In general, when you lack one (or more) of the elements, you’ll have to compensate it with one or more of the others.

So if you have maximized Budget, Content and/ or Outreach, these are the link building styles that would probably suit you best. (click to enlarge)

This post, The Different Styles of Link Building, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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I’ll keep sharing my favorite stuff from the blogosphere every once in a while, with this being the best link building articles I’ve read during the past few months:

• Link building with the experts, the 2011 edition – Rae Hoffman-Dolan
• Content based outreach for link building – Justin Briggs
• The complete guide to link building with guest posts – Ben Wills
• Get over yourself and give me a link (please) – Debra Mastaler
• Competitor backlink analysis in Excel – Ethan Lyon
• Scalable link building for corporate websites – Jason Acidre
• 9 Ways you can improve your pitches to blogs & websites – Jeremy Bencken
• Link building tactics in 2011 – Ryan Clark
• Better understanding link-based spam analysis techniques – Justin Briggs

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• Linkbuilding in competitive niches using communities & content – Pete Wailes
• Creating exceptional content for boring topics – Michael Gray
• 21-Day Link Builder Relationship Challenge – Jeremy Bencken
• Its not about link placement as much as link discovery – Paul Madden
• The link builder’s guide to tracking, documentation and productivity – David Wolf
• How to unnaturally naturally vary your anchor text – Ross Hudgens
• Link building in 2011 – Maria Walters
• Creating encyclopedic content – Michael Gray
• Why some sites link, and others don’t – Mark Johnstone
• Foundational infographic elements for link baiters – Michael Erin Strong
• 25 Ways to quality great links – Adam Melson
• Can competitors hurt your rankings with bad links? – David Sottimano
• 5 Ways to track link building success in the social world – Kieran Flanagan
• A model for link building: beyond “great content” – Ross Hudgens
• Journalism, ‘churnalism’ & the sticky subject of anchor text links – Nichola Stott

And a few conference recaps:

• Distilled link building seminar (New Orleans)
• SMX West (San Jose)
• Think Visibility (Leeds)

Please leave a comment if you think there’s anything missing in this list.

This post, Link Building this Month (03.2011), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Related posts:

1. Link Building this Month (11.2010)
2. Link Building this Month (03.2010)

As soon as you’ve hit the launch-button, you hold tight to your chair and hope for hundreds or thousands of links to appear out of nowhere, but in stead… **crickets**

Ouch.

If linkbait fails in a forest, and no one is around to hear it...

Now there’s two things you can do. You can either curl up into a corner and start crying, or you can man yourself, try to find out what went wrong, and give it another try. After all, if your campaign didn’t succeed the first time, no one will know you’re fishing with old bait the second time.

Obviously, this also works for existing content on your website that wasn’t intended as linkbait (or was more succesful), such as white papers, evergreen content, great images or extensive resource lists.

Advertising

There, I said it. The a-word. The word that lots of SEOs and link builders hate, as paying for traffic is not in their vocabulary. But it can be *very* fruitful, even when it comes to link building.

One of my favorite advertising platforms to promote linkbaity content is StumbleUpon. A succesful StumbleUpon campaign is the gift that keeps on giving. You can buy Stumbles for $0,05 each, and if the people who get to see your content like it enough, you get rewarded with more (free) stumbles. And since Stumblers usually don’t pay attention to post dates, you can use if for old content as well.

I got another reminder of how wonderful StumbleUpon Paid Discovery (what their ad platform is called) works only recently, when a campaign resulted in around 100.000 stumbles, and counting. The costs: a mere $100.

Now everyone knows that StumbleUpon traffic isn’t the best in the world. However, although the 100.000 earlier mentioned Stumblers had a bounce rate of ~95%, they also attributed for a few thousand Facebook likes, a couple of hundred Tweets and a few dozen links. Not bad for $100, if you ask me.

When the traffic seems to be dying off, you simply pour in a bit of extra paid stumbles to get it going again. A regular refill can make sure that your link profile grows steadily as well.

Create a new boost in traffic (and social attention) with some extra ad budget.

Obviously, StumbleUpon isn’t the only ad platform you can try. Use AdWords or Facebook ads, but also advertorials, promoted Tweets, Reddit ads or whatever you think can convert to social votes or links.

Also, think about relevant journalists or bloggers writing an article that’s relevant to your content, and make sure to show up during their research. Give them the content they’re looking for and (hopefully) earn a link.

Alerts

In theory, Google Alerts are amazingly useful. According to Google, you receive “updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic”.

So when someone publishes an article that’s relevant to your website, you instantly receive an email with a link to it. You can then go check it out, and -when applicable- contact the owner to suggest adding a link to a page with further reading material. Again, in theory, as creating a Google Alert usually means that you receive notifications of your own blog posts or two-week-old Tweets in your mailbox…

Bing discontinued their alert service, but Yahoo! still offers it, as well as lots of individual news websites. Services like Trackle, SocialMention and Tweetbeep (for Twitter) can also be quite useful.

Another solution would be to create your own alerts service, for example via Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes has lots of options, which examples like this and this show, but creating your own would allow you to include sources of your choice as well.

Future (guest) content

Do you have some blog posts, guest content or interviews planned for the next few weeks? Make sure to include a link to the content page you’re trying to (re)promote.

Chances are that people have missed that page in the first place. With guest content or interviews you can deliver it to a whole new audience, which is yet another chance of your page getting picked up by others.

Make sure to take a look at your most popular pages as well, and include a link to your had-to-be-popular page here too – if it’s relevant and adds value, of course.

Al these options are great ways to get some good anchor text links to the page, which hopefully increases its search engine visibility. This in turn increases the chance of content researchers finding your piece and mentioning it in theirs. Chances of this happening are very small, but you simply never know. Sometimes it’s just a tiny snowflake that creates an avalanche.

Newsletters

Sending out newsletters regularly? Don’t forget to include to add links that are relevant to the main subject of your mailing or eZine.

Not everyone is in a shopping mood, so make sure to include some reading material for the people who just want to be entertained. If your mailing list is of a somewhat respectable size, you just might have some influential linkerati amongst your subscribers.

Make linking easy

Now this should be a no-brainer, but apparently some companies still have difficulties with this. Facepalm indeed.

Making linking easy goes further than this, though. Encourage your users to link to you, for example by providing embed codes next to your images or infographics, or by creating ‘Our company in the media’ pages – which are basically reciprocal 2.0 pages.

Link building

Now if all of the above fails, you can always revert to good ol’ link building. Contact relevant resource pages, link pages or any other website you deem appropriate, and kindly ask if they’d consider adding a link to your page.

Agreed, it’s not the most fun part of the job, but since most of your competitors probably think the same (and therefore don’t do it), not neglecting this part can actually lead to an advantage.

However, if you’ve made it to this part of your list with promotion options, chances are that your content wasn’t as good as you thought it was. Try to find out what was wrong with it, and fix it for the next time, so you don’t have to run through this list again.

Do you have other ways to promote your existing content (or failed linkbait campaigns) to share?

This post, How to Promote Existing Content (or Failed Linkbaits), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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1. The Mother of All Linkbaits
2. Building Link Targeted Content That Works: Step 2 of 3 – Creating Content & Preparation
3. Building Link Targeted Content That Works: Step 3 of 3 – Launching, Monitoring & After Care

• Don’t break the cardinal rule of link bait – Debra Mastaler
• Original ideas for building content for links – Ken McGaffin
• Link building with developers – Will Critchlow
• 9 Ways to work with your client’s PR agency – Nicola Stott
• Link building for speed, efficiency and quality – Ben Wills
• How to rank nationally with local links – Ross Hudgens
• How I failed at link building – Adam Audette
• How to make a link bait that goes viral – Rohan Pawale
• The preciprocation link building flowchart – Garrett French
• Online PR and getting links from major media – Ken McGaffin
• 51 essential link building tips – Kelvin Newman
• Getting SEO value from your affiliate links – Paddy Moogan
• A link building blueprint: the foundation – Debra Mastaler
• Link acquisition & contextual relevancy – Daniel Butler

This post, Link Building this Month (02.2011), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Related posts:

1. Link Building this Month (03.2010)
2. Link Building this Month (11.2010)

Link building has been as essential part of search engine optimisation since practically before search engine optimisation was even a thing. A lot of the advice has stayed the same all this time (we’ve all known for ages that the easiest way to get people to link to something is to create great content).

But some of the advice – on whether or not you should have a blog or if getting links is worth the effort – has shifted over the years. So I thought it would be fun to look over some of the best link building advice over the last 10 years.

 

Jill Whalen – Link Popularity and PageRank (2001)

Jill answered a query from a reader who asked if she could write a more up-to-date post on link popularity. The other posts, he said, were all at least a year old and all said that links were helpful for higher rankings, but that we shouldn’t spend too much time or effort getting links to our sites (!). Jill did some research, trying to get her site to rank higher for ‘search engine optimization’, and after explaining what PageRank and backward links were, she announced her findings.

Top tip: The words used in the hyperlinks that link to your site have a big influence on what you rank for and how high you rank for it.

 

Robin Nobles, et al. – 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies (2002)

This comprehensive post outlines what was essentially all the link building expertise at that time. They discussed swapping reciprocal links with other site owners, (Rocky Rawstern of 7th Wave in particular felt blogs would become link farms that Google would eventually ignore), and building links to parts of your site besides the home page.

Top tip: Become a content provider. That gives people a reason to link to you.

 

Aaron Wall – Hubs & Authorities: Local Community Link Structure (2003)

By the time Aaron was writing this post, search engines tried to minimise the effects of the link exchanges so beloved by SEOs in previous years. So he set out to show what else a local business could do to get some of the ‘good’ links to their site.

Top tip: Check where your competitors’ backward links come from, and try to get those links, too.

 

Garrett French – SES London: Link Building and Domain Name Issues (2004)

Garrett wrote a round-up of Alan Webb’s Search Engine Strategies London conference posts, pulling out the most useful SEO tips. It had become a largely accepted tenet that search engines looked at links to determine the relevancy of sites for certain key phrases. Matt Cutts (then described as “a Google developer”) insisted that the quality of the links was the important thing, but SEOs were seeing evidence that quantity counted as well.

Top tip: Identical anchor text looks like (and usually is) an attempt to game the system. If you are going to buy links, make sure your anchor text alternates through a few phrases.

 

Darren Rowse – Linkbaiting with Attack (2005)

Darren used a post by Nick Wilson on the Performancing blog as the inspiration for his own post. Nick had advised on using one of five linkbait hooks he had identified. These were the news hook, the contrary hook, the attack hook, the resource hook and the humour hook. Darren (perhaps knowingly) used the contrary hook to advise against using the contrary and the attack hooks as the main way you build links and increase traffic to your site.

Top tip: Use the attack and contrary hooks like pepper. Put a dash here and a pinch there to spice up your blog, but don’t rely on it to build up your professional reputation.

 

Chris Bennett – Not Another Directory Submission Post! (2006)

Chris wrote a post, not about how you should submit your site to directories, but how to make sure you’ve got the strongest link from the directory as you can. He suggested starting, like with any link building campaign, with your site’s keywords and target anchor text in mind. Then you can find relevant pages on directories through certain searches. He then includes a list of some of his favourite directories.

Top tip: Search Google for [directory name] and [your keyword] to find the relevant pages for your site. This will ensure your directory link indicates to Google that you are relevant to your target keyword.

 

Eric Ward – Are You in the Circle of Link Trust? (2007)

Eric used the film Meet the Parents as a metaphor for Google’s algorithmic trust. Because his site, ericward.com, is relatively old and well-known to Google, because it had never been in trouble for doing black or greyhat SEO and because it had a load of links to other pages, Google ranked him in the first SERP for ‘linkbait strategies’, which at the time was a pretty new search query. His site is in Google’s circle of trust, unlike Ben Stiller’s character at the beginning of Meet the Parents. So the new pages on his site will rank higher immediately, all because Google know that ericward.com is a trustworthy, strong site.

Top tip: If you have an older, more trusted site, rely on the trust you’ve built up to buoy your newer pages, and if you have a newer site, try to build up Google’s trust. Your new pages will be stronger if you’re more trustworthy.

 

Tom Critchlow – A Linkbuilding Method so Effective I Can’t Believe it’s not Blackhat (2008)

Back in the day, Tom discovered that he could find pages on sites that no longer offer the content or service they once did. He could then get in touch with that site and ask them to link to his page. Alternatively, he could run an analysis to find out which sites were linking to that page, get in touch with those sites and explain the situation and ask the sites to link to his site.

Top tip: The whole post is one giant top tip, but Tom also listed phrases that you could search for to find the pages that no longer have content on them. These included “service no longer available” [keyword], “stopped selling [keyword]” and “site has been taken down”.

 

Wil Reynolds – Using Twitter for Linkbuilding in SEO (2009)

In this video, Wil detailed some amazing ways to use Twitter to build links. In his example, he used a company that fixed air conditioners. The owners could search Twitter for ‘broken a/c’, ‘my ac broke’ and the like, then contact the most influential Tweeters, inviting them to tell their story in a blog post, then add a widget (which linked back to the air conditioner company’s website) to that post so their friends and readers could vote for their story. The story that got the most votes would win an air conditioner.

Top tip: Build an API or use a tool like Twitter Grader to determine who has the most followers. That way, you’re not contacting people who do not have a lot of influence in your target niche.

 

Rand Fishkin – Link Building Tips for Personal Blogs (2010)

Rand outlined what in his opinion were the most effective ways to build links to a personal blog. He assumed that someone with a personal blog probably doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on link building but probably does have some time and a lot of passion to devote to link building efforts.

Top tip: Answer questions in online forums and Q&A sites. This can lead to a lot of relevant traffic as other visitors to the forums and Q&A sites check out your blog to see who you are.

 

Paddy Moogan – Getting Links and SEO Value From Your YouTube Videos (2011)

Paddy worked with Distilled’s web developer Andy to create an embed code for YouTube videos that would include a followed back link to the video creator’s site. The code puts a line after the video crediting its creator.

Top tip: Again, this entire post is a top tip, but it inspired Sean Lind to build a page that automatically generates the code for you. That way, you don’t have to worry about unclosed tags or an errant comma breaking the code.

 
>> Melissa Campbell is the Content Manager at Distilled, an internet marketing agency based in London. To bring you the latest and best link building advice, Distilled are hosting the Link Building Seminar 2011 in both London, UK, on 18 March and in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 25 March. You can find more information and buy tickets here.

This post, 10 Years of Link Building Advice, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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Reviews of link prospect finder Ontolo, bloggers network SeededBuzz and allround tools SEO Diver and Linkdex have been added to the list. The reviews of Eightfold Logic Linker (which is now free!) and the improved Link Research Tools have been updated with new screenshots and descriptions of new functionalities.

Do you want me to review your link building tool as well? Drop me a note!

This post, Link Building Tools Updated, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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1. Link Building Tools Page Updated
2. 10 Link Building Tools Reviewed
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• See something? Cite something – Caldwell Tanner
• Are you a link loud mouth? – Debra Mastaler
• Link building tips & strategies – Matt Roberts
• How to get links from journalists – Nicola Stott
• Five ways to get links from fan sites – Rob Ousbey
• 4 Link building phenomena dissected – Jennifer van Iderstyne
• How to avoid link builder’s block with chunking – Kieran Flanagan
• Link building interview with Wil Reynolds – Elise Redlin-Cook
• Leverage media buys for link building – Hugo Guzman
• Is this proof directory submissions still work? – Shaun Anderson
• Analyzing a magazine website for link prospects – Ken McGaffin

This post, Link Building this Month (01.2011), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Related posts:

1. Link Building this Month (03.2010)
2. Link Building this Month (11.2010)

In my opinion, starting an online marketing campaign without a competitive link analysis is like starting a company with only half of a marketing plan. You want to be well aware of your surroundings, before you enter a market or start a new project. Sure, there are plenty examples of companies that succeeded without one, but I think that there are over twice that amount of companies that would still exist today, if they had made a thorough plan when they started. “A well prepared man is worth two others”, as a French saying goes.

Michael already mentioned one very valid reason to perform a competitive link analysis, which is securing links from sites that already link to competing websites. The sole fact that these sites already link to your competitors is not a bad thing, as that has absolutely no influence at all on whether these sites may pass traffic, link juice or conversions to yours. Agreed, you can never be 100% sure if a link passes value or not, but if you think that it may provide relevant traffic, any additional link juices comes as a bonus.

Most link builders don’t need any other reason to start a link analysis, but there are much more reasons to perform one.

Goal deprecation

When a prospect (or your employer) tells you “this is what we want to reach, and this is our budget”, a competitive link analysis may be a good way to find out whether it’s achievable or not.

For example, “we want to rank in the top three for keyword X, and we have a budget of $x,xxx to achieve it” might not be such a good idea when you find out that your competitors have been attracting lots of high quality links for several years, and you’re just starting. Of course, a goal like that is never a good idea, but in some cases you’ll simply end up with such a goal on your plate. And it’s good to have some data laying around that you can use to prove that this goal can probably not be achieved within the outlined time frame, as links are -whether you like it or not- of big influence on search engine visibility.

Content ideas

During a link analysis, you’ll come across lots of different pages. It’s remarkable to see how quickly you’ll get to know an industry that’s completely new to you, just by doing some research. This also helps you to find content gaps and to come up with other ideas for linkworthy content.

Identify networks and relationships

Some competitors may use link networks to artificially improve their search engine rankings, and a link analysis can identify such networks. Use this information to avoid contacting sites in this network, to keep track of linking behavior between these networks, or for any other reason that you think it’s valuable for.

The same goes for identifying relationships. In some cases, a link analysis can go as far as telling you which journalists your competitors knows, or where your competitor spends his entire sponsoring budget.

Identify timely patterns

One of the things that I like about Majestic SEO, is that they offer historical linking data. Although this is link discovery data, it can be used to identify patterns, or to show competitors that are either very lazy or very active, link building wize.

Competing websites that have not been attracting links for several months may be interesting targets to acquire, especially for affiliate publishers. Websites that more or less act as link magnets, on the other hand, are worth keeping a very close eye on. Just like you would do with an offline competitor who is suddenly getting a lot of traction.

If several of your competitors show seasonal patterns in their link growth (ie link spikes in the Summer, or near Mother’s Day), but you are not, it may be a good thing to investigate why this is happening. You might be wasting an opportunity – and not just a linking opportunity, but sometimes even a business opportunity in general.

Find common linking reasons

Persuasion plays an important role in link marketing. People always link for a reason, but the most important linking reasons can be different in another industry. In highly competitive industries, for example, reciprocation (link buys, link trades) plays an important role, while authority might be the main influencing factor in some other industries. Finding out who link to your competitors is not the most important thing, it’s learning why they do so.

Identify spammers

When you work at an agency, I think that it’s part of your duty to report any spammer (cloaking, blatantly buying links, or any other spam strategies) in your client’s industry you may come across to your client.

It’s up to you to provide your client with as much information as possible, and it’s up to them to decide what to do with this. Competitive link analysis can be of great assistance with identifying websites that use dodgy linking strategies.

General competitive intelligence

Almost any link analysis that I have performed thus far has provided other competitive information as well. It’s funny to see what kind of information a competitor’s backlinks can take you to sometimes. Content marketing strategies, press releases with business information about the company, interviews with former employees that you would not have found otherwise, and more stuff like that.

I’ve also used link analysis to determine the added SEO / link value of an offline marketing campaign, for example in print or press. This is a bit tricky, but if an offline campaign is somewhat isolated, it is possible to draw relatively safe assumptions.

 
I know that Michael is not a big fan of the artificial link building, in relation to the more natural link marketing. However, with the current link-driven algorithms that Google uses, deliberately neglecting the link building part in a competitive market is like wanting to ride with the Nazgûl on a pink My Little Pony.

PS – Although I don’t agree with Michael’s post about competitive link analysis, I do recommend subscribing to his blog. You don’t always have to agree with someone to learn new things.

This post, Why a Link Analysis is Anything But a Waste of Time, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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1. So many things to do and yet so little time
2. Time flies, things change

During the past eight years, I’ve learned a lot. I’m still learning new things every day, and I hope this will continue for years and years. When I was thinking about some of the things that I’ve learned thus far, I decided to write eight of them down.

 
1. People with the biggest mouths are not always right. Nor are people with the most experience, the best reputation or the most followers. The sole fact that you have eighteen years of experience doesn’t mean shit, except that you’re probably older than me.

 
2. Google makes the rules in SEO. If you’ve always blindly obeyed these rules, you’ve probably been thinking “Just wait until Google fixes things tomorrow, you mean spammer!” every day, for the past six years or so. Ain’t life a bitch?

 
3. Trial and error is the best teacher. Not an eBook, not a forum and certainly not some kind of 3-day online course. However, you can definitely use some of these sources to come up with ideas for things to test and try yourself.

 
4. Getting things done is the most important thing in online marketing. You can analyze things, write reports or fine-tune stuff all day long, but things don’t change unless you get shit done. Hit that publish button, press ‘send’ or kick someone in the nuts to make things happen.

 
5. If you never question anything or anyone, you don’t deserve to know the truth. If you want to believe that links don’t matter, or that 20,000 people a month are really searching for “ski chalet Miami, FL”, be my guest.

 
6. White hat link building is just the search engine friendly version of plain old marketing. You can talk about dofollow and nofollow all you want, but if you don’t know the principles of marketing, you’re doomed to fail.

 
7. Most SEO conferences are a just a nice way to see something of the world and to make your boss pay for your beer. Most of these conference’s networking events, on the other hand…

 
8. Paying for something only is a bad thing when the costs outweigh the benefits. It’s called ROI, and it not only applies on the CPM campaigns you’re managing for your clients, but also on the tools, forums, PR services, books, people, web hosting and many other things you use yourself. Don’t be a cheapskate.

 
Bonus lesson. Never, ever trust someone who calls him or herself a guru. If gurus are a disease, than social media gurus are a nasty STD. Okay, I didn’t need the full seven years to understand this one, it’s an important one to keep in mind ;)

 
Do you have any other important lessons to add? Like I said, I always love learning new things :)

This post, 8 Lessons I’ve Learned From Doing SEO, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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