10 Things I Learned as a Link Building Intern

guest post by Jessica Porter

1. It is, most likely, NOTHING like what you're imagining …

So, there you are, trying to decide what to do with the rest of your life. You realize that media is fully going in the direction of the Internet. Without Internet presence your company is not likely to succeed. You are also interested in marketing and/or advertising. So the perfect combination of those two would logically be Internet marketing right? WRONG!

Even though you really don't know what Internet marketing is, believe me, it is totally different from anything you could possibly be thinking! Internet marketing is so much more about the company than the consumer which is completely opposite from what you're taught for traditional marketing.

Because of all the competition on the Internet you have to try to get your site noticed. It's a little about the consumer because you are trying to get your site to the right consumers but it's more about doing everything right on the company end so that it will eventually reach the ideal consumers.

2.  They do not teach you this stuff in school…

PageRank, back links, no/do follow, cached…ummmm, are we still speaking English?! As a link building intern you learn things about websites and the Internet that you never had any idea existed. You think you just happened to put in the perfect search term in order to find the perfect article for you latest assignment…think again!

You finding that article was the crafty work of Internet marketers placing that article in front of you! You think those pages and articles just showed up because Google happened to know just what you wanted…think again! Those pages appeared out of the vastness of the WWW because of its link builders' perfect SEO concoction: placing the perfect links on the perfect pages, putting out the perfect number of articles and blog posts etc. Google may be almighty but it cannot read your mind….only the link builders can.

3. You will be a Google guru after being a link building intern…

There was nothing I hated more in school than when I had a research paper I had to do and I just could not come up with the right search terms to get what I needed. Well that will never be a problem for me again! Searching for places to post the same keywords month after month really makes you push your search term creativity. Watch out Google, here I come!

4. Laborious tasks….

Research, sparking buzz around a great piece of content, reading, commenting, registering for sites, attempt to prove you are not a robot or computer with Captchas (many times to no avail!), the list goes on and on. Being a link building intern isn't exactly the same every day, and isn't exactly easy either.

5. How much patience I have…

See number 4.

6. What Google wants, Google gets…

We've all heard the age old question "if they went and jumped off a bridge would you go jump off a bridge too?" And generally the answer to this question is "no." However, I have found the exception!

Yahoo who? Bing what? Ask where? These other search engines pretty much just take up space! Essentially the only search engine that matters or that companies care about ranking on is, I bet you can't guess….GOOGLE! Every company bows down to try and please Google. If the algorithm changes then the link builders change their tactics to make Google happy!  Whatever Google thinks makes a site qualify as legit is what makes the site legit. So yes, if Google jumped off a bridge all link builders and SEO firms would also jump off that same bridge!

7.  Constantly learning…

As to be expected, an internship is often filled with learning opportunities. But surprisingly, some internships don't provide as much information as you'd think. Thankfully, in link building, there is so much information to be learned I don't think even during a full time internship I could learn it all. Every day I learn something new that can apply to the next thing I'm tasked with. Sure beats an internship where I have to get coffee, work late, or dress up.

8.  How difficult it is to prove that I'm a human…

I mean seriously?! These captchas are ridiculous! Half the time even if you get them right they tell you that it's wrong. What happened to the day when they were actual words not just random ridiculous letters stuck together in a ridiculously hard to read font?!

Even the most human human wouldn't be able to satisfy some of these captchas. I am a big fan of the new ones coming out that are math equations!

9. It is not in my job description….

As the intern I am not required to do any of the following:

Refill the water jug

Drive to lunch

Pay for lunch

10. How important SEO is to any company with an online presence.

What's the point of having a website if no one is able to find it? That's where SEO comes into play. With a little waving of the wand they can make your site become so much more findable to your customers.

It's all about Google like I said before. They constantly have crawlers out there crawling web pages and they do it by link hopping. Therefore the more back links your site has out there on the web, the more likely Google is to find you and rate you. The more they see you the higher they'll eventually start to rank you.

Higher Google ranking=showing up sooner in search results=your customers might actually be able to find you. No matter how tedious this job can be, it is a huge asset to any online company.

Have you interned anywhere recently? Tell us what you've learned, in the comments below.

About the Author:

Jessica is a recent graduate from Baker University. She is currently interning at Vertical Measures as a link building intern as well as at Zion & Zion as a marketing/advertising intern. She loves dr. pepper, the color purple, the number 13, the Denver Broncos and Sergio Garcia.