Richard Baxter will be speaking on the “Link-Building” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’ve been working in the SEO / digital marketing industry since 2003 – right at the beginning I was a “web manager” (managing the rollout of new content management systems, organising content, images, hosting, etc.) who’d arrived at that job via a sales and then a user experience / usability background. From about 2006 I was a full time SEO working in various agencies and in-house roles, notably in a very competitive travel vertical in my last job before I started SEOgadget in late 2009. SEOgadget is my agency, we now have 25 full time staff, we’re based in London and San Francisco and we’re hiring!

Meanwhile in real life I have a huge interest in motor sport (F1, Endurance Racing), race a little myself and I enjoy movies, music and Television! I also have a cat called Mr Keets. He’s made a guest appearance on a Mozinar before, so he’s kind of famous.

2) How can one build links in 2014 without running afoul of the spam police?
You have to avoid the footprint of very low quality activity. That absolutely rules out common every-day activities like guest posting or any other “tactic” that may be working right now – of course this depends very much on the vertical you’re in, but generally speaking 2014 is about getting mentioned because you did something cool, *not* being too artificial or compromising your integrity just in case a link might make a difference. If you’re good, you’re capable of building something of value on your site (to meet the needs of the people you’re marketing to) and then getting them to know about it. That’s link building in 2014.

It’s definitely worth pointing out that if you’ve got something in your backlink history you’ve not been proud of and that you haven’t been caught for yet, that does not mean you’re out of the woods. Disavow and maybe even remove before that penalty warning comes in.

3) What’s the best way to get a link from someone who doesn’t know you?
Most of the people reading this will be SEO people themselves, maybe they have a blog and they’ll certainly all have Twitter accounts and lots of social presence. Why would any self-respecting member of the SEMpdx audience want to tweet something, or link to it?

In my opinion, if you want someone in particular to use your assets, mention them, cite them as an expert source, you’ve really got to play the long game with that individual. Earning someone’s trust is really, really hard. You can’t just email them and ask, you know?

One of the things I do is drop someone a line thanking them for a recent insight or opinion and I share something of value with them in return and leave it at that – building a relationship every tiny step of the way, with a little follow up, a little social interaction, just making it natural and making myself known to them. You can’t force a relationship, not a long term one certainly! We have a group of journalists we’ve built strong relationships with in the past – all of which started by arranging a meeting! We have them come to the office, teach them a bunch of ideas and show a lot of data – generally speaking you can feel the trust starting to emerge as they write down ideas and start asking questions. From there it’s a case of follow up and keeping the relationship alive.

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