Adam Audette will be speaking about “Link Building” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m the president and founder of AudetteMedia, an internet marketing agency in Bend, Oregon. We specialize in high-end SEO and work with larger brands doing everything from site audits, to long-term search marketing strategy, to link building, and social media marketing and content promotion. Some of our clients are Zappos, Charming Shoppes, Kroger, and University of Phoenix.
My dad, John Audette, founded and sold one of the earliest internet marketing agencies, MMG. It’s still around today under a different name – Outrider. I have deep roots in the space because of that… my destiny to working in this industry, I guess. Which is great – because I love it.
2) Not everyone can manage an Enterprise-level SEO effort. What special skills / background should a company look for when either contracting for or hiring an Enterprise-level SEO?
Good question. There’s “SEO,” and then there’s SEO. Classic SEO – in the traditional sense – is becoming fairly easy to find. Many know you should 301 when you can, that you should focus on relevant terms intitle tags, that you should have URLs that are easy to crawl. That stuff is becoming a part of good webmastering. But really quality SEO, the kind that focuses on enterprise-level sites and very competitive industries, requires a special approach. Experience is key. So is creativity, and the ability to communicate clearly and manage relationships. The person doing SEO for enterprise needs to know how to navigate the many complex relationships and resource management issues that are integral to those types of organizations.
It’s also important to look for scale. What types of work will really push the needle? What can you safely put on the low-priority list? Knowing this is key.
Setting realistic goals and documenting progress is also essential. Careful reporting, and the ability to communicate to C-level management and act as a bridge to development and content (not to mention UX, marketing, branding, PR) — these are all part of the job. It can be very demanding work.
3) Clearly links are an important part of Google’s algorithm, but within the link process, what criteria of a given link do you see Google now giving additional weight and what link criteria do you see Google dampening (compared to the recent past)?
That’s a great question. I’ll take the easy part first. I see Google giving much less weight to internal anchor text. It’s gotten pretty silly how sites try to leverage their internal links… over-optimized sites are actually becoming kind of a blight on the web. I see Google also de-valuing certain types of social media links. Almost any directlink opportunity is going to be fairly low-value, generally speaking. Now, that said, I know of some particular high-value direct link sources too, but they’re rare.
Google will continue to reward press mentions, such as links within USA Today, and NY Times articles. Those sorts of links are always going to be valuable. URL shorteners are probably an area Google’s concerned about. Such a massive amount of links being shared each day through these handlers. Google needs to know what data is there. But the crux is, the short URLs themselves are basically worthless – just redirect handlers and sometimes transient. Not to mention inconsistent and redundant. They don’t add any value.
The ratio of unique referring domains in any site’s link profile is very important, and will continue to remain important, along with the quantity and frequency (and consistency) of new links earned over time.
Paid links. Google has gotten incredibly good at locating paid links and stripping them of value. But, paid links can still work. This is an area Google will continue to focus on, likely using a combination of sophisticated technology and the human element. I’ve never been a big fan of paid links, and I’m glad, because that’s not the place to be in 2010. It wasn’t the place to be in 2009, either, in my opinion.
Other kinds of links are going to be more important than ever: lists of links in XML files. XML sitemaps haven’t really caught on like Google hoped, but Google Base feeds certainly have caught on – and are essential. They’re basically the same thing – a list of URLs for the engines. The more Google goes towards the blended approach, the more these link lists will matter.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.