Get Lots of links quickly?

[hwade]

Hey everyone,

I have some questions about links. First off, I only do things that are very white hat, so I don't want to do any sort of spammy or paid links. I have been doing SEO for a year and a half and have been researching and following SEOmoz for that amount of time as well. I still am having a hard time getting links.

I have a low budget and am not sure what to do. I have two pro webinars in mind as some background for my questions. First of all, the webinar Rand did on link building during the summer was great and really motivated me - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-of-link-building. I realized that there were things we could do to get links, but that they would just take time.

Secondly, in Dr.Pete's recent webinar on the future of SEO, (http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-proofing-your-seo-2012-edition) he threw out a number like 10 as far as referring to how many links someone could get per day. Maybe I misunderstood but this seems crazy to me. I've tried the tactic of emailing for links, no dice (they were personalized emails and done properly). I am now planning on moving towards producing great content to draw in links, but the kind that would work would take a lot more time and money than what I am allotted. I feel a little overwhelmed and concerned. I would appreciate any insights.

Thanks!

Holly

[SarahGoliger]

Hi Holly,

I'll share my perspective on this and I hope it's helpful to you. I've been doing SEO part or full-time since 2008.

The most successful way that I've found to generate repeatable high-quality new links to our website has been to do a lot of aggressive linkbuilding via guest blogging with other blogs or websites in our field. It's been very successful but it is time consuming. My personal goal is to try and get one new targeted link with good anchor text every day. Some days are better than others - I've had days where I get five or more links in a day, and days where I don't get any.

Guest blogging can be time consuming (it's a lot of writing!) but you can get great, targeted links from it, and Google usually recognizes them quickly since they tend to crawl and index blogs very aggressively. I'm not always shooting for A-list blogs in our field either, but a variety. I generally looking for websites that have a mozRank of 4.0 or higher for this. People in the middle of our field are usually much more responsive and helpful (they're hungry for content, like that we offer to co-promote our blog posts, etc.) and work with me more often. If their mR is under 4, the link may not be worth the effort and I'll only consider it if I really think there's some other reason its worthwhile.

I also try to produce about one good infographic a month, and post it to our blog and offer embed code and everything else good with it. These are the days that I can usually get five or six new links from spending about $400-500 and about two hours of my own time providing data, guidance, etc. with a designer to create the graphic. It depends on your budget, but to me that feels worth it. Overall, this has been really effective for us and I've been meeting my goals.

I haven't seen Dr Pete's webinar, but 10 links in a day does seem a little high - That's quite a lot. You might be able to do that if you gave up on trying to get specific anchor text and went for volume, or if you have a uniquely dedicated following who write about and cover many of your activities on their own blogs or websites (like I suspect SEOmoz does). I would encourage you to try to concretely network with more blogs and websites in our field/niche and expand your relationship with them, and keep the goal in mind:

"What can I do to get a link today?" or whatever your goal is that will deliver SEO success to you. From my experience so far, this hustle has been more valuable than any other piece of specific advice I've had. I think I have to thank Justin Briggs for that one - I think his quote that inspired me to that was "Link building is hard. Just f-ing do it." or something like that. I re-interpreted into the above.

I hope this helps!

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, I think my statement may have been unclear. I was throwing out some numbers to try to illustrate what $1,000 could buy someone in low-quality link-building (number of hours, etc.). My broader point, though, was actually AGAINST that kind of approach. I'd rather see people invest in content than cheap links.

What's a "reasonable" number really depends a lot on quality vs. quantity. Someone could get you 100 links/day, but they'd be mostly junk. Some links could take months to build (if they involve building relationships with people and organization), but they might be well worth the investment. It's a balancing act. I think it's fine to get some blog comment links, guest-blog, do article marketing, etc., as long as the quality is reasonable AND you diversify that with hard-to-get links with higher authority.

I'll also make another pitch for content marketing, because it's the only way to put link-building on autopilot, so to speak. Once you invest in content and start to get the word out, that content can naturally attract links. You could get 10/day some days without lifting a finger, once the content is in motion. I think some manual link-building is fine, and probably necessary, but if you can put both in motion, you'll be in much better long-term shape.

[hwade]

Thanks for responding. I appreciate your thoughts and insight, I hadn't thought of Guest blogging. I know content is a biggie and I will certainly be putting a lot of effort into creating content to get links, whether it be on my own blog, website or wherever. I appreciate your time and help.

Holly

[hwade]

Dr. Pete,

Thanks for responding to me. I appreciate the explanation. I had always thought that it could take a long time to get those high quality links (the ones worth going after), so I was confused when I misunderstood what you said. Anyway, thanks for clarifying. I am a big proponent of content as well. Luckily for me, I have a degree in English. Now I guess I just have to come up with something brilliant that everyone will love. No problem right. haha. anyway. Thanks.

Holly

[Dr-Pete]

I really wanted to push the content marketing aspect in those slides, but I just want to add that it is a balancing act. Some manual link-building is fine - just make sure you mix in low-quality with high-quality AND make time to create solid content. In other words, just do everything simultaneously. As long as you don't need to eat or sleep, you'll be fine

Seriously, carve out the content time, even if it's 20 minutes/day and it's the first thing you do in the morning. That investment will pay off. Waiting until you need content to create it is like only networking after you lose your job. It'll work, eventually, but you'll lose months.