Article by Dejan SEO
When it comes to large-scale link building we can easily call it an art, provided that it is done the right way. And the right way for large-scale link building campaigns is based on research, planning and to the point implementation. If you are working for a large company with thousands of pages to build links or if you are supervising a link building team you need to know everything there is about competent implementation of link building on a larger scale.
Team selection / allocation
proper planning and research is essential for any job, but every team or project manager knows that if you want something done you need to get the right people working on the project. So before you give the link building randomly, think about which teams can do the job best and make sure you allocate both time and assignments the right way.
Personal interests of people
when it comes to allocating time and assignments the best place to start is by giving your link builders the tasks they are most comfortable with and have experience working with. That way you will ensure good results from the start.
Streamlining workflow:
Tools
There is nothing as good as manual link building, but to manage a large scale campaign you need to think of time consumption, so using proper tools for research and data can save time and improve your results.
Advanced search queries
By doing research in advanced and providing some advanced search queries for your link builders to start with you will cut your work in half and you can easily assign certain query/queries to each link builder on your team.
Link database
Of course, without proper management of data you cannot run a large-scale link building campaign. If you are an SEO company you probably already have a large database of links, if not it is time you start building one, it will save you time and money and will enhance your link building efforts.
Quality of emails / quality control
Although you need to have trust in your link builders and your entire team there is a need to monitor the quality of everything you do, especially the link request emails your team members send out. Don’t use plain templates that sound like spam, make sure all of your link builders take a personalized approach to new link opportunities.
Awareness of impact of link building on brand and PR
Knowing how a certain type of link will influence both rankings and your brand’s PR is crucial. A single link can drive massive traffic and create a great buzz around your brand, so keep that in mind at all times and don’t just build links blindly wherever an opportunity shows itself.
Listening for new opportunities
Link building in one direction can easily become a problem, especially for large scale link building that is niche oriented. Following the buzz, setting up alerts and monitoring social media is always a part of a good link building campaign.
Watching for disappearing links
Not all links you and your team create will be there forever, so you need to schedule link monitoring and make sure that all the links are in place with the right anchor and right target.
Fixing incorrect links
Like the previous one, link consolidation is one of the first things you need to do with a large scale link building campaign. In fact this is one of the ways to get great quality out of existing and aged links as well as to score new ones. Monitor which links have no anchor text, images without ALT tags, non WWW and WWW targets, no-follow links and everything that can consolidate your links to maximize your efforts.
Balancing targeting of phrases to match campaign size
This part is always hard, whether it is a small project or a large one. But going out for too many phrases and targets can easily become a problem with large scale campaigns. Make sure you know which are the most important ones and when to branch out or branch in as you might be wasting your time building links for too many phrases without much success with any of them.
Measuring success & adjustments
When it comes to the ongoing process of a large-scale campaign we cannot get anywhere without stopping to see what our efforts have achieved and tweak them a bit according to the results we see. If something is not working it is time to change it, and if something seems to be working maybe a bit more of it won’t hurt.
