1. Earn authentic tweets, likes, shares, etc.
2. Become a Content Portal – Publish unique research, informed opinions, insights on trends or news, multimedia, expert contributors, quality discussions
3. Invest into video content (it’s not competitive right now!)
4. Build awesome infographics & visual media
5. Build calculators, tools, web based software; engineering stuff that saves people time or money
6. Publish reference worthy research
7. Leverage current events & news in your content.
8. Find amazing designers & pay them. Great designs are liked more by visitors. (Expert Tip: Go to a CSS gallery and find a featured designer with only 1 submission. Likely he is just starting out or doing it on the side, so he will charge less.)
9. Be cautious with ad placement.
10. Compare how you format text blocks with Panda Update losers.
11. Build robust About Us pages. Include real people with real photos, links to social media profiles, what your business does and the why and how, real contact info for real people, and non-generic descriptions. Include a press kit with logos, images, branding material – people do look for these.
12. Use real contact details and real people on your website.
13. Earn & display testimonials. Give testimonials to others (this will often get you a link). Used LinkedIn for this.
14. Optimize your conversion funnel.
15. Satisfy the user’s search query. Ask them what they were looking for or want. Ask them what would prompt them to share the page.
16. Register your business and address, even if you are not a local business. This is a huge signal of authenticity.
17. Build authentic social profiles with your business name.
18. Earn branded search traffic. Google probably looks at this. Tweet or share links to searches for your brand.
19. Diversify your traffic sources.
20. Get your brand name in headlines. If someone has written about you in the past, or written about something related to your business, ask them to cover you now.
21. Hard to get links are often the best links.
22. File patents, fund research, publish a paper in a college journal.
23. Create content about social sites – they love to stoke their own egos.
24. Get a great design, then list it on CSS galleries and design inspiration galleries. There are hundreds of these.
25. Find where big brands get links.
26. Find where relevant pages on .edu, .gov, or .org get links.
27. Investigate brand “sention” sources. Search [brand -brand.com].
28. Get key bloggers, connectors, and news sites aware of your brand.
29. Host, sponsor, and attend events and meetups.
30. Earn citations on industry portals, forums, discussion boards.
31. Get your brand included on industry brand lists.
32. Seek properties operated by trusted entities.
33. Use your bio / profile as a link accumulator.
34. Use RSS feeds with full content and absolute URLs to your website.

Check them out!

It just seems like its getting harder and harder to obtain good quality links for our clients. I am recently running a link acquisition program for US Patriot Store, a retailer of law enforcement and military gear and clothing.  At times, I spend half or all day and have a handful of links to show for it, or even worse, simply some database entries indicating potential link partners.  It is slow going at best.  Sounds like link acquisition is only to get harder and require more methodical yet creative approaches.

How goes it for you?

• Hey, this article is almost three years old but many of the directory ideas are still good – some are free and some you have to pay a yearly fee. In all cases you have to watch out for the quality of the directory: “56 directories to submit to“
• Another dated but I found still useful article on “how to find directories to link to“
• Great article by Rand Fishkin on “What Makes a Good Web Directory“
• Rand again has some great ideas on what makes a good directory in his article “The Wisdom and Folly of Directory Link Building“
• 131 link building strategies (another way old article but still relevant)
• Andy Hagan & Aaron Wall’s article on “101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website“

• Organization schemes – organizing by topic, task, audience
• Organization structures – hierarchial, database driven, hypertext, social classification
• Labeling systems – labeling of links, headers, content areas, contextual links
• Controlled vocabularies/Thesauri

It occurred to me that this is exactly how we do search engine optimization work here at Out of Bounds. I talk alot about architecting the web site according to consumer search behavior, carefully labeling links with descriptive names, organizing content tightly into related content areas, navigation areas.

They also have a wonderful chapter on Navigation systems that talks about ‘supplemental’ navigation systems such as site maps, indexes and guides. We can build site maps not only to help search engines understand the site information but also provide another navigation aid to our users. Another SEO idea would be to build various ‘shopping guides’ or tools to help browsers or other shoppers in the early buy phases to find what they are looking for.

The book talks alot about ‘findability’ of information. I can see now how proper information architecture is really the key to both solid web site design and seo design!

But, what about SEO? You get thousands of inbound organic keyword searches a month, with visitors using phrases you never, ever optimized for. How do you even ‘allocate’ or define what campaign an organic keyword belongs to? With SEO, you optimize specific pages on your site for a handful of keywords but what keywords organic visitors use if never known until you view your web logs or analytics tool. The difficulty is then sifting through these thousands of organic keywords and figuring out what ‘campaign’ or keyword category they belong to so you can have a more macro view to analyze. Otherwise, how do you determine how you are doing with your SEO?

Page links are critical when you’re attempting to elevate your natural search engine rankings. You may already know this, but did you know that changes in search engine algorithms have made who you link with more important than how many links you have?
Put simply, Google and the other big search engines are making it harder to manipulate your ranking just by adding inbound links.

When you do link building for your web site, you should focus on your “linking neighborhood” and who you are associating with. What many shortsighted search engine marketers view as a hassle can become a great asset to your company if you follow a few simple optimization techniques.

Search Engines Are More Sophisticated

In theory, the search engines are becoming more sophisticated in their analysis of your site’s inbound linking map. As you probably know, Google’s PageRank algorithm, as originally set out, uses a democratic approach to analyzing the value/authority of a page. Each link to a page is a “vote” for that page – the more votes a page has the higher its importance. Combining PageRank with content analysis of the page, Google ranks pages and displays them in the results. However, this connectivity approach to calculating a page’s importance was, at first anyway, easy to manipulate, resulting in less relevant search results.

To maintain quality search results, Google continually updates and modifies their search algorithm. You can monitor that by reading their patent applications and research papers.
For example, the “Hilltop Algorithm” article (see related article entitled: “Hilltop: A Search Engine Based on Expert Documents”) discussed a refinement in page ranking – a sort of “corrected PageRank” – in which the topical relevance, or “authoritativeness” of your linking partner was taken into account when ranking pages. Your pages are ranked according to the number of “experts” that link to your page, relevant to the original search query.

A Google patent application, in March 2005, entitled “Information Retrieval based upon historical data”, discusses, in part, using historical, profiling data to refine the analysis of your site’s inbound links. The patent mentions concepts such as the “staleness” or “freshness” of your linking partner’s documents and content, the speed of your inbound link gain, the percentage of similar anchor text, the age of the linking partner’s page, the disappearance and reappearance rates of links, “link churn” and many other time-dependent variables.
This type of document profile pattern analysis would allow Google to detect both “spammy” and authoritative link growth behavior.

New Strategies for Linking Success

There are two factors you should keep in mind when calculating the success of potential links on your search engine rankings: (1) who you link from and (2) the theme of the page from which you link. For instance, if you sell greeting cards, linking from a site about golf doesn’t carry as much weight as links from sites within the greeting card industry or from business or trade association directories that list information about greeting cards.
In general, links from sites that are considered industry experts carry much more weight than links from irrelevant sites. Thus the importance of linking neighborhoods–linking with other sites relevant to your industry and from sites that are expert or authoritative.

Okay, enough theory. How do you use this information to enhance your natural search engine rankings? Here are some ideas:
High Quality Directories are still a good bet. In some cases, these can be trusted or expert sites. You may have to pay for the listing, but it is a good investment. You are listed in a topically relevant page with other sites related to yours. Some directory ideas include:

• www.dmoz.org
• dir.yahoo.com`
• www.business.com
• sbd.bcentral.com
• dir.whatuseek.com
• www.cannylink.com
• www.joeant.com
• www.chiff.com
• www.botw.org

.edu and .gov Sites – Many SEO experts believe that having links dispersed across top-level root domains demonstrates to the search engines that your site is a trusted authority. Use this to your advantage. Find educational and governmental sites to link from. Write and submit articles to these sites and include links back to yours.
Trade Publications – These are great sources for relevant links. For instance, Out of Bounds has a link from a niche online publisher in our industry (Internet Retailer). We are listed in their directory of search engine marketing agencies, which adds relevancy to our site for search engines and our customers.
Industry-specific online publishers – Can you find online publications in your industry? Even a paid link, or a online display ad, may be worth considering.
Member/Industry Trade Organizations – Member organizations offer many benefits. Are there any relevant associations you can join? A good example for someone in our industry – search engine marketing – would be to obtain (join the association and pay the fee) a link from the home page of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO). Their home page has a PageRank of 6 and is highly relevant.

Your Customers/Vendors – Although most will likely not be 100% topically relevant links – and only if it makes sense to your business and your customers – get links to your website from your satisfied customers and preferred vendors. Most companies will gladly add a link to your site if your respond in kind. Especially those that value the work you do.
3rd Party Hosted Content – In this case, what you do is develop content, articles, white papers, manuals, FAQ’s, or other subject related content that is distributed on other websites, and you embed links back to your site. In this case, you are establishing yourself as the expert in the subject matter. An example here could be if you sell business greeting cards and you write a few articles on “Using a Business Greeting Card Program for Client Retention.” These articles have a link back to your site and the articles are hosted, for example, on a business partner’s site, or an online publication in a niche industry.
Social Networking/Bookmarking/Tagging- Here, you add tags to your articles, images, and other content in your site’s library or resource center. Define tags to social bookmark sites such as: del.icio.us, flickr, technorati. You may be able to build some viral link building activity this way.

Linking Toolbox
There are tons of tools out there that you can use to help in this process. To help you find and analyze linking partners, and investigate who your competitors are linking to, try some of these tools:

• Link Harvester- Great tool from Aaron Wall for finding linking partners
• Hub Finder – Another great tool from Aaron Wall to find “hubs” or authoritative documents in your industry
• GoLexa – Type in one of your search phrases and get competitor’s linking information
• Google “Related” Command – use this to find “Hub” sites within Google
• Link Suggest Tool – Tool to find linking partners within your subject matter area

These are just a few ideas, but as you can see, you are only limited by your imagination and your time! By taking a methodical, long term, strategic approach to your link building campaign, you will be able to increase your search engine visibility and keep it there for a longer period of time. And, as always, the best link building strategy is centered around having good, interesting content on your site so that people WANT to link to you! Good luck with your link building efforts!