10 Link Building Techniques

So for those of you who are new to SEO, link building can be like the mystical unicorn—it seems like it’s really hard. And frankly it is. Sorry, no bones about it. Link building is time consuming and difficult. For your clients, there are all sorts of link building opportunities that pass you by. And every time they do, you either pass them up, or you take them and suck every last bit of juice out of them. That’s right, link building is the part of SEO, I think, that necessitates a bit of creativity, planning, and a tad bit of conniving wit.

After all, according to Rand Fishkin’s survey of 72 SEOs, the anchor text and links from external pages are one of the three most important parts of Google’s ranking algorithm, comparable only to a domain’s trust/authority (which is in large part determined by the types and variety of a page’s links), and an individual page’s link popularity (which can be influenced through link building as well). So, basically, knowing how to build links is uber important.

Scared? Don’t be. Link building requires a certain frame of mind, but it’s not that hard to get into the link building mood. Just put on a little Barry White, light some candles, perhaps draw a bubble bath for yourself, and read the rest of this post. Because, frankly, despite the fact that high-level link building is hard, a good link building campaign is going to have a variety of link building. Needless to say, there are a few things you can do (whitehat and black-ish hat) that might help you start to shoot your clients up little bit in the SERPs. Below are 10 ways to do link building listed from the most blackhat (10) to the most whitehat (1). I guess you might also say that this list is arranged from simplest to most difficult (although that’s not quite true).

10) SPAMMING

SPAM from a can may taste delicious, but when it comes to internet SPAM Google (and most of the civilized world) hates it. Why? Because it’s annoying. SEOs think so too. We all run blogs, we’ve all seen the comment SPAM. But the unfortunate truth is, it’s a perfectly illegitimate link building technique. I’m not advocating SPAM, but as an SEO, it’s good to know how to build it.

This is listed as number 10 because it’s both the msot dangerous and the most interesting link building technique you will find. The basics are pretty easy. You buy a program like XRumer, build a campaign, and let the software go to work. It spiders hundreds and thousands of blogs and forums, fills out fake email addresses, and even attempts to fill the captchas in. The end result, thousands of attempted links, a few that make it past the SPAM filters, and a small bounce in rankings for your site. Usually, a little bit of SPAMMING goes undetected. But too much might get you in trouble. What’s more likely to happen, however, is just that Google will discredit the bad links.

9) Buy in-text Links

So there are a lot of link brokerage services. There is no question that it’s against Google’s rules, but a lot of people do it. It’s pretty standard to buy links, although it’s still considered blackhat. Selling links is also a great way to earn a bit of cash on your blog.

Once again, I’m not saying that I support buying or selling links, but it is an option. The upside is that buying links is a great way to get relevant anchor text pointed at your site. The downside is that if you get caught, Google has been known to penalize perpetrators. So, if you’re going to do this, BEWARE.

If suffering a Google penalty doesn’t matter that much to you though (or you just don’t think that it’s likely), then go ahead and sell a link or two. The two most well-known link brokers (for both publishers and advertisers) are and LinkXL. Both offer a great variety of links. Generally LinkXL is cheaper to buy links for advertisers but less lucrative for publishers, and TextLinkAds is more lucrative for publishers although way more expensive for advertisers.

8) Reciprocal Link Trading

Trading links can be a good way of getting links from authoritative sites. It’s not a good thing if all of your links are reciprocal (meaning you have a link to their site on your site, and they have a link to yours on theirs), but a reciprocal link or two never hurt anybody. The thing you should remember is that Reciprocal links don’t carry as much value as one-way links. But that doesn’t mean they don’t carry any value. Just make sure to trade links with relevant site. Like, if you’re a site whose main content is instructions on how to weed, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to trade links with a pot smoking website.

7) Juicing

This isn’t the MLB, so you won’t be called before the Senate if you juice your links. And as long as your careful, you’ll be good with Google too. Basically, juicing your links is the online equivalent of a link gym. It just refers to making the links that already link to your site more powerful by building links to the pages those links exist on. You can use any of the methods discussed here to juice other links.

Good candidates for link juicing are things like blog posts that discuss use good keywords that direct people to your site, syndicated articles and/or press releases that are living somewhere permanently.

6) Social Bookmarking Links

A great way to increase in the SERPs is to build social bookmarking links. Now you can either buy high quality social bookmarking links, or you can build them yourself. Either way, as with any link building technique, don’t overdo it. Google will penalize you if an ass ton of your site’s links come from Digg or Propeller.

5) Blog Commenting

There are a few great programs to help you find blogs that take the nofollow tag out of comments made on their site. Some of them suck, like Comment Kahuna, others are awesome, like Comment Hunt which taps into the google API to find content that is relevant so that you can comment on articles that will help you in the keyword cloud you’re trying to rank in. I think that’s one of the biggest secrets I can give you. Comment Hunt rocks.

If you’d rather just ignore nofollow/dofollow, you can also just look for relevant posts that you can comment on. Nofollow links, I think, are effective if they are put on relevant posts. They drive relevant traffic to relevant blog posts which in turn can elicit new posts from other bloggers. Nofollow links can be the originators of lots of dofollow content. If you’re just looking to build some good link equity though, just go after the Comment Hunt content.

4) Link Directory Submissions

So there is a lot of debate over how effective directory submissions are. I will tell you that whenever I start a site, the first thing I do is a massive directory submission campaign. It gives me a steady influx of links throughout the next few months as I get the site built up. In my experience, those links make it easier to get the site to rank for other good keywords.

The biggest problem with directory submissions is that submitting to directories is time consuming. Which is why a lot of SEOs hand the responsibility off. The worst thing about directory submissions is that if you submit to good directories, their will be a lot of editorial control regarding what gets in and what doesn’t. So you might submit to 1,000 directories, and only get accepted at 300. That’s annoying. And these are relatively low quality links, so the reward isn’t necessarily great.

While there are a lot of SEOs who do submit to directories on their own, if you’d rather, you can get an account at WickedFire or some other SEO-type forum, and hire a person to submit to 100-1000 directories. Usually, it costs something like $60 for 1000 directory submissions. You do, however, risk being submitted to some pretty crappy directories.

So what’s ideal? Building your own links. What’s the alternative? Paying someone to do it. Just make sure to read the reviews of the user who might be submitting your content.

If you should decide to do directory submissions inhouse, which I guess is preferable, then Philadelphia Based SEO, Wil Reynold’s, recommends you use Directory Critic to evaluate individual directories, which will help you understand the value of a link from them.

Want some more info on directory submissions (and evaluating their effectiveness)? Below are a talk given by Reynolds and his accompanying Powerpoint. Enjoy!
[audio:http://geekcast.fm/podpress_trac/web/1186/0/ASW09-Whitehat-Linkbuilding-Strategies-Beginner-to-Advanced.mp3]

3) Press releases

Press Releases are awesome. They have the potential to create tons of buzz for your website. Tons of buzz=tons of bloggers talking about you=tons of dofollow links to your webpage=increase rankings in google=more RELEVANT visitors=higher conversions. Get it? Got it? Good! Don’t believe me? Watch PRWeb’s video on how awesome press releases are.

Rand Fishkin has compiled a great set of suggestions for press release optimization. And Hubpages has a great tutorial on press releases. So, frankly, I don’t feel like I need to say anymore about the topic.

Once again, as with all things, if you are interested in paying for there are plenty of services. PRWeb is generally regarded as top-of-the-line, but there are plenty of free press release syndicators out there:

• The Open Press
• PR Zoom
• NewsWire
• PRLog
• FPRC
• PR
• PR USA
• 1888 Press Release
• PR Inside
• Pitch Engine
• Press Box
• iNewswire
• Free Press Releases
• OpenPR
• FreshNews

Caveat: I’ve never used free services before.

2.5) Article Syndication

Article syndication is basically the same thing as Press Release Syndication. The difference is, usually it results in more links, it’s a bit cheaper, and you don’t get as much of an instant traffic bump. That said, I like it more. The articles tend to live longer than Press releases.

Fast Submit Articles is my favorite service because it allows you to spin all your content. They submit to 300+ article directories, and because they’ll spin your article for you, you can avoid duplicate content issues. As Tony the Tiger would say, they’re G-R-R-R-EAT!

2) Alms for the Poor: Begging for a link

Like I said at the beginning. Link building opportunities pass us by all the time. One of my clients is a Rhode Island firm that happens to cater to College students. This fall, I’m going to be contacting all of the college papers in the state and seeing if I can urge them to do a profile on my client. If the papers comply, I can almost guarantee you they will throw the article on the web without a link. So here’s where the work comes in, I’ll call each newspaper’s web guy individually and make sure they get an active link in the article. That’s right, it’s a scheme. I’m trying to get my client profiled so that an article about them goes online so that I can ask for a link to their site. BAM! I’m a friggin’ genius.

How is this different than sending out press releases? Well, press releases are different because the goal of a press release for an SEO is to generate links and you hope that as a byproduct people organically link to you. Active link building requires exchanging phone calls, emails, and, perhaps even sexual favors to get a good quality link. You don’t just want links from anywhere. I mean, if you get a link from a porn site, Google will associate you with porn. Get a link from a college newspaper, Google will associate you with frat-boys with an appetite for breakfast-beers. Get the picture? Asking for links should be deliberate and will probably be where you get your most valuable links.

1) Viral Content

This is the HARDest kind of link building to do in my opinion (and I have an opinion about everything). Viral content is awesome. It’s that thing you see that you have to send to your friends. On youtube, you know viral content because it’s always labeled like, “Banned Commercial” or something.

Or it does something so surprising that you have to send it to other people.

It’s not just videos either. Viral content can take the form of an infograph, a hilarious blog post, contests and basically anything else. The goal of viral content creation is basically just to make content that everyone will want to link to. Viral content is sort of the holy grail of white hat link building. It is tricky to do, but incredibly effective. Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can tell you about creating viral content. It’s something that can be orchestrated, but I can’t really give you tools and tips, as it mostly has to do with you’re own creativity.