Today I present another written interview with Dani Schenker who is part founder of Linksquad.de
Check out the interview:
1. What got you interested in starting an SEO company? Share your story.
When I moved from Switzerland to Costa Rica in 2008 I started blogging. Within about two years I was able to live off my blogs (4 or 5 blogs). But, after the big Google updates (panda and penguin) my sites lost visibility very fast. The problem was that I had no knowledge of SEO when I started my blogs. For example, I had hundreds of articles containing 50 words or less. By now Google considers this as “thin content”. I also sold links that were very easy detectable. And other mistakes…
Since my income was pretty much gone I needed an alternative. Luckily I learned about SEO in the meantime and started working as a freelancer. I did this until I realized that my old blogs were lost and that my possibilities as a freelancer were very limited. Meaning, I could only work so many hours and only make this much money.
This is when I decided to become more professional. I learned a lot from the people I worked for and I was ready to offer the whole package myself. I offered my services on sites like oDesk (from Germany) and got a couple clients. One of the clients is now my partner and we just founded Linksquad.de.
2. What types of link building tactics have you found are working today?
Right now there are two ways we recommend out clients to build links. If the budget is big enough we use “sustainable” linkbaits. A good example for this would be to create a software or tool and offer it for free to the users. Unlike with a contest or similar events, links will come in even years later.
If the client wants to invest less, we recommend niche-power-sites (at least that is how we call them). This is basically expired domain linkbuilding, but with a twist. Most people use their expired domains to build links for all their clients. We build a site specifically for one client and create high quality content for the site.
3. I understand you wanted to share an infographic with us today, can you discuss this a bit more in-depth and the premise for creating it?
Yes sure. We created this infographic shortly after starting our blog. The idea of the graphic is to give you an overview of all the linkbuilding tactics that we think still work today (especially in combination). It was also a way to show the user our still and to promote our brand “Linksquad”.
Here is the link to the infographic
The infographic is in English, but the rest of the website is in German. I will respond to comments in English if someone wants to ask something.
4. What are some of the biggest challenges you face when it comes to working on SEO for clients?
To get the client to work with us. SEO is not just SEO anymore. It has to be part of the marketing or even part of the company to really make it work. I explain with the next answer…
5. What are your future plans for 2014 and beyond?
This is my SEO vision: I think that SEO companies will hire architects, plumbers and doctors in the future to provide their services. The will specialize on a few industries and really become experts. So that they are able to create high quality content and even more important “profiles”.
The signs are pretty clear. In the future Google will rank people before websites. This means, a website will only rank well on Google, if the sites authors are important enough. Google will decide this based on the authors activities all over the web. Google+ (obviously), forums, blogs, comments, citations and their own websites.
I think there will be a new sub industry in the SEO world: profile traders.
