The document serves as a comprehensive guide to modern link building within the context of SEO, explaining how inbound links impact search engine rankings and highlighting the evolution of link building strategies from early directories to contemporary practices. It emphasizes the significance of high-quality links, trust and diversity in link sources, and the nuanced changes brought about by search engine algorithms like Google's PageRank. Additionally, it provides actionable steps for acquiring valuable links while avoiding common pitfalls associated with link building.

1. TRINFINITY
A fr a m ewo r k fo r li n k
b u i ld i n g i n to day's
t u m u lt u o u s S EO
en v i ro n m en t.
A MODERN
GUIDE TO
LINKBUILDING

2. Contents
A Modern Guide
to Link Building
2
3
4
5
8
10
12
14
16
19
Introduction to Linkbuilding
The death of directories
The birth of Search engines
The anatomy of a link
The “link” mentality
Link exchange
Article syndication
Link baiting
Social Media

3. 3A Modern Guide
to Link Building
Link. build·ing
/liNGk ˈbildiNG/ 
Link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and
quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the
search engine rankings of that page or website.
“For search engines that crawl the vast metropolis of the web, links are
the streets between pages” – Moz Link building is the digital civil
engineering of building these streets
Link Building has completely evolved since the beginning of search engine
optimization from the Link exchange rush when the basics of link building was getting
listed in as many online directories you could get to blog comments , to link networks
to the more recent guest posting and press releases
Link building can be frustrating in this age of search engines penalties and
bans so it good to understand the importance of links for search engine optimization.
While it's sometimes possible to get a site ranked high in the search engines without
worrying too much about links, that's rarely the case. If you have plenty of competition
for your keywords, lots of other websites trying to rank well for the same terms as
you, then a solid linking game is essential.
The evolution of search engines has changed a great deal and so has the
importance of links to them. Before going into a full link building spree, its good (and
safe) to understand the basics. Search engines hate the link business, such as buying
links. Some seemingly harmless link building strategies can ruin your search traffic.
In some ways linking is the worst part of SEO. With on page issues, page
optimization and site structure, you have total control. It's your site after all. But with
linking, it's different. You're trying to convince other people to link to your site. There
are lots of ways to do that, some good and some not so good, but getting really useful
links can often be difficult. So let's get started with Link Building In modern day age.

4. 4A Modern Guide
to Link Building
In order to understand why links are so important, it may help
to understand the problem that search engines use links to solve.
It's hard now for many of us to imagine the world without a World
Wide Web, but by the end of 1993 there were only around 600
websites and most of those 600 sites were pretty thin; a handful of
pages each. In August of that year, when there were just a couple
of hundred websites, a well-known computer book publisher
O'Reilly and Associates launched what was probably the first
commercial directory of the Internet, GNN, the Global Network
Navigator.
Much of the directory was based on the whole Internet
catalog. In effect, it was like a paper directory of websites posted on
the web. In September, another directory appeared on the scene,
W3 Catalog. And in January of 1994, when there were around 600
websites, David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web
launched. You'll know that directory better by its later name Yahoo!
Yahoo! eventually became the world's top search directory and the
world's most popular site. These were all web directories.
Google PageRank
Link building began with the rise of
Google, since they based the core of
their search around links, considering
them votes of confidence. Therefore,
one of the most important factors in
SEO became your website's backlink
profile - that is who's linking to your
site.
PageRank relies on the uniquely
democratic nature of the web by using
its vast link structure as an indicator of
an individual page’s value. In essence,
Google interprets a link from page A to
page B as a vote, by page A, for page
B. But, Google looks at considerably
more than the sheer volume of votes,
or links a page receives; for example, it
also analyzes the page that casts the
vote. Votes cast by pages that are
themselves “important” weigh more
heavily and help to make other pages
“important.” Using these and other
factors, Google provides its views on
pages’ relative importance.
Google works because it relies on the
millions of individuals posting links on
websites to help determine which other
sites offer content of value. Google
assesses the importance of every web
page using a variety of techniques,
including its patented PageRank™
algorithm which analyzes which sites
have been “voted” the best sources of
information by other pages across the
web
THEDEATHOF
DIRECTORIES

5. 5A Modern Guide
to Link Building
THEBIRTHOF
SEARCHENGINES
So the next step was the search engine, a system that
created an index of pages within sites. There were various
simple search engines early on, but perhaps the first true web
search engine, a system that would allow use of the search
through the text contained in web pages within index websites,
was WebCrawler launched in April 1994. A directory provides
minimal information about a site. A search engine, though, lets
user search pages within sites, a far more useful service.
During 1995 and over the next few years, all sorts of other
search engines appeared on the scene; Magellan, Excite,
Infoseek, HotBot, Northern Light, and of course AltaVista which
became hugely popular when it launched late in 1995. Finally, in
1998, Google appeared on the scene. By the end of the decade,
the writing was on the wall, search engines were the future and
over time search engines would more or less kill off the
directories. Even Yahoo! had to switch.
The Explosion
During mid 90’s and over the next few
years, myriad search engines exploded
on the scene; Magellan, Excite,
Infoseek, HotBot, Northern Light, and
of course AltaVista which became
hugely popular when it launched late in
1995. Finally, in 1998, Google
appeared on the scene. By the end of
the decade, the writing was on the wall,
search engines were the future and
over time search engines would more
or less kill off the directories. Even
Yahoo! had to switch.
Google was based on a revolutionary
idea that you could figure out what a
web page was about and whether it
was a good match for someone's
search query, not just by looking at the
page itself but also by looking at links
pointing to that page. Those links could
be inside the website within which the
page was found, but could even be
pointing to the page from other
websites; sites that the owner of the
reference web page might not even
know existed!
5
In other words, they were list of websites with a little information explaining what each list of site
contained. That was fine in the early days when the web simply didn't contain much information. But as
the web grew, they became unwieldy. If you're trying to find a particular Shakespeare sonnet, a directory
will tell you which sites might contain the information, but they don't let you see what's in each site. They
simply tell you what each site is about and it's up to you to go to the site to see if it contains what you're
looking for.

6. 6
The search engines in the
late 1990s were faced with
enormous amounts of data to
sift through. And that was
before the advent of big data
technologies.
The idea of simply
looking at a page to figure out
what was in it, and whether it
was a good match for a
searcher's query, simply wasn't
enough anymore. New methods
had to be developed for ranking
web pages and link seemed to
be the way to go.
In 1996 a search engine
called RankDex owned by a
subsidiary of Dow Jones was
experimenting with using links
to assess the value of the pages
that links pointed to.
Not all links
are made
equal
From RankDex to Baidu
The site would rank search results based on how many links
pointed to each page. RankDex is long gone, but the designer
went on to build Baidu, China's equivalent of Google, and the
world's fifth most popular website. Then came Google with this
PageRank system and this revolutionized the role of search. The
basic concept is simple: use links pointing to websites to give you
an idea of how important to link two pages really are. If one page
has lots of links and another very few, then the web is just voted
for the highly linked page and against the page with few links
Google can be traced to early 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford Computer
Science students. When they first launched their search engine they called it BackRub, you can see
the original logo here.
The hand allegedly belongs to Larry Page. Why BackRub? The name referred to backlinks.
Page and Brin were examining backlinks, links pointing back to a web page. To paraphrase Page and
Brin's paper, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," they were using
backlinks to figure out a page's importance or quality. Analyzing links then was at the core of Google's
methodology when it finally launched in 1998 and it remains essential to both of the world's top search
engines, Google and Bing.
Today, links provide crucial information about a reference web page's importance and quality
and no concerted SEO campaign is complete without considering them. In the next chapter, we'll look
at what a link actually is.
A Modern Guide
to Link Building
If a link comes from a very popular site, one with many links
pointing to it, then the outgoing link from that popular site is more
valuable than a link from an unpopular site. In effect, the popular
site's links carry more votes. This was a huge change in the
world of search and the very basis of Google.

7. 7A Modern Guide
to Link Building
TheAnatomyofaLink
As search engines have become more
advanced, they have been able to expand the
link-related signals they can use beyond raw
numbers. Search engines can look at a number
of factors, which can all combine and give them
an indicator of quality. More to the point, they
can tell whether the link is likely to be a genuine,
editorially-given link, or a spammy link.
These factors are outlined in more detail below.
There is something important to remember here,
though: it isn't really the link itself you care about
(to a certain degree). It is the page and the
domain you are getting the link from which we
care about right now. Once we know what these
factors are, it helps set the scene for the types of
links you should (and shouldn’t) be getting for
your own website.
Before diving into the finer details of links and
linking pages, I want to take a much broader look
at what makes a good link. To me, there are
three broad elements of a link:
TRUST
By trust, we often mean what Google thinks
of a website, and some will also refer to this as
authority. As we’ve discussed, Google came up
with PageRank as a way to objectively measure
the trust of every single link they find on the web.
Generally, the more PageRank a page has, the
more trusted it is by Google, the more likely it is to
rank and the more likely it is to help you rank
better if it links to you.
However, there is another concept here
that you need to be aware of—TrustRank..
DIVERSITY
Link diversity is important if you want to build
good links and have a strong, robust link
profile.Diversity of linking domains simply
means getting links from lots of different
domains—not the same ones over and over
again. I discuss this in much more detail below.
Diversity of link type means getting links from
different types of domains. If all of your links
are from BlogSpot blogs, that isn’t very
diverse. If all of your links come from
PRNewswire, that isn’t very diverse. I’m sure
you see what I mean. A natural link profile will
contain links from many different types of
websites.
TrustRank:
“Let us discuss the difference between PageRank
and TrustRank first. Remember, the PageRank
algorithm does not incorporate any knowledge
about the quality of a site, nor does it explicitly
penalize badness. In fact, we will see that it is not
very uncommon that some site created by a
skilled spammer receives high PageRank score.
In contrast, our TrustRank is meant to
differentiate good and bad sites: we expect that
spam sites were not assigned high TrustRank
scores.” ~ TrustRank White Paper
THE PERFECT LINK
1. Trust
2. Diversity
3. Relevance
RELEVANCE
we need to acquire links to our website that are
relevant to us—we can do this by trying to
make the anchor text contain a keyword that
we are targeting and is relevant to us.
However, caution is needed here in light
of Google updates in 2012, namely Penguin,
which had a massive effect on link building.
However, building links with overly-commercial,
keyword-focused anchor text is a lot riskier
than it used to be. It can still definitely work, but
does pose a risk if you overdo it.

8. 8A Modern Guide
to Link Building
REL=“NOFOLLOW”
Link have many attributes e.g. Target,
Title e.t.c but from an SEO standpoint, it's
the href and rel ="nofollow" attributes that
are important. rel ="nofollow" provides the
author with a way to tell the search engines
not to follow the link. You need follow links,
links that do not contain the rel="nofollow"
attribute.
You should assume that no-follow
links provide no value to your site. Just
assume that the search engines ignore
them.
Of course, links aren't always place
on to text. They can also be placed on
images. From an SEO perspective, putting
the links on text is generally better. The text,
as we'll discuss in a later video, tells the
search engines what the reference page is
about, so the text can improve the page's
rank in the search results.
Still, now and then you'll want to put links
on the images as you can see here. You can
improve a link like this in a couple of ways. First,
it's always good to use image names with
keywords in them. You can also use an "alt"
attribute in the image tag. The "alt" is intended to
contain words that describe the image in
browsers that are not displaying images. Hover
over the image with the mouse and the "alt"
words pop up. You might also want to use the title
attribute in the anchor tag just in case.
Links can also be placed on to images by
combining the image tag with the map and area
tags. When doing so, remember to use the "alt"
attributes throughout, for the image tag itself and
in all the links created by the individual area tags.
So that's the anchor tag. Perhaps the most
important thing to remember about the anchor tag
is to use keywords wherever you can in order to
be as descriptive as possible.
THE ANATOMY OF A LINK

9. 9A Modern Guide
to Link Building
Ofcourse, you can still link to the site using that domain name as the keyword, but you should also link
using keywords like this. You could even link to different pages with each link. As you learned before, linking
into the site instead of only to the home page is always a good thing. Where else can you link from? What
about social networking accounts? You probably have a Facebook account don't you? How about a Google+
account? Facebook, LinkedIn and various other social networking sites use no follow links.
But don't let that put you off. You may get visitors through the links after all and as I discussed in an
earlier video, I'm not totally convinced that the major search engines ignore all social networking no follow
links. Google+ currently provides follow links by the way. Do you have control over or access to any
other sites? Perhaps you have regular websites. You could at least put links in the page footers or find
various other places to slip links in. This is a time honored mechanism for creating links and most companies
that own multiple sites do it, so why not you? Remember use keywords.
Many companies just link to their other sites by name. But there's no reason you can't do a more
promotional link such as Travel Central America with SeeCA.ni. It's rare these days for people to have
absolutely no web pages under their control in some way. So think carefully about all the possible places you
can place links. How about profile pages in forums and bulletin boards you're a member of? Perhaps you
can even announce your site in forum messages. How about listings in the directories of professional
associations which you remember? Spend a little while thinking this through and you'll probably find a few
good placements.
What next? Friends and family of course. Who do you know who might be willing to give you a link or
two? Who might be willing to mention you in their blog for instance or in groups of which they are members
or in their personal or business websites? Use a broad definition of friends and family. How about your
employees for instance? Your company's or employer's partners. If your company buys product for resale,
will its suppliers provide you with a link? If you sell products to other companies, can you get them to link
back to you? How about professional associations? Can you get them to the link to the corporate site? Does
your company donate money to non profits? If so, can you get links from the donor pages?
BUILDINGLINKS–FIRSTSTEPS
The first thing you should do is to is
place links in the easy, obvious locations.
The obvious place is of course, a web page
is already under your control. If you have a
blog for instance perhaps you can write a
short article about the site you're promoting
and link to it from the article. Remember
use keywords. Don't just link to your site
using the URL or site name but use the
keywords for which you want to rank. For
instance, let's say you're pointing to a
website about travelling in Central America
and you're using the domain SeeCA.ni.

10. 10A Modern Guide
to Link Building
There are myriad link opportunities most of which are not exploited , simply because people involved
in an organization don't realize the value of links, and even when they have a vague idea that links can help
a website, they still don't understand just how powerful putting keywords into a link can be. If at all possible,
try to engender a 'think links' mentality into your organization, so that all staff members understand that links
to your website will be a key factor in the success of your site. Specifically, they need to understand two
things. First, that whenever they see the opportunity for a link, they should grab it!
Secondly, that wherever possible, the link should contain keywords relevant to your organization’s
industry. There are some company departments that really should understand these concepts, a classic
example for instance of lost link opportunities due to a lack of understanding are companies public relations
departments. Most PR departments do not understand linking, so even though they're out there doing things
that can really help, such as issuing press releases, all too often they don't take the extra few moments to
think about links and so the opportunity is lost.
For instance, your PR department should understand that links can often be placed into press
releases pointing back to specific areas on your site, though admittedly over the last year or two, the
situation has changed somewhat and press release links are often nofollow links now. Still, ideally whoever
is responsible for promoting the website should ensure that the PR department knows what keywords to use
and which pages they should link to. When working with new clients looking for possible link locations, I often
hear about various business partners, suppliers, major clients, industry associations and the like, companies
that have websites of course, and who might be willing to link back to the client's site.
Typically, most of these opportunities go unclaimed, so the people in your organization who set up
such relationships really need to understand the value of getting these other organizations to link to your site.
It's not just your PR department who can help, though. Any member of your organization can provide links,
from their Facebook link to new Google+ pages, in the footers of forum messages, from their own blogs and
so on, so try to educate your staff or organization members with some basic linking concepts and with a little
luck and the occasional reminder, you should see your links grow.
THE“LINK”MENTALITY

11. 11A Modern Guide
to Link Building
If the website you're promoting is related to a
local business, an attorney, medical professional,
retail store, plumber or whatever you really need to
work on links from local directories. In fact, for a
number of reasons one thing you should do early in
a link campaign is to make sure you're registered in
as many local directories as possible. This is
actually a good thing on a couple of levels. Yes,
you'll get good links back to your site. But you're
also creating pages about your business linking
back to your site in lots of different directories and
those directories are tickets in the SEO lottery.
When somebody searches for your business
type in your area, hopefully your business website
comes up in the search results. But with luck some
of these other web pages will pop up too. So you get
not just one link on the first search results page but
several. There are several really important local
directories you should manage manually. First and
foremost is Google Places. The directory of
businesses associated with Google Maps. And that
is use to provide local results to the Google search
results.
You should also manage your Yahoo! Local
and Bing Local results manually. You also need to
submit to a directory service such as UBL.org which
takes your data and sends it to hundreds of different
directory services. I won't go into detail here though,
because I've already done a video in this subject in
my SEO course. I explained how to submit to those
services in that video. But, there's more that you can
do. You should also look for specialty directories
and an easy way to do that is to search for your
business type along with the word directory.
You can also search for your business type
along with the name of your city and see what
directories pop up. For instance let's say you're a
cosmetic surgeon. Search for cosmetic surgery
directory, plastic surgery directory, and so on.
You can also try cosmetic surgery along with your
city name and even cosmetic surgery directory
along with your city and see what directories appear.
You'll find various directories. Your job then is to find
out how to get listed in those directories. In some
cases, you'll find the only way in is to pay.
But often you can get a basic listing for free.
For instance, one dental directory I saw recently
included free listings and those listings include real
follow links back to the dentist websites. You only
have to pay if you add a photo and more
information. It's not worth paying for a listing in most
of these directories. But that's not to say some are
not worthwhile, of course that's the subject outside
this course. So let me just say that if you do pay for
listings you should consider carefully whether it's
worthwhile and track the traffic to your website and
calls that you get so that you'll be able to see if it's
working.
GEARINGUP

12. 12A Modern Guide
to Link Building
Another form of directory that is well worth
getting listing in is what I call a local directory, the
specialized city directories. I'm not talking now about
the big systems like Citysearch and Yelp, though
those are important too. I'm talking about the small
directories that focus on a particular town or city.
There are mixed bag. Some are associated with the
local newspaper or perhaps even with small towns,
the local city government. Some are small
independent sites. They're very professional and
attractive. Others are somewhat more funky or
downright ugly.
Some are actually sub domains of very large
national directories, still, they're all worth getting
links from. In some cases, you may find your
business already listed as many of these directories
are getting their data from sources such as UBL.org.
Still, check to see if the data is correct and whether
it contains a link to your site. These directories are
easy to find. Search for your town or city name
along with the word directory. You may be surprised
to what pop ups. Better still go to Yahoo! Directory
or dmoz.org and dig around in the regional search
results.
And you'll often find local directories. Dmoz
even has a guides and directories sub category
which is often quite useful. You might be surprised
that how many local and industry directories you can
find if you invest a little time. Spend a while digging
around and you'll discover lots of great link
opportunities that provide really useful, relevant
links.
LINK EXCHANGES
This is basically reciprocal linking. It's was
such an important link technique in the past and
many people still use it and seem to think it's what
linking is all about. So what is reciprocal linking? As
the name suggests, it's linking with
reciprocation. You link to my site and I'll link to
yours. It's often also known by the term Link
Exchange. You've seen link pages, I'm sure. Many
are still around. You still sometimes see links that
simply say links, or maybe useful links, or
resources, or perhaps our friends or link partners.
Click those links and you'll see pages and
pages of links to other websites. For a surprisingly
long time, reciprocal linking was a very powerful way
to rank a website. It really did work and it worked
very well. There used to be hundreds of companies
providing reciprocal linking services such as
software that helped automate the process of finding
link partners and placing and managing the links,
and people who would search the web for possible
partners and email them. Even now, I still get a few
reciprocal link requests by email every week.
But over the years the search engines have
devalued reciprocal linking to the degree that in
most cases it doesn't work. I'll explain in a moment
how it can still work sometimes. The problem with
basic reciprocal linking from a search engine
standpoint is that the links have no real value. The
only reason they're there is to convince the search
engines that the reference sites should rank
well. Despite the fact that the reciprocal link
companies always used to claim that
reciprocal linking was about providing useful links to
site visitors not manipulating search results.
That was nonsense of course, and over the
years as the search engines reduce the value of
such links, this companies have mostly disappeared
or moved into more general link building
services. You may also hear however that reciprocal
linking is actually dangerous, that doing it can get
you penalized. In most cases that simply isn't
true. In fact, the story that reciprocal linking was
dangerous first started circulating while I was still
seeing sites ranking well using reciprocal linking.

13. 13A Modern Guide
to Link Building
But what if site A links to B then B links to C and C links to
A. Or maybe site A links to B, B to C, C to D and D back to A.
And what if those links were scattered around a site rather than
in a big list of links? This form of reciprocal linking sometimes
known as three way linking or even one way linking, because
your links go one way without a second link back, can work and
many people use it.
But although there are some companies providing three
way linking services, most of this form of reciprocal linking is
more informal with owners of multiple sites linking between their
own sites with other people who own multiple sites. In general,
you'll probably want to avoid reciprocal linking. It's simply a
waste of time. But if you run into some kind of multi-site link
exchange in which you don't do A to B to A linking and in which
you don't create big list of links, then go ahead. It could be
helpful.
Press Releases
PR departments often miss the real
opportunity in the form of press
releases. They are out there creating
press releases for all the usual reasons
companies do so, but they are either
not including keyworded links in the
press releases or not including any kind
of link, even a basic URL link back to
the company site. If you're distributing
press releases, it's a no brainer. Why
not do it right and make the most of the
work you're already doing?
But even if you don't already do press
releases, you may want to experiment
with them.
I've seen releases used very effectively
to generate traffic to sites and they
often rank well in new search
results. So how should press releases
be distributed most effectively?
By submitting a press release to
distribution sites or specific syndication
sites, you can build links if you add one
or two into the body of the release.
Some options are paid, while others
are free.
13
Now using link farms, the automated creation of huge numbers of what are in effect reciprocal links, is
dangerous. But most reciprocal linking won't do any harm. It just won't do any good. So when can
reciprocal linking work? When it's not obviously reciprocal linking. What are the two characteristics of
typical reciprocal linking? Well, first of all, site A links to site B, and site B links back to site A. And the links
typically appear in pages containing long list of links. then go ahead. It could be helpful.

14. 14A Modern Guide
to Link Building
- Article Syndication is very similar to press
releases. Essentially you're writing a different type of
article. Not an article praising your company or
announcing something but some kind of informative
article. Then distributing it through article-
syndication libraries. The purpose of an article-
syndication library is in theory at least, to provide a
repository of articles that website owners can pick
from to help bulk up their sites.You provide your
article with permission for site and blog owners to
use the article.
And in return they agree to run the
article's author information along with the
article, including a link back to your site. That
doesn't always happen of course. Sometimes site
owners simply run the article without attribution. But
it does most of the time. Thus, by distributing your
article through the syndication-libraries, you
potentially end up with links back to your website
from two types of locations. From any websites on
which the article ends up after being pulled from a
syndication-library. And of course, from the library
itself.
Article Syndication used to be a very effective
way to get links back to your site, spread around the
web. Today these sort of links are not as good as
they once were, but probably still help a little. And at
the end of this article, I'll explain a special form of
syndication that can bring more value. There're
hundred of syndication-libraries. And of course, you
can submit to them directly. Sites such as Go
Articles, Ezine Articles, Articles Base, Article
City, contain many thousands of articles each. And
are all indexed by Google.
However, it's a lot of work to distribute
widely by working with each site individually. So
instead, you may want to use a service that does the
work for you. There are a number of these article
syndication services out there, such as
uniquearticlewizard and distributeyourarticles.com.
And software such as articles submitter. Search a
little, and you'll also find plenty of manual
submission services too. You can even find services
that will write articles for you and then submit
them. Article Syndication doesn't have to be hugely
complicated. Most of the article libraries do not allow
key-worded links in the articles themselves, though
some do. Typically links are placed in the
informational bio box at the bottom of the
article. The about the author box. In this box you get
to say who wrote the article, and provide a line or
two about the author. Including a link, or maybe a
couple of links back to the authors
website. Remember, rather than a name or URL link
back to your site, you want a key-worded link. Most
article libraries have very low standards.
Essentially, anyone can submit an article. And
all to often, the articles are poorly written. Some of
the libraries try to keep their standards up
though, and in any case, you want well written
articles, because the better written and more the
interesting the article, the more likely it is to be
picked up and used by site owners and
bloggers. Finally, another Article Syndication
strategy that is rarely discussed. Write articles and
provide them directly to bloggers to run on their
sites. Find the blogs that are related to your area or
business.
Then approach them to see if they might want
to run guest articles. Many blogs will. If the articles
are interesting and well written. There are even sites
that connect blogs with bloggers for this very
purpose. We'll look more at blogs in the next
video. A quick comment about duplicate
content. Yes it would be better if your articles were
all different, and in fact some services even provide
tools that help you mix up your articles. You provide
several headers, several opening
paragraphs, several closing paragraphs and so
on. And the software them picks randomly so that
each submitted article is different.
If you're posting to blogs, you may want to
manually modify your articles so each blog to which
you send an article gets a unique one. Article
Syndication is being used very successfully in many
linking campaigns. And although there are plenty
of low-value syndication-libraries, there are still high-
value syndication mechanisms available to you if
you look carefully.
ARTICLESYNDICATION

15. 15A Modern Guide
to Link Building
There's a fundamental difference between
articles posted into syndication libraries, and those
posted directly to blogs. The links in blogs are likely
to be far more valuable than regular syndication
articles. The search engines know the article
libraries when they see them. And lest, don't links in
their pages high value, and even if someone picks
up an article from the library and posts it on their
site, the search engines may recognize the article
from elsewhere, and thus, give the links relatively
low value.
However, unique content on blogs can
provide very valuable links back to your site. There
is several way to get links placed on blogs. First,
there is the idea of posting links in article comment
areas. A strategy that is essentially worthless, but
you'll still find companies selling blog comment
services. This is what's known as blog spam, and
apart from being obnoxious, essentially polluting
people's blogs. It really doesn't work, because links
and comments are virtually always nofollow links. In
fact, that's why the rel=nofollow tag was created in
the first place, to discourage blog spam.
Next, is the idea of submitting guest articles to
blog-guest posting. If you do this, the articles will be
posted into the blog's article area, and links there
are generally follow links. These are good links,
especially when they come from popular blogs.
Guest blogging has got really bad press in the SEO
world in the last year or two, because there were a
number of services that essentially paid bloggers to
place articles on their site. That's not what i'm
recommending. I suggest you avoid these services
and in fact a number of them have closed down.
I'm talking about high quality, unique articles,
posted on blogs that want the articles because they
provide value to the blog's readers. Not garbage
articles hosted simply because the writer paid to
have them placed. You can also try to convince
bloggers to list to a site in their blogroll or their list of
links. You'll need to have a site that is worth linking
to of course. If for example you're promoting a site
that sells a discount snowshoeing gear, you may be
able to get people who blog about snowshoeing to
list you as a resource.
Finally, you can also get links from blogs by
convincing bloggers to write about your site. Of
course you will need something to write about, a
hook that you can hang a story on. Again, links and
articles posted on blogs, whether written by you or
the blogger, are generally follow links. A good blog
campaign can be very valuable because you get
links distributed widely across the internet, and
they're the type of links that Google typically likes to
see, the real thing. But to make such a campaign
work, you really do have to have a good story.
There has to be a reason for bloggers to link
to your site. I think of a blog link campaign as blog
PR, and there is a core concept in public relations
that goes back many years, "If you want people to
write about or talk about you, you have got to have a
hook to hang the story on". What, I ask my clients, is
your USP? Your unique selling proposition. What
makes your site so special? If you can't answer that
question, there's probably no reason for bloggers to
write about you. If you're just one site in a crowded
arena of similar sites, bloggers won't want to write
about you.
And in any case, you have a bigger problem.
How do you hope to compete in any way? Let's
assume though, that you can answer that question,
and that you really do have a good answer. You
have the best prices, or the best selection, or the
best content, or something that sets you apart. So
the first thing to do, is find the bloggers who are
good prospects for your pitch. You may already
know the number of bloggers, but you can find more
by searching Google for your keywords, along with
the word "blog", for instance.
And don't forget to follow links in blogrolls, or
the useful link lists within the blogs themselves.
You'll soon find a large number of blogs in virtually
any subject area. When you find useful blogs, you'll
want to record some basic information, perhaps in a
spreadsheet. The blog name, the URL, the name of
the person who owns the blog, a link to the author
page, perhaps the author's email address or other
contact method. If one of your goals is to get blogroll
links, you'll want to record information about that too.
Blog linking campaigns are often
overlooked, but can be incredibly powerful. If you
have a good story to tell, get out there, and tell it to
the bloggers.
GUESTPOSTING

16. 16A Modern Guide
to Link Building
Link bait is a simple concept. You place
something on your site that acts as bait for links. It
attracts links. People link to your site not because
you want them to, but because they really want to.
They want to tell people about whatever bait you
place there. You place the bait, then let people know
about it and wait for the links to roll in. These are the
very best type of links you can have. In fact, when
Matt Cutts, Google's liaison with the SEO world,
fields questions about linking, link bait is one of the
first things he mentions.
So what is link bait? It's simply something so
interesting, or useful, or entertaining, or funny, or
sexy, or intriguing, or perhaps even disgusting or
evil that people will link to it because they just feel
the need to tell their friends and colleagues about it.
A classic example is, of course, YouTube, which at
the end of the day is all about link bait. YouTube
contains millions of videos and while it's true that
many of them are most certainly not link bait, many
are. And consequently, YouTube has more than a
billion and a half incoming links.
Another example is Wikipedia, a site that
contains around 18 million pages, each one of which
could be regarded as link bait to someone. You may
not be interested in the Beard Liberation Front, but
apparently, hundreds of people are. Of course, we
can't all be YouTube or Wikipedia, but that doesn't
mean you can't create your own link bait on a more
modest scale. So what can you do? Well, an
obvious idea is hosting a blog on a subject related to
the area you work in. Blogs are very easy to create,
good blogs are much harder.
So don't jump into blogging until you are sure
you can make it work. You need someone who can
write, who wants to write, and who can write articles
that people want to read. If you got what it takes, if
you can create a really top-notch blog, a blog may
provide great link bait. But what is a blog? It's really
just a content management system. So whether you
create content within a blog or using more traditional
web development methods, it's all content at the end
of the day. Perhaps you can provide useful tools of
some sort.
Whatever your link bait is, the next step of
course is to tell people about it. Obviously, you'll
want to use SEO to make sure your link bait is easy
to find, but you'll also want to get out there and let
bloggers, for example, know about whatever it is
you've posted. You'll want to do a basic PR
campaign contacting bloggers, relevant
newspapers, magazines sites, get listed in any
directories that may be appropriate, and so on. Of
course, you'll also want to place link invitations next
to your bait. A little social networking icons and
share buttons that you see so often.
A quick tip, think back to the first two
examples I gave in this video, YouTube and
Wikipedia. Apart from the fact that they contain huge
amounts of link bait, what else do they have in
common? The crowd created the link bait. The
organizations that run YouTube and Wikipedia don't
create any content. They simply created the
infrastructure that allowed other people, the crowd,
to create the link bait for them. In fact, many of the
world's top websites do this. Think of sites such as
Yelp, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Craigslist, and many
more.
Sites that let other people create their content,
they're link bait. If it's at all possible for you to do
that, it's a powerful thing. An example would be a
retail company that also managed to set up and run
popular forums related to its products. Adobe, for
instance, hosts community learning areas. Forums
and music groups, for instance, in which content
provided by Adobe customers act as link bait for
many thousands of links. That's perhaps not why
Adobe did it, but nonetheless, link bait it is.
Creating link bait is actually quite difficult for
many companies, which is why so many people turn
to other methods; methods that create less valuable
links. Spend a little while thinking about this, though,
and you may find a way to create something that
people really want to link to.
LINKBAITING

17. 17A Modern Guide
to Link Building
There is a lot of hype surrounding social
networking, it's quite possible in many cases to
create an effective linking campaign without social
networking. I've seen many sites ranked well using
linking strategies that don't include social
networking. In fact there's also the problem that in
many cases, social networking links are no-follow
links. Take Facebook for instance, the single most
important social network. Links from Facebook to
external pages are no-follow links.
On the other hand some other social
networks use follow links. Take a look for instance at
Google+. Yes, there are some no-follow links
between Google+ accounts for instance, but the
external links, at least for now, are follow
links. Myspace provides no-follow links while
LinkedIn provides follow links. But in both cases,
they're not direct links to the reference sites.They
are redirects and not 301 redirects, so they don't
carry value. Some social networking sites evidently
try to decide which links should be followed and
which shouldn't. Digg for instance says that they
provide follow links in cases that a story has
reached a certain popularity. How about
Twitter? Twitter used to use no-follow links, but
more recently seems to have switched to follow
links. Some Twitter feed mechanisms convert them
to no-follow links though.
For a link to have value it needs to return
301. How about the link shortening services such as
bitly, Google URL Shortener, and Tiny URL? Twitter
users often employ these services to create short
links for use in the limited space of a tweet. Well,
these services typically use 301 redirects. These
three certainly do and you can check your
favorite service for yourself using the method I just
described.
So some social networking links do carry
value, the follow links. But what about the no-follow
links? Is there SEO value to social networking no-
follow links? That is, will the search
engines consider the links for ranking
purposes? Will social network links help push your
site up in the search results? Well,technically no. In
theory at least, the major search engines, and that
essentially means Google and Bing, ignore no-follow
links for ranking purposes.
So social networking useful or not for SEO? In
some cases, definitely useful as you'll get follow
links. In others when you're only getting no-follow
links, perhaps not. The official position of the search
engines is of course you should go ahead and
promote your site in the social networks because
links bring traffic regardless of search results
ranking. And that's perfectly true.
A well-executed social networking
campaign can help a website get traffic
directly, bypassing the search engines. Don't get
pulled in by the hype though. Social networking is no
silver bullet and in fact it doesn't work very well for
many types of businesses. It's not a "one size fits
all" type of thing. In any case, in this video
course, we're interested in SEO, in optimizing for the
search engines. So I'm not going to get into general
social networking discussion. Definitely some food
for thought.
If you think you can make social networking
work for you, regardless of search engine
results, then of course go ahead and do it. If there is
any search engine lift, then that's great. But if you're
not sure that non-search engine results from a social
networking campaign are worth the cost to you and
social networking is very hard to succeed at for
many types of businesses, you might simply do the
basics. Set up the obvious social network
accounts, just don't spend a lot of time on it. You'll
want Facebook and Google+ accounts, perhaps
Twitter and LinkedIn.
You'll also want to use the usual social
networking and share buttons, of course. And try to
encourage people to link to you from their social
networking accounts. Social networking has become
popular in SEO circles. And in fact there are many
companies that will go out and create social
networking links for you. We'll be discussing the
whole idea of buying links like this in a later
video. Do these link campaigns work? Perhaps,
depending on what you believe about the no-follow
issue and what proportion of follow links you're
creating doing such a campaign.
But again, as the search engines are
continually pointing out, linking is not all about
SEO. Sometimes a link is just a link.
SOCIALMEDIA

18. 18A Modern Guide
to Link Building
• One-way links. This simply means that you get a link pointing to
your site without placing a link back to another site. Typically,
this term is used in some kind of link network situation, so be
careful. You may be asked to link to a different site, site B we'll
say, in return for the link from site A, you may be getting yourself
into some kind of link network, and by linking out, you're telling
the search engines that you are a willing participant and thus risk
some kind of penalty.
• deep linking, simply mean linking into your website rather than
just to the site's homepage. This is a good thing to do, spreading
your linking around your site. The term above the fold means the
space in a website that could be seen when the page loads
without scrolling down the page. It's quite likely that links near
the top of the page are more valuable than links lower down the
page. Another link type that's likely to be more valuable is a
content or in-content link, a link that will be placed into content
within a web page rather than just in a block of links.
• landing page. That's simply the page that the link points to; the
page that the visitor lands on after clicking the link.
• Relevant means the link will come from a page that contains
content that is somehow related to the subject area of your site.
That's a good thing, but sometimes even links are non-relevant
pages, in particular, if they are keyworded can help.
• A permanent link is what it sounds like. You pay once and the
link should stay for good; though realistically one day the site will
probably disappear.
• Alexa ranks. Alexa is a website analysis service owned by
Amazon and it maintains list of sites ranked by popularity; the
lower the number, the higher the rank.A low number means a
more popular website.
• Site wide links are links placed on every page in a website. This
often refers to links in blogrolls, or in traditional websites, links in
the page footer. But it may also be links in some kind of link
block higher up on the page. A Drip Feed refers to creating links
gradually, a few a day or a week. The idea is to avoid a sudden
huge increase in links pointing to your site which may look
suspicious.
BONUS LINKS
we've looked at a variety of ways to get
links to your site. From directories, to
link baits, reciprocal linking, to working
with bloggers. Some of these methods
are better than others, of course. But
they're some of the more common
methods for creating links. There's an
almost limitless number of ways people
go about creating links.
• Classified-ad sites. There was a
time classified ads could really
boost a site in the search engines.
But Craigslist has provided nofollow
links for a number of years now.
And most other classified ads sites
provide either nofollow links or
redirect links, so they don't help
much these days from an SEO
perspective. On the other hand,
classified ads, in particular
Craigslist ads, can generate a lot of
traffic to a website.
• Forum linking can be very
effective. I'm not talking about
spamming forums. In fact, you
might term this community
marketing, though there can
definitely be an SEO benefit. if you
can spread these links around a
variety of forums, it can be quite
effective. Note that nofollow links
are not as common in forums as in
blog comments, perhaps half the
time your links will be follow links
and half the time they'll be nofollow
links, either way, there's.
• A similar strategy to forum linking
is Q and A site linking. You've
probably seen these sites, where
people ask questions and others
answer. E.g. Quora Many of these
provide nofollow links, though some
are still giving follow links. But even
the nofollow links can help your site
if you're answering the right
questions.
TERMINOLOGY

19. 19A Modern Guide
to Link Building
Linking is usually the worst part of SEO work. It's a real stumbling block for many people. Actually creating a
website and making sure it's optimized correctly is rather like paint by numbers. You just have to follow the steps
and get it done. But then you come to linking and in many ways, it's far more complicated. It can be boring, tedious
work and it's often hard to find good people to do it properly. It's going to get harder too; this is really a critical area
for search engines.
One sad result of the focus on links to help with search ranking is that the web is now drowning in garbage pages
created solely to hold links pointing to other websites, to convince the search engines that the reference sites are
important. This is bad for the search engines and bad for the web. So the search engines are going to continue to
work on cleaning up, to distinguish between good and bad links. As I discussed earlier in this course, there are two
types of links: the real thing and the fake thing.
Links that exist for good reason and links that exist solely for SEO reasons. They're all part of the link game. And as
time goes on, the search engines will get better and better at figuring out at the difference. In some ways that will be
making linking even harder. But if the search engines could distinguish between two forms of link 100% perfectly, it
might actually make linking easier. Right now, there's a link arm's race going on. It's all very well the search engines
discouraging the link game, the purchasing of links for instance, but as I've mentioned before, at the same time they
are encouraging the link game, quite simply because it works.
And that's why Google talks so much about link bait and why you should think about it too. The most powerful
linking technique is to create something so useful, or entertaining, or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or whatever,
that people all over the web link to it. It's what the search engines want to see and it's what they will reward you for,
if you can figure out how to make it happen. This ebook is by no means exhaustive. If you want to continue learning
about linking methods, there are lots of places to go with a wide variety of opinions.
For the Google point of view, about all things SEO, not just links, I'd suggest that you check in with Matt Cutts' blog
now and then. You might also want to read Search Engine Lands, Link Week Column. Search Engine Land is about
SEO in general of course, but has a regular column about linking strategies. The major link analysis companies,
SEOmoz and Majestic SEO, can also provide interesting information. Or simply Google for terms, such as link-
building strategies and link-building ideas, and you'll find plenty to keep you busy.
So we've come to the end, Thanks for reading and good luck with your link building!
HAPPY LINKBUILDING!
Credits:
1. lynda.com
2. Quick Sprout
3. Moz
4. Freepik
Conclusions

20. 20A Modern Guide
to Link Building
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