Drowning In a Sea of Link Building Advice

[leonfrancois]

You can visit one SEO forum after the other and 50% of the folks will say 'do this' and the other half will say to do something else.

It's always black hat vs white hat and then you still get the grey hat in between. So what does really work?

Leon

[Matt-Williamson]

There are lots of things that work for link building Leon - one of the best starting points, I think, is to aim at creating great content and then make sure people see it by building relationships with authorities and social influencers so that you can make them aware of your content - in turn they will help increase the exposure of your content. This method will lead to links and increased ranking.

What you have got to think is great content + exposure = links

whether this content is a blog post, press release or some sort of viral campaign (video or image). People link to great content and want to tell their friends about it - human psychology

[AlanMosley]

White hat.

Easy to get links have not worked for some time, and google is getting even more tighter on them.

Every product is different, but if you have a product that is cheap enouth, i would find all the magazines, blogs and websites in your area of busniess, and write to them, asking them if you send them a sample will they write a review. Works for me. A lot of people write for nothing, so a free pack of widgets is good enouth reason.

[leonfrancois]

Thanks guys.

Matt what is the best way to get exposure for great content. Guest blogging? But how do you get the quality blogs to post your articles. I'm sure they get a ton of requests from other people wanting to do the same thing.

I've tried guest blogging before and nobody got back to me. What's the point of paying someone $200 for a quality article and you don't get any link juice from it?

[EGOL]

You can visit one SEO forum after the other and 50% of the folks will say 'do this' and the other half will say to do something else.

It's not the quantity of advice that you receive.  It's who you listen to.

Alan and Matt just gave advice that I would listen to.  Alan's for a product site and Matt's for an informational site.

[deaddogdesign]

Hey Leon,

Just being honest with you 85-90% of the stuff you read on forums is crap.  Don't pay attention to any of that junk promising you the next best thing.  No building 5000 wiki's forums, spinning articles, scrapebox blast, xrummer, SEOnukeX, ect.  Might have worked in the past for awhile, but since then Google has made updates and pretty much deemed that a waste of time.

Here is some stuff to help get started:

Submit to top directories.

Use http://myblogguest.com/ to find good authority sites in your niche.  Actually answer your post and be on the lookout for more authority sites from people that comment.  Ask, people to retweet and share you content after doing a guest post.

Build relationships and focus on doing that.  Your time will be much better spent that way.

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Leon - I would say that is where building relationships with social influences/authorities comes in - ways of doing this are by getting involved in discussions and interacting on sites such as twitter. Building this type of relationship takes time and effort but will pay off in the long run. You could also consider setting up a blog of your own and asking established bloggers in your niche to contribute - this may involve incentives for them to participate, but remember when they do they already have a following and are likely to highlight their work to them. In turn this will increase your website exposure which will lead to links.

Remember lots of people are asking to be guest bloggers but you need to think how can I stand out from the crowd to help you get picked. This is where you have to think outside the box and try other routes to get the attention of the person running the quality blog. Also make sure you look on here at the different posts on outreach emails and how others have successfully gone about gaining links, attention for their work, etc.

[loopyal]

Another possibility - and I haven't done this yet, because I'm still working on getting out from under a big fat panda, is to join The Guest Blogger subgroup of "The Blog Zone" at Linked-In, and find someone in your niche who wants a guest post.