Who’s Name to Use for Link Building?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis in Link Building

When executing a white hat link building strategy for our clients, one of the key components is often blog commenting. Leaving comments on relevant and reputable industry blogs is a great way to augment your link portfolio with valuable links, as well as build relationships with industry bloggers, increase your own brand’s authority and more. The key to blog commenting is to use a real person’s name, and not just the company name in the comment field. This blog commenting best practice tip (among others) tips the scales in your favor that the comment will actually go live on the post. However, the question then becomes—who’s same do we use for blog commenting? Whose name do we use to build any link?

When coming up with a name for blog commenting, it’s important to choose a person that is going to be with the company for years to come. You don’t want to spend a year building blog comments, social profiles and content under one person’s name only to have them leave your company. When that person leaves your company, they get to take their name with them (obviously!) which means that any industry awareness and authority that has been built up around their personal brand goes with them! If they were to take a new job with one of your competitor’s this means that all your hard work is now impacting their own online marketing success. The old links might still point to your site, but now your competitor can leverage your former employee’s personal brand for their own SEO.

For Brick Marketing’s link building we use my name whenever and wherever possible. Since it’s my company, I don’t plan on going anywhere for a long time. When I first started the company, my personal brand and the company identity were very strongly intertwined because I wanted to make sure potential clients knew they were working with me, not just faceless employee X. Even though Brick Marketing has grown since then, I still use my name to execute most of the link building components because it’s recognized by the industry and potential clients alike.

For small businesses, I recommend that it’s best to stick with the owner’s name for all link building purposes. It starts to get a little more complicated when you move up into the mid-sized business that might have a few people in the marketing department. It gets even trickier when do the link building for an enterprise that could have thousands of employees. My advice is to stick with a person that is going to be with the company for a while when it comes to blog commenting. If your brand is large enough you might be able to have a few names bouncing around for blog commenting (tell your employees how great it is for their personal brand!) and distribute blog commenting roles equally so no one employee gets all the clout.