When I’m in the middle of creating a new website or an in-depth blog article, one of things I usually do is making a list of which websites to link out to. Sometimes, visitors may find a resource page, a list with links to other relevant websites or a few in-content links very interesting. And when a page is relevant to mine, meets a certain quality standard, and adds value to the content on my page, I’m usually more than happy to link to it. For free. However, you’d be surprised how very few pages meet that quality standard.

1. Ads before content

If I want to see nothing but ads, I’ll go to Google. When I’m looking for content to link to, and I land on a page with a 336×280 AdSense block above the fold, or with bouncing banner ads that have to be minimized before I can read the content on the page, I will definitely not link to it. Why on earth would I want to let my visitors experience something annoying like that?

It’s not a problem that you try to monetize your website, but do you really have to turn your page into a blinking neon sign to do so? Ditch some ads and get more links!

2. Bad writing & grammar

You don’t have to be a best selling novelist, but you should be able to tell me a story without boring me to death. Also, when you’re too lazy to use a spell checker, you probably didn’t deserve that link. Remarkable writers score bonus points, though.

If you don’t like writing, hire someone to do it for you! You can usually tell if someone doesn’t like writing, just by reading one of his or her articles. Try Demand Media if you want to see some examples…

3. Sell, sell, sell

A good salesman knows when he should try to sell something, and when it’s time to socialize or to talk about other things. Bad salesmen try to sell nearly anything, at all times, to anyone, which can be quite annoying. Is your website a good or a bad salesman?

There’s nothing wrong with promoting your services every now and then, but when nearly every blog post is nothing but a lengthy sales pitch with a picture of a kitten, I won’t be linking out to you anytime soon.

4. Link greed and pink illness

The web is a social place. Linking out every now and then is not a bad thing. It might be the link builder in me, but when I see a blog that has zero outbound links in the last 10 or so articles, I’ll go and find a more social website to link out to. The same goes for linking out to your sources. Link out, and thou wilt receive.

Websites that automatically nofollow all outbound links are even worse, in my opinion. I don’t care if it’s company policy, a WordPress plugin going berserk, or ‘something that IT should have fixed two weeks ago’, I’ll do the same to you. Nofollow and thou wilt receive. Yes, karma can be a bitch.

5. Being mediocre

Just recently, I was looking for an article with beautiful city landscapes for an ‘additional resources’ section of a page. I ended up at a nicely written page about city landscapes and what’s beautiful about them, but that page did not contain any photographs. When the SERPS of the topic of your page contain image results (like so), your page should contain images. Period.

Also, when you do a ‘Top 101 Ways to do X’ article, make sure that it contains 101 ways to do X. Not 14, followed by 87 variations of the first fourteen ways. When I send my visitors away from my site to visit yours, I want them to go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. Not ‘meh’ or ‘boo’.

Of course, there are several other reasons that will make me think twice about linking to your website (lack of uniqueness, very ugly web design, bad neighborhoods, not having an ‘about us’ section, being a direct competitor, etc.), but for me, the 5 reasons mentioned in this article are the most important ones.

How about you? What makes you link to other websites, or what prevents you from doing so?

When it comes to link building (but with most other things as well) most people try to find shortcuts. They look for ‘secrets’, smart things that can get them to rank very quickly, preferably without any effort. Unfortunately, I have to say that there are no link building secrets, shortcuts or quick tricks. Well, except for one maybe; have an eye for details.

Just think about it…

• Do you start your email with ‘Dear Webmaster’ or with ‘Dear Lauren’?
• Is your content good or great?
• Do you use a spell checker?
• Do you mention the word ‘Pagerank’ in your emails or not?
• Are you an ‘SEO Link Builder’ or a ‘Product manager’ according to your email signature?
• Do you send out thank you notes?
• Do you use the word ‘guru’ in your Twitter bio?
• Have you thought your content’s title well through, or did you just write down the first thing that came to mind?
• Do you test or do you assume?
• Do you block your HTTP referrer or not?
• Are you going to send a press release on Tuesday morning or Friday afternoon?
• Do you buy your links from a broker or privately?
• Do you take no for an answer?
• Can you answer the most important link building question?
• Do you *really* understand what you’re promoting?
• Do you *really* know who you need to target?
• Did you hire the expensive designer, or the one that was $50 cheaper?
• Do you use the phone as well, or email only?

And that’s just a *very* small portion of all the details you have to think about. Nothing special, it’s all common sense. Get it all wrong, and you’ll find yourself spending your Saturday nights at the DigitalPoint forums, complaining that ‘link building is so hard and it’s not working anymore’. Get it all right, and you’ve got a chance of dominating your niche.

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.

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.

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…

Link building can be relatively easy or pretty difficult, depending on the industry, the type of website and the content. One type of website I have always felt is quite easy to promote, is an image rich website.

Images tell stories, images trigger emotions and images are usually non-commercial, which means they have everything a link builder needs. With a bunch of great images and the right approach, you can turn your photo-rich website into an image-powered link magnet.

Image via Krazydad

Damage repair

However, life isn’t always as good as it should be. Scrapers, copycats, cheapskates and other scum try to use other peoples’ photos for their benefit, without paying for it, or even giving credits to the owner. Especially for Flickr users, photographers and webmasters that paid for their images, this can be pretty frustrating.

Some website try to block others from stealing their images as much as they can, but with tools like Clip ‘n Save, this is a near-impossible job. So in stead of doing your utmost to block image theft, how about shifting your focus to use image users for your benefit? After all, positive energy is more likely to lead to positive results.

Find *your* images

Step one is to all websites that use images you own the rights of. This sounds like a very difficult job, but with reverse search engine Tineye, which searches for similar images in its database of 1.37 billion images, it’s actually pretty easy. You can use their website or the very useful Tineye plugin to search for images that are exactly or pretty much the same as yours. If you want to check hundreds or thousands of images, you can also use their commercial API.

For example, a quick search for this image not only highlighted the same image on Nowsourcing.com (with a link back to my site), but Tineye also found the original of the image.

Now if Nowsourcing.com didn’t have a link pointing back to Wiep.net in the article, I would probably have contacted Brian Wallace, asking him if he would be so kind to link back to the original, since he liked the image so much. It’s that easy.

Getting links, building relationships
Agreed, lots of websites -mostly scrapers, forums or cheapskates- that use your images will probably not link back to you. However, it’s not about the websites that won’t link back to you, it’s about the ones that will.

Your moment of contact could be the start of a new and good relationship – they have used your image once, so they might be interested in using more of your images in the future. Which they can, obviously, in exchange for one or more juicy links. Or money, if you prefer the offline currency.

Tineye is also great to check your stock photos, by the way. If you had known that this lady works for 153 different websites, you probably wouldn’t have hired her for your customer support…

Find hotlinkers

Tineye does not find all images, so you need a second step in your damage repair process. You can find out who is hotlinking your images in your logfiles, but Yahoo! (unlike most other search engines) shows which websites link to your images, too.

Contact the important ones
After you have compiled a large list with websites that hotlink your images, it’s best to start with filtering out the most important websites. Create a shortlist with authority and/ or highly relevant websites that use your images, and contact them directly. The ‘getting links, building relationships’ works here as well.

Watermark the scrapers & forums
You can contact as many scrapers, sploggers and forums as you want, but none of them will link to you. This means that we’ll have to work on a different solution for these owners of automated or UGC websites; shooting them in the kneecap using watermarks. In most cases, a watermark is the closest you will get to getting a link from these types of websites.

There are several ways you can add a watermark to hotlinked images, for example with php or with a cgi script. You can make the watermark as large as you want, or you can even go as far as replacing your images by another image. This is completely up to you, but I usually prefer a smaller, but very clear logo plus URL.

Make linking easier

Now that you have managed to get some links from people that were already using your images, it’s time to ditch most of the booby traps and other anti-copy protection on your website. These ‘solutions’ are usually bothering your regular users, and have a limited efficiency. If someone really wants to use one of your images, he or she will get it, eventually.

Clear guidelines

One of the most important things is to have clear guidelines, that easily informs people on how they can use your images. It depends on your website what the preferred method of displaying these guidelines is, but it is usually the more prominent, the better.

Make sure that your guidelines and/ or the photos pages also contain the proper creative commons information. This ensures that your somewhat web-savvy visitors will know how they should treat your images.

Embed code

If you own the rights of your images, you can also choose to take ‘make linking easier’ one step further, by providing an easy embed code to visitors that want to use your photos. You can display this code on every page, or just when someone right-clicks on one of your images. Services like Tynt can be very useful too, but unfortunately most of these only work for text, and not for images.

Please note that providing an embed code may conflict with the watermarks you’ve set up earlier. Either inform your users that a small watermark will be added to the photo, or, preferably, host your images on one or more subdomains too. This way, you can put the image location on the subdomain in the embed code, while leaving your ‘regular’ photos where they already were. Allowing the subdomain images to be hotlinked, but disallowing it for the regular images, would allow both solutions to coexist.

Again, not a single solution is completely water proof, but when it comes to images, there will never be one.

Target image search engine users

There is one type of visitor you probably want to treat differently, which is the visitor who came in via an image search engine. If someone found your website via images.google.com, bing.com/images, or any other search engine, he or she is more than likely to be interested in your images only. Therefore, treating him or her accordingly is not more than logical.

Maurizio Petrone wrote a great article about how to treat image search engine referrers for PolePositionMarketing a while back, so in stead of regurgitating his article, I’d just advise you to read his post.

Again, it’s completely up to you how aggressively you want to combat image theft. Try to find your personal sweet spot between user experience, image protection and getting links, and set up your measures accordingly.

To conclude

Like I have said many times in this article, it’s near impossible to completely block others from using (read: stealing) your images. However, by taking the right precautions, you can ensure that your website will receive as much link juice from your images as possible.

Obviously, there are many more ways to promote a website that contains lots of beautiful images. However, it depends on your type of website if a photo contest, submitting your website to image related directories, using galleries, or providing photography/ Photoshop/ etc. tips is the right fit for you. A little bit of creativity will get you pretty far, though ;)

Update: Two great additional resources from the comments. Who said blog commenting can’t get you links? :)