With Google’s updates striking hard on sites that falter in following Webmaster guidelines, it is time for you to take a very professional approach to your link building campaign. You certainly need to think and act like an engineer as you use traditional and social media as well as content creation and paid marketing strategies to build quality links.
An engineer thinks about and acts on several processes before a product goes from thought to design to production. These processes include a thorough study including a feasibility study, conceptualization, various stages of design, planning of production, and tool design, before engaging in actual production.
By thinking and acting like an engineer, you can enhance traditional link building exercises such as outreach and guest blogging to a new level thanks to better planning and execution that also stays on the right side of search engine requirements.
You can begin by thinking about the end. In other words you need to define your final link building goals before you devise a plan on how to achieve your aim. The next step is to engage in a detailed study of your existing backlink campaign, if any.
You need to find out why your competitors are ahead of you or why you have not achieved desired rankings with your current strategy. You need to understand how far your renewed goals are and how you plan to reach that goal.
Next, you need to conceptualize a workable strategy that will provide far more improved results that you have currently received. You need to sit down with your team for brainstorming sessions to come up with uniquely creative solutions to current problems. Whether you need to engage in new promotional activities such as distributing free tickets for popular events, offering free scholarships or internships, or any other idea suitable to the business model of your client, you need to explore and implement it.
You then need to incorporate the cost factor of implementing your revised link building strategy. You need to calculate the best possible returns against costs for each individual strategy and implement those that hold the best ROI.
With a clear strategy in mind, you now need to actually design your link building campaign and figure out the exact requirements for seamless implementation. You will need to determine as to how much percentage of your anchor text needs to be branded, targeted keyword, miscellaneous, image based, etc. You will also need to combine different strategies that you may need to implement for your link building exercise such as content creation, content promotion including Facebook stories and tweet promotions, guest blogging, outreach through emails, etc.
You will now have to proceed to several stages of design that merge your final goal along with your approved list of strategies. Each exercise needs to be planned in detail and it would be a good idea to delegate specific tasks to specific members of your team so that you can monitor the progress of your campaign.
Your next step as an engineer would be to engage in tool design, which in this context would be to use appropriate tools to build quality links as well as repair broken links. You can try out new tools to achieve improved results if they fit within your time limit and your approved budget.
The final stage involves going into actual production. This means executing your link building strategy and sub-strategies with full force and monitoring outcomes.
Such a detailed and well-monitored process is sure to reward you with a successful link-building campaign.