A linkbait doesn’t need thousands of links to be successful, a few dozen high quality links can be more than enough. Of course, a mix of quantity and quality would be the ideal situation, but that’s pretty hard to accomplish. Today, an article in a newspaper pointed out a piece of research that -although it sure wasn’t meant as one- could easily take the title ‘mother of all linkbaits’.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities, a ranking of all universities worldwide, not only manages to get links from dozens of newspapers, blogs and other media related websites, but they get dozens of links from several top rated universities from all over the world as well. Each year!

Seriously, if you want to get links from universities (preferably from universities that offer studies related to your product), try to get their attention with things like related award, studies, or a piece of research link the ARWU. Even universities are proud of their awards.

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Sorry, short post this week

• Tom Critchlow mentions a link building technique that is easy to use AND can be very effective
• Matt McGee shows what a small link building push can accomplish
• Micheal Gray teached advanced link building and explained why PageRank will never die
• Eric Sopp lists three reasons why links from brokers don’t work
• MSN adds backlink info to their Webmaster Center
• Rand Fishkin talked about how 301ing misspellings of your domain can improve your link popularity and he explained how to use the Yahoo SiteExplorer for link research as well
• Dave Navarro compiled a great list of 35 ways to get noticed

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When I started this blog little over a year ago, I set only little expectations. No specific targets but having fun writing about SEO and link building and improving my (English) writing skills. Although my writing skills remain far from perfect (I’d give myself a “that’ll do”), they certainly have improved and I’m still having fun maintaining this blog.

Recently, when I evaluated my first year of blogging, I decided to set some additional goals. The first of these goals has been accomplished today; being able to publish dark text on a light background.
Although the current design looked pretty nice (at least to me) a year ago, the readability kept bugging me more and more over time, as a dark background is even considered to be a usability sin.

The design still isn’t completely finished yet, but considering the former readability and the little amount of time that I have on my hands right now, I decided to push it a little bit. I will keep on tweaking it though, reading tips from guys like WordPress Joost and Richard Baxter really helped a lot and they will keep providing a lot of future work.

So, what do you think? Is the new one design better than the old one?

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Thomas Schmitz made an interesting list of everything you wanted to know about inbound and external links. He not only explains why links (and which links) are important, but he also threw in a few nice examples that turned his post into a solid introduction to links.

And also:

• Pete Wailes compiled the ultimate guide to internal linking
• Eric Enge explains what the best way is to move away from paid links (after all, nofollowed links are accepted as well)
• Justilien Gaspard published the second part of his link building with customers series
• Everett Sizemore shows 5 search queries to find sponsorship link opportunities
• David Patterson got caught on camera and talked about link building
• Darren Rowse wrote why a mix of linkbait, passion and fluff is ideal
• Lee Odden compared link building with content promotion for links
• Rand Fishkin nailed the coffin shut on the “don’t link to external sites” philosophy

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Most people see spam as nothing but annoying. However, like I’ve mentioned before, there are lots of things you can use spam for. You’ll receive spam no matter what you do, so why not use it in your advantage?

You’ve probably received the CNN Daily Top 10 email just as often as I did. Lots of people received this email and it raised a lot of questions and discussion. People that have questions usually use Google to find an answer to their questions. Now combine this with Patrick Altoft’s nifty strategy, a domain name like www.CNNDailyTop10.com (still available…) and I’m sure you can come up with something.

This is nothing long term, of course, but it shows that spam is not completely worthless and annoying…

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…yes, so what is link building actually? Lee Odden wrote an interesting post about link building vs. content promotion. In this post, he explains why he thinks that ‘unsolicited link acquisition based on content’, perhaps with a little bit of “traditional” link building, will lead to search engine traffic. He is absolutely right, but it won’t lead to optimal search engine traffic.

Link Building isn’t the same as content marketing, just like link baiting isn’t exactly the same as viral marketing. Link Building (or link marketing, as I prefer to call it) is the place where SEO and content marketing meet. You can achieve great results with just good SEO and you can get awesome results with just good content marketing, but if you add link marketing to your strategy, you’ll be able to perform even better.

Link Building is… Getting that perfect anchor text
The content you wrote is perfectly aimed at your target audience. It even is targeted at the bloggers and journalists you’re trying to reach. That’s content marketing.
You even considered writing a title for your post or article that has one or maybe even two keywords in it you’re going after. Lots of journalists will copy that title, which results in good keyword rich anchor texts. That’s search engine optimized content marketing.
Contacting the authorities in your niche that linked to your article, but failed to use a descriptive anchor text (or maybe even failed to use an anchor text), however, that’s link building.

Link Building is… Reaching that specific web site that makes a difference
Every niche has its own authority web site, or maybe even several authorities. You know, those authorities that don’t get updated a lot or just don’t link out much, but have been around since ‘95 and haven’t been doing anything but building trust. Link building is reaching those websites, whether it’s with an extremely targeted piece of content or with a simple link request.

Link Building is… Reaching that specific web site that you normally wouldn’t
A content marketing strategy usually tends to be targeted at either your target audience, at linkerati that are able to reach your target audience, or both. Link Building is figuring out ways to reach an audience that you normally wouldn’t reach, in order to get a competitive advantage.

Link Building is… Being better than Wikipedia
Lots of people who write new pages (especially when they start a new blog or web site), will search for relevant pages they can link to. In 99% of the cases, they’ll at least link to the best, most prominent and most complete sources. This often is Wikipedia, so all you have to do is to be better (more complete, more comprehensive, funnier, better designed, etc) than Wikipedia. That’s content marketing. But getting (and keeping) your URL into the Wikipedia you’re trying to beat, that’s link building.

Link Building is… Leaving your URL everywhere
Hey, you’re marketing your website. Be proud of your website, it’s your business! Show your baby to anyone, don’t be afraid to mention your URL. Link baiting can provide awesome results, but I agree with Jim that link baiting isn’t enough. You’ll need tactics like this if you want to make the difference.

Link Building is… That extra oompf.
It may look like I’m splitting hairs here, because all things described in this post sure have a lot of overlap, but I really am not. This post isn’t even near complete, but the small differences that I mentioned can already cause the small difference between ranking 4th and topping the rankings.

Just my $0,02…

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