LINKBUIDING SCENARIOS FOR PROS

Linkbuilding is a term used in SEO for the practice of generating inbound links to the website that is trying to gain strength and ranking. It’s a lot like the practice of public relations as if we’re trying to gain media coverage of our client’s brand in a publication. Chances are, if you’ve been practicing PR in the last decade, you probably have already generated some serious SEO link building. We’ll get into this a little more later but first off, here’s a crash course in why everyone needs to link build.

Google, and other search engines, typically base the priority of your site’s indexation based on the number of quality inbound links to your website, blog or press release. When a website – or page of a website – has a significant number of credible in-bound links from other web domains, the probability of your site – or page of your site – having a higher page index rank, both in the short and long-term, in Google is poised to be much better.

How Public Relations can help with Linkbuiding Strategy:

Let’s say, you issue a press release on a wire service and you’re trying to build the page-rank of this release to increase inbound search traffic. Maybe your client is offering a new service and you wish to use this release on a third party website as credibility to your new product.

Scenario A: You launch the release with little to no fanfare or pitching. Chances are, you might have one or two links from your company’s own social media pages and hopefully a link from your company’s blog. Therefore, you’ve managed to build a few links to your press release but nothing really out of the ordinary. After the initial indexation period, You might see a pop in initial search ranking based on the social links but it’s not a healthy, long-term strategy. Of course, this is based on the saturation/competition of your targeted search terms.

Scenario B: You launch the release with a full pitching, social and email marketing strategy. You receive media placements, with inbound links, from some local press and some trade blogs, plus a handful of links from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and your company’s blog and email newsletter. Now, you’re cookin’ with gas. Not only have you planted the seed for brand awareness through traditional media relations, you’ve generated some significant inbound links to your press release which will – for the time being – assist with your releases indexation in organic search.

Is Linkbuilding a “Blackhat” approach to SEO?

SEO, much like public relations, has some gray areas. There are many SEOs out there building link strategies based on plans to foil Google. These can be black-hat – or gray area – approaches that can ultimately lead to penalization and possibly being de-indexed. The scenarios we outlined above are all standard practices and are all standard approaches to SEO.

Sources for links:

Social Media
Email Marketing
Media Outlets
Blogs
Comments
Websites
Guides and Directories

Final thought:

Make sure you ask publications, blogs and newsletters to please link to your client’s website and or blog. If you didn’t read anything above, this is the simplest approach for how Public Relations can assist with SEO Link building.

kbiz September 5, 2017 0 Comments

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3 Tips to Double Productivity

These 3 Tips can Double the Productivity of your Web Based Workforce

We truly live in an era of incredible connectivity. A startup in one corner of the globe can now operate entirely over the internet – using a combination of collaborative suites, conferencing options, and software programs to coordinate employees and contractors from anywhere in the world. Being able to utilize a remote workforce is extremely useful for a company that wants to expand faster than the local job market allows, or that wants to internationalize its workforce, but it also comes with challenges. How do you ensure that your tele-commuting workforce remains on task, and that you actually receive the work that you are paying for? These three tips will help enhance your distributed project management – taking your outsourced workforce to the next level of productivity.

Track Everything

When most people think about “tracking” in the abstract, they think of Big Brother and the negative surveillance connotation, however businesses have always used various electronic tracking methods to ensure that their employees are performing adequately. When you hire a contractor, especially when you are paying them hourly for specific work, you have a right to know that they are remaining on task throughout each one of their billable hours. One way to provide yourself with peace of mind (and keep your contractor focused on work during their billable time) is to use some form of tracking system. There are many different applications that all purport to track freelancers and contractors – and most use some form of activity tracker that logs browser and application windows on a computer, keyboard activity, and occasionally webcam photos or desktop screenshots to demonstrate that the contractor is present.

Make sure you include information about your tracking systems and expectations in your employee handbook, and don’t step over the line into unauthorized tracking. Whatever application you choose should be easily disabled or paused by the user – allowing them to shift into “unbilled” time if they need to check their personal email or leave the computer. Also, avoid the trap of being too vigilant with your tracking requirements – you are trying to get a general idea of the productivity of a contractor, not time their activities to the minute – since this can be counterproductive to contractor productivity and morale.

Meetings

The much-maligned meeting has become a staple of the corporate world, and perhaps it is true that people are depending too much on traditional meetings as a way of assessing project status. Even so, meetings are still a useful tool at bringing an entire project team online – and your contractors should be expected to attend occasional meetings to make them feel like they are part of a broader company team and to allow them to provide their input for decisions that might influence their projects. It is easy to conduct a meeting entirely over the web, or as some hybrid of in-person and over the web, with software like Citrix GoToMeeting or any of its competitors. Make sure you are compensating your contractors for time that they spend in meetings – since any mandatory requirements that you issue to your independent contractors should be priced into the value of their contract or separately compensated with hourly pay.

Collaborative Software

Finally, when you have a distributed workforce, you need a way to bring everyone together so they can see each other’s contributions to a project and you can manage their input in a productive manner. While it would be theoretically possible to manage a project solely on your own local system – manually putting in each team member’s contribution independently – it is far more feasible to manage a project with a collaborative program like Basecamp or Trello. Almost all collaborative programs give team members the ability to upload their contributions, accept assignments and due dates, and converse with other team members in written threads. Most programs give you, the administrator, some level of additional control over security and permissions so you can ensure that contractors only have access to the parts of a project that they need to see, and don’t have access to sensitive information that you might only want to share with full time employees. Both Basecamp and Trello are highly sophisticated systems – and made even more useful with collaborative office suites and calendar systems like Office 365 and Google Apps for Business.

kbiz September 1, 2015 0 Comments