Article by Zac Grace, SEO Strategist and link building team leader at Dejan SEO, a well known Australian SEO company.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many web marketers look at branding and link building as separate activities, but the two can be combined into a single campaign for improved efficiency. The use of more personalized results by the major search engines has increased the importance of branding to the point that it is now more indispensable than ever.

 

Importance of Branding for Search and Online Presence

 

For a long time, many marketers ignored traditional branding in favor of concentrating on exact match anchor texts to improve rankings. However, with the new personalized search results, the chances of a site appearing in the SERPs increases dramatically after one has visited, liked, shared or otherwise interacted with a site.

 

By increasing your company or organization’s name and logo recognition, you can also increase the likelihood of a click through even if you are not at the top of the search page. In the same sense, greater brand awareness and online presence can help improve the percentage of shares, likes and recommendations that your pages attract on social media.

 

Achieving Both with Brand Link Building

 

Brand link building differs from conversion link building in that the former is designed more to build a higher traffic volume and in the process increase your brand awareness and online presence. The key to brand recognition is repetition so you want to expose people as much as possible to your brand.

 

Some marketers create two different types of landing pages – branding landing pages with more generalized content and deeper conversion landing pages with more specialized and valuable content.

 

One easy way to find sites for brand linking is to conduct an “allintitle” search on Google. Enter a search with this format: “allintitle:Company name” or “brand name –your domain URL”. The search will return a listing of all sites that have your name in the page title along with the products, services, etc. linked with the keywords.

 

Check to see if these sites actually link to your site and if they have appropriate anchor text. They should also link to the correct landing pages. If the link is missing or needs to be changed, you can send them a friendly message with your suggested link in HTML code that is ready to copy and paste.

 

Branding links can be built around broader search terms while your conversion link building will be targeted at the more specific search items related directly to conversions. Branding search terms can be those that surfers look for while they are still in the process of formulating ideas.

 

For example, if your site specifically sells Dell computers, a branding search term might simply be something like “desktop computers.” Someone who is looking for ideas on a new computer might use these keywords. A more specific conversion search term could involve a specific Dell desktop computer model.

 

Future of Link Building

 

Some of the current trends in link building include making the links to one’s site appear as natural as possible. You do not want your links to look like the outcome of a marketing campaign. Anchor text should be varied, and links should come from a wide diversity of sites including social media, directories, online encyclopedias, web communities and specialized sites. Long anchor texts and the use of social link sharing are other important trends in link building. Long anchor text allows you to use your long tail keywords in your links for improved conversion rates.

 

Social media offers webmasters the ability to quickly build links using sharing and like buttons. Facebook like and share buttons allow visitors to your web pages to easily share your content to all their Facebook friends. In addition, when a page is liked on Facebook, it may help in the Bing search results when friends search for keywords related to that page.

 

In the same way, when someone gives a thumbs-up using Google’s new +1 button, it can help improve search rankings when Google+ network friends conduct related searches.

 

Web marketers are also using brand names more frequently in anchor text as a way of increasing name recognition and online presence. However, it is a good idea to use variant anchor text along with the brand names so that search engines do not suspect spamming.

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Branding vs Link Building. Why Separate the Two?