It’s been pretty quiet here lately, so it’s a good thing that there were quite a few good link marketing related posts published on other places that I can point you to. Don’t worry, the post frequency here will increase again soon. Hopefully

Link research is a very important part of a link marketing campaign. Tools like MajesticSEO or Linkscape can be very useful, but I’d recommend reading Garrett French’s link builder’s guide to analyzing SERP dominators for link opportunities as well. Combine these two things, and you’ll end up with a killer list of link targets.

When you’ve identified the most relevant and credible link targets, it’s time to contact them. If you’re not sure how to do this, one thing you could do is to ask advice from people who receive lots of link requests or press releases every day. These people can tell you which messages stand out from the crowd, and might be successful because of that.

And also:

• Content aggregation for links, traffic and buzz – Adam Singer
• Strategic link building for SEO – Lee Odden
• Link building Q&A with Ben Wills – Andy Beal
• 10 Link bait tips – Lyndon Antcliff
• Buzz is a vital element of digital PR – Adam Singer

Btw, feel free to share your favorite link marketing related posts of last month in the comments, if you feel that I missed something…

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A good link building campaign starts with a proper strategy. While some think that a goal like ‘obtaining more links’ is sufficient, there are lots of more goals that you can set for your link building campaign.

All these different types of goals also show you that -although pitching your site is part of a link marketer’s daily routine- link marketing is more than just sending out link requests. During any good link marketing training you’ll learn that link marketing is just a search engine optimized form of marketing. And that there are no secrets.

And also:

• How being pet friendly became a link building opportunity – Wil Reynolds
• Trust and link building – Eric Enge
• Prepare yourself for link building – Court Tuttle
• Discrete viral factors that cause people to share crappy content – Brian Chappell
• Easy widgets for link building – Michael Martinez
• 17 Ways to accelerate links to your link bait (and other highly linkable content) – Garrett French
• Free links: The three principles – Melanie Nathan
• Effective link building strategies for successful link acquisition – Augusto Ellacuriaga
• Inbound link building quality flowchart – Nicolas Prudhon
• Distribute your link sources – Eric Enge
• And the last link of this month points to an article that I wrote for Youmoz; Link building from A to Z

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Some months are relatively quite, while you get overloaded with awesome link marketing posts during other months. Luckily, this month was one of the latter, which kinda makes up for the lack of posting on this blog. If only I could find a way to fit 30 hours into a single day, but I guess I’m not the only one with that problem…

A Sphinn thread caused quite some stir about dofollow link building. Just hearing the term dofollow already makes my skin crawl, but luckily I’m not the only one. Also, Yoast mentioned Dave Naylor’s comment referer plugin at A4U, which tells you which comments were dropped by visitors who came from (i.e.) dofollow search engines. I will definitely try that one out.

In the ’scientific approach’ category, Marie-Claire Jenkins (a.k.a CJ) wrote about more link analysis methods. Combine these methods with an awesome tool like Majestic’s Compare Domain Link History and a link prospect qualification guide, and you’ll definitely be able to find some great link targets. And if you still fail to get these targets to link to your website, you might want to improve your email subject lines, or use any of the link attraction catalysts. Or you could create fake websites

Ian Lurie published a series about link building, which -after part 1, 2, 3 and 4- ended with some tips to out-execute the competition. He shared some great tips (quite a big bunch of link building tips, actually) and although most were of a beginner to intermediate level, his fine writing style makes the series a great read.

Lastly, I came across few presentations I believe are worth sharing. BuzzStream’s Jeremy Bencken spoke at the Austin SEO Meetup earlier this month, and, although the presentation took place in January, Wil Reynold’s 1 hour talk at Affiliate Summit is definitely worth listening to as well. The 3rd presentation is one of my own; the guys from A4U Expo already uploaded my presentation about link building for affiliates to SlideShare.

And also:

• 21 Tips to earn links and tweets to your blog post – Rand Fishkin
• SEO: Do link builders need to know it? – Julie Joyce
• 6 Real linkbait examples and the lessons learned – Dave Pye
• How NOT to request a link via email – Rebecca Kelley
• Increase online visibility for sales and links – Justilien Gaspard
• 10 linkbait strategies to build links and drive traffic – Chris Lake
• Optimizing anchor text and titles – Eric Enge
• Guest blogging for (a lot of) backlinks – Richard Baxter
• 15 Ways to measure (and GROW) your site’s linkability – Garrett French

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A bit later than usual (I’ve been away on vacation for about a week), but here’s Link Marketing this Month with the best link marketing related posts from March.

One of my favorite posts of the year so far is Lisa Barone’s killer tips for getting links and content from Flickr, where she explains how the Flickr community can contribute to your content AND help you to promote it. Great stuff.

Also, Gyutae Park mentioned 5 ways to optimize your existing links. Especially his first point, asking links from someone who’s linked to you before, can work like a charm. Combine this with Lisa’s earliermentioned tips, a solid blogger pitching strategy, and probably some offline marketing, and a solid amount of awesome links is a near certainty.

And also:

• Eric Ward was wondering if Twitter is incredibly valuable or utterly useless for link building
• Garrett French listed 16 ways to measure a link’s marketing value
• Eric Enge discussed the temporal nature of link building
• Bill Slawski explained a Google patent on web link spam (btw, if you’re interested in more patent stuff, I highly recommend you to subscribe to Dave’s Dojo newsletter)

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Welcome to the second edition of link marketing this month, which highlights some of the most remarkable, interesting and/ or funny link marketing related articles of last month. One of these articles was Rob Bothan’s Link building is not just for SEO. Also, Dave Harry’s view on How search engines detect paid links, Mike Thelwall’s post about language and linking and the -a little bit less scientific- 9 tips for effective link aquisition by Garrett French were all definitely worth a read.

Because almost everybody seems to be baiting for links nowadays, it is becoming more and more important to create content that’s more remarkable than ever. This starts with a good analysis of what works (or worked in the past), a solid brainstorm session and some field research. After that (and after you’ve defined your goals), it’s simply creating well aimed content that can get it’s point across, targeting the audience you’ve identified earlier (based on your research and analysis) while avoiding common pitfalls, and watching your linkbait campaign move through its cycle. If you put it like this, it looks pretty easy, huh?

And also:

• Sustainable link equity – Eric Ward
• 10 Link opportunity segments that increase link acquisition efficiency and conversion rates – Garrett French
• A link builder is born: learning to crawl before you walk – Melanie Nathan
• Is link building a PR function? – Eric Enge
• Integrating marketing campaigns with link development – Justilien Gaspard
• Who owns link building? – Eric Ward
• 7 Reasons why link building needs patience – Erik-Jan Bulthuis
• 55 Link opportunity qualifiers within large scale link prospect data sets – Garrett French
• Essential qualities of an exceptional link builder – Melanie Nathan

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Where I used to link to other great link building related posts every week, this is the very first edition of Link Building this Month.

One of the best link building posts I came across last month is actually a presentation. Affiliate Summit published Wil Reynold’s presentation titled ‘Changing the way we build links‘.  Not only does Wil provide a few excellent tips, but he scored bonus points for embedding a photo of David Hasselhoff in a presentation about link building.

Garrett French, who has been nominated for a SEMMY recently with his guide to getting maximum link value from your content, recently launched a new blog at Ontolo.com. This month, he published articles about using link prospect segmentation to create content, conversations and high rankings, 12 powerful offers that build links in your link acquisition phase and 8 purchase influence indicators for links that influence rankings and purchase decisions. If you’re interested in reading slightly different posts about link building, I’d recommend subscribing to his blog.

Three interesting posts from the search engine algorithm category: Marios Alexandrou walked through a document about improving web spam classifiers using link structure and both Dave Harry and Bill Slawski discussed patents on reciprocal links.

And also:

• Rand Fishkin tested the value of anchor text optimized internal links
• Peter Young listed several link building tactics, including a few examples of some of these tactics
• Will Critchlow explained how you can squeeze the most link juice from your suppliers’ websites

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