How to get tons of links and make your employees happy

Posted at February 18, 2010

Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza

(“Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge”, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri).

When I joined Webcertain in 2006 I had just a little tiny idea of what SEO was. But I had good managers leading by example and good colleagues stimulating my curiosity. And eventually I got passionate about my job.
I got so passionate that I started testing, experimenting, developing personal projects and writing about Multilingual SEO in my free time. (No worry I have even a life and a personality outside of SEO… I think…) And my confidence together with my skills has grown. And I become SEO Manager.

I think that these supplementary activities have been crucial for my personal development and have brought benefit to the company I’m working with too. Let’s be honest: it’s easier and safer to test new strategies and ideas, to push the boundaries with your own website than with a client website!

I quite like if my team members have their own projects after work. I love to read competent articles of my guys on their own blogs or in other websites. It makes me damn proud.
And I can see they are much more motivated and proactive even with regular clients. Our weekly SEO meetings are becoming a rich exchange of information and ideas.
I agree this won’t work in every industry but it does in the Search Marketing world.

You may wonder as a business owner what do you get out of this:
- You will populate the SERP with your employees blog post. If you have only one corporate blog in the best possible case you’ll rank in two position for a particular key term. Like a little army your employee blogs will fill other positions that may be taken by your competitors.
- Agree a “link back to the company site” policy and you will get tons of links with great anchor text from relevant sources: your corporate site will benefit from this free link juice injection and potentially you’ll get lots of referrals. And Clients. There is no reason for your employee to refuse to link back: if your business goes well they will have a safe job. It’s a win / win situation.
- But most important you’ll get knowledge. Priceless.

Here you can find an incomplete list of blogs from my beloved WebCertain colleagues. I strongly advise to read all of them:

Andy Atkins-Krüger – by far the biggest authority in International Search Marketing
Andy Atkins-Krüger, Ana Valezzi Leckenby, Samia Kesseiri – the “must read” search marketing blog
Davide Corradi – International SEO with an Italian accent
Ching-Yun Huang – Search Marketing from a Taiwanese perspective
Ana Valezzi Leckenby – put your sombrero on: SEO, SEM in a guacamole sauce from Mexico
Peter Kersbergen, Ally Murdoch & Co – Multilingual search from Netherlands, UK and beyond
Oscar Carreras – Search Marketing from Spain (Oscar he’s not working with us anymore but he will always belong to our family) European SEO
Jenny Simpson – PR, Social Media and International Gossip Master