prioritize what you need to look through when you’re doing your link audit and something is a really low Trust Flow or Citation Flow then you know we’re like ‘okay let’s check those out by hand before we go looking at everything’.

When we do backlink audits we definitely pull the entire backlink profile and then go from there as far as determining what we need to actually review.

Mel Carson

When people come up to us on the stand and they don’t have that much experience with SEO they know they’ve got to do it and they kind of understand what a link profile is and kind of understand how Google’s or Bing’s algorithm works, where do you suggest that they start and how should Majestic play into those baby steps of then getting a better understanding of SEO and being better at digital marketing?

Michael King

I think the best way to help them understand that concept is to show them the comparison between them and their competitors, because a lot of people come to us and they’ll be like oh well we’re ‘LG we’re really important why don’t we rank for the keyword “TV”? Samsung is beating us across the board’.

So if I can show you the case that they have way more linking root domains, or way more links, then it’s a really clear picture and what is important and why Majestic is important and showing you what’s going on in the space.

So showing them why one of their competitors is beating them and then highlighting those specific metrics is the best way to give them a crash course in what they need to be looking at and why it matters.

Mel Carson

Thanks very much Michael, great session yesterday that you did on SEO here at Digital East and we will be at Digital Dallas later on in the year. Dixon Jones will be with me there so if you like what you’ve heard about this conference, we will see you there in Texas!

Post updated in 2020 to contain transcript. Post Based on earlier work by Nicola Carey.

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