Since there wasn’t a Link Building this Month in December, because of the yearly recap, this month’s edition basically is a double edition. In 2010, I will be putting the bar even higher than it already was. We’ve all read the same stuff over and over again, so I’ll try only to mention articles that are new, different or simply excellent.

Every new year usually starts with awards, recaps (see earlier link), resolutions (mine is better time management) and predictions. Debra Mastaler asked all Link Week columnists what they think 2010 will bring, and this is the result. As you can see, group interviews can be a great way to create great, linkable content.

And also:

• The psychology behind link giving – David Snyder
• Linkable asset inventory – Garrett French
• Link building checklist – Mark Nunney
• Top searches can attract top links – Debra Mastaler
• How to drive more links via public relations – Jeremy Bencken
• Linkfromdomain: a link building tip for Bing.com – Will Critchlow
• How to woo a blogger – Lisa Barone
• Guest blogging: the ultimate guide – Glen Allsopp
• Getting links for a poker site is easier than you think – Lyndon Antcliff
• How to measure link building – Michael Martinez

Just like last year, SmallBusinessSEM‘s Matt McGee is hosting the SEMMYs, an annual awards event for search engine marketing content. So in case you took a sabbatical last year and want to catch up, I would advize you to take a look at all the great stuff that was nominated this year.

Until the 29th of January, you can vote for your favorite article in 17 different categories. I was nominated in the link building category, but because I hate those “hey, I was nominated, please vote for me here”-posts, I’ll list my personal favorites from all 17 categories first. And then I’ll ask you to vote for me afterwards ;)

SEO – How user data, links & document scoring may be used in the “brand” algorithm – Patrick Altoft (Blogstorm)
Reading patents is hard. Who -except Dave Harry or Bill Slawski- can read 293 pages of technical mumbojumbo without falling asleep, right? Well, that’s why I loved Patrick’s article, since he recapped a very interesting Google patent in ‘normal’ wordings.

PPC – 7 Incredibly valuable but underused free tools tor PPC marketers – Brad Geddes (SEL)
Although I don’t use PPC very often, I like reading about it every now and then. I had hoped to learn a little bit more from the finalists in this category, but because I love tools, Brad Geddes’ article is my favorite here.

Social Media – 7 Reasons your Social Media Marketing failed (and how to fix it!) – Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl)
He wrote my personal favorite link building article of last year as well, but wasn’t nominated in the link building category, to my surprise. Since I am one of the contributors of the SEMMYs, I considered it to be partly my fault that his article didn’t end up on the judges’ table, so this was my sorry-Todd-I’ll-vote-for-you-in-this-category-in-stead vote. And a great article, obviously.

Local search – The Local Search Ranking Factors: Ranking High in Google Maps and Yahoo Local – David Mihm (Mihmorandum)
An excellent resource, written by an expert in local search. Whether you’re an experienced local search marketer, or you’re new and want to learn about it, this article is a must-read.

Blogs & blogging – Guest blogging: the ultimate guide – Glen Allsopp (Viperchill)
The finalists in this category were all excellent reads, and I voted for Glen Allsopp’s article about guest blogging. Not only because guest blogging can be a very effective link building technique, but also because his articles describes almost every aspect of the process.

Viral Marketing – Here’s hard data for headlines that spread on Twitter – Dan Zarrella (Copyblogger)
A good and catchy headline can be the difference between failure or success of your marketing campaign. Dan Zarrella analysed thousands of headlines and published his findings.

Analytics – Google Analytics maximized: deeper analysis, higher ROI & you – Avinash Kaushik (Kaushik.net)
Ten awesome analytics tips and the dozen-or-so links to additional analytics articles are more than enough to get you through one of those rainy Sunday afternoons.

Reputation Management – Online Reputation Management Guide – Rhea Drysdale (Outspoken Media)
I can not think of a reason why this article shouldn’t win. Pure online reputation management awesomeness.

Small Business – If I were launching a new small biz web site today – Matt McGee (Small Biz Trends)
Excellent, in-depth actionable advice for both new and existing companies. Matt shares his findings of I-don’t-know-how-many years of experience, which is probably invaluable to starting small businesses.

Google – Big brands? Google brand promotion: new search engine rankings place heavy emphasis on branding – Aaron Wall (SEObook)
Google’s brand update had (and still has) quite some impact on search engine rankings, as of February last year. Aaron Wall shows where and how big brands managed to get good rankings, and introduced the brand update to a lot of people.

Search Tech – The SEO geeks guide to information retrieval – Dave Harry (Huomah)
I mentioned how difficult reading search patents can be earlier. Well, this page contains 250+ links to such content. How about that for rainy Sunday afternoons…

Design & Usability – 25-point Website usability checklist – Dr. Peter J. Meyers (UserEffect)
It was either this one, or Daniel Ritzenthaler’s Taking the guesswork out of design, but Dr. Pete’s article won because it was numbered, and therefore more user friendly :).

Online Marketing/ General – Why trust matters & how to earn it – Matt McGee (SmallBusinessSEM)
Matt McGee asked a few dozen people to answer a bunch of questions about trust, and how to earn it online.

Industry – 10 Questions to evaluate a social media ‘expert’ – Ian Lurie (Conversation Marketing)
I love Ian’s writing style and probably hate those ‘social media gurus’ just as much as he does.

Copywriting – 50 Trigger words and phrases for powerful multimedia content – Brian Clark (Copyblogger)
Brian Clark highlights 50 words that invoke and engage emotion. Whether you’re a copywriter or have to create some PPC ads every now and then, this is a great read.

Rants – What is the difference between Google’s secrecy & your privacy? – Aaron Wall (SEObook)
As a Googler, you can’t say something like “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” to Aaron Wall, and think you can get away with it.

Link Building – I was quite surprised to see that both of my articles that were nominated made it into the finals, especially when I noticed that Gab’s 101 link buying tips and a few other great posts didn’t make it. My indispensable link building tools probably doesn’t deserve to win, but I think Link building from A to Z (a Youmoz entry) might stand a chance.

If you agree, you can vote for the post right here. And since it’s a Youmoz post, Rand (who’s also nominated in the same category) also wins a little bit, so it’s basically the best choice you can make ;)

About a year ago, I made a selection of a few (in my opinion) indispensable link building tools. Except from a Majestic SEO redesign and some changes to the Link Diagnosis tool, I haven’t seen any big changes in the field of link building tools since then. Well, until this month…

Here’s three great new tools you can use during your link building campaigns.

Link Building Queries

The guys from Ontolo created Link Building Queries, a search query generating tool, mainly based on a massive list with link building queries.

After entering a keyword that’s related to your product or website, you can enter a linkable asset type, an opportunity type, and the type of content you’re after. When you hit ‘Generate link building queries’, Garrett French himself tries to come up with useful queries in the background, and spits them out lightning fast. And the output looks somewhat like this (depending on what you’ve selected, of course);

This tool can be very helpful when you’re looking for specific link targets.

Bulk link checker

Majestic SEO already had a handful of free tools, but they have added a lightning fast Bulk Link Checker to their arsenal this month. This tool will check the amount of linking pages and referring domains to up to 150 (!) URLs in just a split second. It uses Majestic’s own data, and also has the option to download the results in CSV.

I had to edit the results a little bit to make it fit on this page, but you can click it to see the real output. Or you could go and play with the tool…

Open Site Explorer

The third tool in this list was just released yesterday. The Open Site Explorer, an SEOmoz product, provides quite some insights in the link profile of a website. You can check the regular basic link data, but SEOmoz has also added a few very nice features.

One of these features is the opportunity to check which URLs 301-redirect to a certain domain, which makes bait-n-switch pages or redirected domains for SEO purposes easy to find.

(click to see the bigger picture)

Another interesting functionality is the option to compare two different domains. Just enter two URLs, hit enter, and you’ll see some pretty charts, accompanied by very interesting data.

(click the image to see the bigger picture, or click here to see the live data)

The Open Site Explorer is part of SEOmoz’ Pro membership, but you can still try it out for free for about a day or so. After that, the metrics, 10K links and the CSV download will be PRO-only.

All by all three great tools to add to your link building toolbox.

It’s already the last day of the year, so it’s time to list the best link building related posts of 2009. Just like last year, I’ve read a lot of great articles. Here’s my personal top three:

1. Link Development Training: How Link Building for SEO is Like Picking Up a Girl – Todd Malicoat
Unfortunately, Todd doesn’t write tons of articles anymore, but when he does, they’re usually great. In this post, he explains how he trains new link builders and which tools and approach he uses. Great stuff.

2. 101 Advanced Tips For The Next Time You Buy Text Link Ads – Gab Goldenberg
Even when you don’t buy links, there’s lots of tips you can get out of Gab’s post. Just replace ‘buy’ for ‘talk your way into…’ or ‘offer services/ a discount/ anything else in exchange for…’, and you’re good to go.

3. 21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post – Rand Fishkin
Rand shares 21 great tips for optimizing your content in a way that you maximize its linking potential. Just try to implement all these tips in one of your articles, and you’ll end up with some killer content.

And here’s a few more excellent articles:

General

• Link building ranking factors – SEOmoz
• Why link building may not work – Michael Martinez
• How to buy links with maximum juice and minimum risk – Lisa Barone
• 17 Ways search engines judge the value of a link – Rand Fishkin
• Link building from A to Z – yours truly (yes, I hate including my own stuff, but couldn’t find a good 5th article…)

Finding & evaluating prospects

• 21 Link builders share advanced link building queries – Garrett French
• Link building evaluation guide – David Snyder
• The link builders guide to analyzing SERP dominators for link opportunities – Garrett French
• Link buying: the good, the bad and the ugly – Aaron Wall
• A big bunch of link building ideas – Debra Mastaler

Webmaster outreach

• Link building outreach: 5 steps to maximize the value of every opportunity – Garrett French
• Get your link building requests answered – Mat Siltala
• 10 Tips for requesting link exchanges – Steven Snell
• How to woo a blogger (and get covered) – Lisa Barone
• 10 Reasons why journalists will write about your website – Ken McGaffin

Content & link baiting

• What makes a link worthy post, part 1 and part 2 – Casey Henry
• How to research, create and distribute highly linkable content – Garrett French
• Getting links and content from Flickr – Lisa Barone
• The psychology of a linkbait – Ryan Caldwell
• How to promote good content – Lisa Barone

Most viewed posts of Wiep.net

1. 69 Link building strategies for 2009 (I know, it’s a post from 2008)
2. The perfect link request email template
3. Indispensable link building tools
4. 10 Questions to ask a new link marketing client
5. Advertising strategies that improve your link popularity
6. A good alt is better than a bad anchor
7. SEO Motivators (also a post from 2008)

This basically wraps up 2009. I hope this year has been as good for you as it was for me. All the best wishes for 2010!

We all know that link baiting can be one of the efficient ways of getting more websites to link to yours (if you don’t, please go read these articles first). However, there’s a huge difference between knowing that it could work, and actually being successful with it.

In my opinion, there are five important success determining factors for a link bait, and you’ll have to score at least 4/5 in order to reach the results you’re after;

• The idea
• The title/ headline
• The content
• The promotion
• Luck

In this article, I’ll try to give you some directions for finding good ideas that match your situation. That leaves you with only having to fill in the other four :)

Everything starts with having a goal

Before you even start thinking about link baiting, you should have some goals prepared. These goals usually come from your marketing or business plan, and should be followed up by an evaluation of your current situation (or the other way around, depending on your business process).  During this evaluation, you’ll take look at where you’re at right now, if your goals are still achievable, and what you’d have to do in order to achieve those goals.

If the goals seem to be within reach, you’ll have to decide what kind of link building strategy would probably be the most effective in your situation. And if it turns out that link baiting is the appropriate weapon of choice, you usually have three options.

Single target link bait

This is where you create a piece of highly targeted content, in order to obtain a link from just one or two -very valuable- websites. In case you’re desperately looking for high authority websites, it might be worth it to devote some extra time to getting your dream site to link to yours. Writing guest content for high authority websites in your niche is single target link bait as well, in my opinion. If your site doesn’t seem to be trusted enough in the eyes of Google, make obtaining a few highly authoritative links your main goal.

Best matching link baiting hook: Education & information.

Limited target link bait

Another option is to create a piece of content which is targeted at a relatively small group of very relevant websites. A great example of this is the recently re-launched ‘Top 100 Online Marketers‘, which is well-targeted at the egos of 100 online marketers and their followers. With a specific audience of high profile internet marketers, the result of this campaign is probably quite some awareness amongst (and links from) a relevant group of people and websites. If your link profile lacks relevance, a limited target link bait is your friend.

Best matching link baiting hook: Resources.

Mass link bait

The most well know version of link baiting is the mass version, where a piece of content is created that is supposed to reach a very large audience. You can see examples, including 20 amazing facts about beer or this amazing shark pic, waiting for at you at Digg or Reddit’s front page every single day. Although the average relevance and/ or the quality of the links that a mass link bait campaign can result in is usually relatively low, the amount of links can be very high. If you’re mainly looking for plain numbers, a mass link bait is probably the way to go.

Best matching link baiting hook: Entertainment, widgets.

Know, and understand your audience

Each of these three link baiting options requires a different approach, because you’re dealing with different audiences. Your audience is not only the people who end up visiting your website, but also the people who link to you and (either directly or indirectly) help you to promote your content. If these people think your content is good enough, they’ll spread the word – it’s as simple as that. But how do you know if your audience will like it?

Define who your audience is

First, you’ll have to know who your audience is, and this depends on the type of link bait you’ll be using. It’s relatively easy with a single target link bait, but it can be more difficult for the other types of link bait. Once you’ve identified your audience, write it down on a piece of paper, so it’ll remain clear for you in the future as well.

Know what moves your audience (into linking to external sources)

Now that you know who your audience is, you can try to find out what you can do to make them link to you. Find out why they have linked to other websites before, find out which of the principles of persuasion they are most likely sensitive to, etcetera. When it comes to mass link baiting, try to find out what moves the larger groups you want to reach (and their influencers), for example by learning more about them.

Analyzing for new ideas

Now it’s time to move on to the part where you can actually try to come up with good ideas. Finally.

I have explained a few brainstorming methods earlier, but here are a few additional tips.

Single target link bait brainstorming

This is the easiest to do. During your situation analysis, you have (hopefully) identified a few ‘link building must-haves’; websites that are highly authoritative in your niche, and which would be really valuable to add to your link profile. These websites should be worth it to put in some extra effort for, otherwise you’d have to target them either via a limited target link bait or a mass link bait.

Try to find out:

• What the most relevant pages on their website are.
• What kind of websites they’re currently linking to, and from what pages they link to them (for example via Bing’s linkfromdomain: command).
• What kind of content they’re missing, or which content is incomplete or incorrect.
• What kind of content is popular on relevant social media platforms, such as Delicious.

Mix these things up, match it with your audience, and try to come up with an idea.

Let’s do this with an example – let’s say you’re in internet marketing :). It shouldn’t be hard to find a few key influencers and websites that get linked to a lot in our industry. Like I mentioned before, guest posting would be an option, but you could also try a Cuttbait.

Limited target link bait brainstorming

Now you have to broaden your view a little bit. In stead of taking a look at just one target, you’ll have to look at multiple different targets at the same time, and look for commonalities. With relatively small groups, ego baiting (such as the earlier mentioned Top 100 list) can be very successful.

Try to find out:

• What the most important influencers in your target group are. When one starts, the rest usually follows.
• What (kind of) pages the majority of the target group links to.
• What kind of content is popular on relevant social media platforms, preferably social niche websites.
• What kind of websites the most important influencers in your target group currently are linking to, and from what pages they link to them.

Let’s use the same example again. Websites like Sphinn can help you to find even more important influencers, and you can keep an eye on link posts to find important websites and inspiring content. Asking people to help with research or creating an industry award could be good options. A quiz might work as well, but you’d be targeting a much bigger group with something like that.

Mass target link bait brainstorming

This is the easiest to do. During your situation analysis, you have (hopefully) identified a few ‘link building must-haves’; websites that are highly authoritative in your niche, and which would be really valuable to add to your link profile. These websites should be worth it to put in some extra effort for, otherwise you’d have to target them either via a limited target link bait or a mass link bait.

Try to find out:

• What the most important influencers in your target group are. When one starts, the rest usually follows.
• What pages/ websites the majority of these influencers links to.
• What kind of content is popular on relevant social media platforms, such as Digg or StumbleUpon.
• What kind of content, which is relevant to yours, has made it to leading news/ entertainment/ etc. websites.

Back to the example; broaden your view, and take a look at the tech section of the Guardian or WSJ, and find out what kind of content gets mentioned. Besides news related stuff, creating a bunch of useful tools, a much more general award, or developing a dozen or so great plugins could work perfectly also. Still not big enough? How about a layoff tracker?

Conclusion

Coming up with good ideas isn’t difficult, but finding the right idea that perfectly matches your situation can be pretty hard sometimes. Knowing what you need (authority, relevance or quantity) is important in this process. Not with getting more creative, but with helping you focusing on the right type of ideas, and therefore finding the right solution.

Please note: Just like with nearly anything related to marketing, there is no ‘scientifically proven method’; this is just how I look at things and try to get links. Do you have additions, or do you use an other approach? The comment entry field is down below ;)

With Halloween, Thanksgiving and even the other upcoming holidays in sight, November usually is a slow month in terms of finding high quality articles. And last month wasn’t any different. Wordstream’s interview series and Ari Ozick’s excellent interview with Deb Mastaler made up for it a little bit, though.

Also, Garrett French’ compilation of dozens of very useful advanced search link building queries was an excellent read. I’m pretty sure that nearly anybody would find at least one new query he or she didn’t think of yet.  And if you didn’t: how about keeping track of (relevant) companies going out of business in your neighborhood, and checking out their link profiles? :)

Everybody and their dog knows that having good content improves your chances of getting good links, but how do you come up with good ideas? Of course, analyzing success stories is a good starting strategy, and from their on, it’s basically just thinking outside the box.

And also:

• 11 Effective, efficient ways to use limited time to build links – Debra Mastaler
• The disproportionate value of deeplinks – Eric Enge
• The new rules of international link building – Andy Atkins Kruger
• The holiday link building blitz: a plan for ecommerce sites – Garrett French
• 10 Reasons why good link builders fail – Angela Moore
• Effective link building, one major ingredient – Lynn Terry
• 7 Ways to maximize your internal linking value – Thinkseer
• How to buy links with maximum juice and minimum risk (Pubcon) – Lisa Barone

Tools:

• I came across Tynt last month, but Patrick Altoft mentioned a similar tool today that’s certainly worth checking out as well: Link building pro.
• Cemper.com’s Link Research Tools will be leaving beta soon. I hope to review some of their tools (along with a few others) later this month.

PS – If you think I missed one or more interesting link building articles last month, feel free to mention it in the comments ;)