In order to enhance a website’s exposure, as well as increase traffic and rankings, link building is a necessity. Links from other sites that reach across the web and reference your site are like bridges spanning bodies of water or deep gorges. Just as types of bridges vary in form and function, so do your link building campaigns.

You may be in a rush to garner links, but do you want links that resemble rope bridges (think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), or would you prefer Golden Gate type bridges? If you chose rope bridges, then you must enjoy living life on the edge; and they will probably hold up and work for you for a while. Golden Gate bridges (links) on the other hand will stand the test of time and serve you well.

The Golden Gate Bridge took research, planning, design and labor to build it, and so should your link building campaigns. Ken Lyons wrote a helpful post on the step-by-step process to creating amazing backlinks. The post provides great information on finding out what people are linking to, who’s linking and why. Of course, the main reason why a site would link to you is because you have something of value to share.

So, you do your research to see what types of content people in your niche or industry are hungry for. Then you design a plan (blueprint) of the content that you want to publish. Don’t forget to audit your site to see what you already have; there’s no reason to duplicate your efforts.

A Short List of Ideas:

With link building the old saying really holds true, “It won’t hurt to ask.”  Sturdy links can be acquired when you have something to share and leverage. In your research, when you find who’s linking to content similar to what you’ve created, ask them nicely, in a well thought out email, to share your content as they’ve done in the past with others. Ken provided an email example in his post that has worked well for him. Don’t forget to use your social media accounts (you better have these or else) to promote your awesome pieces. Utilize your blog to publish posts about your new content as well.

As you create your link building blueprint, it’s important to keep in mind what your link portfolio will look like over time (the search engines are always watching.) Your backlinks should be a well-balanced mix to keep your site nice and healthy. Having a portfolio that appears natural and unmanipulated is what you want.

Diet for a Healthy Link Portfolio:

A successful link building campaign should be part strategy, part content creation, and part promotion. It may seem like such a daunting task that you feel like jumping off a……well, you know. The Golden Gate Bridge employs 17 ironworkers and 38 painters that are constantly working it to keep it sturdy and strong. It’s hard work. Of course, you could settle for the rope bridge that will be quick to build and hold up at first. But then it will start to deteriorate and rot in the rain and sun. Just remember that the greater your efforts are, the more links you will attain.

Ardala Evans

Ardala is a Project Manager working with the client Services Team at Vertical Measures. She supervises the completion of the monthly tasks for the clients. She also works directly with clients to provide reporting on their projects and ranking reviews.

+Ardala Evans

Twitter – More Posts

Keywords are a gateway to understanding how a market thinks, acts and buys. They’re also the common language for most SEO and PPC teams, and a clear way of connecting revenues with their work in the eyes of upper management. This all makes keywords a natural place to begin discussing – and designing – a link building campaign.

(Note: To thank early adopters during the launch of their new Link Building Toolset, Ontolo is offering a 25% discount that ends today at 9pm PST on 4/27/2010. They’ve let us know that they will never be offering a discount like this again, and that the pricing is good for all future upgrades, price changes, etc.)

Money Keywords vs. Market Defining Keywords

First, a note on the disctintion between money keywords ($KWs) and market defining keywords (MDKWs). Most SEM teams are familiar with $KWs – those are the terms that they bid on and optimize for because prospects use them when looking for solutions to their pains. However, $KWs are not always as useful when analyzing a market for its link building opportunities. This requires market defining keywords, which are the highest-level terms used to describe a market. So, for an online golf retailer, the money keywords would look like [brand name, model number, driver]. The market defining keyword is, simply, golf and possibly golfing.

1) Identify Your MDFK and $KW SERPs Dominators

SERP dominators are the websites that consistently rank well in the SERPs for your $KWs as well as your MDKWs. Though you may think you know your primary search competitors, you’ll be surprised at the true SERPs dominators when you do a comprehensive analysis. Start with reading our guide to SERP dominator analysis here >> We created a worksheet and occurrence counting tool to help out (there’s also source code available for a tool that automates this process). The SERP dominators in your keyword market space are also excellent places to start pulling competitive backlink data, should you choose to develop a link prospect list that way.

2) MDFKs for Industry Link Opportunity Analysis

What link opportunities exist in your market? Your market defining keywords are an excellent place to start gauging opportunity. You can look for blogs: [MDFK blogs], news sites: ["MDFK news"], guest posting opportunities: [MDFK "guest post"], interviewers/ees: [MDFK intitle:interview], niche directories: ["MDFK Directory"], niche forums and community sites: [MDKW community], and industry associations if you’re in the B2B space: [MDKW association]. Search for each of these in Google and compare the number of relevant hits in the top ten. The query with the most relevant hits could be an area for you to query more deeply and begin developing a specific campaign.

3) MDFKs for Competitive Link Analysis

While surveying your industry for opportunities, keep an eye out for your competitors, as well as any of the SERP dominators you previously identified. Are their hostnames appearing in any of your result sets? Are they mentioned in the news sites you find? Are they the subjects of interviews? Track them carefully and you’ll uncover the PR and content-based link building moves of your competition. Most importantly you’ll get some great ideas on what’s working.

4) Connecting Existing Linkable Assets to Keywords

We wrote recently on link building assets, which are pages and resources on your site – and people within your organization – that are the most linkable to your market. This could be a PDF collection, a jobs listing page, coupons, or even your CEO (for interviews). The important thing is going from assets to the keywords that will help you turn up link opportunities. Start with your list of assets and then brainstorm their keywords. Then combine these keywords with your MDKWs and you should start to turn up some places to submit your assets or request that someone check them out for consideration.

5) MDKWs + Link Building Query Operators

MDKWs are crucial when conducting a thorough dig for ALL the link prospects in your keyword space. You conduct this dig by combining your MDKWs with link building queries, designed to root out opportunities based on their "footprints." We recommend the following tools for this:

SEOBook Link Suggest Tool

Link Search Tool by SoloSEO

The Ontolo Link Building Query Generator

6) Getting Your Money Keywords in Anchor Text with Guest Posts

One way to use your money keywords in linkbuiding is when you’ve decided on a guest post campaign, in which you write articles for publication on relevant sites that accept content submissions. In most cases you’re allowed a snippet of description, along with a link or two. Depending on your relationship with the publisher, you may be able to have more control over the anchor text. In some occasions they may allow you to even add links within the body text, especially if there’s a value-add reason for the links to be there.

7) Getting Money Keywords in Anchor Text with Outreach Requests

When conducting outreach you can request that people link to you with particular link text. However, unless you’re paying them, it’s not highly-likely that people will respond to your requests. It doesn’t hurt to ask, though you’re probably better off focusing on building high-trust editorial links to your site and letting your onsite SEO handle the rest!

About the Author:
Garrett French is the co-founder of Ontolo, Inc., creators of the Ontolo Link Building Toolset which uses your target keywords to find and grade link prospects. The Link Building Toolset reduces link prospecting and qualification time, letting you focus on the most valuable part of link building: relationships.

Guest Blogger

Google wants it.  Eric Ward promotes it.  You should do it.  Link to get traffic not search engine rankings.  In fact, the people best able to withstand major changes and shifts in the search engines that affect their rankings are the people who have a broad, multi-faceted link building campaign.

In order to weather any drops from single-sources of traffic to your site, you must have a lot of irons in the fire (links). People you have targeted as your best prospects should be able to find your site virtually everywhere they surf.

Web site owners who rely solely on search engine ranking are leaving 90% of the marketing pie on the plate! For long-term stability and steady, predictable traffic, you simply must broaden your reach and utilize a host of different publicity tactics in order to keep sales up.

A lot of people miss the boat on this one.  Most people focus on the quantity of links pointing to their site. (Solely for search engines to find)  The problem is all they have at the end of the day is a link pointing to their site.

Placing links on sites with little to no traffic results in no traffic produced for your site. The webmasters who focus totally on getting links as a tool to increase their pagerank in Google are missing the point entirely.   Getting ranked well in the search engines should be considered a by-product of a properly executed link building campaign.

[tags] link building campaign, search engine ranking, pagerank, web traffic [/tags]

Vertical Measures

 If you are worried about your website’s low page ranking, the best technique to improve search engine rankings may be a link building campaign. A successful link building campaign or increased link popularity will surely improve your website’s page rank. The procedure of link building just refers to the quantity of sites that have you linked to them.

Vertical Measures