Link Love Boston: When you seek links, you’ll need quality content

Link Love Boston 2012 courtesy of David Zwickerhill Photography

A few talks into the Link Love Boston conference, someone tweeted: “Link Love? More like Content Love.”

Bottom line from Link Love: Invest in content; links are are not what they once were in the SEO realm. Social is where it’s at. And what makes something share-worthy?

Link Love Boston aligned a small galaxy of search marketing superstars, best of all in little ‘ol Boston. Normally, you’d have to trek to New York or San Francisco.

The best part of the day? A single track of presentations. No running across campuses or wondering which presenter will be asleep at the podium.

Highlights from Link Love Boston, featuring Rand Fishkin, Wil Reynolds, Tom Critchlow, and more show links require quality content + social media.

In the SEO battle, CONTENT reigns as king

• Storytelling, belief, trust is what makes us buy. Create content with those aspects!
• You don’t have to limit your content to your work: find what your audience cares about and build community.
  • Tell stories that mean something to your audience, i.e. create cool stuff and they will come.
• The value of a link isn’t based on cost to acquire it.
  • Content wins long-term. You pay upfront rather than paying each month: Google increasingly devaluing links.
  • Content will continue to win sooner, as Google places greater emphasis. How soon until we’re all swimming in content?
• Negative ROI to start, but content always wins over paid links, and it always wins earlier.
• Rather than remove links, need to ensure you have lots of quality to balance out your profile.

Best practices with links

• Quantity quotas diminish quality; this applies to links like everything else.
• We always think in volume. But really, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get if it converts terribly.
• Marketing needs to be holistic and integrated, rather than myopic link-network. Google may catch up to you.
• Cramming your title tag with keywords is bad practice.
• If it looks spammy ultimately cuts down traffic.

Create a content team

• 20 people creating content, 5 people on outreach, 10 people doing design/development.
• Create a new position: A chief content officer can turbocharge results.  She will focus on strategy and make the inflection point happen.
• Make the blogger into a permanent position: It is an important part of branding agenda.

Tactics for creating content-rich links

• Help people get more traffic if they deserve it.
• Find related articles, develop infographics. Reach out to original source & everyone who shared and interacted.
• Rich links help to enhance search engine optimization.
• SEO is half assignment-editing, half circulation.
• SEOs look more like the leaders in digital publishing every day.
• Treat the meta-description like it’s a sales copy: capitalize words, include phone numbers, etc.
• For niche B2B: focus on building thought leadership and experts, PR outreach.
• Don’t cram keywords into titles, make them read like headlines and make sense.

Links tools to consider using on a tight budget

• Rankerizer, Keywordspy – allow you to export to excel and provide excellent analytics.
• LinkDetective – find out how competitors rank.
• LinkResearchTools – compares self to competitors, who’s building links faster.
• Buzzstream – finds contacts for free.

Rethink the way you produce content for Pinterest

• If planned correctly, Pinterest can drive over 100,000 visitors to your site.
• What Pinterest wants: great ideas to guide through life, steps and guides.
• Infographics don’t work as well on Pinterest.
  • Instructographics for Pinterest must be at least 500 pixels wide and max 5,000 pixels long.
  • Ideal graphic size for Pinterest 500 pixels wide by 2,500 long, want them to click through to your site.
• Best time to “Pin It” – 5 AM & 5PM EST.
• If you’re a business, pin IDEAS not products to Pinterest.
• Create attractive images for Pinterest and post to your blog, pin the image to your page.
• Make sure your text is small enough Pinterest visitors have to go to your site to really experience your pin.

These are simply a sampling of Link Love gems. Watch to know more? Check out the Link Love videos. And don’t miss Search Love San Francisco 2012.

Special thanks to @josephschaefer, @fairminder, @randfish, @BigGuyD, @timothyjjensen, @dohertyjf, @sarahbethgo, @shawnccpr, @sicodeandres, @bankonjustin, @seomoz, @foliovision, @JustinMattison, @colbyalmond,  for their insights!