Link Building Fundamentals: A Primer
The following post was inspired by a presentation I did at Searchfest earlier this month. Since this blog is new, I’ll be posting articles on fundamental marketing concepts that we can use as reference points on the site. This is the first in a series of posts along the theme of Internet Marketing Fundamentals…
The Fundamentals of Building Links
There is a golden rule to link building: links reflect value on the web. Remember that rule, because we’ll come to it later.
Right now, let’s expand that rule with two important definitions:
1. Linking is a communication and citation signal inherent to the web. Links reflect contribution, value, relevance and influence. If you want a scalable solution for building high-quality links, then provide solid value and contributions to your market, industry and community. If you do, the links will come – with hard work.
2. There are many different ways to build links. There’s no “right way” and no “best practices,” there’s only creativity, intelligence, and labor.
Links are now a major commodity. It wasn’t always this way. In the pre-Google era, links were about sharing resources and getting traffic.
Today, links are about traffic, sure, and they’re about sharing – but they’re also about search engines (especially Google).
Links have two primary audiences: visitors and search engines. You want the traffic and credibility association good links can provide for your visitors, and you want the rankings boost good links can provide for the search engines. Learn to distinguish between these seemingly disparate audiences, but don’t forget this guideline: develop your linking (and marketing) strategy with people in mind, not search engines. Just don’t be blind to the search optimization factors involved.
Link Building Today
There are nearly an infinite number of potential link opportunities on the web today. Link sources are literally everywhere you turn. That’s great if you know where to start, but what if you don’t? Then you need to distinguish between low-quality links and high-quality links, or between links that have little value and links that have the potential to be valuable.
The image to the right is the entire Star Wars movie in 1 second screen captures. Each screen grab is analagous to a website. The result (for our purposes) is the image of a nearly infinite amount of sites, and thus potential link sources. 
There are endless potential sources of links on the web.
To be faced with so many link opportunities can be daunting, and it begs the questions: where does one start? What links matter, and what links don’t? How does one find a “good” link in an endless sea of potential link sources?
These are all fundamental questions that I’ll do my best to answer.
Components of a Quality Link
There are seven primary components that define a valuable link:
- Relevance: valuable links are relevant to your market, industry or community. Valuable link sources are within your neighborhood on the web and provide you with accurate co-citation.
- Context: valuable links are contextual and come from sources with keyword-focused pages. How do you know if a page is keyword-focused? Well, does it rank? In most competitive markets, pages that rank well – and hold their rankings – are semantically well-optimized and have plenty of descriptive text on the page. You want your link surrounded by that keyword-themed content.
- Difficulty: in general, valuable links are difficult to obtain. There is an associated cost: whether it’s in the investment of the link itself (note that I’m not talking about paid links), in the content that secures the link, in the site development and design, or in the time requirement getting in front of the webmaster. Valuable links are not inexpensive to secure, and they’re not easy to secure. The most valuable links come from sources where your competitors are unlikely to get the same link.
- Humanity: valuable links require a human element to obtain. We all like direct link sources, but quite often the most high-value backlinks come from sources that have a human being in control of the website. You are picking up the phone and calling a webmaster, or emailing a contact person, or networking with someone in charge of an influential site or blog at a conference. There is almost always a human being in charge of creating links on the pages you want to target.
- Credibility: a quality link comes from a credible source. Credible link sources elevate the perceived credibility of the site they’re linking to because they’re already trusted sources.
- Authority: working alongside the credibility quotient is authority. High quality links come from authoritative sources, either in your niche or in the wide environment of the web.
- Investment: valuable links require an investment of some sort. This factor goes hand-in-hand with the Difficulty factor. There’s an associated cost involved, whether in the development of a targeted piece of content or survey, in the purchase of the link, in the design and launch of the site, or simply in the time required to influence the influencers.
The Importance of Link Neighborhoods
As was stated earlier, there are many different ways to approach link building. By far the most popular and widespread is the tactic of getting links in sheer quantity. The idea is to bludgeon the search engines with so many backlinks that you simply overpower competing sites. After all, a site with 30,000 links is usually going to out-rank a site with 3,000, right?
Well, not always. There is another way, and it’s called relevance.
Remember the importance of finding link sources that are within your ideal link neighborhood? I mentioned that above as the first criteria in our 7 components of defining quality links.
Building links en masse is fine if you can do it, but it’s usually a ham-fisted approach. The more subtle method (that’s also much harder to accomplish) is to target high-value link sources within your market. Monitor what neighborhood Google thinks your site belongs in, and monitor what neighborhood your ideal link sources fall in. Pay attention to co-citation factors to ensure your list of potential backlink sources are citing high-quality resources within your target market. If they’re not (and this is another area where paid links hurt you), your rankings will suffer (or at least be sub-optimal).
I’ve seen many sites outrank competitors with less incoming links. They do it (usually unintentionally) by garnering higher quality, more on-topic links from relevant neighborhoods of sites. And there’s another advantage as well, in that topically-relevant links will garner targeted traffic that’s more likely to convert.
Where To Begin
Start building links by focusing on your market. Remember the importance of your link neighborhood, and build links strategically with that in mind. Nearly every imaginable topic is being discussed on the web; there are centers of influence, there are bloggers, there are directories and mailing lists and forums and social sites. Find where people are talking about your market, and enter the discussion through channels such as:
- Hubs: use Aaron Wall’s fantastic Hub Finder tool to locate topically-relevant pages through co-citation. It’s free and it rocks.
- Forums: perform searches like this one at Google to find forums in your niche.
- Authority Sites: perform searches like this one to find authority link sources. Use different words for targets along with your key phrase, and substitute the
site:portion with other TLDs:"keywords" [library] [resources] [sites] [links] site:[.mil] [.us] [.gov] [.edu] - Social Media: in addition to performing search variations of the above examples, you can use well-researched lists like this one on 48 social news sites and this one with 40 niche social media sites. You should also consider joining SEOmoz.org where a premium membership gives you access to an excellent directory of over 100 social media sites by topic.
- Influencers: where do the influential bloggers hang out? Find out using tools like Technorati, Techmeme and Google Blog Search. Delicious can also be useful, as can Digg and a number of other tools.
- Email Lists: email discussion lists represent a wealth of largely untapped link building potential. They’re not utilized as much as they could be for internet marketing, partly because they take a lot of time committment and specific knowledge to post to (and thereby benefit from correctly). They also normally don’t pass any anchor text in the link – which is great if you’ve got a domain with some semantic value – but otherwise not ideal. Similar to forums and communities, if you can’t offer something of real value you won’t last on an email list. There are lots of good potential sources, just take care to approach these with the community in mind first and your link drop second. Sources like this one, and this one, and this one should sufficiently whet your appetite.
- Blogs: even with rampant nofollow in effect, there are plenty of benefits from posting comments on blogs. Ignore for a moment the question if anchor text is passed from a nofollowed link. By posting on high-traffic and influential blogs, you are getting in front of many people and contributing to the discussion. If you provide something of value, visitors (and the blog owner) will most definitely visit your site to check you out. Do it repeatedly and you’ll begin to create a reputation for yourself which could lead to business opportunities. And of course there are lots of dofollow blogs online, just do a simple search to find them.
- Directories: directories should be considered as a staple for any business online – but not just any directory. Google has increased their disdain of most directories, since most directories are designed only to make the owner the most money rather than create the most relevant lists of links. Good directories to use include Yahoo!, Business.com, Best of the Web, DMOZ, and Starting Point. There are myriad niche directories as well, do creative searching to find them and also use lists such as the one found on SEOmoz (you’ll have to be a premier member there to see it).
- Organizations: every small business should belong to the Better Business Bureau. You get a link, and it’s valuable. Third-party organizations exist in nearly every industry and market, use these to advantage.
- News Sites: news is one of the pillars of online content, and has several advantages for publishers, including wide adoption of syndication. Online press releases are a good idea, use them. Just use them right (and that’s another post). In the meantime, no one knows it better than Lee Odden.
- Human-Powered Search: human-powered search engines are sites like Mahalo, Bessed, and ChaCha where human beings (real human beings!) are assimilating tightly focused, topical pages. If the human-powered search site is valuable and the link category is competitive, it’s going to take high-quality or even exceptional content to get listed.
Build Links Strategically
When you starting building links, do it in a systematic way. The following pyramid shows one method of thinking about link building as steps from easiest and lowest cost, to most difficult and highest cost.
- The triangle is segmented into 6 steps. At the base and 1st step are link sources such as quality directories, classified advertising, and third-party organizations. These require some sort of investment, but it’s normally not substantial.
- Working up the triangle, the links get more valuable (only as a general rule) and more expensive. The 2nd step contains link sources such as email lists, forums, blog comments, and social media profile pages.
- The 3rd step is reserved for places like article sites, niche directories, human-powered search engines and guest blog postings.
- The 4th step contains techniques like basic social media marketing (creating Myspace pages, Facebook groups and profiles, etc) and online public relations.
- When we reach the 5th step, we’re getting into advanced link acquisition territory: reaching key influencers (Rand Fishkin’s linkerati) through social media.
- The pinnacle and 6th step of the triangle is reserved for the Hilltop: authority sites at the center of Google’s Trustrank (which is starting to appear out-dated and vulnerable, but is still essential to their algorithm). For 90% of sites in a market, these are unobtainable links and come from sources like the US Military, government offices, libraries, universities, non-profits, high-traffic Wikipedia pages, old-school individual sites and so on. These sites normally require very topical, high-quality, and mostly non-commercial content (not to mention a concerted effort) to acquire links from. But they’re imminently worth all the trouble.
By approaching the art of building backlinks as a series of distinct channels, and by identifying the best links among a sea of potential opportunities, you can strategically find the most high-value links, spend your resources with those targets in mind, and build them systematically. As the pyramid indicates, the bulk of links come from sources that are of relatively less value but are easier to obtain. These build the foundation of a site’s link profile. The most valuable backlinks come from fewer sources that are more restrictive in their linking policies, and form the peak of a link profile.
Conclusion
Now forget everything you just read and remember the golden rule of linking:
With that rule in mind, what’s the most efficient method of building powerful backlinks?
The answer is simple, but the way is hard: you must build exceptional resources and provide information that’s unique and valuable. Only then will you succeed long-term in link building, and therefore, internet marketing.
Hi man,
Your hard work is showing,
Its kinda a bible for link builders..
Great article..
Excellent selection of tools and commentary. Well done Adam.Outstanding post! The ideas and insights are very worth reading. I will surely take note all of these. Thanks for sharing it!
Excellent selection of tools and commentary. Well done Adam.Outstanding post! The ideas and insights are very worth reading. I will surely take note all of these. It would be very much useful to my website. Thanks for sharing it!
This is a great post. I’m looking forward to tell all of my friends most especially those who really love to link their work in other sites, to read your article…Good
cheer up…>>>
a good read.
It was a long time ago that I left a cranky email about the diagonal stripes behind the post and comments. I was using IE. Not sure why was appearing that way, but it appears to have been resolved, so kudos!
This is a really good read. I will be telling my readers about this article, which covers the subject very well. Many thanks
Great article Adam, and I just spent nearly 30 minutes elsewhere in your blog too – I’m super impressed!
I had to work pretty hard to find your RSS subscription button though, only finding it by going back to the home page of the blog…
The quality of what I’ve read here simply demands that you have it on every post!
@Scott thanks very much, great to have you here and subscribed to the feed. I’ll take your advice on the RSS call-to-action – definitely agree it’s not prominent enough. Appreciate the kind words very much :)
APPLAUSE!
Adam, that was one of the most concise, well written articles on link building I have ever read and a list of tools to boot!
I never heard of you before I came across this article, but you can be sure I’ll be spending more time visiting your blog and site and subscribing to your RSS feed!
This is a fantastic resource. I assume it did the front page on digg and is linked to by all “relevant” authority bloggers.
It certainly deserves to. Its hard to find this level of quality in a web page.
cheers
Tony
Hi Adam! Great work :) Your report is really interesting for every SEO (rookies and professionals) and i hope to read some more nice reports like this next time from you!
Greetz from Germany!
Great post ;-)
I have read a lot of post about link building and yours is different. Different because you have written a great article about link building.
I’m following you now.
Nice post, However I think, Gaining maximum number of links pointing to your website requires skills, backed up by your website’s worthiness. If your site is worthy of a link, you can earn a great profit with Link Popularity. And if it isn’t, all your Link Building efforts might go in vain!
Well, very interesting article … thanks
hooo!AMAZING! I thought I can only find SEO articles that worth my time from Rand Fishkin blog. Am wrong I should say as this one got my attention. Well written spontaneous thoughts, man! You have to keep writing and writing and writing!!!
Hi Adam, this was a really good article….
I’m new to SEO, but try and learn everything I can, it’s sort of in my personality ;)
I am having the most difficult time finding an answer, and maybe you could help. If the links are relevant, and in article directories, or related blogs although likely low pr pages, can a new website build links too quickly?
In the past 3 weeks, I may have build 500 of such links, and for fear of going too quickly, I’ve scaled down today. For the past three days, I’ve been building 1oo links a day, with 50 article pick ups a day and two links each. Mostly unique content… My site is two months old…
Some have said I’m going too fast for a new site, so I slowed it down. Others say I have nothing to worry about and I can continue to trickle content out at this rate or faster. What do you think?
I’d love to hear someone at least generally talk about what too fast or too many means in terms of actual links, from relevant sources, with of course varied anchor text. Much appreciated :)
Kim
Hi Adam,
Given you did such an excellent job on this blog entry, you really have a good head start on a e-book about link building. You could expand on the fundamentals by giving some consideration to inbound versus outbound links, the speed at which links are acquired (per Kim’s post above), how links should be posted on a website (categorized, uncategorized, number on a page, etcetera), do’s, don’ts and tools which could be used to assist in link building. I’d subscribe! And guess what, then you’d have a tangible product to market :)
That’s very good advice, thank you :-)
But, still… it’s never easy to persuade people to link to a page.
Hi Adam, that’s a good post right there. Like others say, most of it as already known but you explain it very well. Keep up the good work. :-)
Hi Adam
This was a really great read and its going to help me in what I do, its always great to get different advice on link building and I love to learn new ways, your article is also quiet easy to understand, so I am booking marking and will be returning again to learn something new.
Great SEO report! :)
Hope to read some more nice reports like this next time from you!
Hey Adam,
Firstly thanks for the informative post.
I have heard the days of directory submissions are gone as PR of directories is coming down.
They say google will soon consider these web directories as link farms, and sooner or later they are supposed to do more bad than good.
Anyways i am still in love with the directory submissions.
(They dont send traffic though)
One sure thing i loved about this post is that pyramid of link building (the stages)
But yes, did we forget to tell us that we can never stop building links. Its a cycle which has to happen to keep that PR and traffic flowing in.
The other day i read a post about link baiting by Matt Cutt.. (The Google guy)
I was quite impressed by the idea and the impact it has in multiplying the natural link building efforts one does.
Way to go!
Very well written. This is the kind of information that is useful to those want to increase their SERP’s. Keep up the good work.
A wealth of information about link building. Taking the time does produce the benefits. I applaud you for this contribution!
Thank you very much for the article…I’ve bookmarked it for future use. Your easy-to-use strategies are something we will definitely employ as we continue to build our network and add useful content to our blog. Thanks so much..
Excellent article, Adam
I visited this blog first time and found it very interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing such information.
Hi Adam, great roundup on link building I especially liked your 6 step pyramid.