What does link building have to do with marketing? For folks who don’t spend much time immersing themselves in the intersections between emerging technology and marketing, the answer can be elusive, and in truth, it’s probably best left to the nerds – like me. So, as the resident SEO nerd in the Marketing Program I assure you, link building is VERY important to the portion of the integrated marketing plan that resides online!
A great link profile can lead to better results in organic search, which can lead to more traffic to a website, which then leads to increased brand awareness, and then hopefully will lead to increased customer conversion rates. With a strong link profile on a business website and best practice link building methodology to back up existing and future initiatives, any online campaign can receive an enormous bump in its effectiveness and outcomes. On the other hand, without a good link profile and link building methodology an online campaign can flounder, or worse, be DOA as soon as it drops online.
There are of course right and wrong ways to go about a link building campaign, as was recently illustrated by the JC Penney debacle. JC Penney involved itself in some seedy link building strategies. The company was able to generate an effective (though not ideal) inbound link profile, they did receive more traffic and brand awareness, and in the end they generated many sales despite their argument to the contrary. However, the result was penalization by Google, and the company paid the price for their link building transgressions.
Below Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz gives a short presentation on how the wrong kind of link building strategy can lead to strong penalties being leveraged against a website. If you are unfamiliar with the SEOmoz blog, the website is a good source for information on search engine optimization and I highly recommend it.
4 Responses
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Lynn Smaagaard Says:
It appears that authenticity is still the best policy. Have a vision and purpose and stay the course.
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Judelia Says:
Frightful to say the least! What’s the world coming to when JC Penny’s may indeed be wearing the ‘black hat’ of SEO! On the other hand this whole social media thing has come seemingly “out of the blue” and taken over like… dare I say “a tsunami”! And while the “good/bad” practices are out there… the laws will take years to catch up. So my questions is… can we police ourselves? After all, who wants to wear a ‘black hat’?
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Judelia Says:
Frightful to say the least! What’s the world coming to when JC Penny may indeed be wearing the ‘black hat’ of SEO! On the other hand this whole social media thing has come seemingly “out of the blue” and taken over like… dare I say “a tsunami”! And while the “good/bad” practices are out there… the laws will take years to catch up. So my questions is… can we police ourselves? After all, who wants to wear a ‘black hat’?
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Randy Says:
Measuring Social Media: Who Has Access to the Firehose? http://on.mash.to/hA6Qvm
Posted: 13 Mar 2011 08:23 PM PDT
At SXSW 2011, I moderated a panel titled “Measuring Social Media – Let’s Get Serious,” with the goal of having a frank discussion about the realities, pratfalls and opportunities for individuals and marketers tasked with managing social media and measuring social media ROI.
During the Q&A session of the panel, a audience member from Porter Novelli asked Kevin Weil, product lead for revenue at Twitter, a pointed and direct question that cuts to the core of the conversation surrounding social media measurements: Who has access to the data?
In the case of Twitter, the company offers free access to its API for developers. The API can provide access and insight into information about tweets, replies and keyword searches, but as developers who work with Twitter — or any large scale social network — know, that data isn’t always 100% reliable. Unreliable data is a problem when talking about measurements and analytics, where the data is helping to influence decisions related to social media marketing strategies and allocations of resources.
The question that the audience member asked — and one that we tried to touch on a bit in the panel itself — was who has access to this raw data. Twitter doesn’t comment on who has full access to its firehose, but to Weil’s credit he was at least forthcoming with some of the names, including stalwarts like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo — plus a number of smaller companies.
