10k link budget

[Crush]

How would you allocate a 10k/month link building/seo budget. This is not hypothetical, this is want we want to spend for the next 6 months.

[Crush]

half is going to buy links, what would you do with the rest.

[tangor]

Hire the right kind of people to make it happen... meaning, don't buy links, find the best way to get natural links... which includes methods of presenting, begging, obtaining links...

[KJBweb]

I'd spend that 10k on quality content, innovative user interaction and good branding.

You'd be pissing the money up the wall spending that on links, especially given the recent shake-up.

[Crush]

We have inhouse people, begging sucks, buying is better.

As for content we are an ecommerce company that sells stuff, so we will spend some also on PR. Getting some product placement etc in visible places.

[KJBweb]

I see, in that case AdWords would probably be your best bet though you might find direct media buys (perhaps buysellads.com, etc...) would be much more effective.

That way, you'll not get penalised SEO wise for buying the links purely for SEO.

See the following published yesterday:
[searchengineland.com...]

[Crush]

This is a seperate budget from our PPC department.

[FranticFish]

Never had that much cash to spend, but if I did here's what I'd try.

Spend c£3K on some cool expensive stuff to give away that relates to what you do (three prizes: 1st, 2nd, 3rd) and then spend the rest on publicising the competition plus FB ads.

See if you can leverage the competition to include submission / voting so that you can attract links (or brand mentions) in some way from that. Can you interview your winners and blog about that or get them to do that?

Or if you're doing it for 6 months why not try and work it into some sort of serial competition with a HUGE load of stuff to be won at the end, again leveraged for content/voting/coverage. Spend 60-65% on the prizes and the rest on seed PR to get the message out there.

Say you do travel, then offer a load of free flights / weekend breaks with the condition that your winners keep a Tumblr or similar autoplugged into FB with your brand plastered everywhere. Make it a quiz where people submit answers and then share with their friends via email, Twitter etc.

People love free stuff; I'm sure any business could find a way to leverage a competition for loads of traffic and links. Might be easier if you're B2B rather than B2C, but with that much money to spend I'm sure you could find an angle.

[FranticFish]

This might be too manipulative, but what if...

(a) each competition entry takes the form of some online content (written, photo, video, doesn't matter - whatever's appropriate to your business),

(b) each entry has to be verified by your own bot, so each entrant has to cut and paste code for a banner saying "I've just entered the £3K giveaway on blah.com" which has the unique tracking ID for your bot AND a nice link around it. Don't try to optimise for anchor text, just blast your PR into orbit with thousands of 'natural' links popping up everywhere.

The entries can be posted on their blog, homepage etc.

[martinibuster]

begging sucks, buying is better.

Yes, it can be a slog. But the links, when/if you can acquire them, have a pretty good trust profile. Sometimes the outreach conversion rate can be surprising, particularly if your site offers some kind of advantage over the competition, as well as sprinkle some trust signals to inspire confidence in the site and encourage them to believe that a link to your site belongs in their resources section alongside those of your competitors. Trust signals are typically an award that the site received, some positive press mentions, etc.

Put the trust signal ducks in a row prior to starting a link beg campaign, and that includes the broken link gambit. I wouldn't recommend the link beg otherwise.

[lfgoal]

You'd be pissing the money up the wall spending that on links

Absolutely not true. Relevant links establish relevance and authority.

We have inhouse people, begging sucks, buying is better

Buying doesn't usually get you smell-proof links. Anyone who sells you a link has some capacity for stink, now or in the future

My finishing statement is "What MB said".

[Crush]

Interesting, we have never tried a competition before, but I thought that the internet is full of competition's these days. Too much noise might just get drowned out by all the other free stuff out there.

[CainIV]

Lots of money: Let's Go Shopping!

Pull all inbound links from any competitors from the top 3 inbound link metric tools. Reduce duplicates. Amalgamate results. Run using a simple api script through metrics tools for age, relevancy, pr and other metrics. Sort by strength.

Develop a diverse strategy using queries based on matching company resources. Very Garrett French-esque.

Plan the profile build in advance. In detail. Triple check plan in regards to rate and anchor text variations.

Study % of inbound links to brand name for top ten competitors.

Hire a part time phone person to do outbound calls and write scripts.

Hire a good writer. Allocate $1000 a month to super duper highest quality content.

Use a simple script to mine google for any and all related keywords to your product vertical that relate to blogs. Link bait your content using the phone person

What would Google see as the ideal inbound link profile for a naturally dominant brand in your sector(s)

In terms of specific links I would utilize the funds to develop:

Full local profile links, and even small game "link-less" citations. Match your inbound rate/ profile plan to the exact business name in your profiles. Use the full business name, address and local phone number in the footer of all pages of the website. Spill the business name and phone number any and everywhere relevant.

Paid authority directories. I believe there are truly only 9 of these. Give or take.

Civic and local chamber of commerce links

Links from Manufacturers

Guest post and similar type links so long as they are unmarked

One wave of press releases only

Contextual links from blogs via contests and link bait / viral

Intelligent comment links on relevant websites

Social media links via those accounts

Hope this helps...

[lfgoal]

Great list

Paid authority directories. I believe there are truly only 9 of these. Give or take.

Mind sharing?

[wheel]

Pull all inbound links from any competitors from the top 3 inbound link metric tools. Reduce duplicates. Amalgamate results. Run using a simple api script through metrics tools for age, relevancy, pr and other metrics. Sort by strength.

You forget the extension of that:

- call the top 10 of those and offer them $ to replace the links to your competitors with a link to your site.

[CainIV]

Wheel - nice one. I think that one is very dependent on the ethics of the business, but certainly belongs in this list.

[wheel]

Well, I've never done it, not by type of thing. But I'm reasonably sure that I've had it done to me. And I'm surprised that it worked for even one link. If one's backlinks are high enough quality, then one should be reasonably proof to these things. But nothing's 100%.

As for ethics, if a competitor has a link they paid nothing for, and I pay the site owner $500 for the spot, then I win and the site owner wins by $500 and the competitor sucks at business. That's ethics for you.

Now on the flipside, I came across a dofollow ad today. I was reasonably certain that the ad had probably expired and was simply there because the site owner never took it down. Asked the owner how much to put my link there. Well, turns out the ad wasn't expired yet (I think this may be an interesting tactic - if a link looks old, it may be worth pursuing with a current suggestion) - but they told me not only could I have the ad/link once it did expire, but that I could actually have it for free. So is that a paid link?

[fom2001uk]

lfgoal, the big 2 used to be Yahoo and Business.com but I think they've stopped their paid service now. Others I believe include BOTW, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Ezilon, and Aviva. Can't think of others of top of my head. Maybe CainIV will share ;-)

[pageoneresults]

How would you allocate a 10k/month link building/seo budget. This is not hypothetical, this is want we want to spend for the next 6 months.

There goes your established link profile. So, you're going to go on a mission and distort your existing link profile eh? Okay, be forewarned, you're messing with fire! Take a look at the link profiles of those who have been pandalized. I'm willing to wager that many of them have distorted link profiles due to what you're about ready to do.

$10k per month for links? That money would be better spent elsewhere.

[tec4]

"We have inhouse people, begging sucks, buying is better. "

I'd say that begging does suck but don't look at it as begging, a better term would be networking with people who have authority websites and if you have a 10K/month budget for SEO then you are likely, if you're not already, to be come an authority site as well.

[CainIV]

There goes your established link profile. So, you're going to go on a mission and distort your existing link profile eh?

A link profile only becomes distorted when one does not know the rate and diversity / type of inbound links that need to be built.

It is not budget-dependent.

[martinibuster]

a better term would be networking with people who have authority websites

I agree, that more accurately describes the process, and I initially resisted the phrase. But there's no getting away from it now. In link building parlance, it's commonly referred to as link begging.

[tangor]

it's commonly referred to as link begging

Which is my preferred method, and with 10k/mo to throw at it I have no doubt very creative ways of "begging" can be done... (generally called meet and greet, expense paid lunches, a drop of brew, personal interaction, or "networking"). Those kind of links usually have more punch then whatever you can BUY.

[pageoneresults]

A link profile only becomes distorted when one does not know the rate and diversity / type of inbound links that need to be built.

So tell me, how does one determine this rate and diversity? Do you think the majority of people who embark on these campaigns would be able to determine that?

Take the $10k each month and build something worth linking to. Create applications. Infographics. Contests. Giveaways. Etc...

The last thing you want to do is chase links - they should be chasing you.

One Tweet on Twitter is like sending out 1,000 link requests if you have the right following. Spend your money and your time wisely.

[CainIV]

So tell me, how does one determine this rate and diversity? Do you think the majority of people who embark on these campaigns would be able to determine that?

By analyzing the inbound links of the top 30 competitors in Google.

I don't think the majority of people could do it. Just as I don't believe my friend, who happens to be a carpenter, could launch a website and market it.

But Crush has been in these forums for some time now, and I am assuming he / she understands quite a bit of the information provided.

Creating infographics is already "yesterday" in my opinion.

Infographics don't pay the bills. Sometimes people simply want money.

Just my 0.02

[Crush]

I agree about the banklink profile, it is of a concern to me. Buying too many links from one source is something I need to think about now.

We have an eight year backlink profile of natural linking as well as all the other tricks we have tried along the way.

The obvious one to buy is on topic blogs, it is semi advertising combined with link equity.

To be honest not seeing much movement here now. Sitewides probably not the best.


As far as the viral, linkable stuff goes, we have too many cities/languages to make this pay I think. We would have to do something that made people link to the respective parts of the sites. Not impossible, but really need to put my brain into that one. That one seems difficult but we could try it.

As mentioned, I see page rank ruling once again. We may put a proportion of index/deep links into PR aquisition.-

[Rosalind]

How about organising an event that you can invite all the top bloggers in your niche to? Then they'll have something to write about, and reason to give you lots of natural links.

[fathom]

Put 5K into aftermarket domains (about 8X PR5/PR6 level domains) will do nicely and then say 3K for content development into your own internal blog

Then hire writers to write about your blog content using your newly developed posts as their research material... and post these on your newly acquired domains... referencing your blog posts.

This is just "blogging" no different than when Google or Matt Cutts blogs about something and Search Engine Land or SEOMoz runs with it on their own domains quoting Matt or Google (or a 1000 others quoting/linking to the source).

There's your editorial links... and not a paid link to be found.

There's one part I missed... but if you can't figure that out you shouldn't be doing this yourself.

[Crush]

I guess you mean IP's fathom. We have a load of old domains already, this is actually quite nice, I like it.

[fathom]

Not really ... you don't need to worry about IP's so long as the links are legitimate.

HINT: you don't want advertising links to spoil this... that is, links anchored with the phrases you desire ranks for just because you desire the ranks... it defeats the purpose of doing all this editorializing.

So how do you incorporate advertising links (a.k.a. paid links) without appearing like paid links?