Thank you everyone who came to Search London last week. We had the highest number of RSVPs ever recorded – 166 !!
Although not everyone came, we did have a full house with about 60 – 70 people.

Lisa Myers – the CEO of Verve Search and cofounder of StateofSearch gave a presentation about link building post panda.

http://www.slideshare.net/lisadmyers/link-development-post-panda

For those who were unable to come, here is a brief summary of the meetup.

Panda was not a link algorithm update but a site quality update. This means that user experience, content, design of the site is much more important. The update has affected the links quality of a site. Sites that paid for links or syndicated their content to dodgy places have seen their rankings drop.

Lisa gave two ways to ensure that you have the best links to your site.

1) Link Analysis and Link Prospecting
2) Link Development

1) Link Analysis and Link Prospecting
There are a number of tools you can use to find the site you want to host your content on.
Raven, seomoz, majestic seo are some of the many avaialable in the market.

You will then need to analyse the site, the anchortext, the type of links it gets, the authority and strength of links, the depth of links.

Now due to the panda update, you will also have to look at quality of content on the site, the design and UX and the traffic. Find out if the site is doing any other marekting like PPC and Facebook.

Link Prospecting

Well how do you find these sites? It is mostly manual unfortunately, using the syntax below:

Keyword+“article”
Keyword+“blog”
Keywordinurl:“writeforus”
Keywordinurl:”guestposts”
Keywordintitle:“writeforus”

For large scale link prospecting, you can use a scraper tool such as the Chrome extension
http://goo.gl/c7erv or the SEOmoz APIwww.seomoz.org/api
Spreadsheethttp://justinbriggs.org/quick-link-prospectingwith-scraper-extensionFollow: @JustinRBriggs

Most of all, use common sense. Think about what visitors to your site are searching for, what they are interested in. Also look at the social influencers within the market you are link building to, are they using Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin?

2) Link Development
Here you need to use those existing relationships you have built previously. Someone that you are a partner with or past and current customers.

Link baiting
Link baiting is becoming more important in seo. It is a piece of digital content that specifically increases the chances for you to get organic links to your site. For example it could be an infographic for your product. Link baiting could also be an article or a video, so think creatively and “out of the box”. Make sure the link bait is on your domain

Infogaphics
This is great link bait. It can take some time to come up with an idea and draw the graphic, but it is well worth it. You may just need to think of a different angle for the linkbait which can be difficult if it is a B2B client in a field that you are not familiar with.

Write content for websites
If you want a link from a specific site, write the article in their tone of voice and style and send it to them. The content has to be relevant, sells your USP and attracts the readers attention.

There was a lot covered in the Search London session, thank you to Lisa Myers from Verve Search for the presentation.