by Phil Golobish
Legend has it John F. Kennedy once came across an especially upbeat janitor while touring NASA. When JFK asked the janitor what he was so happy about, the janitor stopped, looked up with pride, and responded, “I’m happy because I’m sending a man to the moon.”
Whether or not this story is accurate, I’ve taken NASA’s flair for the dramatic and applied it to my own professional life. Now, whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, I stop, look up with pride, and say, “I rank websites on the first page of Google.”
While ranking websites is hard work, it isn’t like putting a person on the moon. For all I know, NASA janitors have multiple advanced degrees and can manipulate general relativity with a slide rule. However, similar to that fabled NASA janitor, I do play a part in a larger delivery process called CLASS that Jay Love, Slingshot SEO’s CEO, blogged about back in January. In the spirit of Jay’s January post, which offered a glimpse into the actual delivery of CLASS, today I’ve decided to shed some light on how Slingshot SEO optimizes link profiles.
Using strategies similar to public relations professionals, Slingshot SEO builds external inbound links through the generation of earned media. To do this, we manage large teams of people in our Search Media Department, called networkers, who are highly skilled in creating and maintaining relationships with online publishers. The relationships they build are based on both the merit of the content and the relationship they provide. Slingshot SEO never buys links. Once a relationship is created, networkers maintain it by using a proprietary workflow management system we’ve developed to keep everything organized. Within this system, we’ve built in strict editorial processes that ensure we always meet client brand guidelines and the expectations of the sites publishing our content.
Slingshot SEO also engages in other outreach linking opportunities with webmasters and site owners when natural relationships that exist in the offline world are not producing digital signals. Some examples of these types of activities include contacting charities, vendors or other partners when appropriate. We also use infographics to build external links. Infographics and other forms of rich media are designed to be shared easily and earn relevancy signals like links and social mentions. For more information on rich media, check out this recent post about infographics from another Slingshotter, Sharlene Boodram.
The results of our link profile optimization efforts are closely tied to the results achieved by optimizing all aspects of Slingshot SEO’s CLASS methodology – Content, Links, Architecture, Social and Strategy. In our experience, sites that optimize for CLASS achieve top organic search rankings. In my experience, it’s better than mopping floors.