Efficient Link Building Ideas

I've been designing websites for a long time. I remember I made my first website back in 1997 and hosted it on my AOL Hometown account. It was about a video game that was really popular on AOL at the time and was a collection of about 20 pages about information found in the game. I got some great word of mouth traffic from the other people who played the game.

Since then I've worked on all kinds of websites, from small-town real-estate sites to multi-million dollar company portals. And as I've grown up with the search industry it's become increasingly important for me to know how to optimize sites to rank well in search engines. It just doesn't work any more to tell a group of people about your site and expect it to spread (especially if your site doesn't have funny videos and the like!).

Of course, my clients are always getting smarter about the internet world, and recently more and more of them are asking me if I can help them rank better in search engines. The more sophisticated ones are even asking me about how they can get more links.

More links? Even I don't know the answer to that!

Well, I didn't know.

When I first started trying to help my clients increase their search engine rankings, I did a lot of research online to try to find an efficient link building method. I tried everything I could think of and decided that, instead of letting my research go to waste, I would post my results on the web for anyone to find. Here's what I've tried and what I think of each.

Tools

The first link building tool I tried was Zeus Internet Marketing Robot. Having never really been exposed to these kind of internet marketing tools I found it pretty easy to use. Every couple of days I would run through 15-20 sites and shoot emails to their webmasters requesting links. Then I could export the link directory right out to my clients' FTP accounts and establish a reciprocal.

Eventually though people got wise to these emails. No matter how well I wrote the email, it was still evident that it was an automated request. The last straw was when I started getting angry replies, threatening legal action under the CAN-SPAM act. I quit using the tool, despite it still being a somewhat effective link building method.

Outsourcing

I am a big fan of running my business like a CEO, and a big part of that is recognizing that you don't know everything and that other people might have a competitive advantage in certain activities. I negotiated with a firm in India (I won't reveal their name here, but there are a thousand of these places doing the same thing) and got some pretty good bulk rates, around $4/link.

This worked great for a while, I would get monthly spreadsheet reports with all the link placements, their PageRank values and the URL of the main site where the links were place. The links were all topically related, had great anchor text and looked legit.

Then Google made it clear that reciprocal linking was a bad thing. Suddenly my Indian team wasn't able to fill the monthly quota any more, they switched account managers on me about 4 times, and my monhtly reports were full of websites that they obviously owned. I was getting low-PR links from a huge network of poorly written blogs. I was sure this would get my client sites banned by Google, so I cancelled my contract with the Indian company and started looking for another alternative.

Articles

During my time with the Indian company, I also took some classes on writing. I was hearing good things about article writing, and although it wasn't the powerhouse tactic it used to be, people seemed to be using it effectively still. I wrote some articles on a couple of topics and distributed them via iSnare">iSnare. After the first couple of articles secured the numbers 1 and 2 rankings for one of my client's biggest terms I knew I was on to something.

Back into my CEO mentality, I found a team of content writers who could crank out 15-16 articles a week that were high enough quality to make it through distribution. This system worked great, until my content writers started to flake out on me, and with every new client it seemed like it took more articles to push the site up. When I first started, I got a PR4 and 500 visitors a month from 1 article, by the end it was taking 5 articles just to get to the front page of a moderately competitive term.

Again it was time to look for a new solution.

Blackhat

Getting desperate, I dove into the "dark arts" of the web and figured out how to spam links via RSS feeds. My experimental site went from nothing to 3,000 visitors a month in a matter of weeks. Every time someone visited the site around 30 new links were generated. After about a year of this Google banned the website and I learned that blackhat is always short term.

The Solution

For a long time I just did simple things for clients who wanted traffic: directory submissions, social bookmarking, etc. But I still needed a long term link-building solution. It wasn't until my friend Dave asked me if I had heard of the "Easy Link Building" tool. He told me he had been using it for a couple months and was super happy with the results. He sent me the link in an email, and here's what he had to say about it:

I visited the site Dave gave me and dropped $67 on the app. So far it's been working great. Here are the tips I have for you if you want to give it a try:

The tool gives you a lot of blog-type sites where you need to leave a comment to get a link back.

• Make sure you leave a useful comment on the blog, it's a fair trade: some good content for them, and a link for you.
• Take advantage of the ranking factor, it makes life so much easier.

The Conclusion

So what do I do know? Well, like everything it's not black and white. I typically start with some directory submissions and articles via iSnare for a client site. Then I plug their keywords into Easy Link Building and check in once a week to build 25-30 links. This gives them some initial boost and then keeps links coming in as long as they're clients of mine.

I hope my experience helps you find ways to help your clients, too!