Link Building and What it Means
Sunday, May 13th, 2007
I recently was present with this question… “How do you measure link building success and effectiveness?” The marketing world is filled with various metrics. Quantifying SEO can be challenging and you’ll see why. An easy answer would be for me to say by search rank improvement or click traffic. Unfortunately, it is a little harder then that because these are moving targets ever changing which means nobody knows where they are headed. A link that is giving me or my client’s page one rank today might stop helping tomorrow. This is why you can’t count on the algorithms of tomorrow, because they are always changing. In addition the click traffic you get from social media sites such as “Digg” or “Stumble Upon” will decompose over time.
For every online promotion there is somebody somewhere wanting to measure it from basic questions to hardcore metrics. Questions like did it work? How? In what way? And why? Why didn’t it work? Do you think we can make it work? For many they want a solid measure for ROI. This is the hard part, because it’s easier to measure for some online marketing promotions then others. When it comes to measuring marketing effectiveness such as email, PPC campaigns, banner ads and various media buys it can be tested, tweaked measured, re-measured and compared to other past marketing campaigns.
However link building is a different kind of animal, measuring ROI is much more difficult. In order to measure it you end up having to employ linking strategy that are ineffective, but are measurable.
An example is buying a link building package from a link broker. A link broker is a service where you will get x number of links for y number of dollars. That’s an ROI you can measure. The problem is most of these links are not relevant to your content, its subject, intended audience and purpose. This does not make packaged link building services bad or wrong, it makes them somewhat ineffective.
In house link building is where you find sites that are truly relevant to your content. The real value of any link must is proportionate to how much work I had to do to identify and evaluate its potential, plus the work the webmaster of the other website had to do in order to add my link on their page. Yes there are a handful of exceptions, but let’s keep it “White Hat” for now. With that said, true value link building requires spending serious time doing research and web surfing to find the most relevant and legitimate websites to obtain a link from. Then you have no assurance you will even get the link. The other webmaster of said site has to make a qualitative decision about whether or not you website deserves a link or how much to charge you for said link.
When it comes to SEO and link building it very much part science and part feeling. Who’s to say what a proper link building package should be for one site versus another site? What’s the magic number of inbound links to get you placed on page one of Google? How many PR 5 sites lining to yours will help you move up the SE rankings. Some links that send you absolutely zero click traffic will have tremendous impact on your search rank, and some links do nothing to help your search rank but send you a steady flow of targeted click traffic. But which ones and how many and how do you get them and how long will it take?
These are just some of the innate challenges of measuring link building accurately. I know it’s frustrating and I know we all long for spreadsheets and charts and graphs that always go upwards and to the right. But don’t let the pursuit of statistical satisfaction get in the way of the reality, and don’t believe bundled and packaged link building approaches will be the key to your success.