If there’s one thing I’ve learned from looking at our analytics over the years since we launched this blog, it’s that People. Love. Link building. Articles about link building consistently drive the most traffic over time. Why? It’s not the only thing that matters for SEO – you also need great title tags, strong information architecture, etc.

, etc. Those posts do pretty well too, but there’s not as much to say about them.My theory is that link building is more like a game, and I bet a lot of SEOs grew up as gamers. SEO link building isn’t just a matter of learning a few basic best practices and applying them. There will always be new ways to score links, and getting a great link is a triumph for an SEO. It’s like a new top score on Donkey Kong.Are you the King of Kong?Since... > Read more

Paul May is the CEO and co-founder of BuzzStream, a provider of link building management software. Paul has spent most of the last fifteen years either starting or working on early-stage startups. BuzzStream also offers a variety of free link building tools for small businesses, SEOs and Internet marketers.

Follow and connect with Paul on Twitter: @PaulMay.BuzzStream is often thought of as a link building tool, but you actually have products for PR and social media as well. How much overlap are you finding between the three disciplines?It’s funny, because Rae Hoffman-Dolan wrote a post a few years ago where she talked about the skills to look for when hiring a link builder, and I remember thinking when I read it that she might as well have been writing a job spec... > Read more

In the early 2000s, buying and selling paid links to increase rankings in the SERPs was a common occurrence in the world of SEO. It was an acceptable SEO link building practice until 2007, when Google declared that paid links were in violation of their Webmaster Guidelines, as they were purposefully trying to manipulate the search results.

As Google stated, …some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results. If there is anything that I have learned in my 12+ years as an SEO professio... > Read more

It’s true that infographics have become somewhat more difficult to attract attention with, but a clever concept and solid execution around promotion can still help generate a lot of authority and a high volume of quality links for a domain quickly. The question is always, “What sorts of things make good data visualizations?” In this post we’ll walk through three categories of infographic and offer a real-world example of each from the WordStream blog itself.

Evergreen Infographics Evergreen infographics are graphics that aren’t tied to a specific date and won’t get “stale” over time. A couple of examples of this type of graphic are: “History Of” graphics that detail the chronology of an event in the past or a specific topic ... > Read more

In the world of SEO, links are the currency of choice. The more quality, inbound links you have pointing toward your site, the “richer” your site is. Those links affect your site’s trust factor with the search engines, which impacts how well your site ranks. A link building campaign is designed to create unique links that pass their link juice (link credit) along to your site.

The better the quality of the link, the more link juice they share. The overarching goal of any SEO link building campaign is to grow numerous links from many different, yet relevant, sources over time. The key to a strong and viable link building campaign is to take a slow and diversified approach. Search engines like to see a natural development of quality links, as this is a good indication that ... > Read more

Kellogg’s Cereal has space-themed nutrition lessons in downloadable PDF files. Orkin Pest Control has a virtual insect designed to offer an alternative to classroom dissection. Ben and Jerry’s has interactive games about the environment. Big companies have, for years, been putting educational materials online and getting benefits in the form of coveted .

edu links and serendipitous traffic. Smaller sites can do the same. They usually don’t, but the benefits can be significant. High-quality sites that would never link to your commercial website’s homepage will link to your educational page. You can also list your educational page in high-value places like Google groups for educators or Teacher’s Sourcebook – as long as you’ve got actual educational m... > Read more

There's a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the value of blogging frequently and interacting with your community. And there's a lot of great articles available on doing outreach for cornerstone content like in-depth guides, infographics, and free tools. But what there seems to be less of is specific how-to information on promoting more mundane day-to-day blog content that thought leaders are telling you to crank out.

It's not practical to do an in-depth link campaign for every quick how-to blog post you create, so what can you do to promote your content on a daily basis? Step 1: Create Syndication Channels This is a bit more "social" than the headline implies: The first step here is to build social media followings and start to participate on social news sites. You can create ... > Read more

This is a guest post by A.D. Srikanth, a Web Developer and SEO Consultant. Check out his portfolio or contact him by email at adsrikanth[at]gmail.com for more information. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to visualize link flow within a website to see how links flow from one page to another? You can, by making use of a couple of free tools, and without having to code.

Following is a brief tutorial on how to create a visualization of the link flow on a site. For this purpose, I will be using Xenu, which is a free tool to check for broken links on a site, and, Graphviz, an open source graph visualization tool. In order to demonstrate an example, I am considering a random restaurant website. Some directories within the site, like images and others, are being skipped so that link flow amo... > Read more

Thus far in our Quick and Dirty Link Building series we've covered two crucial stages in the link prospecting and outreach stages: Getting Lots of Link Prospect URLs FAST Prioritizing Your Link Building Efforts Now we have to actually take the URLs that we've deemed outreach-worthy and make them outreach-ready.

This means appending contact information to the URLs, and coming up with an approach for outreach. How to Get Contact Information for Your Link Prospects Before you can reach out to people you need to actually have an email address and contact information to reach them at. The first step in this process is to target a specific type or types of contact information. Here we'll look to get the emails of the potential linkers we've identified and filtered. There are a few ways... > Read more

Once you've created some stellar content, as an SEO, the next step is to go and promote it. One of the challenges with link prospecting is that not every link is a home run. In fact, most of the people you'll identify as possible prospects through traditional means will be some combination of: Irrelevant - Some of the potential targets you pull up in your research won't really be targets at all (often you'll find competitors, sites that are dormant or don't link out, etc.

) Unresponsive - If you are creating content and generating a "traditional" link outreach list, a large number of possible linkers won't respond to your emails. Slow to Respond - Additionally you'll also often run into linkers who just take their time getting around to your request. For these reasons, it's impo... > Read more

This is a guest post by Lior Levin, a consultant for online task management company producteev. Most people who are familiar with SEO know that not all links are created equal. In addition to the “nofollow” tag, there are many ways that a webmaster can value or devalue a link, intentionally or unintentionally.

This includes everything from the keywords included in the anchor text to the HTML formatting that surrounds the link. However, there is one aspect that is often overlooked, especially by those relatively new to SEO: the position of the link on the page. Though a link can be stuck anywhere on a page, the search engines quietly judge links based on their location. One spot in particular – the site footer – has drawn their attention, and not for good reasons, s... > Read more

Influence Finder is one of the latest link profiling tools to hit the market. I would classify the Influence Finder software as a "link target tool," giving users the ability to "spy on" the backlink profile of a competitor or multiple competitors to discover link opportunities. Influence Finder also lets you evaluate your own site's link profile as well, to perform some self-assessment and find out who's linking to you and what's driving your site's SERP performance.

Where Does Influence Finder Get Its Link Data? Influence Finder grabs all of its link data from the massive Majestic SEO API, so you know it's robust and accurate. But Influence Finder takes Majestic's link data a step further by re-crawling the Majestic link data and filtering out any dead links, so the d... > Read more

As any link wonk will tell you, link building is hard work. So for efficiency's sake, I’m a big fan of harvesting the low hanging fruit in link building. Why kill yourself trying to acquire links from super domains, like CNN.com or The New York Times, when you can grab some quick wins just by tending your own garden? One of the ways I snag some easy link wins is by turning citations into links.

Of all the daily link building tactics I engage in, this is probably one of the best ROI producers. You see, at WordStream, we get cited dozens of times each day across the Web. Most of these mentions (I'd say about 70%) contain links back to our site. But roughly 30% are linkless. And therein lies the opportunity to build a link. Now when it comes to local SEO, I know that citations are lik... > Read more

  There's a reason that link building is often touted as being one of the top strategies for gaining exposure online: it works. Unlike many other online marketing strategies, link building is a consistently reliable way to draw targeted traffic to a website. Like anything else, though, plenty of myths about link building are swirling around out there.

In order to make the most out of your Internet marketing experience, you should educate yourself about the most common link building myths. By doing so, you can use link building to enjoy a more fruitful online marketing experience. Dispelling the Top Five Link Building Myths The Internet is awash in conflicting information about link building. Below, we highlight five of the most pervasive link building myths, then cut them down t... > Read more

This is a guest post by Christopher Angus, an SEO expert who runs a bespoke digital marketing agency/SEO company in the Cotswolds, United Kingdom. In addition to his extensive SEO knowledge, Christopher specializes in social media marketing, viral marketing, pay-per-click management and website design.

Rated the 26th Most Influential Marketer in the World in 2009, Christopher’s portfolio includes a range of high-profile companies within the travel, finance and gaming industries. Linking is the holy grail of getting better visibility on Google. It’s no secret that getting great quality links from trusted sites is the key to success in terms of organic results and therefore free traffic. Previous SEO techniques used to mainly involve buying links, as many as you could afford... > Read more

Today Garrett and Ben over at Ontolo launched their Link Building Toolset to the world. We got a chance to catch up with them and get a sense of what their tool does and how it's different from the industry standard for backlink prospecting: competitor backlinks. Note: To thank early adopters during the launch of their new Link Building Toolset, Ontolo is offering a 25% discount that ends today (4/27/2010) at 9 p.

m. PST. They've let us know that they will never offering this service at this low of a price again, and that the pricing is good through all future upgrades, price changes, etc. First off, here's what it does, in their words: "We start with your targeted SEO Keywords. Using these we deliver, each and every week, new link prospects to you that have been crawled and analyzed b... > Read more

A while back we interviewed a handful of link-building experts (Garrett French and Ben Wills, Wiep Knol, Debra Mastaler, and Julie Joyce) on everything from what features they'd want in their ultimate link-building tool to how to brainstorm linkbait. Here, you can find all of their answers to eight key SEO link-building questions in one place.

  What factors go into a quality link? Which link building tools do you recommend? What features would the ultimate link analysis tool include? What are some strategies for brainstorming and creating linkbait? How does social media change the link building game? How should marketers go about making link requests? If I engage in link buying, how can I avoid being caught by Google? What's a better link: one from an... > Read more

Last week I landed a spot in the most watched television broadcast on the planet. The International Olympic Committee estimated that 450 million people worldwide tuned in to watch the Women's Figure Skating Finals at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics – more than the population of the entire US – and I was in the TV coverage! How did I do it? By applying a variation of Ken's link baiting strategy! Goals of My Link Bait Campaign One of my more ridiculous objectives in life is to achieve TV fame.

Now unfortunately I don't have any acting talents, great looks, or anything else remarkable for that matter – so I figure my only hope to achieve my goal is to ride someone else's coat-tails to TV stardom. (Yes, I know, this is pretty sad). And I don't want to be a guest on some d... > Read more

Recently at WordStream, we launched our first link bait campaign. By our standards, the campaign was successful, and we thought we'd share the details on how to build a linkbait campaign. How to Get Links from New York Times: A Case Study In a nutshell, we attribute the campaign's success to setting clear objectives, creating killer content and aggressive marketing.

What resulted from our hard work, planning and execution was a link from one of the most trusted sources on the planet: The New York Times. How did we do it? Read on and find out how to get a link from the New York Times. Link Bait Campaign Intro: Before You Start, Have a Plan! You may be wondering how to start link baiting, and in ultimately, great linkbaiting is all about planning. In my mind, much of link baiting fails becau... > Read more

As the link profile of WordStream.com continues to grow and grow, we realized it was time to purchase software that would assist us in managing our ballooning link database. Up until now, we'd been tracking all of our link acquisitions and link outreach efforts in Excel. But Excel has serious limitations, due in part because it's not built for link management.

As active link builders, our goal was to find a product that was designed specifically for our link management needs. And as Garret French espoused in Link Building Trends for 2010: "2010 will be the year of “link relationship management” software, and more and more link building firms will shift away from spreadsheets." I wholeheartedly agree. Why do you need a link management tool? If you're serious about... > Read more

We've been following Penn State Professor Jim Jansen and his PPC Advertising course for a while now, eagerly awaiting the outcome of his class's competition for the best performing nonprofit PPC campaign. Which got me thinking--those involved in nonprofits understand the difficulty of initiating a PPC campaign for their cause, and as much as I'd like to preach about the ease and importance of PPC for all businesses, nonprofits included, we'll save that until after Jim's results are in (mostly so we can read about the lessons his class learned and then pass them off as our own).

In the meantime, we'll focus instead on link building. In my experience, mentioning "link building" among nonprofit professionals mostly results in blank stares and disinterested looks, so we'll start slow... > Read more

Dixon Jones is the managing director of the respected UK Internet marketing consultancy Receptional, which heads up the marketing of MajesticSEO, the world's largest open anchor text link map of the web. He has spoken at Internet marketing conferences including Pubcon, SMX, SES and International Search Summit.

To learn more about Dixon Jones, check out his website or follow him on Twitter: @Receptional. Tell us a little bit about your roles, both at Receptional and at Majestic SEO. I publicly took over the marketing role at director level at Majestic SEO in the summer, after a long discussion with Alex, who is a brilliant programmer and who – I believe – has built something absolutely world-class. I’m not used to working for someone else, as also I founded Receptiona... > Read more

All this month we'll be interviewing link building experts on the WordStream blog. First up is Debra Mastaler. (Also check out Ari Ozick's interview with Debra on SEO Contrarian.) Does great content market itself? Yes and no. This really depends on the reputation of the person/company producing the content.

Those with a good rep can publish and have content pushed forward, even if it's not so great. Strong reputations carry tremendous power. Those without a reputation will need to work at pushing content and building their power base. Do you believe in linkbait? If so, what are some strategies for creating it? Interesting question, I've never been asked if I "believe" in something link-related before. Let's see ... I use it, I think it's effective and I think it adds diversity ... > Read more

Apologies for the (slightly) misleading headline. You won’t find something like this within this article. What you will find is a means for accumulating passive, recurring, and authoritative links to content by leveraging the popularity and search prominence of Wikipedia (which I assume probably sounds pretty good, too).

Wikipedia is Where Research is Being Done There are a number of bloggers, journalists, students, and others in control of Web content who rely on some combination of Google and Wikipedia to research a topic. This can be evidenced by a couple of handy graphs. Lots of people visit Wikipedia, Compete puts the estimate at somewhere around 60+ million a month: Many of these visitors link at Wikipedia: But that in and of itself may not be terribly interesting to us, beca... > Read more

The MadeUpCompany Link Building Kit This is an “internal link building template.” One best practice for companies hoping to attain high search rankings is to get company employees to link to your site. This document attempts to give a brief run-down as to how to go about requesting that your employees link to you.

The main things to note here are that: It’s too long – This could be considerably shorter. One reason it’s too long is that, personally, I would rather have one link from someone who had been properly instructed than ten from people who have a vague idea of what they should be doing. The potential for seeing four pages and not reading a word is definitely there, though, so keep that in mind. It’s not terribly specific – You could tailor ... > Read more

It’s the Holy Grail of link building: deep links from authority websites. And link builders far and wide know that getting these links is difficult. The belief espoused by most SEOs is that if you create remarkable content people will naturally link to it, which is both true and untrue. If you've got a blog and you're publishing topical, informational or solutions pages, then having great content is a natural link magnet.

But what if you're publishing content around product pages on an e-commerce site? Forget about it. No matter how good the content, product pages simply don't attract external links. Heck, I could author this great page about window shades, with in-depth, insightful content and beautiful photos of my product. Trouble is, there's nothing notable or link-worthy about ... > Read more