Link Building Notes of an SEO Kindergartner

SEO digest

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Sharing is good in kindergarten and in SEO.

- Kate 

Hello fellow mozzers! Since this is my first YOUmoz post, let me introduce myself. I am Pritam Barhate, a fellow (as you may have noticed) who posts long, intelligent, insightful comments (* All the readers roll their eyes. One of them even looks for a nearby rotten tomato. Fortunately, he doesn't find it. *) here on SEOmoz.

By profession I am a web developer and designer. I was introduced to SEO around 9-10 months ago. And since then I have been fascinated by the subject.

A while back, Rand did a post asking us, "What Part of the SEO Process is Hardest for You?", to which most of us replied, "Link Building." My answer was the same. I decided to go through all the blog posts on SEOmoz tagged under 'link building'. While reading the posts (as like a good student), I took some notes to record the tips and techniques of link building. And since this is my first year as an SEO, I consider myself an SEO Kindergartner.

This is my attempt to share all those link building tips that I learned from SEOmoz in a well structured manner so that they can be read as a complete document and can be referenced later when we need help in any particular area. I hope that all the SEO beginners out there will find this helpful and maybe, just maybe (a little tiny maybe), those SEO ninjas will also find it helpful in case they need to brush off a bit of rust here and there from their swords.

So without wasting anymore of your time, here I present to you...

Link Building Notes of an SEO Kindergartner: 19 pages filled with highly effective link building tactics shared by the coolest Mozzers (Size: 156 KB).

Introduction to the Link Building Notes:

The very first tip in the notes is Link Building Opportunities

Where to look for links:

1. Social news sites
2. Online media sites such as The New York Times, Boston.com, and About.com
3. University sites
4. Government sites
5. The blogosphere
6. Professional contacts (satisfied customers, suppliers, business groups, regulatory bodies, similar sites operating in different geographic areas)
7. Personal contacts
8. Directories

How to get links:

1. Link bait content
2. High quality exclusive content
3. Missing content on other authority websites
4. Article submissions/article exchanges
5. Your own blogs
6. Widgets
7. Through PR firms and offline marketing
8. Contests
9. Ask for a link (directly/indirectly)
10. Micro sites/buying sites for links
11. Restructuring your website to make it more link-sexy

After that I have created 20 broad categories representing each of the above (8 places + 11 tactics + 1 miscellaneous) and put the tips in these categories where they belong. Somehow this reminds me of the sorting hat in Harry Potter movies, and that hat is black ;-). But I haven't tried to pass any judgment while including link building tips. If it is posted by a mozzer then it is there. As far as Black/White hat is considered, use your moral judgment.

Also, there is one big question of credits. As I started putting the final version of notes together initially I tried to add the username of the mozzer who posted the tip. But then I found out that it was becoming very jarring to read the notes because of all these user names on every third line. Also, it was adding quite a few lines to the documents and I wanted to compact the notes as much as possible.

But then again, it is not good to use somebody's content and not give him/her some benefit. And for an SEO, what is more valuable than a link? So here are the real heroes of this post (in alphabetical order):

Ant Onaf, bookworm seo (Gabriel Goldenberg), BottomTurn, Brent D. Payne, Crash (Melanie Nathan), David LaFerney, davidmihm, domfosnz, EGOL, Eric Enge, everett, hagrin, HoboSEO, Hornedog, HunterW, jamersan, Kate, Lars Bachmann, Lydia, Mark Rushworth, Matthew Inman, Michael Martinez, mikka2008 (Michael Janik), Mintyman, Pulkit007, Rand, rishil (Rishi Lakhani), rjonesx, roadies (Jason Murphy), Scott Willoughby, Sean Maguire, Thetjo, Tom Critchlow, tom6a, TroyJMorris, TShears, Will Critchlow, wouter, wrttnwrd (Ian).

Need for a wiki dedicated to SEO:

While gathering material for this post, I realized that SEOs as a community don’t have a wiki dedicated to SEO. I know Wikipedia, Knol, and sites like are those are out there. But Wikipedia nofollows everything, so contributors don’t get much incentive for contributing. And maybe someone will ask, "What’s wrong with YOUmoz? If you have something meaningful to say, post it there." Yes, but by nature YOUmoz is a blog. And in my opinion, blogs are a navigational nightmare. A wiki is more organized, so it is easy to access the content as and when required without much hassle.

What I am suggesting is a wiki dedicated to SEO maintained by an entity that does SEO and understands SEO. For this to be successful, I think such an entity should be popular enough and should have its own active community. (Hint SEOmoz, Hint!) Somebody financially big enough that they will not need to add advertisements on the wiki pages (at least not within content AdSense). Somebody who will do it just for branding purposes.

Does some great wiki like that already exist and I just made an ass out of myself by asking to create it? If yes, please point me to that wiki.

Thank you.

www.seomoz.org

published @ September 9, 2008