Link Building

For the average web publisher, free traffic is our lifeblood. Thats why SEO gets a lot more attention in this industry than PPC marketing (advertising-side), e-mail marketing, conversions, etc. Hell, I would say SEO is probably the number one thing on most of our minds.

Last week a sixth grader was suspended from school for giving Jolt gum to another student. The problem? The gum contains caffeine, a stimulant banned by the school (nevermind that they sell soda in the cafeteria.) The response from Jolt — a $1,000 scholarship. That $1,000 has bought Jolt a hell of a lot of publicity for a very small price (and made the school administration look like complete asses, but thats a different story.)

Jump over to Sweden; last week Swedish police raided the servers of a search engine called “The Pirate Bay.” This website was a search engine that allowed people to find BitTorrent files on the internet. Incidently, most of those files are for copyrighted work including movies, software, games, books, etc. Immediately following the raid the MPAA issued a press release detailing, among other things, that The Pirate Bay was raking in $60,000 a month from advertising. Fast forward to yesterday, the site is back up, under a new name The Police Bay. Along with hundreds of people in Stolkholm protesting the raid the owner issued a statement saying the site would be “bigger and better than ever.”

Think back to 1999 to early 2000 and the days of Napster. Simliar events transpired. While Napster ultimately was shut down its owner was able to spin the RIAA’s attacks and make a killing in the process.

This post isn’t about the ethics of piracy or whether kids should be allowed to injest caffeine in school. Thats not the point. The point is that good marketers can not only fend off their attackers but that they can turn them into homeruns.

Right now Shawn Hogan, the founder of Digital point, is doing taking on the MPAA. Whether he wins or not, its going to give digitalpoint some killer backlinks. I don’t think that is his intention or goal, but it will happen regardless.

Lets call this matyrdom SEO.

Jon from the Super Affiliate Marketing Blog made a post today talking about link building strategies.

“Don’t worry about pagerank either, because it’s fairly useless. Make sure the pages that are linking to you are ones that are visited often by the engines and are RELEVANT to your PAGES.”

If you are doing this part-time you will be anxious for the quick easy links. It is well worth it to spend some time building links from high quality related websites rather than chasing every free directory or spammy link exchange page. Building a quality content site will go a long way here.

One technique I have been using recently is including a backlink request in registration confirmation e-mail sent out to my forum members. In this particular niche many of the users have their own websites.

Be active in the online community surrounding the niche you are targetting. A few contacts will go a long way. The first blog that I started, which was a little over a year ago, is effectively dead. Despite this I get targetted link and advertising requesting regularly. Because this blog is linked to in the right places and already ranking for many keywords, the link requests come to me, not the other way around.

Most search engine optimizers agree that .edu and .gov sites carry a lot of weight when it comes to link value. Presumably, sites, as well as links from, either domain extension tend to be pretty authoritative. If you look up a site on breast cancer, its probably going to be pretty acurate.

Today I ran into a story about a Northwestern University professor who told an Iranian newspaper that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

This was the part of the article that caught my eye:

Butz, a tenured Northwestern professor since 1974, is known for denying that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II. He promotes his views through his Northwestern-affiliated Web site, including a link to his 1976 book, “The Hoax of the 20th Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry.”

I did a search and quickly found his site, yes, on a .edu: http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/

If someone who denies the Holocaust happened can get a page on a .edu site, theres a pretty strong chance that you can get .edu links to your commercial site, and get away with it. In fact, Jim Boykin often talks about getting .edu links on his blog.

If you are having trouble bringing traffic to your new website (or old one) here are two great posts by Aaron Wall at SEOBook.com. Its well worth your time to read these completely and understand them (in other words, don’t skim)

How Do I Get Bloggers Attention?
How to Create a Giant…

The more I read Aaron’s blog, the more convinced I am that he “gets it.” As both a blogger and a professional developer I can tell you these two articles are gold. Some of those internet companies struggling to be the next MySpace or Weblogs Inc should spend their time looking for experts like him instead of trying to win more venture capital millions.

Ever notice that obsession with directory listings website development forum users have? (sitepoint, digitalpoint) What is amusing is that, until recently, I’ve heard little to no mention of Wikipedia. Imagine that, a website people actually read, use, and follow links from (An Alexa rank of 31! Oh, and you can enter your link and have it instantly added to the page — no login needed.

Unlike most directories, Wikipedia sends real traffic. There are two reasons for this. First, many of Wikipedia’s entries have been getting high rankings in the search engines. Second, anyone can copy Wikipedia’s content (given that they follow the proper rules.) This means that your link will show up on hundreds of other pages around the internet. It hasn’t made me rich, but I’ve had scraper sites send me valuable traffic thanks to a Wikipedia link or two.

Things aren’t quite as easy as they sound. The novice Wikipedia user may not be aware that all changes are logged — IP included. Wikipedia’s active users and editors are very viligant. In fact, Wikipedia editors recently caught Congressional staffers making over 1,000 edits — including one calling another US Senator a “douche-bag.”

This attention to detail is probably why Wikipedia is nearly as accurate as The Encyclopedia Britannica. Expect your link to go under the microscope.

I’ll admit, even I got in trouble with Wikipedia a while ago. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been and I ended up getting a warning. A suggestion: if you add a link and it gets deleted, don’t re-add it again.

Wikipedia’s open nature at first appears to leave it open to exploitation. While spammy links may go unoticed in the lesser-used of Wikipedia’s 945,000 english entries don’t expect spam to last in popular entries. If you want your link to stick around it better be pretty damn relevent.

Judge for yourself — there is a thread over at Digitalpoint right now where a few people are discussing their results. Subigo documented his results, which ended up with 15 interviews, including 3 TV and 5 radio.

A press release isn’t a magic bullet. You still have to write about something the media is interested in & write it appropriately. As a general rule, the headline should sum up your main point, and it should read from most important information to least important details. Kind of like the opposite of a joke — the punchline comes first, or else its going to get passed over.

Remember Weblogs Inc. was purchased by AOL for $25 million? Where you one of those people who thought it was overpriced? Read this analysis of traffic for an art e-commerce site following a post on a major blog, BoingBoing. Its complete with charts and graphs. This is some good stuff.

..I ran a report to breakdown visits to the ordering page by initial referrer to the site. As you can see, even though BoingBoing readers directly accounted for 22% of the visits to the site (from the stats above), they accounted for 30% of the visits to the ordering page.

There is an excellent article at the SEOMoz Blog on getting links when you can’t buy them. Rand posts 8 different ways you can get someone to link to you along with details on how to do it. The article is specifically about getting links from sources that don’t accept paid links. Its also works for webmasters with tight budgets.

Be prepared, this will take some work!