Search Engine Marketing Blog: piloSEO

A funny thing happened to me recently. I have a client who is in a market where the webmasters of the big sites are fairly SEO savvy but the many individuals with smaller sites are not. Like many bloggers and webmasters they do it because they love the subject material. It is not a commercial market but it is a HUGELY popular subject matter. So there are quite a few small but well designed sites with great content and some good link juice. This has created a strange situation at least for me.

Back to the topic at hand. Last week I was on one of the big social media sites for this market and found a great post from one of the other members there. I checked out a few more stories and decided to send a friend request. Now usually when I send friend requests the normal response is to either accept or decline and maybe send a short response. This person went crazy. The client I work for is a pretty big player in this market and the person I friended told me how honored she was to accept our request and raved about my clients site. She then asked if it would be OK if she added a link to our site. Of course I said yes, she has a great site with tons of great content and only a few links. Her next response was what surprised me the most. After I told her yes she said she was nervous about asking if SHE COULD LINK TO OUR SITE.

This opened my eyes to the fact that many bloggers outside of the SEO world and some highly competitive industries do not know the power of a link. She was honored that we would let her link to us. My past experience is usually the opposite. Because of this I have adopted a different link building strategy for this client that will leverage this different attitude.

It makes link building more difficult if using traditional methods because many bloggers are not going to add links on their own for fear that you don’t want it. On the other hand by changing my methods a bit it will make things easier because the bloggers want to link to but feel they need some sort of approval.

Now obviously link building strategies are going to differ from market to market. The key is to understand each market and adjust your linking strategy based on how the players in that market treat links. Some will treat links as a commodity for both traffic and link love while others may not understand the power of links and think of them as a way to make their site stand out (by linking to the big players). Figure out where your market is and build links accordingly.

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