 You have to understand as a marketing director, what is link building and why is it important? Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where we share marketing agency insights, best practices, and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder of Slam Agency. We have offices in St. Louis in Miami. And today I want to share with you, I want to take you back a little bit and talk to you about the basics of link building. So I built my first website in 1999. Now this was pre WordPress, pre HubSpot. This was way, way back in the day. Actually, Google came out in 1998. And here I am building my first website. So if you want to know what this website was for, it was for a mobile disc jockey business. I was in college at the time. I was in my third year. And at this point, I was completely out of money. All of my credit cards were maxed. And so, you know, I picked up the phone. I was going to do this mobile disc jockey business. And I picked up the phone. I called the yellow pages. And I said, how much would it be to place an ad in the yellow pages? And I think they said like $500. And I was just, my jaw dropped. I was like, there's no way in the world that I can pay $500 for a yellow pages ad. So what did I do? I decided to investigate this thing called websites, figured out, taught myself how to do it. Actually, I think my first website I built in Microsoft. Can you believe that craziness? It wasn't very pretty, but it got the job done. It put the information on the page that needed me on the page. And that was just step one. Step two was how were people going to find my site? And this happened through a process that I would teach myself called search engine optimization. 1999, like I said, Google came out in 1998. So it was just the right time to figure out this new thing called SEO. And the purpose of SEO at the time and still to this day is to create pages and optimize them in a way that promoted them to the top of the search engine results pages so that when someone typed in a search for mobile disc jockey St. Louis, they would find my page before anyone else's. And so that served me really well throughout the remainder of my college years. I had an amazing business. I traveled all over the region and that was because people found me first. But really what happened was I was able to discover this talent, this ability to rank pages. And back then it was the Wild Wild West. It was the Wild Wild West because people were doing some pretty crazy things on their pages and, you know, offsite in order to get these rankings up. The search engine basically was easily manipulated. As time went on, they tightened their rules and their guidelines and the factors that they would look at to determine rankings and things got more difficult. But some of the things that worked back then still work today, actually those things like link building are really the foundations of search engine optimization. And so you have to understand as a marketing director, what is link building and why is it important. So the internet is essentially millions, hundreds of millions of computers that are all linked together. Your website is on a computer called a server. That server is hosted possibly in your company in your corporation or somewhere out there on the web somewhere. In order for people to find you, they have to know where you're located, what server is important. And so the way they Google crawls the web, if you will, is they crawl via links from one server to another. Okay, it's not just as simple as typing in a search in your browser and then popping up all the pages. Like the search engine bots have to crawl from one server to another in order to find what they're looking for. Each link that a bot would follow has certain words attached to it. Okay, this is typically what you would see underlined in blue. What are those words that the link is referring to for the search engine that is super important because what it does is it says okay, I just clicked on St. Louis agency. I just followed as a bot this link that said St. Louis agency and now it's taking me to a page and my first assumption as a bot is that because it was linked in this fashion that that page is about St. Louis agency. This may or may not be true. And back in the day, you could just put whatever you wanted in this text and just trick the search engine into thinking that the page that it was headed to was about that. And the more links you had, the better the higher quality signal it would give to the search engines to say that the page that it's headed to is all about that. Well, guess what? That's where link spam really began to flourish and Google had to shut that down and they're still working to this day to figure out how they can tell the difference between quality links and just like crappy spammy links, right? And so today I want to share with you how to gain quality links. The first way to get really amazing links is to create really amazing content, creating podcast, creating videos, creating authority driven, you know, thought leadership content that people number one are going to engage with, that they're going to enjoy reading, that they're going to learn something from. If you create this type of content, I guarantee you that people will link to it. So do yourself a favor and put together a content marketing plan, determine how it is that you're going to develop content day in and day out and do so in a way that brings increase to your reader, to your viewer, to your user because if you bring increase with no expectation of return, I guarantee you that what will happen is you'll start to see those links come in from all over the web. The second way to build links and really one of my favorites, if your business has been in business for a while, then you might have a lot of links out there that were acquired in the past that have just broken, you know, websites have been updated, your page has been updated, and so those are broken. So my number two way to get links is to go look for all the broken links that are pointed to your site and figure out, you know, how to either get in touch with the person that's linking to you to ask them to update the link or number two, like figure out how you can redirect that 301 redirect that link to the most appropriate page on your site in order to get the value, the full benefit of that link. The best way to find these links is to go to your analytics reports and look for your 404 pages. These are pages, the 404 air page is where people are coming in and you'll be able to see like where they're coming in, what the referring sites are, and that will give you a list that someone on your team can begin to work, can begin to contact, can begin to make those corrections so that those links are no longer broken links, but they're links that are providing value to your site. The number three way to build links is to search the web for unlinked brand mentions. And what this means is that in the era of social media, in the era of, you know, blogging and just like just 24 hour content, what happens is a lot of times you get mentions like slam agency, we have a Google alert that's set up that anytime the phrase slam agency appears anywhere in Google, we get an alert. And this is important because just because Google notices that the phrase is popping up on a website somewhere, it may not be linked back to our site. So the important thing here is if there is an unlinked mention of your brand name somewhere out there on the web, do yourself a favor, get in touch with that page owner with that website owner and ask them say, listen, thank first of all, thank them. Thank you for mentioning my company. Thank you for mentioning my website. Would you please provide a link from that name to my site that way people can find me. You've obviously, you know, mentioned me and provided a shout out. Can you go that one step further and provide a link? It would be greatly valued. I'd highly appreciate it. And most of the time people are going to say yes. All right. The number four way to build links is to sponsor things. Okay. Now this is actually a paid link and you want to be careful in that number one that you identify paid links. And so the official SEO recommendation would be that anytime you buy a link, make sure that that link doesn't pass link juice, that it is a no follow link. And that's the way to stay, you know, with your white hat. Here at Slam, we say if it matters, we'll help you make an impact. If it matters to you, look at what sponsorship options may be. And if it makes sense to, you know, provide a donation in exchange for a link for, you know, a Gala or something like that, do it. This is important because if you were to buy a link, you know, five years ago, the amount of money that people would spend buying links, most of the time was more than it would cost to just sponsor an event, give some money back to the people doing work in your community in exchange for a link. And most of the time, if you're a sponsor of a Gala or, you know, a fundraiser or something like that, they're going to provide a link to your site. And that link is very important. And finally, the number five way to build links is to just ask. This is monotonous work, meaning that the response rate is low. You've probably been asked to share links and these emails, you probably haven't responded to them and most people don't. But it's still a very important way to build links because what you're doing is you're making personal connections in your space and you're asking to share links, right? And this is important because most people aren't doing this anymore. But if the value of the linking site could really bring value to your site in terms of promoting your site in the search engines, then guess what? It's worth the ask. It's worth making that personal connection. And here's the thing, asking for a link is no different than asking for a sale. Okay. And what does that mean? It means I'm not just going to send you a cold email and ask you to do business with me. I've got to get to know you first. I've got to understand who you are. You have to understand who I am. And we have to figure out where their shared value. What that means is you got to get to know the people. You got to, you know, like follow them on Twitter, engage with them on LinkedIn. If all I do is send you an email that says, I would love to have a link from your site. What can I do to get that? Then the response rate is like 1 to 3%. It's not going to work. It's like cold calling. And it's not worth your time. But if you actually go through the social selling process where you get to know people, where you engage on their content, where you kind of build this online friendship, then when the time is right, ask to share links. That's the fifth way to build links. If you've enjoyed this episode, do me a favor in the comments. If you're on Facebook, Instagram or anywhere, leave me a comment. Tell me how do you build links and tell me what you're doing to increase your SEO on your website. And if you're a marketing director and this is just like completely over your head, or it's just not something that you have the bandwidth or the time to take on, then, you know, companies like ours or companies that can help you in this area to make sure that you're doing the right things in order to increase your search engine presence, rather than the wrong things that could potentially harm your search engine rankings. Thank you for tuning in. Next week, we're talking about all the things that you should not do when it comes to link building. So thank you for tuning in and I'll see you next week.