Becoming a Clockwork Pirate

A Field Guide To Creating Links For Search & Social Success

Kelvin Newman

Becoming a Clockwork Pirate

A Field Guide To Creating Links For Search & Social Success

Kelvin NewmanJanuary 2011

Why Do You Build Links To A Website?

Its easy to make large sweeping statements about how the Internet has changed society. It's probably best to leave those far reaching theories and schemes to the historians. However one thing you cant argue with is over the last decade we have changed the way we access information; links have had a huge part to play in that shift.Before search engines came to dominate the web, you browsed like you would in a library. In the early days of the web, the experience wasnt much different to parsing through a Dewey card system. If you wanted to find something online you might browse a directory, click a hyperlink or even type the address of a website into your browser, but then search engines came along and absolutely everything changed. At that point, we stopped browsing and started searching.

Nowadays Search is synonymous with Google, but it goes beyond Google and their constantly rebranding and restructuring rivals. The concept of search has far reaching cultural and commercial implications which implications, which affect and influence everybody.

Our behavior has changed, every website you visit has a white box, a flashing cursor and a search button you type in what you want and itll take you there.

Or at least try to... This is hugely apparent on two of the largest websites in the world eBay and Amazon; the last time you visited these sites the chances are you used the search; but its not just shops were searching at; in October 2008 (according to Comscore) YouTube became the worlds second biggest search engine overtaking Yahoo and Bing. iTunes has shaken up the music industry; singles are thriving, albums less so. Catalogue songs featured in TV shows are topping the sales chart and people only buy what they want rather than just what is available. What people search for may vary, but people are doing it everywhere.

The ability to search is changing the way we buy things and its changing the way we promote them. Econsultancy in their 2009 survey of professional your marketers found 79% of marketers used search marketing. The majority of marketers havent been slow to catch on to the trend of search.

Though browsing might have taken a back seat to searching those blue underlined links, that took you from one site to another didnt lose any of their importance. Their significance is now hidden behind the search engine algorithms.

The way most people think about doing better on Google and other search engines is wrong - it's not just about your website it's about who links to your site. When the search engines decide who ranks where, most rely heavily on your credibility. They decide how important you are and where you should rank on any given term based on how many people are citing you with links to your website.The number and quality of links pointing to a site is a signal to the search engine algorithms that determine who should rank, and how high, in their results. On a basic level, the more higher quality links you have pointing to your site the higher your site will rank in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and any other major search engines.

Dozens of books have been written about technical onsite SEO, a few even touch on building links, but none have dedicated themselves exclusively to what is the most important topic you need to cover if you want your website to rank. How to get links. Thats what I want to do with this book.Over the years, Ive worked on hundreds of link building and development campaigns to help websites do better on search engines and everyone has been slightly different.

Some worked.

Some didnt.

Some were easy, some were hard. Despite there being hundreds of different link development methods, there were many similarities in the most successful campaigns and approaches that worked. This book is my attempt to document and share them with you.

What is a Clockwork Pirate?The challenge of link building is that it requires a mixture of skills from a number of different disciplines. You need the ability to write a great story like a journalist, build relationships like a public relation expert, spot trends in data like a financial market analyst, produce video like a documentary film maker and build websites like a developer. I like to call the type of person with this raft of different skills a Clockwork Pirate.

Yet whatever combination of skills you have currently (or hope to build), there will be mixture that will uniquely enable you to build and attract the kind of links a website requires to gain a share of the search market place.

The Clockwork Pirate is the perfect link builder.They understand systems and patterns, not just the systems that govern the search results but also the uniquely human patterns in how the people with the power to link behave. An analyst and a psychologist.

They have to be systematic and methodical to follow through with ideas that influence the results but equally they need a bit of devil may care pirate attitude. They cant be scared or lack the confidence to explore the boundaries of the rules set by the search engines. They need to think creatively and inventively and come up with the ideas everyone is envious of.

Inevitably, there is tension between these differing sides of a personality, you might be better at the clockwork side or maybe youre a more natural pirate. Either way this book is an instruction manual on how you can use both those sides to achieve natural links, which drive traffic and search visitors towards your site.

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Principles of Link BuildingFocus On Quality Not Quantity. The Web is all about linking and enabling a web surfer to travel from one page to another. Hopefully at the same time helping them find quality and trusted

information. Search engines operate in the same way; they want to provide their users with access to high quality content from trusted websites. They do this by trying to understand which sites are most important. They cant think like a person, so they take a short cut. Their conceit is that the most important sites tend to be those people talk about the most, and when they talk about them they end to link to them.

So the lazy link builder might say, doing better on Google is easy, I buy links from a thousand different websites, maybe I could bribe people to link to me or just pay people a pittance overseas to submit my site to directories. If it were that easy, this would be a very short book. The fact is today, quality and reputation rules over quantity when developing links. Remember rubbish in = rubbish out!

So swapping reciprocal links with hundreds of sites is unlikely to improve your online reputation or search engine rankings. Nor is any quick and easy scheme where with next to no effort you can attract links. Its not that simple. It requires a mix of methodical hard work and a spark of ingenuity.

Google would like you to only build links to send traffic to your site and ignore how their bias towards well-linked sites might help you rank better. However, search engines reliance on links to rank sites has altered the way most people go about getting links. Some link developers sometime take the unusual attitude where they aim to get the links to game the search engine and ignore the user. Im pragmatic whenever building links, I know not every link I build for search marketing will deliver a deluge of traffic: Even so, you have to think about the real purpose to help people move from one site to another; Plus I always have in the back of the mind how that link can benefit the website in search results.

Or to put it in a much simpler way - Quality will always usurp Quantity. The BBC might have a highly trusted website; it makes sense to us that a link from the BBC on a high traffic page is better indicator of quality than a link on a low traffic page even on the same domain.

In the past, the engines only had links to decide who was trusted; however, social indicators are starting to give Google this type of information as well. If someone with thousands of Twitter followers mentions you its likely to be a better indicator of your sites quality than someone with dozens. The shift to these cleverer understandings of relevance is on-going. Google, Yahoo & Bings systems dont stand still, they are all making ongoing shifts from the link graph (i.e. the more high quality links you have the better you rank) to the social graph, where your social reputation influences the search results. This could sound the death knell for link development, but I think it makes the quality of your links and connections ever more important.

We might not have fully felt the impact of these changes yet, but if you are a forward thinking link builder, who has one eye on what Google likes, but at the same time, are building links to make powerful connections and encourage visitors, youll rank well whether Google looks at the link graph or the social graph.

The rest of the book deals with the methods that work right now to improve your search ranking and deliver new traffic, but also appreciates the inevitable changes in how relevance and reputation will be judged in the future so your investment now pays out in the future.

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The VAVA Principles of Link BuildingWhen I look at any websites link portfolio, I look at four key areas: Link Volume, Link Authority, Link Velocity and Link Anchor Text. No matter what challenges a website faces I will look to improve these VAVA principles.

Link VolumeWe can all easily get our heads around the idea that Google and the other search engines like websites with more links. And though the intricacies of link building require a nuanced approach very often a website cant go too far wrong with a strategy that results in more links.

Link equity is far more complicated than just volume this but it is still important, it doesnt matter if you have a pile of links as big as Ben Nevis Mountain if your competitors is as big as Everest.

Link AuthorityIn real life not all recommendations are created equally, we know who of our friends and acquaintances are experts, and who doesnt know what they are talking about. If we want advice on a new car, we trust our mechanic friend more than our dentist. Google when they look at link authority are trying to achieve something very similar. They make judgments about how much sway any endorsement should have.

Well come onto how you can assess the authority of any given link later in this book but be warned the metric that most people use to access link authority, PageRank, is at best misleading and more likely damaging to link building efforts.

PageRank is the basis of Googles original algorithm, and still has a part to play in how they determine rankings, but what they display as a green-bar and a score out of ten, is something very different. This score is only updated once a quarter, at best, and by that point will be several months out of date, if it was ever accurate in the first place.

Google have also been known to use this score politically, i.e. to punish link selling offenders while the change in score seemingly has no influence on results. So take PageRank with a shovel full of salt and use it for what it is useful for, a very quick, very inaccurate, finger in the air assessment of a pages quality.

A far more effective way of judging a sites quality is your noggin, does it feel like a trusted site? Does it appear to have the signals of credibility that you implicitly understand? Does it have readers wholl take the content seriously? From my experience these gut feelings are far more effective at judging site quality than PageRank or any other score. This is why people are far more important in any link building campaign than any tool or algorithm.

Link VelocityIf youve looked at the volume and authority of your competitors you might find yourself scared stiff, but there is some good news though. Google have realised there is a fault in their algorithm; there is a lag, a lag between a page being important enough to include and when it has received enough links to rank. To rectify this there is a phenomenon, which is sometimes known as a Google

Honeymoon Period or officially, Query Deserves Freshness, this means new pages dont need as many links to rank when they are fresh.

It makes a lot of sense. Imagine two identical sites, one with 1,000 links but static growth vs. another with 500 gained rapidly over the last few months. Which do you think will be the best website to return for a topical search query?

This isnt the only way link velocity influences rankings, but there is a general trend if you can engineer a healthy link velocity you will benefit more than your link volume and authority may initially suggest.

Link Anchor TextA varied and inventive link building campaign will usually deal with authority, velocity & volume factors by default, but are you making sure you get the right anchor text? Anchor text is one of the most complex of the four pillars so Ive covered it in much more detail than its peers.

But what is anchor text? If someone links to you in a piece of text and a few words are underlined and in blue, thats known as anchor text. Its the words or phrases people use when they link to you. Google use these words to understand what your website is about. If someone writes the word foolproof widgets and makes it a clickable link to your site, the search engine can be reasonably confident that your website is about foolproof widgets

It used to be the case that if you wanted to demonstrate the power of anchor text in Googles algorithm, you pointed someone at an example of a Google Bomb. A Google bomb was when a swarm of websites link to a page using certain anchor text in order to influence the search results. The de-facto example was during George W. Bushs time in the White House, disgruntled bloggers who were angry at his handling of the Iraq War en-masse linked to his biography on the Whitehouse website using miserable failure

The Google algorithm at that stage assumed that page must be about miserable failures why else would people link to it using those words, so made that page rank whenever anyone searched for that phrase. Not surprisingly seeing thousands of people willfully manipulating its algorithm didnt impress Google so they altered their algorithm. With these changes, its a little harder to find such obvious examples of link texts importance as miserable failure but its still highly regarded as a very important ranking factor.

One good example anchor texts importance is a blog post about Googles new ranking system, known as Caffeine; ranking when you search just for Caffeine, which despite not being particularly well optimised for the term ranks highly on this competitive term. This illustrates just how important having keyword rich anchor text still is. However when we talk about the right anchor text, its more than just aiming to get the odd keyword here and there you need to know what the breakdown of your anchor text is.

How does that differ from your competitors anchor text?What are your deficiencies?And how are you going to deal with them?

Sometimes it wont be keyword-rich anchor text youre looking for. Recent shifts in the algorithm may mark your site as unusual if the ratio of keyword-rich links to branded terms is an out of the ordinary, in comparison to other top ranking sites. If youre in this situation, tactics like press release syndication and directory submission may be your friend where youll be able to easily

build links to your site using your brand name as the anchor text. Back link analysis, where you examine who is linking to your competitors using their brand as the anchor text may present opportunities to build the links you require or maybe youll ease up on the tactics you use to get keyword rich anchor text.

Other times there will be a very clear correlation between your anchor text and the types of key phrases you are ranking for. Maybe youve been link building for years and gaining anchor text for just your main key phrase. Here youll want to increase the variety of keywords, to show the search engines youre not a one trick pony. Whatever your situation, you shouldnt be carrying out your link building without an appreciation of the anchor text landscape.

How do you get the anchor text you want? As link building becomes more about content than link requests, how can you get the anchor text you want without even asking for it?

When writing link-bait (or as I prefer to call it, link worthy content) headlines and titles are of huge importance, grabbing attention, getting click-throughs from social sites and encouraging people to read on. But dont forget; the title will become the default anchor text people will use to link to the content, so try to ensure the keywords you want to target are in there. It may seem obvious, but youd be surprised how many great pieces of link-bait I see with great titles in every other respect other than their potential anchor text.

Another clever trick is to get keywords in your domain; you knew that already right? Someone linking to your site will quite likely use the website name or domain of the site as the anchor text thats a big part of the reason generic domains are so valuable.

If you dont have your keywords in your domain, you could consider the bait and switch. This is where you build a site on a keyword domain, attract links to it, take the site down and 301 re-direct the links to your main site. Its not ideal for everyone, but if youre struggling to get links to your main domain, and when you do manage to get a link the anchor text is terrible, its certainly worth entertaining the concept.

I also mention the words a couple of times subtly if I get in touch via email to ask for a link. If you are sending a link request but dont want to outright request specific anchor text because you think it might put off the link prospect, try subtly mentioning the keywords a couple of times within the email to make sure the linker associates the website with those terms.

How about something like the following.

Hey JoeyIm contacting you on behalf of ACME INC, who is the UKs largest supplier of super duper widgets. Were doing some promotional work for their website and came across your page where you have links to some of the other suppliers who make and sell super duper widgets. I was wondering whether it might be possible to link to ACME INCs website on this page? Itll be useful to your readers and hopefully help them find what they are looking for a little easier.Let me know if thats okay or if theres any other ways ACME INC might be able to work with your website, maybe we could work together to produce a buyers guide to super duper widgets.All the bestMR SEO

A technique that works very well is providing an embeddable link; you want to make it easy for people to link back to your site, so learn from the masters of embeddable links; YouTube. YouTube

supply the code to link to the site in HTML and some of the more popular forum languages. If you do the same, it becomes easier to get the anchor text you want by including it in the embed code.

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Carrying Out Some Basic Competitive ResearchIf you want to out rank your competitors you have to have better links than them. Too many people think they have to trick or beat Google; when actually you only have to perform better than your rivals do. If youre on a rush to top the search rankings you need to know what chinks they have in their armour and where their strengths lie.

If you know where they are lacking and appreciate where they excel, your efforts will be much more effective and constructive. What follows is a basic competitive research process Ive been using a lot recently and I thought wed share how I analyze competitors link profiles and how we use that to inform our link building strategies.

Every company has a few businesses that they have friendly rivalry with but those who immediately spring to mind might not be the only sites you should analyze. I normally take five keywords and see which three websites rank the best across all the terms plus a couple of the obvious choices.

We then look at how many sites links to them; I have a few private tools to do this analysis and number crunching, though a few off the shelf tools like http://www.OpenSiteExplorer.org and http://www.MajesticSEO.com work quite well too. Volume is only part of the equation, but the nearer you are to your rivals the easier your job may be.

Next look at the anchor text of the links highlighted by the tools. What proportion of your competitors links use anchor text containing your top keywords? If they have a small proportion, you should try to attract more. Be aware though weve found in quite a few cases recently if you have too many links using one kind of linking text it will impair your ability to rank on that term.

Understand the spread of links across different Page Rank scores, while in many ways Page Rank is a flawed metric to judge sites, when combined with other factors I still think its worth spending some time looking into. Does your competitor have a bigger percentage of high PR links? Do they rely on quantity rather than quality? While you should always aim for authority links, if you can understand the makeup of those already ranking well itll help you target the links that will deliver most quality.

What types of domains do they have as link partners? I dont think any of the major search engines give links from certain domain extensions more value automatically; however understanding how many .ac.uk or .gov.uk links a website has can be a short cut to understand the scale of your link development requirements. I always try to build links on these types of domains, but if I find the competitors have a large proportion of links on trustworthy Top Level Domains I make it even more of a priority.

Do their links have a strong on contextual relevance? Imagine youre Google for a second, which link would you see as the most valuable. A site about ponies linking to an industrial widgets site or a page explaining the technology of widgets linking to an industrial widgets site?

Have a good look into the content of the website linking to your ranking competitors. They might rely on links from quality business directories or link pages of suppliers neither of which will be contextually that similar to their website. This gives you a great intelligence to your link development campaign, and informs you should be targeting gaining links in pages talking about topics similar to your site.

Its also incredibly useful to see what internal pages are being linked to. A lot of high ranking websites only receive external links to their home page or a few important internal pages, if you can attract links to a greater variety of pages it sends a strong signal about your websites reputation, but also understanding what types of content have been able to attract links can be helpful. Do they have a well liked tool? Do they have printable guides, which are recognised as an excellent resource? Learn from what has worked for them.

Many link builders will just aim to build good links. Exploring these indicators can give you a more intelligent strategy. A Clockwork Pirate carries out in-depth research and comparisons between his website and competitors back links, it helps make their link building even more effective.

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The Methods of Link Building

When I decided to sit down to write a book about link building I wanted to make it as hands on as possible. Some books are great for making you think hard, some are about introducing a new topic, and some marketing books manage to be entertaining, some concentrate on being inspirational. I wanted to do something different; I wanted to provide a checklist of tactics and strategies, which Ive used and have worked, so you can do similar.

I hope this book can be a helpful how to guide on how to build the kind of links that promote your business to users as well as search engines. Ive grouped the approaches broadly into three categories, Find, Create and Benefit. Often one tactic may fall into more than one of these categories but as youll already know, the best ideas rarely fall nicely into clearly defined pigeon hole.

Its into these three categories the following chapters and techniques are grouped to; all these techniques are ideas Ive tried and used over the last few years. Ill describe what I found successful and what I didnt. Ill talk about those that are essential but boring, those that are exciting but might not make much difference to the bottom line and draw upon the experience and expertise of internet marketers renowned for using these very tactics.

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FINDThis is where you have to carry some research and create links from scratch using your Clockwork Pirate ingenuity. Often this means acting like a cross between the Rain Man and Columbo.

This category includes delving down into who is linking to competitors; knuckling down and spotting trends in outbound links from trusted sites within your niche. We will also cover off tried and tested (but not very creatively challenging) tactics like directory submission. Itll appeal more to the clockwork side of the link builder, but will still require inventiveness and inspiration to really achieve great results.

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Directory Submission Some links are easy to get, some are bloody difficult. The more difficult they are to get the more value they have. Directory submission is a fairly easy way to build links, which unfortunately means theyre not usually that valuable. But theyre not worthless and are always top of my hit list when I get my hands on a new client project as they normally are a quick win.

Before search engines came along the easiest way to find new content online was by browsing a directory. When Google rose to prominence the use of directories as a navigational tool fell but they were still very important for another reason. These directories linked to the best and most important sites on the web and provided the search engines with a great way to find websites (even if web users didnt use directories much).

During these two periods of the internets history directory submission was an essential part of promoting a business online. But as it became easier to produce websites online using blogs, free-hosting etc, the search engines became less reliant on directories to find the most valuable content.

At the same time it became easier to make your own website, it also became easier to produce your own directory. So the numbers of them sky rocketed. Not a good sequence of events for directory submission as a link marketing tactic, declining use by users, decreasing reliance in search algorithm and increasing numbers of generic un-differentiated directories.

This is the situation we find ourselves in now, but there is still a time and a place for directory submission as a tactic. Its something where you can be fairly confident X amount of hours in produces Y amount of links out. Even if these links dont have that much influence theres a definite value in that kind of predictable outcome.

Plus many of the most effective types of link building have a fairly substantial lead time, you need to produce excellent content and you cant do that quickly. Where-as with directory submission can start reaping rewards as soon as you start the process.

So for these two reasons directory submission typically has an important role in the opening stages of any link marketing efforts. The directories you submit to will depend on your business, there are a few like business.com, dmoz etc which have generic value; but the directories you should concentrate on are specific to your industry. Fortunately these are really easy to find; type all your main keywords into your search engine of choice, append directory to the search term. Youll quickly find the number of directories you require.

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Back Link Analysis All SEO professionals broadly choose from a similar menu of tactics, where they vary is the creativity they put into those ideas and the mix between options. i.e. some will tend use some tactics more oftn thn others. There is one area of link building which I personally always include and see as the bedrock of any campaign - back link analysis.

The logic of back link analysis is if someone links to your competitor they might link to you.

This tactic works, it really works. Its been the foundation of every successful SEO campaign Ive ever worked on. Im glad most SEOs underestimate its potential as that makes my job easier.

Start by choosing competitors, Youre always going to have a good idea of who your main competitors are, but before jumping to any conclusions, look at whos ranking for your keywords. They may differ from your instinctive list but its the people who are performing on Google who your really up against.

You need to audit the links of those you know as competitors, those ranking but also those not ranking. I often look at those using paid search, theyll have few links but theyll all be legitimate so worth replicating.

Which tool can help with this? There are dozens of different tools that enable you to look at the back links of a competitor from the most simple of searching Google for link:domain.com (where you replace domain.com with the URL of your competitor) to specific tools designed to manage back link research on an industrial scale.

Here are a few of my favoured tools

Yahoo Site Explorer - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ Probably headed for the cemetery, with Yahoos deal with Bing, but Yahoo provide one of the easiest to use and most comprehensive free link research tools, even if its long term future may be in doubt.

SEOmoz Open Site Explorer - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ The easiest to use professional back link analysis suite provides great data which can easily be used to create boss friendly reports and graphs. Also part of a package huge number of advanced tools.

Majestic SEO - http://www.majesticseo.com/ Its not quite as aesthetically pleasing as Open Site Explorer but its a lot more powerful under the hood and its ability to plot of links over time is the most useful tool out there if you believe Link Velocity is a ranking factor. (which I do!)

No matter which of these tools you chose to find back link opportunities you need sophistication in managing link requests. Depending on the volume of back link research youre dealing with, an Excel spreadsheet may be sufficient, but if you doing back link research on any real scale youre going to have a lot of data to deal with. Though a CRM like SaleForce.com could be used with a bit of tinkering, the two market leaders in managing linking data are Raven SEO http://raven-seo-tools.com/ & Buzz Stream http://www.buzzstream.com/

Both are competent pieces of software and worth exploring if a spreadsheet is getting overwhelming.

How to Contact Potential Link PartnersI was working the other day sending out some link requests for one of our publishing clients. Id taken quite bit of time selecting who to contact so I had my fingers crossed that Id be pretty successful. What I hadnt anticipated that a lot of the people I was contacting would reply asking how to subscribe to the magazine in question. It reminded me that with a bit of luck the link building process can actually do quite a good job to help you sell.

It got me thinking about things to do when link building that might encourage the recipient to buy your product as well as link.

Sell yourself, dont be scared in your link request to talk about what makes you better than your competitors or why nobody else like you exists. Itll help your argument when asking for a link and at the same time it might convince them to part with their cash. And if you dont know what make you unique, all the link building in the world isnt going to help you!

Encourage Feedback, the best PPC adverts & landing pages feature a call to action with a clear desired outcome. You link requests shouldnt be any different. One of the most positive things you can ask in your link request is for feedback. Itll spark a conversation and you might learn about potential customers opinions of your website.

Dont seem cookie cutter, whether you are trying sell in your link request or not, youve got to avoid seeming cookie cutter at all costs. At the very least youve got show youve read the site, ideally if you can mention their name (and get it right), give them some genuine feedback youll do

well. Sometimes with link requests it can be a war of attrition but that doesnt mean you shouldnt take the time to personalize them. Itll improve your success rate no end.

Respond to them as quickly as you can, if theyve taken the time to read your link request, look at your site and then email them back you owe them some of your time. Though they might not want to link to you, a quick note saying no worries and thanking them for their time can leave a good impression. This means the next time they are looking for a product or service like yours, the goodwill will attract them to your site. Or when youve worked on an engaging piece of content they might like you can get back in touch.

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Link Research on trusted domains The search engines have been around for quite a while now, and they have a lot of historical data up their sleeves. They have a really good idea of who can be trusted and who cant. Though we dont have access to everything they know there is a lot we can surmise who they trust and who they dont

For example most academic and government websites have never linked out to spammy websites, therefore a link from them usually passes a good deal of value. An engine sees each site individually, they dont apply a blanket approach to ever .edu, .gov or .ac.uk, but we can be reasonably confident they are all good sources of link equity.

So with this in mind its often a very good tactic to explore link opportunities from trusted websites like university and government sites. In the past Ive been lucky enough to get a number of links to client websites from academic and government sites. What follows are some of the tactics Ive had the most success on.

There are certain directories and business listing services on very trusted domains here in the UK and around the world. I wont reveal them here, for fear of inundating them with link requests. These types of sites have much higher editorial standards than most, so you will have to be whiter than white to reach their required level of quality. Never forget, every website has a purpose and if linking to your website fulfills that purpose theyll be happy to oblige, even if thats a university or government website.

There are a large number of student, lecturers and professors running blogs which are located on academic domains. Rightly so, these bloggers take their efforts very seriously but there are opportunities to collaborate and get links to a website from these blogs, many of the normal blogger outreach methods (covered later in the book) will work well applied to this audience.

Another option for academic links is to offer discounts to students and staff, by offering this incentive you are giving the academic website a reason to link and quite likely increasing the interest in your business from this lucrative group of customers.

Many universities are looking to work with commercial organisations, sometimes this can be as part of a scheme or sometimes to gain case studies for their business students. Volunteering will help build good will, but also create the kind of links which are almost impossible to replicate, making them even more invaluable.

With some analysis of who and what government sites are linking to youll learn that they tend to link to charitable and community websites. Chances are the site youre building links to wont fit into either of these categories. Could you create a new site, that links to you, that is more in-fitting with these demands. A clever link builder not only builds links to one site; they also build links to webpages that link to their target website.

Theres hundreds of ways to get links from trusted websites, itll require Pirate ingenuity and Clockwork follow through, but the opportunities are there.

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Sponsorship & Partnership Philanthropy is very rarely entirely altruistic, but you might not have realised its actually possible to use charitable work to attract the links and attention. It may seem a little sneaky, but if youre going to spend money trying to build links, if you can help benefit a good cause at the same time, I think its good karma.

Your generosity can vary from the low scale donations like dropping a blogger a few quid for their latest charitable escapade; all the way to spending thousands supporting a conference or event. The link should never be your primary motivation for these deeds, but theres no harm in it being your secondary motivation!

Going on the look out for charitable opportunities would be very time consuming and unlikely to provide the contextual relevance youd be looking for. A far more realistic approach is to monitor your industrys sites as you would normally and keep an eye open for the best charitable opportunities that present themselves, with an open mind that it may be able to benefit you link building. Let the opportunities find you

Make the donation on behalf of the website. Ideally you want the subject of the donation to link to the site out of satisfaction from your gift, rather than because you twisted their arm. In this case its easier to get the link if you donate on behalf of the website. I.e. your donating on behalf of www.acmewidgets.com rather than Acme Widgets. Including the URL will make it easier for the person to link through to your site.

Youre unlikely to get the anchor text youd like from these kind of links but what youre really concerned about is authority rather than link text.

Fit the donation into a bigger campaign. If you have an underlying theme or message in your business, try and support causes that chime well with idea. Its old school marketing, but if youre all about enlightening your customers, maybe you should contribute to charitable cause with an educational slant, or if you have global attitude you should have a multinational approach to your Corporate Social Responsibility. Itll make everything tie up. Plus if the charitable cause see they are part of a bigger campaign theyre more likely to draw attention to your work, and often that attention will result in a link.

Partnering and working with other organisations can be a great way to market and grow your business, with a little bit of work, you can also gain additional benefits for your SEO. Youd never enter into these kind of relationships just for link reasons, but if you find yourself in these situations you should ask for links from the partner, syndicate press release announcing the news and engage with the industry press when the news is announced to try and gain additional link exposure.

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Guest Posting Everyone and his dog has a blog nowadays and a challenge that they all face is how to regularly produce content that will interest and appeal to their audience. This difficulty is an opportunity for anyone looking to build links to a website. Find some one with the need for blog content and fulfill it. This is a method weve had a lot of success with, it requires a significant investment in terms of time and effort but fortunately normally the rewards make it worthwhile.

Start by identifying the main blogs covering your niche, some you may already be familiar with but I always start by using Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/ ) and looking around your main keywords.

I normally keep a Word document open and copy the URLs of all the blogs I visit to keep track of them. This will immediately throw up maybe half a dozen blogs that directly or partially cover the areas your business operates in. Dont stop there though, as these will likely be the most well established who have clear editorial policy and may not accept guest posts from their readers.

Once Im on a potential site I look for a blogroll, to see who they link to, and read at least a dozen of their most recent blog posts and follow their links to other websites, these websites with smaller audiences and less presence in the sector may be more willing to publish your guest post. By this point youll have a pretty good handle on maybe 20-30 potential blogs to contact. At this point you need to short-list ruthlessly.

Which didnt you enjoy reading? Which seem like they could get too much mail to respond to your request? Which just dont post frequently enough or get enough comments to justify writing for them.

At this point youll have a much more manageable list to deal with and youll already started to get your head around their editorial foibles. Now I take a good couple of hours reading through the site to get a good handle on their house style, the topics they cover and how, if you were writing for them, you would need to approach a topic.

Again keep a note of all these observations, as without them the sites may merge into one blurred collective memory. Add all these blogs to a folder of your RSS reader, monitor them for a couple of weeks before even considering getting in contact, you need to feel like you know the blog inside out before making the leap of getting in touch.

As you monitor and read the site, consider commenting if you feel you have something valuable to add to the discussion. Most administrators of blogs still take the time to personally moderate their comments. This can be a great way to get on the radar of the blogger, so when you finally do get in touch they dont feel they are being contacted out of the blue by a stranger.

Once you feel youve got a good appreciation of what the blog is about, get in touch with the blogger. Its normally most successful when sending these messages if you refer to a previous guest post you appreciated on their site or by making reference to a topic theyve been covering recently. The purpose of this is to show that you are a genuine reader who over the last few weeks has taken the time to consume their content.

This isnt something you can fake, a blogger will instantly see through a drive-by visitors, so its vital you take the time up-front to get to know the blog and tailor your request to match the personality of the site. i.e. a very jokey informal blog probably wouldnt respond to a corporate-speak email request, and equally the semi-pro journalist wont respond well to a internet short hand note.

Weve found our requests are most successful when we take the time to brainstorm two or three potential titles for the guest post to include in the contact, or some cases even write a guest post speculatively. It makes the offer more tangible so they understand what youre offering and it also shows that you have an understanding of the blogs audience if the titles (or completed post) are suitable.

Typically at this stage youll need to exchange a few emails with the blogger in question, remember theyre a journalist and their blog is something they have a lot personally invested in, so treat them with politeness and gratitude.

When writing the article dont link to your own site excessively, typically a guest post is pre-fixed or suffixed with a author biog which contains your much sought after link. When you sit down and write the content make it as good as you possibly can. Youre putting your website on display and the first impression the blog readers make will be lasting. A poorly written guest post can do much more harm and outweigh any of the SEO benefits.

Try to link to other bloggers within the niche whos attention you are hoping to attract, dropping them a trusted one way link from a third party site is a great way to catch their attention, plus it sends the message to current readers that youre doing this to add value rather than just benefit to yourself.

When the blog post is live try and give it as much attention and value as you can, promote it like you would a piece of content on your own site using your social networks and connections. Ive even seen examples where my team have built links to a guest post to help our client site in-directly. Certainly a tactic that would work well with some of the high volume low resource tactics covered earlier in this section.

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Create Widgets which Syndicate your content People no longer find your content or products just on your site. They might read your blog referenced on Digg, or browse your catalogue of products on Google product search. So dont be precious about your content. Let anyone kind enough to syndicate your content free reign as long as they link back.

If you want to create a quick and dirty RSS syndicating widget that people to embed in their site and link back to you, start by exploring this Widget on Widget Box. http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/rssAs this task is so easy to carry out its going to be a struggle to gain much traction; unless your regularly producing content that your audience already love and anticipate.

What if you dont already have that track record? That doesnt mean a widget wont work for you. Do you have data that if manipulated in the right way provide insight and interest? If you do, then a widget is a perfect approach for you. Getting at that data and presenting it a way which can be used in a widget is going to be a challenge; however it might be the first step to opening up your data to a API which lets anybody interact with your data in interesting ways (its Twitters API which allowed so many desktop clients and free tools to be made) is a business changing goal to aim for.

If you struggle through these technical and political obstacles; dont blow it by letting your widget wither and die. Ive seen companies with Widgets that could drive hundreds of thousands of links and even more impressions and eyeballs, but they havent promoted it. Any piece of content you produce, be it a ten second tweet or a two year development project requires a promotional strategy. It can be a simple as pinging a few contacts an email or as sophisticated and far reaching as you like. What is important is to have the plan and follow it through.

Even the name widget can get in the way of your success, a friend of mine who specialising in the production of widgets have found that calling widgets web apps can have a significant positive impact on the success of a campaign!

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Embeddable BadgesI know a few of the guys who work at Findaproperty in their SEO team, and have had the pleasure of collaborating with them on a number of projects, and they are geniuses. Beyond all the clever things they've done to make one of the most comprehensive property portals, theyve pulled off a link building master stroke, and got nearly every estate agent in the country to embed a image which links through to their website. If you were new entrant into the property sector youre going to need some serious chops to fight that kind of link portfolio.

Look at it from Googles point of view as well. Hundreds, if not thousands, of websites all talking about property all with their own link portfolios and trust sending a reference to one central site. Its pretty hard to ignore that when ranking sites. Unfortunately in the property sector everyone is using that tactic, however in most industries a badge link building campaign can be supremely effective.

They may have been able to get thousands of links but the chances are you only need dozens, so get on to your graphic designer to knock something up and get on to your customers, suppliers and anyone else you think would like a little bit of credibility by associating with you.

Dont forget them to make that image a link as well. It might not pass as much value as a normal text based link but dont think the search engines are ignoring these very real, very hard to replicate signals of topical authority.

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Offer a Ranking or Give Awards Not another reference to SEOmoz! Okay it is. Their web2.0 awards is an almost perfect execution of the awards for links technique. Again this isnt a new technique. What HiFis Star Rating is included in every HiFi advert plus most in-store displays. Great advertising for the main magazine isnt it?

If youre doing it for links you need to give your winners a badge they can proudly display and link back to your site. If you do choose this approach though do it properly; put some thought into your awards or it could ruin your hard earned credibility.

A few things to bear in mind, dont replicate an award that already exists, unless you have a huge amount of credibility in your field youre going to play second fiddle. Also if youre going to allow you audience to nominate and vote for the outcome prepare for foul play. People love the opportunity to mess with awards and votes, have systems in place which allow you to deal with

issues like multiple votes, people voting systematically and people just mucking about; like voting to send Justin Bieber to North Korea to play a concert as orchestrated by 4chan.

Another method similar to the award is to produce a ranking, Its no secret that a post like Top Ten X or 25 Best Y Companies are popular with punters and the people featured in the list. If you arent doing this every three or four months your not using your blog or website properly.

When youre producing a ranking its best to use a external metric to decide the sequence than just your opinion, itll give you more credibility and make the job of putting the list together much easier.

Also when putting together your list consider adding value in some way like providing a link to tweepml.org to easily follow everyone on the list on Twitter or a OMPL file which will allow you to easily subscribe to everyone on the lists blog RSS feed.

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Article Syndication Another less fashionable tactic that still pay dividends if used properly. I look for a link to do one of four things, add authority, add anchor text, add volume or add velocity. On three of the four counts, article syndication scores well.

Its also a great technique to get deep links to those inbound pages that need a little nudge to perform better in search. But its a commonly used tactic so it unlikely to have much impact when used in isolation.

The premise behind article syndication is that webmasters who struggle for content would be prepared to publish content written by external authors and provide a link back to the creators website. This isnt that different to many types of outreach other than the fact it is administered and run through website like EzineArticles.com.

Typically though, the kinds of websites that republish content from article sites are of a very low quality, so pass very little authority. But as we discus later theres no such thing as the perfect link and a link will never tick all four boxes of Volume, Authority, Velocity & Anchor Text. If you appreciate this and use articles appropriately they can still be a great value tactic.

Getting More from Your Article Syndication

Start by writing them to rank, a well written piece of content thats well optimised and submitted to a an article syndication site may often rank in its own right so follow the best practice on-site recommendations for any article.

Make use of anchor text, each different article syndication site has different rules about how you can implement outbound links but always use your best anchor text link first and include the types of keyword you might normally struggle to get from more authoritative links.

Remember to point links to your most important internal pages, your aim is to attract external links to every page of your website but some pages are far more link worthy than others, article syndication can be a an effective way of showing some love to a those less link worthy pages. Even consider writing articles that point to pages on other websites that link to your website to boost their value.

If youre clever you can re-purpose other content, theres only so many ideas for content you can come up with for a business, as syndicated articles typically dont have the biggest audiences you neednt use your best ideas. One method I suggest is to take the content of a popular blog post or white paper and use it as the basis of an article to syndicate.

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Press Release Syndication If you think submitting your website to PRWeb will get you coverage in a national newspaper on its own you need your head-testing. If, like me, you treat it as slightly different type of article syndication which gives you the opportunity to get some links across a variety of domains on a keyword relevant page, youre spot on.

One of things I find most aggravating in internet marketing is the way PR wires overstate their importance, they claim somehow by dropping fifty quid on their submission fee youll be able to get widespread coverage both on and off-line. If only it were that easy.

Do you think if all it took to get this kind of coverage was press release syndication why would companies spend thousands on PR teams or agencies? Despite my negative feelings towards press release syndication sites they do have a place in any link marketing campaign but unfortunately its at the high volume, low effort end of the scale.

If you have a genuinely useful press release youll get the best response by sending a personal email to the small number of journalists wholl potentially cover the news. Where syndication wires work best is where you have some news that youd like to share but its not hold the presses significant.

In these cases its sensible to treat press release syndication in a very similar way to which you would article syndication. Spend very little time on the release as its not going to be that highly read, concentrate on practical issues of quality like spelling, grammar and tone rather the the content itself. Make sure its keyword rich as this type of approach has a very straightforward link building benefit.

Syndicate the press release widely using combination of free and paid for submission sites. As this is a tactic concentrating on volume rather than authority distribution should be your primary concern. Be aware that in the world of press release syndication higher price doesnt always equal higher quality.

Here are a few of the paid services Ive had most success with

http://www.prwebdirect.com/http://www.prleap.com/http://www.realwire.com/http://www.sourcewire.com/

In terms of free press release services they tend to be sites of very low quality which dont have the longest shelf lives. Invest some time in creating your own list of these free sites as I suggest syndicating a press release through them one a month to every six weeks, depending on if you have the news to justify the releases.

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Respond to Online PR opportunities Believe it or not there are journalists out there looking for people just like you; Business people or marketers working on behalf of companies to provide expert opinion on specific areas. Theyve become inundated with press releases (which Ill admit is partially the SEO industrys fault) and hence are trying to find news and sources in their own right.

If you oblige them theyll definitely mention your brand name and with a little arm twisting theyll usually link through to your site.

Theres lots of different ways to find these opportunities - like following journalists in your niche on Twitter and monitoring if they are looking for sound bytes or sources - but there is another really efficient way to find out about these types of requests. Its a great newsletter Im signed up for that sends me dozens of these kinds of opportunities twice a day. Its known as Help a Reporter Out (or HaRO to its friends) http://www.helpareporter.com Though a little US-centric, it features dozens of genuine editorial opportunities neatly categorized and packaged with deadlines and details of the feature in question. Much easier than maintaining your own watch list.

However its worth noting that thousands of PR people are signed up for this service so the journalists get overwhelmed with follow ups so you really need to make your insight or understanding of their issues standout from the other people who respond.

This may seem a little challenging, but at least they are looking to cover something related to your business so you will have a much greater success rate than you ever would sending emails with press releases cold.

If you do decide to contact a journo from the list how can you increase your likelihood of being the person they chose to feature in their piece?

Quick beats slow, these types of requests get dozens of replies so one of the easiest ways to stand out is to be the quickest to respond, itll increase the likelihood of you getting read and hopefully you can start a dialogue before the flood gates open.

I always suggest avoiding Boilerplate emails. Getting back a response as quick as possible doesnt mean you should fire off an identikit response to anything remotely relevant. Being quick will help you cut through but it wont make up for a lousy pitch on your part. So take a little time to make it unique and tailored.

Always make yourself easy to contact, Ive put requests out like this before with tight deadlines its been amazing how many people have got back in touch, said they can do something that morning, yet havent supplied a phone number and then not responded to the email until after the deadline. Make it as easy as possible for them to get in touch, provide a land line and a mobile and take the journos call if they do get in touch. Any time you spend playing voicemail table tennis is time someone else could sneak in and get the coverage youd set your heart on.

Explain exactly what you will add to their piece, in HaRO and similar services theyll usually be a brief on what the feature or piece will be about; have a good read of this and put your journalistic hat on, what sort of voices are they looking to hear in the piece, have they implied a certain angle they want to approach the story with? This understanding can help you frame your message and up the stakes of you getting included.

Quite a lot of the requests will be for television and radio pieces, provide details of previous experience. If the coverage isnt online initially you may think this is unlikely to have much impact on links; however more frequently now TV and Radio Stations are taking content like this and repurposing them to appeal to search engines. If they do this ask whether they can provide the link through to the site. Additionally this kind of coverage will help your link marketing in other ways, i.e. if youre offering to write a guest post and you can say youve been featured on radio station X or TV channel Y youll get a much better response rate.

So once youve done a couple of these types of projects youre happy with, include them in any further requests you put forward, as if you can show your confident and experienced on air and on screen youll jump the queue over other options.

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Blog Commenting You realise just how fast the web moves when you think of something that used to be really important tactic just a few years ago is now seen as a little pass. Before the rise of Twitter and Facebook the easiest way for most people to share content they found interesting was via blogs. Blogs still have a really important part to play in the link graph, but the dynamic nature of their role has changed quite significantly.

Most blog comments are no-followed and normally if you want your comment to be approved youll need to comment under your own name. As this name is usually the anchor text, blog commenting is not normally the most effective tactic. This is a shift from the past where a well written comment on a contextually similar blog was a great way to promote a website. No-Followed links dont past the trust of a conventional link, so in many cases all but the dodgiest spammers dont dedicate much time to blog commenting as part of a link building campaign.

But I disagree and think you should dedicate some time to the process.

First up, there is some debate whether no-followed links are as benign as Google et al would like us to believe. If we believe that all links pass a value on a sliding scale, is it that hard to assume that no followed links just put an upper limit on that score rather than automatically zero it?

Plus many advocates of White Hat link building techniques will constantly extoll the virtues of establishing relationships with the linkerati and the people within your industry with the power to link. Surely adding value to their website by writing interesting, considered and debate inducing comments to their site is a great and subtle way to begin building a connection.

Only on the biggest of blogs, will the moderation of the comments not be carried out by the main blogger. Which means a very good chance that they will read every comment. Spending some time on comments, to the extent the blogger starts to recognise your name, will do wonders for the success rate of any future link building approaches.

So establish a clear list of the influential bloggers, sign up for their feeds in Google Reader, keep up to date on what they are writing about and commit yourself to try and comment on as many of their posts as you can manage. Dont force yourself to comment if you havent got anything to add, that wont help your cause. But similarly you need to try and make a deal with yourself to try and comment as frequently and quickly as you can manage if you want to build the no followed links and build a foundation of a connection with the writers of the site.

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Forum Posting

You wont be carrying out this tactic just for link building, but if participating in the forums makes sense from a social media perspective theres a likelihood it is having a marginal impact on your SEO. But should you bother with something that only has marginal benefits?

If you follow track cycling, youll be familiar with the UKs recent successes and the approach adopted by the team behind the UKs hugely successful team. Dave Brailsford, the man behind their glory credited much of their recent domination of the sport to not one factor but an accumulation of marginal gains I think youre wise to take a similar approach to your link building. Each individual link is unlikely to have a huge impact on your rankings, but each one gained is a marginal benefit over your main rivals.

How do you find niche forums specific to your campaign? The best way to find forums is to look in the same way a potential forum participant would, using the main keywords in your sector combined with phrases like forum and community this is a great place to start but often some of the most active and valuable forums dont have the basics of SEO sorted and find new members based largely on word of mouth. They are more difficult to find using simple Google queries and in these cases its worth exploring the results of forum specific search engine Omgili http://omgili.com/. This can usually help you find some of the more elusive online forums.

Think twice about signing up and casually dropping links. If someone came up to you in a pub, butted into your conversation and handed you a business card youd think they were an idiot and probably recommend to your friends they never use that company. Unfortunately this is the approach taken by most companies in social media communities and forums. It doesnt work and does more harm than good. However if youre prepared to invest hours of time up front into a community so when a suitable opportunity arises to suggest your service you might have some success.

At the moment none of the search engines are sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a link from the same forum which is a shameless piece of self promotion or trusted recommendation. Human Beings can though; and theyre the people wholl be reading the forum.

Depending where you are in the world there are various laws being introduced to avoid fake commenters sometimes known as sock puppetry or astro-turfing. But it doesnt matter where you are or what the law is, as you should always declare your interest. One option is to include your company name in your username or a signature if the forum allows it, this normally works well but not everyone feels comfortable wearing their companys badge 24-7.

If you decide you dont want to be so open about your business connection you should always mention your connection when linking to your business site. People will respect your honesty and it can have a positive influence on click through rates as people can appreciate your knowledge on the subject.

One issue youll quickly come across with forum links are No-Follows; many forums, like blogs, will have no-follow enabled on their outbound links which is known rather in-eloquently by some as a link condom. This means by default they tell Google and co. not to trust the link. Some people think these links are still valuable, I think it re-enforces the understanding that the investment you make in every tactic should be justified by traffic and branding first, that way youve not lost out in-case the SEO impact is reduced.

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Social Voting & Bookmarking Site Submission Submitting your website to social voting and book mark websites is another tactic which falls into the no follow, so dont bother category for most SEOs. I agree with them to a certain extent. A good SEO does a balancing act between the work you could do and how much resource is available. So a Clockwork Pirate will weigh up the options and see if it makes sense for them.

Theres a couple of ways you can get links from social media sites, firstly when your site is listed on a site like Digg or Delicious youll get a link through to your site, but being honest with you this link is very unlikely to get you any real value in the eyes of the search engines. That makes sense - they have a very low barrier to get these links. Something that is this simple and easy guarantees that it will be low value, but its not these low/no value links that justify you including social voting and bookmarking sites as part of your link building plan.

It is the indirect benefits that justify trying to get your website mentioned on voting and bookmarking sites. Who are the people who frequent these types of sites? They are socially savvy digital media aficionados; just the kind of people who own and maintain websites, or as many Clockwork Pirates like to call them: the linkerati,

Presence and profile on voting sites will get you in front of these people. If youve built in link worthy-ness to your content youll stand a good chance of attracting links to your site. What makes this such a successful technique is its so much more scalable than approaching people yourself. Its just not feasible to contact more than a few dozen people and asking to link to your content, being featured on a voting or bookmarking site can get your site in front of thousands of people with the power to link. Additionally, because youre not making the response directly youre not running the risk of alienating people, which is always a danger with those fickle linkerati.

Theres one thing Ive forgotten here, how do you get the traction to go popular on these sites? Well thats a books worth in its own right, but producing the type of content that people love is great place to start...

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Create Content on Sites Like Squidoo & HubPagesIf you believe the advocates of user generated sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages they are the link building silver bullet. The advocates miss the point slightly. The trust in these domains can help

you, but not really in straightforward way they suggest. They have the potential to help you in some areas where your back link portfolio is lacking, but would the time you would spent writing the high quality content these websites require be better spent publishing it on own your own blog or website?

They do have a small link building benefit and I think if used correctly can have an interesting use in your search marketing efforts. I think they are much better used as a launch pad for content to rank thats not on your domain.

To give you an example, for about three years a well-received article we wrote on ezinearticles for a client currently ranks in third place behind two listings from the clients site. This isnt a high volume search phrase by any stretch of the imagination but that additional real estate in the SERPS does have real value and its a tactic weve repeated since.

So content on sites like Squidoo and Hubpages can help you dominate more of the results you already rank highly on. This can be taken to its logical conclusion by using this tactic on branded terms as well as generic terms i.e. are the negative results on Google when someone searches for your company name? Produce content using your brand name on other sites and there is the potential these articles will begin to out-rank the negative press.

Part of me would suggest youre better off dealing with the negative press in a positive rather than underhanded way but I appreciate thats not always possible.

Also these types of articles can be used to promote pages which link to you. This starts to go a bit down the rabbit hole, but if you appreciate the more authority and trust a page has the more it passes to the domains it links to. Its not that far-fetched to take an approach where your aim is to link build to pages one step away from your websites.

It can be hard to dedicate the resources required to develop the unique high quality content these websites require. So using a bit of Clockwork Pirate attitude you can take existing assets, be they blogposts, white-papers, etc. and repurpose them enough to fulfill the requirements of these sites and Googles duplication filters without having to start from scratch.

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Join Trade Associations and Professional Bodies Trade associations and professional bodies have all kinds of benefits to justify the cost; but with my link building hat on I think its worth joining up with as many as possible as you can because they usually list their members with a link.

These websites have been around for years, so have built up trust, they also will likely link to your competitors showing the search engines that youre part of the same niche and sector.

And if theres not a suitable trade body you should set one up.

How to get links from Trade Bodies? In most case paying your membership dues isnt enough to get the full potential value from membership of an association. Youll need to go out of your way and make extra effort but fortunately all this work will also build the brand of company in front of your peers and potential customers.

Start by listing yourself in their directory, most organisations maintain a directory or listings page where they have links to all their paid up members. This will be the lowest hanging fruit for your business, make sure your listing is uploaded and that the page in question is re-indexed by Google as soon as your link is uploaded using Pingomatic to encourage a quicker visit from the search engines.

Could you collaborate on a report or some research? Trade bodies want to provide value to their members and a great way they can do this is by producing reports, white-papers and other pieces of valuable content. We talk in the book about these types of projects as link building techniques in their own right but if you can get the extra credibility of working with a business association youll find it much easier to attract attention and links.

Getting involved with arranging, sponsoring and attending events. One of the bread and butter jobs of a trade association is organising events for their members and the community at large. Real Life events are hugely link worthy so it makes sense to be involved just for their link building potential. Offer to speak, suggest a topic, ask a good question or provide follow up coverage; this type of participation will put you and your business in the type of lime light that normally ends up with links to your site.

Another recommended technique is participating in a sector social event, In any industry there are going to be certain similarities in the personalities of the people involved. Beside you spend a huge chunk of your week doing similar things, its like a shared hobby! This means if you meet people from the other members theres a good chance youll get on well with them.

Suggest a social gathering or attend one already arranged. Having a strong network of contacts will help you seed any content you produce to attract links.

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Use Twitter to get yourself in the eyes of potential linkers.How did Gartner get me to link to their site? A few months ago, I was doing my usual web based R&D and came across the Gartner Hype Cycle. Its is a simple model to understand how 'hyped' something may be and how subjects of excessive hype tend to settle down although they didnt deliver the promise initially expected, they do still prove useful.

Its one of those common sense models that when you see you wish youd come up with, its a hugely useful model like Tipping Points and The Longtail. The accompanying graph is also a pretty good way to represent a concept visually which can be difficult to explain in words.

Knowing my connections on Twitter (mainly people working in New Media & SEO) I thought they might also find the concept and illustration useful when putting together presentations, so I shared a link to the Wikipedia page on the topic. I had a few responses from my connections. Then, shortly after the mention, I received a reply and a friend request, which came from Gartners official company Twitter account. They pointed me towards a microsite for a book on the subject, which had links where you can buy the book.

As it turns out, I bought the book and now am talking about the experience and sharing it with you, and have linked to their site dozens of times. They had simply set up an alert set up for their name and a well-timed response led to a directly attributable sale and a series of high quality links.

Great ROI for a ten second tweet.

There are dozens of situations like this where a well-timed tweet can result in a really high quality link. Rand Fishkin and his team over at SEOmoz have established themselves as one of the most trusted sources of SEO advice online. As a consequence, a link from them has huge branding and SEO benefits if you run a Search Marketing website. I was able to gain one of our websites best links using Twitter.

I saw they had written about the merits of domain leasing and mentioned to the one of their contributors, Will Critchlow, that there have already been some posts written on the subject by an associate of mine which might make a good addition to his post on the domain market and was rewarded with a link to mine and my friends site.

The ROI of a quick tweet, which resulted in a link from a website with a Page Rank of 6, on a page which has a PR of 4 in its own right, and has been read by many other search marketers, is really high.

Showing how having closely monitored Twitter account can help you build links.

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Send Gifts or Offer Freebies If youve got a background in traditional public relations youll have to forgive me as a good number of the tactics which Ive included to build links in this book are methods youve probably used before to gain press coverage. Sending out gifts and freebies is an old school PR classic.

But what differs is your ultimate aim and the people you approach. While a small mention in a specialist magazine may have been the aim in the past, now a link from a blogger or news website covering your niche will not only build your brand, it will send some referral traffic and pass the link equity as well. It goes without saying that you should take this approach with caution, the web is littered with examples of PR companies who have sent bloggers and web publishers freebies only

to get bad press. Many bloggers dont get paid professionally so therefore have quite a different attitude to commercial interests getting involved in their hobby.

If you are considering going down this route here are a few short tips you should consider.

Have they received what appears to be promotional gifts in the past and have they responded positively? You cant really tell this if your only a drive-by visitor looking for a set number of people to contact. Youll need to have invested some time in the site and be familiar with what theyve covered in the past.

Whos the best person to send to? Many of the sites which will fit your brief will have multiple authors who may not be based in the same physical location. So really you want your promotional item to go to the person most likely to react to it positively so spend some time appreciating the differences between contributors

Strike while the iron is hot; If youve already received some positive coverage from a source then follow up with the gift or freebie. Their already familiar with you so there will be much less resistance to writing a follow up piece. Re-enforcing your first link.

However you have to be prepared for negative feedback, even if the recipient isnt averse to receiving these types of gifts if you send them your product it is inevitable it will face their scrutiny. These people are experts in their field and will have experience of both the best and the worst alternatives. So before engaging in this type of activity you should be supremely confident in the quality of your product. And if youre not then you have a bigger problem on your hands!

You should always follow up sending a gift with a phone call. For all the wonders of social media technology allowing us to ever increase the scope and scale of our personal networks it still builds a much stronger connection if youre able to speak to someone face to face or over the phone.

As this free gift may well be the first opening gambit in an ongoing relationship with a web publisher its always worth taking the time follow up with a phone call. Dont get heavy handed and demand their cover your product, ask whether they received it okay and whether they have any thoughts on ways you could improve it in the future.

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Advertise Jobs or Projects As the company I work for has been growing in the last few years weve always been looking for good SEOs; like any link marketer and if youve got link building in your blood, youll see opportunities everywhere. A while back when we were recruiting we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to attract some additional links for Site Visibility.

For as long as Ive been working in SEO, Google has seemed to be place a lot of emphasis on links from authority domains, in the UK one of the most trusted sites you can receive a link from is an .ac.uk address which are used by British Universities.

They are the holy grail in any link building campaign, worth their worth their weight in gold & always top of our linking wish-lists. The good news for us was most of the universities have their own career services, which are organisations that help their students & alumni get jobs. They were ideal for us to target; while for some roles we werent deliberately recruiting graduates for the positions, they might be ideally suited.

The added bonus was most of these careers services have their own websites where they post the vacancies. With an .ac.uk address, with regularly updated content, established for years & with high page rank, its the perfect link. Suffice to say you must actually be recruiting for the job or looking for someone to fulfill the project!

Its a perfect example of some opportunistic link building and how you can take advantage of normal business activities that can gain some added link juice as a bonus. It shows why there is no benefit to doing your link building in isolation from the rest of the business. Its much easier to attract that valuable blue underlined text with a spark of pirate inspiration on seemingly unrelated business process.

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Offer Testimonials This is another classic link building tactic that a lot of people forget about when the embark on a link building campaign, if youre a satisfied customer of a company get in touch and offer to write or record a testimonial. First theyll bite your arm off because of its positive impact itll have on their conversion rate. Just ask them whether the link can include a link to your site and Bobs your uncle.

You know that links on pages covering topics similar to the content of your website are more likely to pass value than those on completely different subjects, so consider this when deciding which of your suppliers you offer testimonials to. Only choose your most relevant customers. If youre a telemarketing company you will see more value from a linked testimonial from a specialist recruiter or industry specific technology supplier than you would from your cleaning company or accountant.

You should try and benefit from the first anchor text, its widely believed that the anchor text of first link to a site passes the most value, so think about this when writing your testimonial. Try and work in a keyword rich anchor link first. To continue our example of a telemarketing company here is an example testimonial you could offer your specialist recruiter.

As a rapidly growing telemarketing agency (with telemarketing agency linked to your home page) weve needed to have a trusted recruitment company who dont waste our time and only send us the

highest calibre of candidates. John Doe and Partners have consistently delivered this kind of service over a number of years.

John Smith, ACME Telemarketing (with you brand name linking to your site)

If you can; when offering testimonials you should try to avoid site wide links. One of Googles biggest headaches is paid links, where cash changes hands in return for a link; Google acknowledge this is a problem and have set about trying to spot these paid links algorithmically.

One of things they have noticed if youve ever been approached to sell paid links is the buyers are often looking to buy what is known as Site Wide meaning they appear on every page of a site. The connection between site wide links and paid links means Google pays less attention to links that occur this frequently, like on every page of a site.

This logic makes perfect sense even ignoring paid links. You trust the recommendation you received from a friend, however if they make this recommendation all the time for the same product and far more often than youd normally expect them to make recommendations, it makes sense you might take their suggestion with a pinch of salt. Its a similar approach taken by Google.

I like to think of it as the law of diminishing returns, the first link passes the most value, the second link between a site passes some value but less than the first. The third again passes equity but less than the two previous links and so on. Therefore theres not a huge amount of appeal in having a link from every page so consider asking your testimonial subject whether theyd be happy only including your testimonial on a few of their most powerful pages.

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Review Product or Services on Other Sites We talked previously about how offering testimonial to your suppliers can be a great and subtle way to increase the links pointing at your site. Another similar approach is to review products on other sites. Nearly all ecommerce sites now include some type of product review functionality. This is really beneficial to them as an organization as it reassures customers they are making the right choice and also provides them with keyword rich user generated content. Some, but not all, of these websites manage their reviews in a very similar way to the way they manage comments, which means they allow you to include a link to your site as part of your contact information. As is typical with user-generated content its likely the links will be no-followed so are unlikely to have a significant impact on your link equity but if carried out correctly can have a large role in improving the perception and reach of your brand.

Imagine whenever you are buying an item related to your business you notice a review from a company for who you are a potential customer of. Seeing them impartially making recommendations that benefit you as a consumer will slowly develop trust in that organisation.

Supplying reviews on ecommerce sites isnt the only way to build links based on reviewing products; you can use it as a tactic very similar to guest posting. If you go to a third party website and ask to write them content you are going to have to come up with a series of interesting potential pieces of content. Often it can be quicker and easier to provide them with a review of a product that would interest both your customers and the audience of the website.

i.e. if you are a travel agent specialising in one destination and they are a travel guide to that area, a review of the best near-by restaurants would be beneficial to them, to you and their audience. Or perhaps youre a supplier of technical equipment to the IT industry, perhaps you could review a complimentary product which would also be bought by your customers, this would make great content for a website that shares the same audience as you.

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CREATETheres a often repeated cliche in the world of SEO that says content is king if Id got a quid for every time I heard this I would be able to afford to pay Bill Clinton to transcribe this book for me, maybe even have enough change down the back of the sofa to launch a hostile take over of Google.

But so very few people really follow this advice, and even less work it into their link building.

Creation can cover variety of different techniques from link-bait, podcasting or even surveying to create a great news story. Youll probably have realised this will appeal to you artistic and imaginative side, but without the rigor and follow through these tactics wont help you gain business changing links.

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Printable Resources Why is it people still respect print journalists and published authors more than a blogger or web writer? Thats because, like it not, there is still some kudos in producing something you can hold. Call me old fashioned but sometimes I find new or complicated subjects much easier to digest offline on paper. This is part of the reason Im such a big fan of business books. People love printed or printable documents and books. Normally its something theyve put their heart and soul into.

However for really cutting edge or niche topics there may not be the time or demand to produce a full blown book. That is where the white-paper or ebook normally comes in. If you produce content like that and make it available online theres a good chance itll attract links and attention.

I like the white-paper format, in many ways this can be perfect example of this link building tactic in the b2b market place. With a little bit of pirate imagination the white-paper can also work in b2c applications, though its likely the content will go by a different name. Weve done well with consumer facing white-papers, though weve called them Downloadable Guides or Print and Keep Guides to ...

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