Why you should forget about Linkbuilding

Rand of SEOMoz makes a few good points in his series on ‘link-worthiness’:

• The ’secret’ of SEO success is not keywords in the title tag, or links from quality websites.  Each of these  strategies are low ROI-strategies.  The ’secret’ high-ROI strategy is creating content that the linkerati will want to share.
• Most of us put a certain degree of effort into identifying a website’s potential customers, but few identify their potential linkerati.
• A good way to discern whether an article is link-worthy is to tell a friend you, ’saw this article about {your topic}’ and describe your idea a little.  If they ask you to email them the link, you’re on to one.

Examples

A B&B could win links from a number of other B&B’s by asking it’s customers for the best B&B’s they stayed in elsewhere in the country, and publishing the results with some sexy graphs in a sexy design.  Sending an email about the article to the winners would probably result in them linking to the article because that would be information they’d want to share with their customers.

A web designer could do a survey of clients to find out the most important issues, best/worst parts of their web designer’s service, etc.  You might generate discussion in the industry if controversial, and might win links from resource lists such as those from sites like SmashingMagazine.  Alternatively (or additionally!) do a random survey of web design companies in the UK, ask who their service provider is and the above questions, and then publicise as with the B&B.

The Take-Home Lesson

The point here is that, somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten that what we’re doing, is marketing.  As in that field you get courses on at University.  Our role is to create interest, to generate buzz, not to hunt for individual link opportunities.