SEO seems to have a questionable reputation, unfortunately, which is comparable to the reputation of car salesmen and lawyers. I’m sure that, like in any other industry, over 80% of the people working in it has the best intentions, but it’s tactics like this and threads like this that give both the 80% and the other 20% a bad name. That’s just how things work, and “92 reasons why SEOs are God’s gift to humanity”-type posts usually only make it worse. You are now a car salesman, deal with it.

Now on to today’s main concern for many of these SEOs: getting links (legitimately). One way to get links is via PR. And although many news websites and journalists don’t link out very often, there are still lots of ways to get links from newspapers. Just make sure that your pitch is ok, that you’re pitching the right person in the right way, and you’ll double your chances of success. Keep in mind, though, that influence != popularity.

And more great articles:

• 5 Link building questions that make me die a little inside – Jennifer Van Iderstyne
• An infographic case study – Ken Lyons
• Five things I’ve learned about paid links – Melanie Nathan
• Link building expectations formula – George Fisher
• 124 eCommerce link building queries – Garrett French
• Market research for link building – Paddy Moogan
• Link building techniques: risk vs. reward – Ian Lurie
• 7 Different visualisations of link profiles – Tom Critchlow
• Different types of overlooked linbait – Jordan Kasteler
• How to promote link worthy content – Arnie Kuenn
• Investing in link building – Mike Pantoliano
• SESSF link building live blogging – Garrett French
• ASE link building live blogging – Lisa Barone

PS – Feel free to drop me a note or to shout at me on Twitter if you think I left out an amazing article.  Desperately need more link building round-ups? Ontolo publishes one every week!

When I’m in the middle of creating a new website or an in-depth blog article, one of things I usually do is making a list of which websites to link out to. Sometimes, visitors may find a resource page, a list with links to other relevant websites or a few in-content links very interesting. And when a page is relevant to mine, meets a certain quality standard, and adds value to the content on my page, I’m usually more than happy to link to it. For free. However, you’d be surprised how very few pages meet that quality standard.

1. Ads before content

If I want to see nothing but ads, I’ll go to Google. When I’m looking for content to link to, and I land on a page with a 336×280 AdSense block above the fold, or with bouncing banner ads that have to be minimized before I can read the content on the page, I will definitely not link to it. Why on earth would I want to let my visitors experience something annoying like that?

It’s not a problem that you try to monetize your website, but do you really have to turn your page into a blinking neon sign to do so? Ditch some ads and get more links!

2. Bad writing & grammar

You don’t have to be a best selling novelist, but you should be able to tell me a story without boring me to death. Also, when you’re too lazy to use a spell checker, you probably didn’t deserve that link. Remarkable writers score bonus points, though.

If you don’t like writing, hire someone to do it for you! You can usually tell if someone doesn’t like writing, just by reading one of his or her articles. Try Demand Media if you want to see some examples…

3. Sell, sell, sell

A good salesman knows when he should try to sell something, and when it’s time to socialize or to talk about other things. Bad salesmen try to sell nearly anything, at all times, to anyone, which can be quite annoying. Is your website a good or a bad salesman?

There’s nothing wrong with promoting your services every now and then, but when nearly every blog post is nothing but a lengthy sales pitch with a picture of a kitten, I won’t be linking out to you anytime soon.

4. Link greed and pink illness

The web is a social place. Linking out every now and then is not a bad thing. It might be the link builder in me, but when I see a blog that has zero outbound links in the last 10 or so articles, I’ll go and find a more social website to link out to. The same goes for linking out to your sources. Link out, and thou wilt receive.

Websites that automatically nofollow all outbound links are even worse, in my opinion. I don’t care if it’s company policy, a WordPress plugin going berserk, or ‘something that IT should have fixed two weeks ago’, I’ll do the same to you. Nofollow and thou wilt receive. Yes, karma can be a bitch.

5. Being mediocre

Just recently, I was looking for an article with beautiful city landscapes for an ‘additional resources’ section of a page. I ended up at a nicely written page about city landscapes and what’s beautiful about them, but that page did not contain any photographs. When the SERPS of the topic of your page contain image results (like so), your page should contain images. Period.

Also, when you do a ‘Top 101 Ways to do X’ article, make sure that it contains 101 ways to do X. Not 14, followed by 87 variations of the first fourteen ways. When I send my visitors away from my site to visit yours, I want them to go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. Not ‘meh’ or ‘boo’.

Of course, there are several other reasons that will make me think twice about linking to your website (lack of uniqueness, very ugly web design, bad neighborhoods, not having an ‘about us’ section, being a direct competitor, etc.), but for me, the 5 reasons mentioned in this article are the most important ones.

How about you? What makes you link to other websites, or what prevents you from doing so?

When it comes to link building (but with most other things as well) most people try to find shortcuts. They look for ‘secrets’, smart things that can get them to rank very quickly, preferably without any effort. Unfortunately, I have to say that there are no link building secrets, shortcuts or quick tricks. Well, except for one maybe; have an eye for details.

Just think about it…

• Do you start your email with ‘Dear Webmaster’ or with ‘Dear Lauren’?
• Is your content good or great?
• Do you use a spell checker?
• Do you mention the word ‘Pagerank’ in your emails or not?
• Are you an ‘SEO Link Builder’ or a ‘Product manager’ according to your email signature?
• Do you send out thank you notes?
• Do you use the word ‘guru’ in your Twitter bio?
• Have you thought your content’s title well through, or did you just write down the first thing that came to mind?
• Do you test or do you assume?
• Do you block your HTTP referrer or not?
• Are you going to send a press release on Tuesday morning or Friday afternoon?
• Do you buy your links from a broker or privately?
• Do you take no for an answer?
• Can you answer the most important link building question?
• Do you *really* understand what you’re promoting?
• Do you *really* know who you need to target?
• Did you hire the expensive designer, or the one that was $50 cheaper?
• Do you use the phone as well, or email only?

And that’s just a *very* small portion of all the details you have to think about. Nothing special, it’s all common sense. Get it all wrong, and you’ll find yourself spending your Saturday nights at the DigitalPoint forums, complaining that ‘link building is so hard and it’s not working anymore’. Get it all right, and you’ve got a chance of dominating your niche.

A few weeks ago, Aaron Wall and Geordie Carswell launched a new PPC Training and Community Forum. This is an excellent place to learn about PPC for both newbies (like me) and experienced paid search marketers. With 50 (!) training modules, a very helpful and knowledgeable community and 11 very useful PPC tools, PPC Blog’s training center has a lot to offer. Link builders can learn a lot from doing PPC (and vice versa), so I’d highly recommend you to check it out. Just read the PPC blog, and you’ll get a feeling of what quality you can expect.

To prove that it’s not for PPC marketers only, I’ll highlight one of the tools from PPC Blog’s arsenal that can be used during a link building campaign as well.

The Local Keyword Tool

One of PPC Blog’s tools is the Local Keyword Tool, which you can use to create a large set of locally targeted keywords. However, you can also use it to create search queries that help you find local link targets. Just enter the zipcode of the region that you’re targeting (it currently works for eight countries, but this number will get higher) and a radius, and the tool will generate a list with relevant locations.

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After the list with zip codes, communities, counties, states, and state codes has shown up, you can enter two additional keyword groups. Try adding keywords relevant to your products or services (plumbing, flowers, lawyer) in the first one, and adding some additional keywords like resources, articles, listings or blog in the second one. The third column can be used for the locations.

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There you go: a very long list with search queries that you can use to find new local link targets. Not bad for a PPC tool, huh?

PS – For those of you wondering, yes, I will be updating this page soon, hopefully later this month…

Update: Darren Shaw of Whitespark.ca informed me about his Local Citation Finder Tool that is released on August 5th. The output of the tool will look something like this, which can be very useful for local websites.

We’re only halfway during the summer, but I think that this years winner of the SEMMYs is already decided. Rae Hoffman collected the thoughts of 11 great link builders (just like she did two years ago)  and compiled something that I would call link building awesomeness. That’s about 100 years of link building experience in one article, so you’d better read it, bookmark it, print it and read it again.

The reason why group interview articles are so great to read, is because they are usually packed with real life examples (not guesses or assumptions), case studies, tips from the field and some form of link building discussion. Any link building strategy tips, advice on how to do research, or content marketing guidance you get from such an article has already been tested an tuned, so you can use it straight away.

And more great articles:

• Are we over-engineering the link graph? – Nicola Stott
• The 5 types of influencers on the web – Lisa Barone
• 9 Steps to SEO PR that won’t drive the PR team crazy – Ian Lurie
• The evolution of ranking signals – David Harry
• Visualising back link data using Venn diagrams – Kelvin Newman
• 15 Tips for harnassing your creativity – Tucker Cummings
• Content based link opportunity analysis – Garrett French
• Crafting real business metrics for link building – Conrad Saam
• Guest blogging: leveraging expertise and influence – Loren Baker
• How to focus on content to create linkbait – Jordan Kasteler
• Link bait: half luck, half skill, half something else – Ian Lurie
• How to rank on page 1 of Google without buying one paid link – Neil Patel
• Beginners guide to link building – Steven Bradley
• Linktoberfest (Infographic) – Vertical Measures
• Link building Monopoly (Infographic) – Linkbuilding.nl

You can come up with all the explanations you want, but link building basically is nothing more but a popularity game.

(click to enlarge)

Infographic by Linkbuilding.nl, which is the Dutch company I run together with Martijn.