The following is a submission by guest author Cody Cahill, a U.S. based Content Marketing and Link building expert:

“When I made my pitch for a guest post with Underscore, my goal was to craft a piece that would be of particular relevance both to their website and mine.

Since Underscore is a leader in online branding strategy and content marketing, and my company Page One Power operates in the link building niche of the search engine optimization world, I proposed a piece about how you can build brand while also building links.

The response I received wasn’t entirely unfavorable, but I was met with some skepticism about how these two topics related to one another.

To paraphrase slightly the response, I was essentially told:

We don’t usually publish posts about link building, but if you can make it about branding in some meaningful way, I’d be willing to take a look at it.

This response was instructive and jibed perfectly with something I’ve observed in my first year working for an SEO company that focuses primarily on building links.  For many people, the whole term link-building (if not SEO as a whole) comes drenched with negative connotations.

When link-building is mentioned, certain undesirable images are conjured up, such as black-hat practitioners blasting the internet with thousands of irrelevant links meant only to fool the search engines.

To be honest, this manner of link-building ruled the roost for far too long and it understandably warped people’s perception of the tactic as a whole.

However, the Panda and Penguin updates forced the industry to reinvent some of their tactics and link-building has undergone a quasi-renaissance for companies that understand SEO and link building no longer need be relegated to outsider status, existing only in the ethers of a company’s overall marketing plan.

When done optimally, it can be a powerful tool in a company’s overall branding strategy.

Building Links = Building Brand

Historically, link building campaigns were designed with a singular purpose in mind: creating backlinks to a specific website in order to improve that site’s position in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).  For many, this activity was about getting as many links as robotically possible with as little effort as humanly possible.

Fortunately, recent Google crackdowns of this method have greatly decreased the effectiveness of this black-hat approach.

In the last year these game-changing events led many in the SEO world to denounce link-building as dead, though many savvy search marketers knew that the rumors of link-building’s demise had been greatly exaggerated.  It wasn’t dead; it just needed to be reinvented, transformed into something more dynamic and effective for multiple ends.

The scorecard for measuring the success of a link-building campaign has changed; no longer is the measuring stick the quantity of links built, but rather the quality.  Obtaining a link on a high-authority site with editorial standards and an engaged readership might take longer in terms of man-hours than 100 spammy links in the “old days” but the benefits are far greater.

These quality links will not only have a big long-term impact from a strict SEO perspective – but you also get the added benefit of putting your company and the author you choose to represent it in front of thousands of readers who are grateful that you’ve written a piece worth consuming.

And that’s the tricky – yet ultimately most rewarding – part: crafting content that is engaging enough that it makes an impact on the audience, thus creating good will for your brand with the appreciative reader.  The foundation of a good content marketing strategy is creating content that is helpful to potential customers, and by incorporating the best of these inbound marketing practices into your SEO strategy you’ll get the best of both worlds.

Building Relationships = Building Brand

One of the most oft-repeated truisms of post-Penguin SEO is that you build quality links by building quality relationships.  The same is true for an effective inbound marketing campaign; the goal is to create content (it could be articles, videos, infographics, etc.) which proves helpful to the readership and engages then in a way that causes them to remember you.  There is no better way to attract and retain customers than to develop and foster a lasting bond.

Relationships are also the foundation of effective branding.  You want customers and potential purchasers to remember and recognize you, and to do so in a positive and memorable fashion.  Through this relationship with the customer the brand attempts to make a distinctive impression that distinguishes the company from the competition.

Effective content marketing is a great way to build distinguishing brand; when done properly it lures the potential customer to the brand’s website and creates that lasting bond by providing them with helpful information.  Link building can be a natural extension of this strategy, particularly when utilizing the specific tactic of guest posting.

Constructing quality links with guest posting is all about relationship building.  First a relationship is forged between the writer and the webmaster by which the site owner becomes convinced that the writer is capable of crafting content that will be valuable to the readership, and thus the site itself.

Secondly, once the piece is published the seeds of a relationship are planted with the readers.  Ideally, they will find so much educational and/or entertainment value in the piece and that an enduring imprint will be branded into their memory.

The fact that a high-quality link will also be built – driving traffic to your website and helping improve your standing in the SERPs – can almost be seen as merely the cherry on the top of brand-building sundae!

Authorship as Brand Building

In the SEO circles, few things have been given as much attention in recent months as Google Authorship, the program by which Google links published content to a specific author and then provides established and demonstrably authoritative authors with certain perks.

Right now those advantages include a picture next to the content in the Google SERPs listings, and most SEO prognosticators are anticipating that Google will soon be unveiling their full AuthorRank system, in which authors who have proven their expertise in a given niche will have their content boosted in the search results.

Authorship is seen as another nail in the coffin for the antiquated practice of guest posting for bundles of low-quality links.  Once, guest posting was as simple as churning out 500 words and getting published somewhere.  But as Authorship continues to gain in importance, the value of these types of links will be further decreased, and only those pieces written for genuine human consumption by authors who have been established (or have the ability to establish themselves) as experts in their industry will reap the benefits.

This is good news for true content marketers, and it is good news for those seeking to build brand, as well.

Authorship provides the opportunity for companies to utilize their content creators as a branding tool.  Whether the content producers are in-house or contracted out, the Authorship profile of the writer can become a powerful branding tool once that writer has been established and a bond has been forged between the writer and the company.

Eventually that little picture tagged onto the search results will become associated with your brand in the minds of your target customers, and because your content is going to be helpful and engaging, this will prove to be a powerful branding tool.”

Cody Cahill is a writer and SEO guru at Page One Power, a white hat link building firm located in Boise, Idaho.  More of Cahill’s work can be found on their link building blog.

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