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.

“Link building is becoming more difficult lately. People don’t link out anymore and Twitter is polluting the link graph. Oh, and Google isn’t treating my links they way they should.” This seems to be the consensus on various blogs, forums and even Twitter, but I can’t say I agree with it.

Actually, I even think that link building has become more easy, and especially a lot more fun during the past few years. Sure, it can be different to build links to certain types of websites, and some industries are more polluted with bad links than the Gulf of Mexico currently is with oil, but this just asks for more creativity.

Thinking outside the box, evaluating success from the past, building relationships, or even thinking a bit past the usual tactics while avoiding the most common pitfalls can bring you quite far. In other words: there’s no such thing as advanced link building – it’s simply a mix between creativity, logical thinking and persistence (sometimes with a little bit of help).

And also:

• Real life link building examples from SMX Advanced at Bruce Clay and SEO Gadget
• The myth of volume-based link building – Hugo Guzman
• Why building links is important – Leo Dimilo
• Choosing the right link development strategy – Kieran Flanagan
• Death to the paid link – Ross Hudgens
• Link building opportunities big brands miss – Rishi Lakhani

Managers love visuals. Nice charts, infographics or pivot tables make excellent excuses for not having to actually *read* those long reports or documents. And since link building reports tend to be packed with data, they love to see something visually appealing every few pages to give their eyes some rest.

A possible chart that could spice up your SEO or link building document, is a World Link Map, which displays your link profile on a world heatmap. And although this may sound like a lot of work, it’s actually quite easy. All you need is Majestic SEO and Google Spreadsheets.

Step 1: Get the data

Create an Advanced Report of the website who’s link profile you’d like to see in a World Link Map via Majestic SEO. Select ‘Countries’ in the Report Menu and export this report to csv.

Besides using Majestic’s ‘Countries’ info, which uses the IP adress of a website to determine the country of origin, you can also use the TLD data that Majestic provides. Although such a report is more accurate for ccTLDs, it is also a bit more work to create a World Link Map with this data.

Step 2: Copy, paste & ISO codes

Now you can copy the first five columns and paste them into Google Spreadsheets (or delete the other columns if you have opened the csv file from Google Spreadsheets directly). Now insert one column between the first (Country) and the second (RefDomains) column, which you can title ‘Country code’, or something similar.

In order to let Google create a nice map of the world, you will have to add the ISO Country Codes of all countries into this column. This is not my favorite step in this process, but adding the ISO Country Codes to the country csv export is already on Majestic SEO’s feature request list :) Until then, if you’re planning on creating multiple maps, I’d suggest taking a look at using the QUERY formula.

Step 3: Create a World Link Map

Right-click anywhere in your spreadsheet, and select ‘Insert Gadget’. After clicking on ‘Maps’, select the option ‘Heatmap’.

Now you can select the field range and the map region, before you hit ‘Apply and close’. The result is a small map, which displays your link profile. Light colored countries indicate a low level of links, while you get linked a lot from bright colored countries. Grey countries indicate no links at all.

Some examples
These World Link Maps can highlight interesting situations. For example, the relatively high amount of links from Polish websites is a bit strange for a Scottish website.

And this African News website seems to get links from anywhere but Africa…

You can take things even further, by dividing the amount of links by (for example) the spent marketing budget in certain countries, population, or any other data.

The map below shows the link profile of the earlier mentioned African News website, but with the amount of links per country weighed against the amount of internet users in that country.

As you can see, there’s quite a lot you can do with link data and a map of the world, besides ‘just creating pretty maps’. While creating a World Link Map may not be very useful for most SMB websites, link visualizations like this may reveal very interesting overviews for large and/ or international websites.

Newspapers are asked to remove links, natural links become a rarity, and more and more webmasters become link-greedy; the link graph is breaking down. In other words: link building seems to become more difficult.

Sure, there are still many relatively easy ways to get links to your SMB website, or to build links to local websites, but this trend will probably not go away. Link tactic differentiation, of which creatively pursuing .gov links or by building links backwards (a very effective way of content based link building) are just a few examples, is probably more important than it ever was.

And also:

• Link building normalization – Anthony Verre
• The reasonable surfer – Bill Slawski (but please read this one, too)
• What kind of links do you need – Scott Willoughby
• 9 “Reach metrics” for evaluating guest publishing opportunities – Garrett French
• Breathe new life into your emailed link requests – Julie Joyce
• How to use goverment website information to create sticky link bait – Debra Mastaler
• All links are not created equal – Rand Fishkin

I have written about useful link building tools here in more than one occasion, but I still get questions about which tools to use (or not) quite regularly. This made me decide to write reviews of the most useful and/ or well-known link building tools available on the market.

The first set of reviews includes reviews of four free link building tools, and six paid link building tools. One of these paid link building tools is Influence Finder, a great tool that is being launched at SMX Advanced London at this very moment.

I will continue to add new tools to the list of tools, starting with the tools that I have already listed. If you want me to review your tool, or to test a tool you’ve heard of and want to know if it’s any good, feel free to let me know.

Free link building tools

Link Diagnosis
Majestic SEO Free tools
MyBlogGuest (coming soon)
Open Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer

Premium link building tools

Advanced Link Manager
BuzzStream (coming soon)
Enquisite Linker (coming soon)
Influence Finder
Link Assistant (coming soon)
Link Research Tools
Majestic SEO
Ontolo Link Building Toolkit (coming soon)
Raven SEO Tools (coming soon)
SEObook Premium Tools
SEOmoz Premium Tools

You can find all link building tools I have reviewed, or will be reviewing in the near future, right here: link building tools.

When it comes to link building, people tend to overestimate and over-analyze the entire process. Although the dozens of link building tools out there definitely can be useful, and many advanced factors can come into play, the essence of link building all comes down to answering one single question;

Why? Image via Jody Miller

Yes, it’s that simple. If you can answer the question ‘Why should I link to your website?‘ without hesitation, you’re good to go. However, answers like “because our websites are relevant” or “because it’s relevant for your users” are not good answers. Most links on the web are placed out of emotion, and relevance does not trigger any emotion.

Think of all the link requests you have received yourself, and about which ones you have actually accepted, and why. Think of all the websites you have linked to yourself over time, and why you have linked to these sites.

There are many good answers possible to this question, but the most common ones are:

• because I love your website/ images/ article/ etc.
• because I like you
• because you have offered something in return
• because I think I will be missing out on something if I don’t share your website with others

Ask yourself this question before any link request you send out. Before you start creating another link bait concept. Before any brainstorm session you run.

If you can’t answer this question properly, there are basically three things you can do:

• proceed nevertheless, and deal with demoralizingly low acceptance rates
• offer something in return (content, money, services, etc.) to persuade people
• improve your content (or your pitch) in such a way that it does answer the question

Now if more people would ask themselves this question, it would make my inbox a whole lot cleaner…