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.

The goal of link building is to acquire keyword-rich links in the body of pages that don’t have many other outbound links, have many inbound links, and are about the same subject as the page on your site for which you’re acquiring links.  The end objective is improved search engine rankings and traffic via the links themselves.

I’m going to divide link building strategies roughly in two, into high-effort, low-return strategies and high-effort, high-return strategies.  There are no low-effort link building strategies – at least not until you’ve invested in some significant high-effort strategies!

High-Effort, Low-Return Link Building Strategies

Most start link building with directory submissions. We know large directory submissions are virtually pointless – a links page is a pattern Google must surely be able to detect, and want to devalue.  Instead, focus on niche directory submissions, those with only a few links on each page, and perhaps some content around them.  Use google to search for your keyword + ‘directory’, your keyword + ‘links’, ‘resources’, etc.  However even this is a high-effort, low-return link building strategy.

Many then progress to building free links from profiles on sites like LinkedIn, Meetup.com and AboutUs.org, or links from CSS Gallery sites.  Again, this is a relatively high-effort, low-return link building strategy because creating each link takes time and most likely these sites bear little relevance or authority in the subject for which you’re winning links, and you’re only getting one link.

Most then start to consider reciprocal linking when directories and profiles become tiresome.  The important points to note here are to:

• Search google for related but not competitive pages
• Trawl the sites linking to your competitors
• Isolate sites that already link to external sites, ideally in the body text
• Offer a non-obtrusive way to incorporate a link into the body of the page
• Offer some reciprocation, ideally not a reciprocal link from the same page/site/C-Class

Next up comes article building as success with directories, profiles and reciprocal link requests dries up.  Articles allow you to create a keyword rich page and include a link to your site.  The value of more than one link from the same article directory is questionable, as is the value of multiple links in the same article to different pages of your site.  Important points to note here are:

• Write a long author biography with your keyword-rich link to your page near the end or beginning, depending on whether the bio will appear at the beginning or end of your article.  The aim is to keep the link within the body of the text on the page.
• Article spinning is the practice of writing one article with multiple phrasing options throughout which are then used to automatically generate multiple unique versions of your article for submission to multiple article directories.  This can save you time and acquire more links, but feels decidedly spammy.

Article writing is also a high-effort, low-return link-building strategy.  Articles can take half and hour to over an hour or longer, and win you a single link, perhaps from a domain from which you already have a link.

High-Effort, High-Return Link Building Strategies

The problem with each of these strategies is that they are aimed at building a single link each time.  Instead, focus on strategies that have the potential to win you 100’s of links of more based on a one-off effort.  That is, focus your energies on strategies that will continue to build links to your site without additional effort on your part after your initial investment.  The key is to develop a page that people will want to tell others about.

If you have design skills, creating a free wordpress theme can be a high-effort, high-return link building strategy.  Your initial investment is substantially higher – you might spend a day or two designing, implementing and marketing your new wordpress theme.  But from that point on, with additional effort on your part, every time your theme is implemented, the keyword-rich crediting link you built into your theme passes link value to your site.

If you have programming skills and a decent idea, creating a free wordpress plugin can acheive the same result, and you can also market the plugin from your site.

If you are enough of an expert in your field, then writing an controversial, innovative or summarial blog post is often recommended for acquiring natural links.  If you can attract attention, you will win substantial traffic and substantial numbers of links from related and perhaps authoritative sites.

What other high-effort, high-return link building strategies have you tried?  Do you agree with my division of link building strategies in two?

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Web Design is a complex form of design, but still draws key principles from design as a discipline. In summary, these might be:

• Contrast
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• Precedence
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• Alignment
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• Convention
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