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A f r a m e w o r k f o r l i n k b u i l d i n g i n t o d ay ' s t u m u lt u o u s S E O e n v i r o n m e n t .

A MODERNGUIDE TO

LINKBUILDING

Contents

A Modern Guide to Link Building

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Introduction to Linkbuilding

The death of directories

The birth of Search engines

The anatomy of a link

The “link” mentality

Link exchange

Article syndication

Link baiting

Social Media

3A Modern Guide to Link Building

Link. build·ing/liNGk ˈbildiNG/ Link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website.“For search engines that crawl the vast metropolis of the web, links are the streets between pages” – Moz Link building is the digital civil engineering of building these streets

Link Building has completely evolved since the beginning of search engine optimization from the Link exchange rush when the basics of link building was getting listed in as many online directories you could get to blog comments , to link networks to the more recent guest posting and press releases

Link building can be frustrating in this age of search engines penalties and bans so it good to understand the importance of links for search engine optimization. While it's sometimes possible to get a site ranked high in the search engines without worrying too much about links, that's rarely the case. If you have plenty of competition for your keywords, lots of other websites trying to rank well for the same terms as you, then a solid linking game is essential.

The evolution of search engines has changed a great deal and so has the importance of links to them. Before going into a full link building spree, its good (and safe) to understand the basics. Search engines hate the link business, such as buying links. Some seemingly harmless link building strategies can ruin your search traffic.

In some ways linking is the worst part of SEO. With on page issues, page optimization and site structure, you have total control. It's your site after all. But with linking, it's different. You're trying to convince other people to link to your site. There are lots of ways to do that, some good and some not so good, but getting really useful links can often be difficult. So let's get started with Link Building In modern day age.

4A Modern Guide to Link Building

In order to understand why links are so important, it may help to understand the problem that search engines use links to solve. It's hard now for many of us to imagine the world without a World Wide Web, but by the end of 1993 there were only around 600 websites and most of those 600 sites were pretty thin; a handful of pages each. In August of that year, when there were just a couple of hundred websites, a well-known computer book publisher O'Reilly and Associates launched what was probably the first commercial directory of the Internet, GNN, the Global Network Navigator.

Much of the directory was based on the whole Internet catalog. In effect, it was like a paper directory of websites posted on the web. In September, another directory appeared on the scene, W3 Catalog. And in January of 1994, when there were around 600 websites, David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web launched. You'll know that directory better by its later name Yahoo! Yahoo! eventually became the world's top search directory and the world's most popular site. These were all web directories.

Google PageRankLink building began with the rise of Google, since they based the core of their search around links, considering them votes of confidence. Therefore, one of the most important factors in SEO became your website's backlink profile - that is who's linking to your site.PageRank relies on the uniquely

democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Google works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. Google assesses the importance of every web page using a variety of techniques, including its patented PageRank™ algorithm which analyzes which sites have been “voted” the best sources of information by other pages across the web

THE DEATH OF DIRECTORIES

5A Modern Guide to Link Building

THE BIRTH OF SEARCH ENGINES

So the next step was the search engine, a system that created an index of pages within sites. There were various simple search engines early on, but perhaps the first true web search engine, a system that would allow use of the search through the text contained in web pages within index websites, was WebCrawler launched in April 1994. A directory provides minimal information about a site. A search engine, though, lets user search pages within sites, a far more useful service.

During 1995 and over the next few years, all sorts of other search engines appeared on the scene; Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, HotBot, Northern Light, and of course AltaVista which became hugely popular when it launched late in 1995. Finally, in 1998, Google appeared on the scene. By the end of the decade, the writing was on the wall, search engines were the future and over time search engines would more or less kill off the directories. Even Yahoo! had to switch.

The ExplosionDuring mid 90’s and over the next few years, myriad search engines exploded on the scene; Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, HotBot, Northern Light, and of course AltaVista which became hugely popular when it launched late in 1995. Finally, in 1998, Google appeared on the scene. By the end of the decade, the writing was on the wall, search engines were the future and over time search engines would more or less kill off the directories. Even Yahoo! had to switch.

Google was based on a revolutionary idea that you could figure out what a web page was about and whether it was a good match for someone's search query, not just by looking at the page itself but also by looking at links pointing to that page. Those links could be inside the website within which the page was found, but could even be pointing to the page from other websites; sites that the owner of the reference web page might not even know existed!

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In other words, they were list of websites with a little information explaining what each list of site contained. That was fine in the early days when the web simply didn't contain much information. But as the web grew, they became unwieldy. If you're trying to find a particular Shakespeare sonnet, a directory will tell you which sites might contain the information, but they don't let you see what's in each site. They simply tell you what each site is about and it's up to you to go to the site to see if it contains what you're looking for.

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The search engines in the late 1990s were faced with enormous amounts of data to sift through. And that was before the advent of big data technologies.

The idea of simply looking at a page to figure out what was in it, and whether it was a good match for a searcher's query, simply wasn't enough anymore. New methods had to be developed for ranking web pages and link seemed to be the way to go.

In 1996 a search engine called RankDex owned by a subsidiary of Dow Jones was experimenting with using links to assess the value of the pages that links pointed to.

Not all links are made equal

From RankDex to BaiduThe site would rank search results based on how many links pointed to each page. RankDex is long gone, but the designer went on to build Baidu, China's equivalent of Google, and the world's fifth most popular website. Then came Google with this PageRank system and this revolutionized the role of search. The basic concept is simple: use links pointing to websites to give you an idea of how important to link two pages really are. If one page has lots of links and another very few, then the web is just voted for the highly linked page and against the page with few links

Google can be traced to early 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford Computer Science students. When they first launched their search engine they called it BackRub, you can see the original logo here.

The hand allegedly belongs to Larry Page. Why BackRub? The name referred to backlinks. Page and Brin were examining backlinks, links pointing back to a web page. To paraphrase Page and Brin's paper, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," they were using backlinks to figure out a page's importance or quality. Analyzing links then was at the core of Google's methodology when it finally launched in 1998 and it remains essential to both of the world's top search engines, Google and Bing.

Today, links provide crucial information about a reference web page's importance and quality and no concerted SEO campaign is complete without considering them. In the next chapter, we'll look at what a link actually is.

A Modern Guide to Link Building

If a link comes from a very popular site, one with many links pointing to it, then the outgoing link from that popular site is more valuable than a link from an unpopular site. In effect, the popular site's links carry more votes. This was a huge change in the world of search and the very basis of Google.

7A Modern Guide to Link Building

The Anatomy of a LinkAs search engines have become more

advanced, they have been able to expand the

link-related signals they can use beyond raw

numbers. Search engines can look at a number

of factors, which can all combine and give them

an indicator of quality. More to the point, they

can tell whether the link is likely to be a genuine,

editorially-given link, or a spammy link.

These factors are outlined in more detail below.

There is something important to remember here,

though: it isn't really the link itself you care about

(to a certain degree). It is the page and the

domain you are getting the link from which we

care about right now. Once we know what these

factors are, it helps set the scene for the types of

links you should (and shouldn’t) be getting for

your own website.

Before diving into the finer details of links and

linking pages, I want to take a much broader look

at what makes a good link. To me, there are

three broad elements of a link:

TRUSTBy trust, we often mean what Google thinks

of a website, and some will also refer to this as authority. As we’ve discussed, Google came up with PageRank as a way to objectively measure the trust of every single link they find on the web. Generally, the more PageRank a page has, the more trusted it is by Google, the more likely it is to rank and the more likely it is to help you rank better if it links to you.

However, there is another concept here that you need to be aware of—TrustRank..

DIVERSITYLink diversity is important if you want to build

good links and have a strong, robust link profile.Diversity of linking domains simply means getting links from lots of different domains—not the same ones over and over again. I discuss this in much more detail below.

Diversity of link type means getting links from different types of domains. If all of your links are from BlogSpot blogs, that isn’t very diverse. If all of your links come from PRNewswire, that isn’t very diverse. I’m sure you see what I mean. A natural link profile will contain links from many different types of websites.

TrustRank:“Let us discuss the difference between PageRank

and TrustRank first. Remember, the PageRank

algorithm does not incorporate any knowledge

about the quality of a site, nor does it explicitly

penalize badness. In fact, we will see that it is not

very uncommon that some site created by a

skilled spammer receives high PageRank score.

In contrast, our TrustRank is meant to

differentiate good and bad sites: we expect that

spam sites were not assigned high TrustRank

scores.” ~ TrustRank White Paper

THE PERFECT LINK

1. Trust2. Diversity3. Relevance

RELEVANCEwe need to acquire links to our website that are relevant to us—we can do this by trying to make the anchor text contain a keyword that we are targeting and is relevant to us.

However, caution is needed here in light of Google updates in 2012, namely Penguin, which had a massive effect on link building.

However, building links with overly-commercial, keyword-focused anchor text is a lot riskier than it used to be. It can still definitely work, but does pose a risk if you overdo it.

8A Modern Guide to Link Building

REL=“NOFOLLOW”Link have many attributes e.g. Target,

Title e.t.c but from an SEO standpoint, it's

the href and rel ="nofollow" attributes that

are important. rel ="nofollow" provides the

author with a way to tell the search engines

not to follow the link. You need follow links,

links that do not contain the rel="nofollow"

attribute.

You should assume that no-follow

links provide no value to your site. Just

assume that the search engines ignore

them.

Of course, links aren't always place

on to text. They can also be placed on

images. From an SEO perspective, putting

the links on text is generally better. The text,

as we'll discuss in a later video, tells the

search engines what the reference page is

about, so the text can improve the page's

rank in the search results.

Still, now and then you'll want to put links

on the images as you can see here. You can

improve a link like this in a couple of ways. First,

it's always good to use image names with

keywords in them. You can also use an "alt"

attribute in the image tag. The "alt" is intended to

contain words that describe the image in

browsers that are not displaying images. Hover

over the image with the mouse and the "alt"

words pop up. You might also want to use the title

attribute in the anchor tag just in case.

Links can also be placed on to images by

combining the image tag with the map and area

tags. When doing so, remember to use the "alt"

attributes throughout, for the image tag itself and

in all the links created by the individual area tags.

So that's the anchor tag. Perhaps the most

important thing to remember about the anchor tag

is to use keywords wherever you can in order to

be as descriptive as possible.

THE ANATOMY OF A LINK

9A Modern Guide to Link Building

Ofcourse, you can still link to the site using that domain name as the keyword, but you should also link using keywords like this. You could even link to different pages with each link. As you learned before, linking into the site instead of only to the home page is always a good thing. Where else can you link from? What about social networking accounts? You probably have a Facebook account don't you? How about a Google+ account? Facebook, LinkedIn and various other social networking sites use no follow links.

But don't let that put you off. You may get visitors through the links after all and as I discussed in an earlier video, I'm not totally convinced that the major search engines ignore all social networking no follow links. Google+ currently provides follow links by the way. Do you have control over or access to any other sites? Perhaps you have regular websites. You could at least put links in the page footers or find various other places to slip links in. This is a time honored mechanism for creating links and most companies that own multiple sites do it, so why not you? Remember use keywords.

Many companies just link to their other sites by name. But there's no reason you can't do a more promotional link such as Travel Central America with SeeCA.ni. It's rare these days for people to have absolutely no web pages under their control in some way. So think carefully about all the possible places you can place links. How about profile pages in forums and bulletin boards you're a member of? Perhaps you can even announce your site in forum messages. How about listings in the directories of professional associations which you remember? Spend a little while thinking this through and you'll probably find a few good placements.

What next? Friends and family of course. Who do you know who might be willing to give you a link or two? Who might be willing to mention you in their blog for instance or in groups of which they are members or in their personal or business websites? Use a broad definition of friends and family. How about your employees for instance? Your company's or employer's partners. If your company buys product for resale, will its suppliers provide you with a link? If you sell products to other companies, can you get them to link back to you? How about professional associations? Can you get them to the link to the corporate site? Does your company donate money to non profits? If so, can you get links from the donor pages?

BUILDING LINKS – FIRST STEPSThe first thing you should do is to is

place links in the easy, obvious locations. The obvious place is of course, a web page is already under your control. If you have a blog for instance perhaps you can write a short article about the site you're promoting and link to it from the article. Remember use keywords. Don't just link to your site using the URL or site name but use the keywords for which you want to rank. For instance, let's say you're pointing to a website about travelling in Central America and you're using the domain SeeCA.ni.

10A Modern Guide to Link Building

There are myriad link opportunities most of which are not exploited , simply because people involved in an organization don't realize the value of links, and even when they have a vague idea that links can help a website, they still don't understand just how powerful putting keywords into a link can be. If at all possible, try to engender a 'think links' mentality into your organization, so that all staff members understand that links to your website will be a key factor in the success of your site. Specifically, they need to understand two things. First, that whenever they see the opportunity for a link, they should grab it!

Secondly, that wherever possible, the link should contain keywords relevant to your organization’s industry. There are some company departments that really should understand these concepts, a classic example for instance of lost link opportunities due to a lack of understanding are companies public relations departments. Most PR departments do not understand linking, so even though they're out there doing things that can really help, such as issuing press releases, all too often they don't take the extra few moments to think about links and so the opportunity is lost.

For instance, your PR department should understand that links can often be placed into press releases pointing back to specific areas on your site, though admittedly over the last year or two, the situation has changed somewhat and press release links are often nofollow links now. Still, ideally whoever is responsible for promoting the website should ensure that the PR department knows what keywords to use and which pages they should link to. When working with new clients looking for possible link locations, I often hear about various business partners, suppliers, major clients, industry associations and the like, companies that have websites of course, and who might be willing to link back to the client's site.

Typically, most of these opportunities go unclaimed, so the people in your organization who set up such relationships really need to understand the value of getting these other organizations to link to your site. It's not just your PR department who can help, though. Any member of your organization can provide links, from their Facebook link to new Google+ pages, in the footers of forum messages, from their own blogs and so on, so try to educate your staff or organization members with some basic linking concepts and with a little luck and the occasional reminder, you should see your links grow.

THE “LINK” MENTALITY

11A Modern Guide to Link Building

If the website you're promoting is related to a local business, an attorney, medical professional, retail store, plumber or whatever you really need to work on links from local directories. In fact, for a number of reasons one thing you should do early in a link campaign is to make sure you're registered in as many local directories as possible. This is actually a good thing on a couple of levels. Yes, you'll get good links back to your site. But you're also creating pages about your business linking back to your site in lots of different directories and those directories are tickets in the SEO lottery.

When somebody searches for your business type in your area, hopefully your business website comes up in the search results. But with luck some of these other web pages will pop up too. So you get not just one link on the first search results page but several. There are several really important local directories you should manage manually. First and foremost is Google Places. The directory of businesses associated with Google Maps. And that is use to provide local results to the Google search results.

You should also manage your Yahoo! Local and Bing Local results manually. You also need to submit to a directory service such as UBL.org which takes your data and sends it to hundreds of different directory services. I won't go into detail here though, because I've already done a video in this subject in my SEO course. I explained how to submit to those services in that video. But, there's more that you can do. You should also look for specialty directories and an easy way to do that is to search for your business type along with the word directory.

You can also search for your business type along with the name of your city and see what directories pop up. For instance let's say you're a cosmetic surgeon. Search for cosmetic surgery

directory, plastic surgery directory, and so on. You can also try cosmetic surgery along with your city name and even cosmetic surgery directory along with your city and see what directories appear. You'll find various directories. Your job then is to find out how to get listed in those directories. In some cases, you'll find the only way in is to pay.

But often you can get a basic listing for free. For instance, one dental directory I saw recently included free listings and those listings include real follow links back to the dentist websites. You only have to pay if you add a photo and more information. It's not worth paying for a listing in most of these directories. But that's not to say some are not worthwhile, of course that's the subject outside this course. So let me just say that if you do pay for listings you should consider carefully whether it's worthwhile and track the traffic to your website and calls that you get so that you'll be able to see if it's working.

GEARING UP

12A Modern Guide to Link Building

Another form of directory that is well worth getting listing in is what I call a local directory, the specialized city directories. I'm not talking now about the big systems like Citysearch and Yelp, though those are important too. I'm talking about the small directories that focus on a particular town or city. There are mixed bag. Some are associated with the local newspaper or perhaps even with small towns, the local city government. Some are small independent sites. They're very professional and attractive. Others are somewhat more funky or downright ugly.

Some are actually sub domains of very large national directories, still, they're all worth getting links from. In some cases, you may find your business already listed as many of these directories are getting their data from sources such as UBL.org. Still, check to see if the data is correct and whether it contains a link to your site. These directories are easy to find. Search for your town or city name along with the word directory. You may be surprised to what pop ups. Better still go to Yahoo! Directory or dmoz.org and dig around in the regional search results.

And you'll often find local directories. Dmozeven has a guides and directories sub category which is often quite useful. You might be surprised that how many local and industry directories you can find if you invest a little time. Spend a while digging around and you'll discover lots of great link opportunities that provide really useful, relevant links.

LINK EXCHANGESThis is basically reciprocal linking. It's was

such an important link technique in the past and many people still use it and seem to think it's what linking is all about. So what is reciprocal linking? As the name suggests, it's linking with reciprocation. You link to my site and I'll link to yours. It's often also known by the term Link Exchange. You've seen link pages, I'm sure. Many are still around. You still sometimes see links that simply say links, or maybe useful links, or resources, or perhaps our friends or link partners.

Click those links and you'll see pages and pages of links to other websites. For a surprisingly long time, reciprocal linking was a very powerful way to rank a website. It really did work and it worked very well. There used to be hundreds of companies providing reciprocal linking services such as software that helped automate the process of finding link partners and placing and managing the links, and people who would search the web for possible partners and email them. Even now, I still get a few reciprocal link requests by email every week.

But over the years the search engines have devalued reciprocal linking to the degree that in most cases it doesn't work. I'll explain in a moment how it can still work sometimes. The problem with basic reciprocal linking from a search engine standpoint is that the links have no real value. The only reason they're there is to convince the search engines that the reference sites should rank well. Despite the fact that the reciprocal link companies always used to claim that reciprocal linking was about providing useful links to site visitors not manipulating search results.

That was nonsense of course, and over the years as the search engines reduce the value of such links, this companies have mostly disappeared or moved into more general link building services. You may also hear however that reciprocal linking is actually dangerous, that doing it can get you penalized. In most cases that simply isn't true. In fact, the story that reciprocal linking was dangerous first started circulating while I was still seeing sites ranking well using reciprocal linking.

13A Modern Guide to Link Building

But what if site A links to B then B links to C and C links to A. Or maybe site A links to B, B to C, C to D and D back to A. And what if those links were scattered around a site rather than in a big list of links? This form of reciprocal linking sometimes known as three way linking or even one way linking, because your links go one way without a second link back, can work and many people use it.

But although there are some companies providing three way linking services, most of this form of reciprocal linking is more informal with owners of multiple sites linking between their own sites with other people who own multiple sites. In general, you'll probably want to avoid reciprocal linking. It's simply a waste of time. But if you run into some kind of multi-site link exchange in which you don't do A to B to A linking and in which you don't create big list of links, then go ahead. It could be helpful.

Press ReleasesPR departments often miss the real

opportunity in the form of press

releases. They are out there creating

press releases for all the usual reasons

companies do so, but they are either

not including keyworded links in the

press releases or not including any kind

of link, even a basic URL link back to

the company site. If you're distributing

press releases, it's a no brainer. Why

not do it right and make the most of the

work you're already doing?

But even if you don't already do press

releases, you may want to experiment

with them.

I've seen releases used very effectively

to generate traffic to sites and they

often rank well in new search

results. So how should press releases

be distributed most effectively?

By submitting a press release to distribution sites or specific syndication sites, you can build links if you add one or two into the body of the release. Some options are paid, while others are free.

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Now using link farms, the automated creation of huge numbers of what are in effect reciprocal links, is dangerous. But most reciprocal linking won't do any harm. It just won't do any good. So when can reciprocal linking work? When it's not obviously reciprocal linking. What are the two characteristics of typical reciprocal linking? Well, first of all, site A links to site B, and site B links back to site A. And the links typically appear in pages containing long list of links. then go ahead. It could be helpful.

14A Modern Guide to Link Building

- Article Syndication is very similar to press releases. Essentially you're writing a different type of article. Not an article praising your company or announcing something but some kind of informative article. Then distributing it through article-syndication libraries. The purpose of an article-syndication library is in theory at least, to provide a repository of articles that website owners can pick from to help bulk up their sites.You provide your article with permission for site and blog owners to use the article.

And in return they agree to run the article's author information along with the article, including a link back to your site. That doesn't always happen of course. Sometimes site owners simply run the article without attribution. But it does most of the time. Thus, by distributing your article through the syndication-libraries, you potentially end up with links back to your website from two types of locations. From any websites on which the article ends up after being pulled from a syndication-library. And of course, from the library itself.

Article Syndication used to be a very effective way to get links back to your site, spread around the web. Today these sort of links are not as good as they once were, but probably still help a little. And at the end of this article, I'll explain a special form of syndication that can bring more value. There're hundred of syndication-libraries. And of course, you can submit to them directly. Sites such as Go Articles, Ezine Articles, Articles Base, Article City, contain many thousands of articles each. And are all indexed by Google.

However, it's a lot of work to distribute widely by working with each site individually. So instead, you may want to use a service that does the work for you. There are a number of these article syndication services out there, such as uniquearticlewizard and distributeyourarticles.com. And software such as articles submitter. Search a little, and you'll also find plenty of manual submission services too. You can even find services that will write articles for you and then submit them. Article Syndication doesn't have to be hugely complicated. Most of the article libraries do not allow

key-worded links in the articles themselves, though some do. Typically links are placed in the informational bio box at the bottom of the article. The about the author box. In this box you get to say who wrote the article, and provide a line or two about the author. Including a link, or maybe a couple of links back to the authors website. Remember, rather than a name or URL link back to your site, you want a key-worded link. Most article libraries have very low standards.

Essentially, anyone can submit an article. And all to often, the articles are poorly written. Some of the libraries try to keep their standards up though, and in any case, you want well written articles, because the better written and more the interesting the article, the more likely it is to be picked up and used by site owners and bloggers. Finally, another Article Syndication strategy that is rarely discussed. Write articles and provide them directly to bloggers to run on their sites. Find the blogs that are related to your area or business.

Then approach them to see if they might want to run guest articles. Many blogs will. If the articles are interesting and well written. There are even sites that connect blogs with bloggers for this very purpose. We'll look more at blogs in the next video. A quick comment about duplicate content. Yes it would be better if your articles were all different, and in fact some services even provide tools that help you mix up your articles. You provide several headers, several opening paragraphs, several closing paragraphs and so on. And the software them picks randomly so that each submitted article is different.

If you're posting to blogs, you may want to manually modify your articles so each blog to which you send an article gets a unique one. Article Syndication is being used very successfully in many linking campaigns. And although there are plenty of low-value syndication-libraries, there are still high-value syndication mechanisms available to you if you look carefully.

ARTICLE SYNDICATION

15A Modern Guide to Link Building

There's a fundamental difference between articles posted into syndication libraries, and those posted directly to blogs. The links in blogs are likely to be far more valuable than regular syndication articles. The search engines know the article libraries when they see them. And lest, don't links in their pages high value, and even if someone picks up an article from the library and posts it on their site, the search engines may recognize the article from elsewhere, and thus, give the links relatively low value.

However, unique content on blogs can provide very valuable links back to your site. There is several way to get links placed on blogs. First, there is the idea of posting links in article comment areas. A strategy that is essentially worthless, but you'll still find companies selling blog comment services. This is what's known as blog spam, and apart from being obnoxious, essentially polluting people's blogs. It really doesn't work, because links and comments are virtually always nofollow links. In fact, that's why the rel=nofollow tag was created in the first place, to discourage blog spam.

Next, is the idea of submitting guest articles to blog-guest posting. If you do this, the articles will be posted into the blog's article area, and links there are generally follow links. These are good links, especially when they come from popular blogs. Guest blogging has got really bad press in the SEO world in the last year or two, because there were a number of services that essentially paid bloggers to place articles on their site. That's not what i'mrecommending. I suggest you avoid these services and in fact a number of them have closed down.

I'm talking about high quality, unique articles, posted on blogs that want the articles because they provide value to the blog's readers. Not garbage articles hosted simply because the writer paid to have them placed. You can also try to convince bloggers to list to a site in their blogroll or their list of links. You'll need to have a site that is worth linking to of course. If for example you're promoting a site that sells a discount snowshoeing gear, you may be able to get people who blog about snowshoeing to list you as a resource.

Finally, you can also get links from blogs by convincing bloggers to write about your site. Of course you will need something to write about, a hook that you can hang a story on. Again, links and articles posted on blogs, whether written by you or the blogger, are generally follow links. A good blog campaign can be very valuable because you get links distributed widely across the internet, and they're the type of links that Google typically likes to see, the real thing. But to make such a campaign work, you really do have to have a good story.

There has to be a reason for bloggers to link to your site. I think of a blog link campaign as blog PR, and there is a core concept in public relations that goes back many years, "If you want people to write about or talk about you, you have got to have a hook to hang the story on". What, I ask my clients, is your USP? Your unique selling proposition. What makes your site so special? If you can't answer that question, there's probably no reason for bloggers to write about you. If you're just one site in a crowded arena of similar sites, bloggers won't want to write about you.

And in any case, you have a bigger problem. How do you hope to compete in any way? Let's assume though, that you can answer that question, and that you really do have a good answer. You have the best prices, or the best selection, or the best content, or something that sets you apart. So the first thing to do, is find the bloggers who are good prospects for your pitch. You may already know the number of bloggers, but you can find more by searching Google for your keywords, along with the word "blog", for instance.

And don't forget to follow links in blogrolls, or the useful link lists within the blogs themselves. You'll soon find a large number of blogs in virtually any subject area. When you find useful blogs, you'll want to record some basic information, perhaps in a spreadsheet. The blog name, the URL, the name of the person who owns the blog, a link to the author page, perhaps the author's email address or other contact method. If one of your goals is to get blogrolllinks, you'll want to record information about that too.

Blog linking campaigns are often overlooked, but can be incredibly powerful. If you have a good story to tell, get out there, and tell it to the bloggers.

GUEST POSTING

16A Modern Guide to Link Building

Link bait is a simple concept. You place something on your site that acts as bait for links. It attracts links. People link to your site not because you want them to, but because they really want to. They want to tell people about whatever bait you place there. You place the bait, then let people know about it and wait for the links to roll in. These are the very best type of links you can have. In fact, when Matt Cutts, Google's liaison with the SEO world, fields questions about linking, link bait is one of the first things he mentions.

So what is link bait? It's simply something so interesting, or useful, or entertaining, or funny, or sexy, or intriguing, or perhaps even disgusting or evil that people will link to it because they just feel the need to tell their friends and colleagues about it. A classic example is, of course, YouTube, which at the end of the day is all about link bait. YouTube contains millions of videos and while it's true that many of them are most certainly not link bait, many are. And consequently, YouTube has more than a billion and a half incoming links.

Another example is Wikipedia, a site that contains around 18 million pages, each one of which could be regarded as link bait to someone. You may not be interested in the Beard Liberation Front, but apparently, hundreds of people are. Of course, we can't all be YouTube or Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean you can't create your own link bait on a more modest scale. So what can you do? Well, an obvious idea is hosting a blog on a subject related to the area you work in. Blogs are very easy to create, good blogs are much harder.

So don't jump into blogging until you are sure you can make it work. You need someone who can write, who wants to write, and who can write articles that people want to read. If you got what it takes, if you can create a really top-notch blog, a blog may provide great link bait. But what is a blog? It's really just a content management system. So whether you create content within a blog or using more traditional web development methods, it's all content at the end of the day. Perhaps you can provide useful tools of some sort.

Whatever your link bait is, the next step of course is to tell people about it. Obviously, you'll want to use SEO to make sure your link bait is easy to find, but you'll also want to get out there and let bloggers, for example, know about whatever it is you've posted. You'll want to do a basic PR campaign contacting bloggers, relevant newspapers, magazines sites, get listed in any directories that may be appropriate, and so on. Of course, you'll also want to place link invitations next to your bait. A little social networking icons and share buttons that you see so often.

A quick tip, think back to the first two examples I gave in this video, YouTube and Wikipedia. Apart from the fact that they contain huge amounts of link bait, what else do they have in common? The crowd created the link bait. The organizations that run YouTube and Wikipedia don't create any content. They simply created the infrastructure that allowed other people, the crowd, to create the link bait for them. In fact, many of the world's top websites do this. Think of sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Craigslist, and many more.

Sites that let other people create their content, they're link bait. If it's at all possible for you to do that, it's a powerful thing. An example would be a retail company that also managed to set up and run popular forums related to its products. Adobe, for instance, hosts community learning areas. Forums and music groups, for instance, in which content provided by Adobe customers act as link bait for many thousands of links. That's perhaps not why Adobe did it, but nonetheless, link bait it is.

Creating link bait is actually quite difficult for many companies, which is why so many people turn to other methods; methods that create less valuable links. Spend a little while thinking about this, though, and you may find a way to create something that people really want to link to.

LINK BAITING

17A Modern Guide to Link Building

There is a lot of hype surrounding social networking, it's quite possible in many cases to create an effective linking campaign without social networking. I've seen many sites ranked well using linking strategies that don't include social networking. In fact there's also the problem that in many cases, social networking links are no-follow links. Take Facebook for instance, the single most important social network. Links from Facebook to external pages are no-follow links.

On the other hand some other social networks use follow links. Take a look for instance at Google+. Yes, there are some no-follow links between Google+ accounts for instance, but the external links, at least for now, are follow links. Myspace provides no-follow links while LinkedIn provides follow links. But in both cases, they're not direct links to the reference sites.Theyare redirects and not 301 redirects, so they don't carry value. Some social networking sites evidently try to decide which links should be followed and which shouldn't. Digg for instance says that they provide follow links in cases that a story has reached a certain popularity. How about Twitter? Twitter used to use no-follow links, but more recently seems to have switched to follow links. Some Twitter feed mechanisms convert them to no-follow links though.

For a link to have value it needs to return 301. How about the link shortening services such as bitly, Google URL Shortener, and Tiny URL? Twitter users often employ these services to create short links for use in the limited space of a tweet. Well, these services typically use 301 redirects. These three certainly do and you can check your favorite service for yourself using the method I just described.

So some social networking links do carry value, the follow links. But what about the no-follow links? Is there SEO value to social networking no-follow links? That is, will the search engines consider the links for ranking purposes? Will social network links help push your site up in the search results? Well,technically no. In theory at least, the major search engines, and that essentially means Google and Bing, ignore no-follow links for ranking purposes.

So social networking useful or not for SEO? In some cases, definitely useful as you'll get follow links. In others when you're only getting no-follow links, perhaps not. The official position of the search engines is of course you should go ahead and promote your site in the social networks because links bring traffic regardless of search results ranking. And that's perfectly true.

A well-executed social networking campaign can help a website get traffic directly, bypassing the search engines. Don't get pulled in by the hype though. Social networking is no silver bullet and in fact it doesn't work very well for many types of businesses. It's not a "one size fits all" type of thing. In any case, in this video course, we're interested in SEO, in optimizing for the search engines. So I'm not going to get into general social networking discussion. Definitely some food for thought.

If you think you can make social networking work for you, regardless of search engine results, then of course go ahead and do it. If there is any search engine lift, then that's great. But if you're not sure that non-search engine results from a social networking campaign are worth the cost to you and social networking is very hard to succeed at for many types of businesses, you might simply do the basics. Set up the obvious social network accounts, just don't spend a lot of time on it. You'll want Facebook and Google+ accounts, perhaps Twitter and LinkedIn.

You'll also want to use the usual social networking and share buttons, of course. And try to encourage people to link to you from their social networking accounts. Social networking has become popular in SEO circles. And in fact there are many companies that will go out and create social networking links for you. We'll be discussing the whole idea of buying links like this in a later video. Do these link campaigns work? Perhaps, depending on what you believe about the no-follow issue and what proportion of follow links you're creating doing such a campaign.

But again, as the search engines are continually pointing out, linking is not all about SEO. Sometimes a link is just a link.

SOCIAL MEDIA

18A Modern Guide to Link Building

• One-way links. This simply means that you get a link pointing to your site without placing a link back to another site. Typically, this term is used in some kind of link network situation, so be careful. You may be asked to link to a different site, site B we'll say, in return for the link from site A, you may be getting yourself into some kind of link network, and by linking out, you're telling the search engines that you are a willing participant and thus risk some kind of penalty.

• deep linking, simply mean linking into your website rather than just to the site's homepage. This is a good thing to do, spreading your linking around your site. The term above the fold means the space in a website that could be seen when the page loads without scrolling down the page. It's quite likely that links near the top of the page are more valuable than links lower down the page. Another link type that's likely to be more valuable is a content or in-content link, a link that will be placed into content within a web page rather than just in a block of links.

• landing page. That's simply the page that the link points to; the page that the visitor lands on after clicking the link.

• Relevant means the link will come from a page that contains content that is somehow related to the subject area of your site. That's a good thing, but sometimes even links are non-relevant pages, in particular, if they are keyworded can help.

• A permanent link is what it sounds like. You pay once and the link should stay for good; though realistically one day the site will probably disappear.

• Alexa ranks. Alexa is a website analysis service owned by Amazon and it maintains list of sites ranked by popularity; the lower the number, the higher the rank.A low number means a more popular website.

• Site wide links are links placed on every page in a website. This often refers to links in blogrolls, or in traditional websites, links in the page footer. But it may also be links in some kind of link block higher up on the page. A Drip Feed refers to creating links gradually, a few a day or a week. The idea is to avoid a sudden huge increase in links pointing to your site which may look suspicious.

BONUS LINKSwe've looked at a variety of ways to get links to your site. From directories, to link baits, reciprocal linking, to working with bloggers. Some of these methods are better than others, of course. But they're some of the more common methods for creating links. There's an almost limitless number of ways people go about creating links. • Classified-ad sites. There was a

time classified ads could really boost a site in the search engines. But Craigslist has provided nofollowlinks for a number of years now. And most other classified ads sites provide either nofollow links or redirect links, so they don't help much these days from an SEO perspective. On the other hand, classified ads, in particular Craigslist ads, can generate a lot of traffic to a website.

• Forum linking can be very effective. I'm not talking about spamming forums. In fact, you might term this community marketing, though there can definitely be an SEO benefit. if you can spread these links around a variety of forums, it can be quite effective. Note that nofollow links are not as common in forums as in blog comments, perhaps half the time your links will be follow links and half the time they'll be nofollowlinks, either way, there's.

• A similar strategy to forum linking is Q and A site linking. You've probably seen these sites, where people ask questions and others answer. E.g. Quora Many of these provide nofollow links, though some are still giving follow links. But even the nofollow links can help your site if you're answering the right questions.

TERMINOLOGY

19A Modern Guide to Link Building

Linking is usually the worst part of SEO work. It's a real stumbling block for many people. Actually creating a website and making sure it's optimized correctly is rather like paint by numbers. You just have to follow the steps and get it done. But then you come to linking and in many ways, it's far more complicated. It can be boring, tedious work and it's often hard to find good people to do it properly. It's going to get harder too; this is really a critical area for search engines.

One sad result of the focus on links to help with search ranking is that the web is now drowning in garbage pages created solely to hold links pointing to other websites, to convince the search engines that the reference sites are important. This is bad for the search engines and bad for the web. So the search engines are going to continue to work on cleaning up, to distinguish between good and bad links. As I discussed earlier in this course, there are two types of links: the real thing and the fake thing.

Links that exist for good reason and links that exist solely for SEO reasons. They're all part of the link game. And as time goes on, the search engines will get better and better at figuring out at the difference. In some ways that will be making linking even harder. But if the search engines could distinguish between two forms of link 100% perfectly, it might actually make linking easier. Right now, there's a link arm's race going on. It's all very well the search engines discouraging the link game, the purchasing of links for instance, but as I've mentioned before, at the same time they are encouraging the link game, quite simply because it works.

And that's why Google talks so much about link bait and why you should think about it too. The most powerful linking technique is to create something so useful, or entertaining, or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or whatever, that people all over the web link to it. It's what the search engines want to see and it's what they will reward you for, if you can figure out how to make it happen. This ebook is by no means exhaustive. If you want to continue learning about linking methods, there are lots of places to go with a wide variety of opinions.

For the Google point of view, about all things SEO, not just links, I'd suggest that you check in with Matt Cutts' blog now and then. You might also want to read Search Engine Lands, Link Week Column. Search Engine Land is about SEO in general of course, but has a regular column about linking strategies. The major link analysis companies, SEOmoz and Majestic SEO, can also provide interesting information. Or simply Google for terms, such as link-building strategies and link-building ideas, and you'll find plenty to keep you busy.

So we've come to the end, Thanks for reading and good luck with your link building!

HAPPY LINKBUILDING!

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Conclusions

20A Modern Guide to Link Building

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