Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

In 2010, Anova Group began working with a university-based company that was seeking help in developing more leads for their proprietary technology. Given our mathematical and engineering background, we were intrigued by a technology that can specifically detect and locate any electrical intermittent faults in complex power systems. One interesting application is in aviation maintenance so as to proactively identify minutely (i.e. undetectable by normal inspection) damaged wires that could turn into in-flight electrical fires.

Previous Inbound Link Strategy

Previous to hiring Anova Group, the company had made a valiant effort to increase the number of inbound links to their website by posting short answers and mini-blogs throughout the web. Not surprisingly, the impact on organic search was negligible. The mistake, we believe, was that their posts were often relatively minor comments and answers to questions that were only tangentially related to their technology and expertise. So while they increased link quantity, the search engines did not view these links as high quality.

Leveraging An Existing Asset

After reviewing their account, we were impressed by the academic journal articles published by the founders. While they had posted a handful on their website, the article visibility was nearly absent on the web. For us, these articles were an untapped goldmine to be leveraged for quality in-bound links. As an example, despite a fairly robust section in Wikipedia on related technology, their academically recognized research was nowhere to be found. We knew that by simply summarizing and posting some of their research on Wikipedia, their visibility would be greatly increased which then both directly and indirectly would increase their SEO rankings. (Note to the SEO Gurus: I am intentionally ignoring NO FOLLOW issues as I would argue this often is a distraction to adding high quality links)

Three Lessons Learned

While we admit most of our clients are not academically published or recognized internationally as thought leaders in their field, here are lessons for anyone who is thinking about an inbound linking strategy.

(1) Take an inventory of your current quality content (no matter how old) and determine if you have maximized the visibility of that content. In this example, the founders had over a dozen published articles within the last 5 years that were essentially locked away in academic journals.

(2) Look to publish links to sites that are BOTH recognized by search engines and are sites in which prospective customers visit. Unfortunately, in this example, the company was a little too focused on creating links and ignored the fact that no prospective customer would actually see the links they created.

(3) With apologies to Vince Lombardi, content isn’t everything, it is the ONLY thing. Great content creates links that improve SEO rankings. Links without great content will not create sustainable SEO success.

Posted by Jeff Aliotta