Every two years, SEOmoz ask dozens of search marketing professionals to share their opinions on several (possible) search engine ranking influencing factors, and they’ve just released this years edition. It’s funny to see that, although I hear and read about ‘links getting devalued as a search engine ranking influencing metric’ more often, 80% of the top 5 factors (according to the 72 contributors) are still link related.

The top 5 ranking factors:

1. Keyword focused anchor text from external links (73%)
2. External link popularity (quantity/quality of external links) (71%)
3. Diversity of link sources (links from many unique root domains) (67%)
4. Keyword use anywhere in the title tag (66%)
5. Trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains (e.g. TrustRank, domain mozTrust, etc.) (66%)

Additionally, Google (unintentionally) underlined the outcome of SEOmoz’ research, and the importance of links. About two weeks ago, they decided to give the world a preview of what it calls its “next-generation infrastructure”, with the code name Caffeine. Within two weeks, this page is ranking at #3 for ‘caffeine’, without even mentioning it anywhere on the page. Although Google tried to make sure that the effectiveness of link bombing would decrease, this again shows the importance of external anchor text and page content of linking pages. Even in Caffeine.

[Edit 27/08: I just noticed that DaveN covered this as well. Great minds... :) ]

Yes, I know that I have already explained where you can start your link building campaign, but, actually, a link building campaign begins even before you start analyzing the current situation, and far before you start building new links. It starts with asking the right questions.

In this post, I’ll mention a few questions that you could ask your new link building client, but, in the case that you’re not working for a client, you could be asking them to your boss or maybe even to yourself as well.

Some of these questions should also be asked earlier in the sales process, for example before or during a sales pitch, but not every link marketer is in the situation that he or she is involved in this sales process from start till end.

What do you know about link marketing? What does your boss know about link marketing?

Starting with this question will make it a lot easier for you to keep your client happy. If he doesn’t know a lot about SEO and/ or link marketing yet, you can try to increase his level of knowledge, while you work for him. For example, when you’re working for someone who’s new to link building, reporting that ‘you’ve managed to get 2 highly relevant, editorial .edu links in just a few hours of work’, might not be such a good idea. Try to explain the value of links first, and/ or start your reporting with results that he can fully understand.

Also, when your contact person has to report to his superior, it’s also useful to get an idea of what the knowledge level of that manager is. That way, you can provide the right information to your contact person, to keep his boss happy as well. Using an approach like this usually results in a very happy contact person (you’re ‘helping him out’ as well), who’s willing to fight for you during meetings with his boss.

Did you hire an SEO or link building company in the past, or have you built links yourself?

Asking a question like this might give you an indication of what kind of strategies have been used in the past. For example, if your new client hired an SEO agency in the past, that mainly used services like TLA, ReviewMe and PPP to get new links, you know that you have to clean up first, before you can start building new links.

While tools like MajesticSEO also have the ability to show you what links were placed to a specific web page in the past, simply asking the client what strategies were used previously can give you just as much information.

Can you tell more about your company, i.e. the company philosophy, office locations, etc.?

Link building opportunities are everywhere. Office locations are a good start for localized link building, a list of important employees might help you to discover (linkless) press mentions, and the company philosophy may provide different link building angles as well.

Ask your client to provide as much information about the company and the people that work there as possible, including (old) brochures and other documentation. Filter out whatever you feel is necessary or useful, and write that down for future use.

What are the USPs of your product(s) or service(s)?

Just like with the company, you also need to know what is unique about the products your client is trying to sell. Unique angles lead to links. Are their products environmentally friendly? Aim at eco blogs & websites. Is your client the cheapest in the industry? Try to obtain links from price comparison websites, or focus on websites that offer money saving tips, just to name a few.

If your client is not able to tell you their USP, you’ll probably have a hard time promoting the website. No USP usually means mediocrity, and mediocrity means low link building conversion rates, because the website does not add a lot of extra value. Adding exceptional content to your client’s website will probably be your only option.

Can you name 5 of your biggest competitors? Can you explain why these companies are big competitors?

Asking this question can give you more insights in the knowledge level of your contact person (“yes, there is a difference between online and offline competition”), but can also be the jump start of your competitor analysis.

Also, adding ‘why are this your most important competitors’, may reveal some details about these competitors and their USPs as well. Some companies seem to know their competitors better than they know their own company, so asking this question might be very useful.

Do you have a LinkedIn profile, and -if so- can you accept me as a connection?

LinkedIn profiles, and some other social network profiles as well, are excellent to discover interesting connections that your new client may have.

First, you can try to see which journalists, bloggers, reporters or other interesting webmasters are directly connected to your contact person. Advise your client on how to use this network optimally, by giving him clear directions. Don’t just say “try to get links from these places”, but use him as one of your own link developers.

You can also try to find interesting connections the other way around. Determine which people are highly influential in your client’s industry, and find out if your client is connected to these influencers, or which of your client’s connections are.

Are you currently sponsoring any events, charities or whatsoever?

Asking this question (and getting ‘yes’ as an answer) can lead you to some low hanging fruit. High quality, very low hanging fruit. Lots of charities and events list their sponsors on their website, but not a lot do this in an optimal way. Some only mention contributing companies, others link using third party scripts and some use heavily unoptimized image links. Spending some time optimizing these relationships (in a non-spammy way, of course) is usually well worth it.

What kind of private data do you have?

I’m not talking about personal private data here, but lots of companies have a huge amount of market research information, general client data, or other facts and numbers that are perfectly suitable for creating linkbait-type of content. Try to find out what kind of data your client has. Most companies don’t even realize the value of the information they have, or what they could do with it.

Now comes the difficult part: when you have discovered some data, studies, or other information that you could use to attract more links, it’s time to convince the client why making his precious, valuable information accessible to the public (including competitors) is a good thing. Some clients will understand this straight away, but you might have a hard time convincing others.

Do you have any interns or students working at your company?

Interns and students not only can be an access point to a .edu domain, but can be used to create awesome, linkable content during their internship as well. Mix both, and you have the ability to publish links to awesome content on a .edu domain :)

What are your offline marketing plans for the next season?

Integrating online and offline marketing efforts can be highly effective. Instead of 1+1=2, it could even be 1+1=3, depending on the campaign and execution. However, even in 2009, not a lot of companies seem to realize this.

If your client is planning on launching a creative offline advertising campaign, you’d want to know, because failing to create a related linkbait campaign (or optimizing the online part of the campaign) would be a missed opportunity.

Of course, there are tons of other questions that you could ask a new (or existing) client. Do you have any other questions to add to this list, that you could ask a client?

Over time, people must have asked me over a hundred times what kind of link request email template I use when I contact other websites owners to get a link, or what kind of email format I consider to be the “perfect” link request format.

In my opinion, the perfect link request email template looks something like this;

{Greeting} {Name},

{Opening/ Introduction}

{Explanation of why your website is relevant to the one you’re contacting}

{Include WIIFM for the person you’re emailing}

{Close},

{Your Name}

I bet you were hoping for a bit more :) . You were hoping for something that you could copy/ paste and save time with. Well, sorry, but it usually doesn’t work like that :)

The problem with sending out emails is that your contacting individuals. And every individual is different, and therefore requires a different approach. Sure, there are things that you can either automate or templatize, but this is pretty difficult with link requests in general. In most cases, using email templates will result in a significantly lower success or link conversion rate.

When you think about all different factors that come into play, you’ll probably agree with me:

• What industry are you in? Whether it’s tech, banking or automotive; every industry needs a different approach in email format, use of language and level of explanation.
• What kind of media are you approaching? Traditional media usually need (or are used to) a different approach than bloggers or other webmasters.
• What is the profession of the person you’re emailing? Is it a professor, a hobbyist or a school boy?
• Are you contacting a man or a woman? This isn’t just for the opening (Dear Mr. X/ Hello Mrs. Y), but you can use it for so many other things as well. Leveling, for instance.
• What’s the age of the person you’re trying to reach? A eighteen year old will probably communicate on a different level than an eighty year old.
• Does your contact person have any hobbies? Hobbies are excellent for personalization; you show that you’ve been following the person you’re contacting (don’t overdo this in a creepy way, though)
• What is your proposition? Are you just requesting a link, trying to establish a relationship, or are you aiming at a guest post?
• Are there other relevant factors you could use? Have you read other articles written by the person you’re trying to reach? Do you have a history with the guy you’re contacting, or are you contacting him out of the blue? What’s the relevance level between your website and the website you want to obtain a link from? Etcetera, etcetera.

If you’re constantly working in the same industry, contacting the same type of men (or women) of the same age, with the same hobbies, then, perhaps, you might be able to create a format that you could use yourself. However, I doubt that that’s your situation.

You could try to counter these statements by saying that sending out a link request is similar to email marketing (I’ve heard this argument in more than one occasion), but this simply isn’t true. When you’re using email marketing as a method of communicating with your customers, you (1) already have a relationship with the people you’re contacting, and (2) people don’t expect your email to be a personal email. Or do you expect that Zappos is crafting each and every email newsletter individually on a personal level? When it comes to a link request (or any other business proposal), people DO expect that the email comes from a real person, not a bot or tool.

Saving time in other ways

In stead of trying to save time by using templates that lower your success rate significantly, there are several other ways you can save time during a link marketing campaign.

> Contact relevant websites only

Lots of people are wasting time by contacting not (or slightly) related websites, in an attempt to obtain a link. Irrelevant websites will be much less likely to link to you, in comparison with relevant or highly relevant ones. So if you want to save time in an efficient way, filter out every website that’s not relevant enough. The same goes for low quality websites, by the way.

> Test your email skills

Although, like I mentioned before, no two websites or webmasters are the same, it still is possible to test your skills. For example, you could try to contact someone you know with a link request without disclosing that the email is yours. Afterwards, you can ask him what he or she thought of the email (or why it got deleted :) ). If the person finds out the email was sent by you, he/ she’ll probably honestly say what he or she thinks of your message. Repeat this a few times and learn from the opinions of your friends.

> Outsource your link marketing

Seriously, if you don’t want to do link building, you’re probably better off not doing so. If seen a lot of link requests in my life, and you can often see if it was sent by someone who’d rather be on the beach, or some place else.

In stead of focusing on link marketing, you could work on your on-site optimization, your content marketing, client acquisition or anything else you like to do. Hire someone to do the link building part for you, or to help you with the process.

You can compare sending out a link request to trying to close a sales deal; it all comes down to liking. And if the person you’re contacting doesn’t like your email, you probably won’t close the deal.

More about link requests at Clickz.com, SoloSEO and SEJ.com.

Recently, I had a discussion with a (not-so web savvy) friend who felt that link marketing services were pretty expensive. While I do believe that Tribal Internet Marketing’s rates aren’t exactly cheap (we’re certainly are not expensive either, though), it did made me think: when are link marketing services cheap and when are they expensive? To make my question a little bit more clear, I’ve listed some of the most common types of link building related ‘products’ below. Some of these products may seem really inexpensive at first, but remember that cheap usually is expensive in the long run.

Automated link building software

It may not come as a surprise that I’m not a fan of automated link building software. There are tons of reasons why I believe you should never choose for any link building software, but there are two big reasons why lots of people still do so: it’s easy and cheap.

The low quality of the links that most automated link building programs bring you is the least of your worries. Because most other webmasters that use tools like this usually control websites of reasonably low quality, the use of automated link building software might put your website in a bad neighborhood. That would mean that, in stead of reaping the benefits of your nifty little tool, this might result in you having to clean up your automatically generated link profile all summer long. Manually.

Directory submission package

In stead of building links the automated way, you can also build links the nearly-automated way. On forums like Digitalpoint, lots of users offer their manual directory submission services. While most of these aren’t exactly manual, some actually provide a package of around 800 manual submissions of your website to general directories. The costs vary from around $100 to about double. Most of the lower prices are in fact automated tools (see above) that do the work. Do you really think that Indian guy who offered to submit your website to 13,000 (!) directories for $13,50 does this manually?

Directory submission packages are near useless in 99% of the situations. The majority of the directories that your website gets submitted to hold no to very little value and you’ve probably already submitted your site to the handful of directories that do carry any value. In some cases -for example when you submit your brand new website to 13,000 ‘high-quality’ directories ‘manually’-, it could even cause serious problems. Let me re-phrase that for you: if you want to prevent your brand new competitor to perform well for a very short while, make sure that his site gets submitted to a large amount of questionable directories.

Do-follow hunting

Apparently, do-follow hunting is the next big thing. I came across quite a few blog posts recently, that discussed how going after nearly any link that is not being nofollowed will help you to gain better rankings in search engines. It’s easy (there are lots of do-follow search engines), it results in extra links and -best of all- it’s totally free!

Well, the only thing free is the waste of time, because the do-follow links that the most are after don’t contribute a lot to your search engine rankings. Most social media profile links don’t pass any value either, will get nofollowed later on, or will simply never get found by search engines. Blog comments (whether they’re dofollow or nofollow) do not pass the same amount of juice as blog post links and most other FFA links hold little to no value as well.

Also, hunting for do-follow links also isn’t exactly free. I’m pretty sure that, in stead of going after those secret, high value links (or hiring someone to do it), you could’ve done something way more productive.

Link brokerage deal

Link brokers are the link building equivalent of Google AdWords. Once you stop paying, the results may drop almost instantly. In some occasions, however, buying links may still work exceptionally well, which is why link brokers (and paid links in general) still exist.

Renting links has two really big advantages. The first one is that, once you stop paying, everything disappears. The links, the rankings, everything. If the ROI happens to be positive, it’s really not a big deal. Keep those paid links until Google finds them and then stop paying. This brings me to the second disadvantage as well: the risk. If Google (or more probably: a competitor) comes across your obviously paid link profile, it can all be over very quickly. And not just the links and rankings, but your brand as well. And it will take a whole lot of time and money to rebuild that.

Pay per link

Where link brokers usually just rent links, other companies charge money for their services based on the amount of links that they’ll obtain for you. Some do this on a flat rate (for example $25/link), others try to differentiate the rates by charging for PageRank (for example $20 for a PR2 link and $50 for a PR4 link).

There are lots of reasons I can think of why such a pricing method is wrong, but Eric Enge already wrote a great post about this earlier.

Link marketing workshop/ consultancy

A trend that started a while ago -and that will probably go on for at least a few more years- is a growing demand for good SEO related workshops and trainings. While the price (usually low to mid-range $XXXX for half a day, or a several hundred bucks an hour for one-on-one consulting) scares off lots of folks, because it looks pretty expensive for just a few hours of training, from my experience, private workshops tend to have an exceptionally high ROI.

A couple of hours listening to, or brainstorming with, an expert can lead to a lot of extra knowledge, tips, ideas and solid advice. Also, in stead of having to find everything out yourself by trial and error, the expert’s experience can save you time, by helping to filter out all strategies and tactics that might work in your specific situation.

Conclusion

I am not judging any of the link building services listed above, as they might definitely work in certain situations. However, you’ll have to keep in mind that there’s a difference between cheap and inexpensive. Something can only be inexpensive if the ROI is positive, the price alone is not enough to determine this.

Starting up a link marketing campaign is easy. Thorough preparation before starting up a link marketing campaign is often neglected, however.  By thinking everything well through in a structured way, you dramatically improve the chances of your link marketing campaign being successful.

Make a snapshot of the start

You’ll never know what you’ve achieved if you don’t know where you came from. Capturing your starting situation is very important for an evaluation of how successful (or not) specific strategies or actions have been in a later stage.

Think about your goals

Try to think as ambitiously as you can. Don’t limit yourself to anything just yet, but try to picture where you want to be in an X amount of time. I usually refer to these goals as the ‘wish-goals’. The real goals will be determined later on, but it’s important to think about this early as well. It not only gets you thinking about what you want, but will make sure that the research you’ll perform is more targeted.

Investigate the competition

Look at the keywords you want to rank for and determine who your online competitors are. Don’t limit this to organic competition only, but look at the paid results as well. Check out what the overall quality of the competing sites is, what the most important features of these sites are, what kind of content they carry, where they’re listed, and so on.

Evaluate what you have

Now that you know where you’re at right now, where you want to be in the future, and who you’ll have to compete with, you can start evaluating what you have. Is your current situation enough to reach your goals?

If not, try to determine what you’ll have to adjust. Your internal link structure, the amount (and quality) of your content and your website’s design are easier to adjust than your external links. After all, you’re in control.

Of course, it could also turn out that the goals you’ve set can’t be reached with what you have right now and a few additions or adjustments. In that case, adjust your goals to something more acceptable and try to aim for those higher goals at a later stage.

If it turns out that you can easily reach your goals with what you have right now, adjust your goals and start being a little bit ambitious, dammit! You won’t get anywhere if you don’t push yourself.

Determine your goals & strategy

Now it’s time to rethink the goals you’ve thought about earlier, but keep them SMART. You know what you want to reach, you know which companies you’ll have to compete with and you know what you’re current situation is like. Try to calculate where these three lines meet, put the bar just a little higher and there: you’ve determined your goals.

Because you’ve done your homework, it’s also a lot easier to create the perfect strategy for your campaign. Whether it’s building links to specific pages, creating link targeted content or any other strategy; write it down before you start. This makes sure that you don’t forget certain tactics and that the overall campaign will be a well-structured one.

Find the influencers

Although there are tons of link building strategies that you can use during a campaign, there is a specific group of influencers for any campaign that you just have to target. These influencers not only reach your target audience spot on, but may be able to boost your website to top rankings with just a few links. Connect with them, but don’t harass them with link requests or whatsoever. People are much more willing to link to you if they’ve known you for a (short) while. Networking is a process, not an action.

Plan moments of evaluation

This is a very important step in the process of starting up a link marketing campaign. Compare your achievements with your snapshot of the start and the goals you’ve set regularly. Plan these moments in advance, in order to being able to adjust your strategy in time, if things don’t seem to work out like you’ve planned.

Start your campaign

Finally, it’s time to start the campaign. First, there are several link marketing tactics that you can use that don’t envolve hunting, cold calling, or any other mind numbing activities. After picking the low hanging fruit, you can move on to the next part of your strategy. Contact the influencers you’ve been chatting with for the past few weeks or months, leverage your existing network, go after those .edu’s, or whatever you have to do to reach your goals.

Don’t be afraid to adjust your strategy during a campaign, by the way. Things change, and so do your competitors, your online environment, search engines and their algorithms. Follow your results, link building news and your overall campaign very closely, and you’ll probably be safe.

Six and a half years ago (which is ages, in Internet years), Robin Nobles, Eric Ward, and John Alexander compiled a legendary list of 131 legitimate link building strategies. Four years later, Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans published 101 link building tips to market your website, which was inspired by the other article. Considering the furiously changing face of search engine marketing and with 2009 already ahead of us, I thought it was time to evaluate both lists and create an updated collection of link building strategies.

7 Internal link building strategies

1. Make sure that your navigation is spiderable. Either use (anchor text carrying) text based navigation, or an image based navigation with relevant alt attributes attached to each image link.

2. Breadcrumbs are a great internal linking tool. Use them for usability and anchor text differentiation.

3. In-content links not only tend to have a higher click through rate and perceived trust, but are also able to add more relevance to a link because of the surrounding text.

4. Use a sitemap. A good sitemap is useful for visitors, useful for search engines and, therefore, useful for you.

5. Link to topically relevant pages on important pages of your website. Link to important pages on every (or most) topically relevant page of your website.

6. Be consistent in linking behavior. If you link to homepage.com, always link to homepage.com, and not to homepage.com, homepage.com/index.php and homepage.com/index.php&id=123.

7. Identify your most linked-to pages, and make sure that the link juice flows to your most important pages from there, in a well-optimized way.

10 Easy link building starters

8. Optimize your existing links. Contact the webmasters of prominent websites that link to you and ask them to change ‘click here’ to an anchor text that contains relevant keywords, an anchor text that encourages clicking through, or -ideally- a combination of both.

9. Monitor your 404 statistics. Keep track of whoever links to old pages or misspelled URLs, which is data that Google provides as well. Contact those webmasters and provide them a good URL which they can link to.

10. Create a ‘link to us’ page, where you provide information about how people can link to you and which URL(s), logo and/ or anchor text they can use. Update this page regularly in order to diversify the anchor text.

11. Contact family, friends, colleagues and other people you know and let them know about your website. Some will send you useful feedback, others -who happen to have a website of their own- might link to you.

12. Do you block search engine bots from indexing certain parts of your website via robots.txt or meta-noindex? Find out if people link to this section of your site. If so, contact the webmasters of these sites and kindly ask them to link to an other page of your website.

13. Use your spell check. People will more likely link to correctly spelled articles than to content that’s full of grammatical errors.

14. Search for websites that already mention your business name or URL, but haven’t linked to your website. This works excellently in Yahoo!.

15. Look for websites that mention your personal name, but currently don’t link to your site. Use Yahoo! for this as well.

16. Leave comments on the blogs you visit every day. Hey, you’re visiting them anyway, so why don’t leave a (relevant, useful!) comment?

17. Find out which website your company owns. If you work for a small company, there may possibly be several. If you work for a large company, the number will probably knock you off your shoes. Link these websites (carefully!) together, or redirect the most important and/ or relevant ones to your main website.

12 Old school link building techniques

18. Search for related websites by using relevant keywords. Filter out all interesting websites and contact them. When you did this for your main keyword(s), there are still tons of other combinations possible.

19. Check which websites link to your competitors. Try to get them to link to your website as well.

20. Check which types of websites link to websites that offer the same services or products as you, but in a different country/ language. This might result in a “I never thought of that…” feeling.

21. Either interview an expert from your field, or try to get interviewed by someone else. Don’t forget to mention your best content: readers of the interview might be willing to link to it.

22. Write guest posts for relevant websites in your niche. You could also write posts about your industry for websites that are slightly related to your niche.

23. Teach. Whether it’s a public workshop (local press), a class at a local college or University (.edu website) or at a business related event (industry links), teaching can result in authority links.

24. Use any search engine advertising program and advertise on keywords that linkerati might use. Try to convert the targeted traffic into links.

25. Use Google AdWords’ content network to determine which (relevant) websites generate traffic and conversions. Contact those websites directly.

26. Join an affiliate program. See #25.

27. Determine who’s linked to you before. Contact them again when you’re releasing an interesting new piece of content.

28. Trade links. There’s nothing wrong, with swapping links with a few, highly relevant, authority websites that can bring in extra traffic. Exchanging links with lots of irrelevant websites, however, might get you in trouble.

29. Donate to a charity. Although buying links is not allowed by Google, there are still lots of ways you can buy links (kind of) legitimately.

12 Places to submit your URL to

30. Most social media websites are only useful for promoting good content (which will get you links in return), but sites like LinkedIn still provide dofollow links with an anchor text of your choice.

31. Some general directories, such as DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web are still worth submitting your website to. Make sure to submit your site to the most appropriate category.

32. High quality, niche directories can be worth considering as well. Notice the emphasis on high quality.

33. Don’t forget to submit your website to high quality, regional directories. Especially worthwhile for websites that target local markets.

34. Publish stunning, interesting, funny or beautiful images in your Flickr account, that contains a link to your website.

35. Writing an article about a relevant topic, that contains one or more links to your website, and submitting it to article directories such as eZineArticles might work for you.

36. Relevant, non-spammy links in Wikipedia articles, Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups may have nofollow attributes attached, but can lead to (dofollow) links indirectly.

37. Submit your RSS feed to important RSS directories.

38. Blog directories may be willing to link to your blog. Submit your blog to the high quality ones.

39. Use PR websites to distribute your press releases, in addition to your PR agency. Make sure that your press release contains one or more (clickable) links to your website.

40. Got a great design? Submit your site to CSS directories and/ or website design contests. Even well-designed parts of your website can result in links.

41. Twitter. Just published a new post or article? Mention it on Twitter, your followers might visit it and -if they find it interesting- link to it.

12 Ways to make people write about you

42. Send out christmas gifts or birthday gifts to bloggers (or website owners) you know.

43. Offer services or a product in exchange for a review. Don’t ask the bloggers or webmasters to link to you, they most often will do anyway.

44. Create something unique. Top 10s, top 250s, mash-ups, how-tos, best-ofs, surveys, studies, awards. Define the proper hook, create unique content and attract good links. The possibilities are infinite.

45. Try to start a hype, use a new word, get a meme going, or do something else you’re the first at.

46. Link to others. People -especially bloggers- will notice it if you link to them. If you do this several times and offer content that is or might be relevant to these bloggers, they might link to you as well eventually.

47. If you happen to have some breaking news, offer a blogger (or a select group) the scoop. Bloggers love to publish scoops.

48. Say something groundbreaking, shocking, confronting, stupid, weird or flattering. People tend to link to others who are different or act that way.

49. Create something with an amazing design. This does not necessarily have to be your website, just having an awesome business card can result in extra links.

50. Launch an extraordinary offline campaign. People will talk about this online. If you integrate this offline campaign with an online version in a perfect way, you may even receive some extra links from ‘this is how you should integrate offline and online’-articles as well.

51. Create a contest and offer give-aways for winners. This is not only a great way to get attention, but to get valuable input as well, for example when hosting a guest post contest.

52. Build useful tools and/ or plugins that are free to use.

53. Speak at an industry conference. You’ll meet lots of interesting new people, and will probably get mentioned in several conference write-ups.

12 Common business tactics

54. Add a link to your local Chamber of Commerce profile.

55. The Better Business Bureau, and any industry related association you’re a member of are interesting link targets as well.

56. Contact your (preferred) suppliers, manufacturers, other partners. Obtain links from these website if they have a partners page as well.

57. Offer to write testimonials or a quote to your suppliers, if they are willing to link back to your site in or near this testimonial.

58. Ask clients to write testimonials about your product or service that they publish on their website, in exchange for a discount, extra fast delivery or any other benefit you can provide.

59. Hire a publicist. Press agency employees usually know the right people in the right places, which can result in a higher acceptancy rate of your press release.

60. Join relevant forums. You can either link to your website on your profile page, in your signature or in your posts. Notice how this one is listed under ‘Business related tactics’ in stead of ‘Places to submit your URL to’? There’s a reason why: forums are not places to drop links, but to join discussions.

61. Sponsor something. There are tons of possibilities, such as an industry conference, a sports club, a relevant forum, a local happening, or just any offline event that happens to have a website.

62. Hire an intern. You can let him or her work on a piece of research, which you can in your link building process. Also, don’t forget the website of the University you’re intern is attending.

63. Offer awesome product or services. People love talking about great stuff they’ve bought. If your products are ‘just’ good in stead of awesome, make sure that your after sales or customer care is excellent. People love talking about companies with a great service as well. Of course, offering crappy products or a lousy service will also result in links, but I don’t think those are the links you’re after.

64. Look for companies that went out of business. Either acquire their website, or contact the website that they’re currently getting links from and ask these sites to link to you in stead.

65. Turn your colleagues into link developers. Each of them has his or her own specialty and group of contacts. This not only take works off of your hands, but is very efficient as well.

4 Important considerations

66. Hire a link builder or an expert. Either let somebody you trust manage (a part of) your campaign, or visit a link building workshop. Especially when you’ve been building links for your own site for several years, a fresh mind can bring new ideas.

67. Hang in there. Link building isn’t something you can do in just a few hours, or something that you only have to do during one week in a year. Building a brand can’t be done in a single day, the same goes for a solid link profile. It’s a continuing process that takes time. Lots of time.

68. Keep an eye on the news. Follow important and interesting different blogs, in order to keep up with the latest news, trends and tricks. I’m not just talking about link building or SEM blogs, but make sure to follow general marketing blogs, slightly different, creative blogs or industry related news websites as well.

69. If you have to ask yourself ‘is this a legitimate approach’ or ’should I be doing this’, the answer is probably no. Too much, too aggressive or too shady isn’t advisable. Don’t do things you would be ashamed of when explaining them to your mother. Or Matt Cutts.

0 Advanced link building strategies

There is no such thing as advanced link building. While this list already sums up quite a few different strategies, I’m pretty sure that you can easily come up with a dozen more, that are specifically suitable for your company or industry.

Eric Ward once said that link building is “one part marketing, two parts public relations, and three parts common sense”. I’d say that link building is 10% basic SEO knowledge, 20% business thinking, 30% creativity and 40% perseverance. Either way, there’s nothing advanced to it.