What is the best white hat seo link building strategy?

[djlittman]

My goal is to build links that comply with Google's Quality Guidelines.  I am wondering what is the best way to approach webmasters or bloggers about submitting guest posts or writing content.  I have done a competitive analysis, and have a list of potential link sources, but I am not sure what approach to take next.  Any advice or strategy would be appreciated.

[Barbio]

Hello,

I think that a great start is to to watch this great webinar by Rand

"Using Open Site Explorer to Uncover New Marketing Opportunities"

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/using-open-site-explorer-to-uncover-new-marketing-opportunities

Here you will learn some tips for linkbuilding and how to use SEOMOZ available tools to be more productive inthe Linkbuilding process.

using-open-site-explorer-to-uncover-new-marketing-opportunities

[Ci3reR]

I think you can write an introductory letter, showing your interest of why you want to be guest poster on their blogs. Also, introducing your business background and explain how you can also bring benefit to them.

In the end, you need to show that there will be a mutual relationship between you and them.

Make it as appealing (and honest) as possible

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey,

This is a hell of a question and in honesty, there is no 'best' strategy and the best strategy is the one (or many) that works for you and your business.

There are two main link building strategies from a pure performance in the search results perspective:

1. Manual Link Building

You actively seek links from sites that will allow you to link back to yourself. In this category we can have everything from article marketing and press releases through to guest blogging. Even the lowly directory can feature in this approach.

Some ideas that fall under this category

• topically relevant & local directories (that are high quality) - article marketing (squidoo) - press releases - infographic submission directories

Really, we are looking at places with little to no editorial control and that have a fairly low impact when it comes to moving the dial. You will also hit a wall with these approaches and whilst there is really no limit on how many articles you could submit to squidoo there is a limit on how much value they pass. (obviously, if your squidoo stuff is super awesome and gets tons of links it's better but really, if it was that good it should be on your own site).

This approach also does not scale awfully well so by all means, pick the low hanging fruit but don't expect it to be particularly sweet!

2. Content Based Link Building

Next up we have all the ways we can use content to build links and this includes various strategies (some of which we covered above but)

• guest posting (the fashionable one) - getting interviewed if possible - blogging - big content - infographics and directories - ebooks

Now, with content based stuff, we are seeking to identify useful and in demand content and hoping that it generates links. Well, it would be great if you could do that and it 'just worked' but the reality is that it takes time and effort to get to the point where your blog is in such demand that people are tripping over themselves to share and link to it (but you can get there).

There is no reason why you can't look at the easy options or even guest blogging but it is not a process you can scale very well and it can be a slow, painful process to build links in any volume whilst maintaining quality. To put this into perspective the textlinkbrokers people offer a high quality guest posting service - I have not tried this but it is like $800 a pop. Now, I don't know how many $800 links you want to buy but clearly, whilst there are other options, this is going to get pretty expensive pretty quickly.

My suggestion would be some kind of long term structured approach starting with a six month program. An approach that focused on identifying at least two to three pieces of big content that you can use to attract links and then using social media to help promote that content.

A process like this has been pretty well covered here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

It includes social outreach to build a network, identification of link targets, identification of influencers within your niche that you can use to help seed out your amazing content and techniques and strategies to help build relationships with the people you are asking to share your content and link to you.

This is not a paint-by-number approach, you are going to have to use some smarts to help identify valuable content but all the tools are out there.

Ultimately, I expect people to dive in with the usual content, content, content approach and that is right to a point. But what you really need is great content and a well established network of people that you are going to get to share your content and link to it. (think blogger buddies).

Point I am trying to make here is that any one 'strategy' is not going to win the war. You want diversity, you want scaleability and true content driven strategies like infographics + guest post on an established site, ebooks + guestpost on an established sites, ego bait, social outreach etc will help you take great content and give it the audience it deserves.

If you follow this kind of approach for six months or longer (try to think 2 year strategy if possible) and build up a great social network winning links can become easy. A client we work with who has gone through a similar process can pop a blog post out, promote it via the social channels, see a large number of retweets, likes etc and expect several links. A recent piece of content that hooked into halloween generated over 30 links from a single, fairly pedestrian piece of content.

Summing up

Really, you can't replicate this kind of scale or success by manually building links and you can't get to this point over night but if you hunker down and play the long term game, build a big social network, develop content people are actively seeking, blog and network with blogger buddies then long term you can get into a position where the external portion of the SEO should take care of itself!

Hope that helps!
Marcus