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All the link-building rules you will ever need

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 13, 2007 in Link Building, Link Theory

So I was reading SE Roundtable’s report on the 2007 SES New York Linking Strategies session. I was not only disappointed to see such lame, outdated advice being shared at a major conference, I was convinced that we made the right decision not to send me to New York.

Most people know that I’m highly critical of the SEO industry in general. I expect just about any reservations I express to either be ignored, ridiculed, or at least taken with a grain of salt by the firmly entrenched echelons of the SEO industry, the people whom Aaron Pratt calls the SEO elites.

A lot of those people have been doing SEO for at least as long as I have, some of them even longer (and I got involved in search engine optimization in 1998). I am what Danny Sullivan would call a “second generation SEO”. I don’t pretend to be any more “early” than that.

Still, there’s a lot of just plain, bad advice that you will find on many of the so-called “A List” SEO blogs. These people have become so emotionally invested to their strategies that they just don’t see how much they have limited themselves. There is a difference between making enough money to hire additional people and actually knowing what you are talking about. And idiot can become a billionaire with a stupid idea.

The problem with following outdated advice from people who are making money is that every methodology has its first-generation investors who make the millions. These are the people who take out advertisements in the backs of magazines or who put up Web sites offering to sell you their secrets to success for just $20. But when you pay your $20 for that eBook that tells you how to become a millionaire, do you actually stop to consider that if this guy was really rich he wouldn’t be selling books for $20 that share the secret to his succes?

In search engine optimization, people share their ideas for one of two reasons: either they are genuinely interested in helping other people learn about the industry or they are trying to make a name for themselves. A lot of, and perhaps all of, the SEO elites fall into both categories. They are well beyond the “unknown” status but they recognize the value of maintaining visibility so as to attract new clients and keep their value fresh in case they need to form new partnerships or seek new jobs.

I’m here for similar reasons.

Okay, you want the juice my headline promised. First, let me point out what is outdated advice from the SES session. Much of it is simply wrong.

From DetLev Johnson:

• “One of the ways [to build links] is through directories that are made for people and that people use.”
• “He only uses directories that rank well in Google.”
• “You can use blogs, wikis, and forums as well. Blogs help and establish you as an industry expert.”
• “Take advantage of social media for promotion - Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, etc.”

From Jim Boykin:

• “Submitting to search engines is long dead. They find you.”
• “Meta tags and on page optimization without backlinks is dead.”
• “Don’t link a bunch of your sites together. The IP addresses of the sites are important.”
• “Getting new sites ranked quickly for competitive factors is dead.”
• “4 Trust Factor categories: unique content, who do you link to (and their neighborhoods), who links to you, and is your link found within the content?”
• “Who do you want to link to: trusted sites, edus, govs, non competing resources”

I like to read Jim’s blog but I find it to be less and less informative with each post. In my opinion, anyone who cannot get a domain to rank for competitive queries in less than six months has no business speaking at SEO conferences and should be taken off the “A” list. Who are you kidding when you say a domain should be at least 2 years old before anyone with a trusted site will link to it?

The whole “trust” issue has been misanalyzed by these guys anyway. They all run around the Web blathering about Google’s TrustRank when there is no such thing. Yahoo! devised TrustRank, not Google. If you don’t know enough about who developed TrustRank to attribute the name correctly, you don’t need to be dropping it in your “advice”.

And none of the major search engine rank on the basis of trust anyway.

So here are the link building rules you need, details follow.

1. Ignore all link-building advice from any SEO who speaks at a conference, has a popular blog or forum, or is back-slapped by any other SEO who speaks at a conference, has a popular blog or forum, or gets back-slapped. Why? Detlev Johnson put it well: “some methods work better than others. You should find one that fits you best”.
2. Ignore all link-building advice from anyone who runs a linking business: link builders, link brokers, link reciprocators, link managers, etc. They have a vested interest in acquiring you as a customer. They may do what they do very well. But if you’re looking for link building advice, you’re looking in the wrong direction. They don’t build links the way most people can or do.
3. Ignore anyone whose link-building advice includes words like “directories”, “profiles”, “articles”, “press releases”, etc. You can easily go back and find a gazilion forum and blog posts where I, myself, gave out such advice. The problem is that the advice is now so frequently handed out you’re running behind the train as it leaves the station.

Do these guys give out good advice at all? Sure. You can find a few gems of wisdom even on Aaron Wall’s blog occasionally. Anyone on the “A” list can give out good advice once in a while. So can anyone on the “B” list. So can anyone on the “C” list.

Everyone once in a while some of these sage advice givers tell you, “Take this with a grain of salt. It may or may not work for you.” That’s the best advice any of them have ever given, and they don’t give it enough.

You need three kinds of links:

1. You need lnks that get your site indexed.
2. You need links that build trust in your site.
3. You need links that help you with competitive, hyper-optimized queries.

If you don’t know how to go charging into a competitive query with on-page optimization, you’re not a search engine optimizer. You have not earned the badge of Professional SEO. You may be a darned good link builder but you don’t qualify as a search engine optimizer until you show you can take a page and put the keywords on there right.

The list for keyword optimization ain’t long. Anyone should be able to remember it, and it works like a charm with all four major search engines (Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo!).

1. Title tag (helps with all four)
2. Keywords meta tag (helps with Yahoo! and Ask)
3. Meta description tag (take control over your listing in the search results)
4. H1 headers (or a bolded large font header line)
5. Internal link anchor text (”Home” is the most optimized keyword on the Web)
6. Repeat your keywords liberally in your body copy
7. Use embedded bold and italics, not CSS, for emphasis.
8. Repeat your keywords liberally in your body copy
9. Use your keywords in ALT= text for images where relevant

This is not Rocket Science. It’s so easy a cave man can do it. Your grandma is probably doing it right now.

Before you worry about links, optimze your content because search engines rank on relevance.

Now, where do you get links? That is what everyone wants to know. What’s the secret sauce?

The truth is that there is no secret sauce. You have no way of knowing which links help or why they help or how they help. Links don’t just boost your rankings. In most cases, in most competitive queries, links are not helping the rankings as much as the very badly misinformed SEO community has convinced itself they do.

If you find a directory that meets Detlev Johnson’s criteria, you feel the link will be helpful, great. Go for it. But one of his criteria is that the directory page where you link will go should have as few links as possible. Why? That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. People generally don’t use directories any more. That’s the sad truth of the matter. You’ll get limited visibility from a directory listing, so being prominently featured in a directory page is not as helpful as it once was.

If the page is going to pass value, help you get crawled, and build your trust reputation, take the link. Don’t dither over PageRank. Don’t obsess over how many outbound links should be on a page.

We received an email at Xenite this week from someone wanting to buy a link. I don’t sell links. I may give the guy a link after I look at his site because he claims to have content that is actually relevant to our own content. So when you ignore the rules on a Web site that tells you not to ask for links (I won’t explain why I’m even considering linking to him), make sure you provide an extremely compelling reason for risking an irate Webmaster’s fury.

In other words, stop asking other sites for links. Tell people what your site is about and let them decide if it’s worth linking to. I hate to say it, but the least utilized tactic for getting links is simply to send out an email that says, “Hi, I’m Michael Martinez. I’ve got a Web site called Xenite.Org. It includes forums, essays, news, and feature articles about science fiction, entertainment, and other topics I find to be personally interested. I’d like you to check it out.”

But don’t send it to 100 people. Don’t send it to 50 people. Nothing irks me more than to see I’ve been spammed by someone hunting links. There is one reason more than any other that I’ll be glad to link to your site. I’m the only guy you’re asking for help from. Think about that. The quality of your site, in terms of whether I link to it, is highly dependent upon the uniqueness of the link you want.

Volume does not equal success. If you think you need 1,000 links, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve been reading too many SEO blogs and forums and paying attention to the wrong people (many “A” listers have all said frequently that it’s not volume, it’s quality that matters — that is advice I whole-heartedly agree with).

Think in terms of who can be the best influencer in a community for you. Don’t go after the top five influencers in a community. If you get just one influencer in a community to link to your site, odds are pretty good that other influencers in that community will follow suit. They don’t like to be left behind. When I read the SEO news sites every morning, many of them have the same headlines, talk about the same breaking news.

Think in terms of how many communities your content provides value to. Value is measured only in how much free, unfettered information you provide. Just because a site gets 5 million visitors a month doesn’t mean it provides a lot of value. If the content is obscured by ads, if the articles are little itty-bitty eyeball bait, the site doesn’t provide value. When you’re building your own site’s visibility and reputation, you don’t have the luxury of playing with ad-obscured eyeball bait. How many different communities will get useful information from your eCommerce site?

Leverage your personal interests. There is no reason that a Web site which sells mail-order pizza kits cannot have a features article section where the owner talks about his hotel in upstate New York. Include pictures. Link to your articles from the site’s home page. Link out from your articles to sites that share your interests. People will find your articles and link to you. The content is not what makes your site look professional or unprofessional. It’s the presentation.

Build networks of Web sites. Matt Cutts pointed out to someone last year that if you manage 50 sites you’re less likely to spend as much time and attention on each site than if you just manage 1. He’s right. But a lot of people create and promote really awful sites while staying focused on just one domain. Quality is not dependent upon whether you’re managing one domain or one hundred. It depends on the standards you set for yourself.

If you have 5 domains, you can interlink them together. If you have 500 domains, linking them together may look a little suspicious. There is no reason not to link a small number of related domains together if you own them and want people to know about them. Just don’t be sneaky. But if you’re cranking out 50 domains, I have to ask why. At first glance, you’ll look like an AdSense spammer to me. Or maybe just a spammer.

GeoLocal Web promotion does not require a domain for every community you target. But if you have a network of Web sites you control, link to yourself. You should have nothing to hide.

Ask not for the links you want. Link to the sites you want to be associated with. In the game of link-building, the fastest way to get links is to build outbound links, say nothing, and wait. It works like magic. In the time it takes you to write that spammy looking email asking yet another jaded Webmaster to link to your Ring Tones site, how many links can you be adding to your content to help your visitors find great content?

Make every link on your Web site a personal seal of approval. If you are not willing to openly link to your own content, why should anyone else? But if you are unwilling to link out to other people’s content, then why should anyone else link to yours?

Ignore all lists of “best places to get links” Every time some popular SEO guru creates a “50 ways to get link lovers” blog post, I roll my eyes. You don’t help anyone when you compile and publish a list of 101 cool places to get links. At worst you’re ruining the resources for everyone because they’ll be spammed to death. At best you’re just looking silly because you’re listing resources no one can get links from.

If you’re link hungry and you have been following all those “101 ways to get free links” articles, stop and look at where your site is. If you’re not where you want to be, what is your incentive for continuing to waste your time? If you’ve actually achieved your goals, why are you spinning your wheels? You’re at number 1. Rejoice! But if you feel like you can do more, then you’ve done something wrong.

Your search engine optimization should not be based on the acquisition of links. There is no methodology which is more inefficient and produces less return on investment than SEO-through-linkage. If you’re trying to build up your rankings with link anchor text, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re trying to build up your rankings through PageRank, you’re doing it wrong.

The SEO community is very good about promoting bad ideas. They do it all the time. They’ve been doing it continuously for years. They will continue to do it for years. It takes the most popular SEOs six months to a year to understand when “sound advice” has played itself out. At any given time, about 1/3 of your favorite SEO gurus are wrongly proclaiming the death or rebirth of some methodology.

The SEO community is also a wealth of good ideas. They find good ideas and toss them out all the time. There are two problems you have to resolve: first, how do you determine which ideas are good and which are bad? What’s the SEO methdology? Experiment, evaluate, adjust.

Second, how do you know when a good idea goes bad? There are two ways to tell. One way is to just watch for the search engines to start hammering on a methodology. Remember link farms? Remember paid links? At best they are risky. At worst they are a waste of time and money. The other way to tell when a good idea goes bad is to see who is denouncing it as “old advice”, “bad advice”, etc. Is it someone who used to advocate the idea? If so, learn from the reformed smoker. Anyone who turns their back on an idea they once advocated is trying to stay ahead of the curve.

We’re not always right. But we’re always looking for better ways to get links. The easiest, most natural way to obtain links is to build links to other sites. But the problem is that too many people ignore the last rule on the list:

Don’t confuse search engine optimization with Web site promotion. If you just launched a new Web site and you’re only plan for getting traffic is to achieve high rankings in the search engines, you’re doing it wrong.

The right way to promote a Web site is through every avenue and channel you can possibly work into. No one is limited to just the search engines. If you think you have no other options, you have much to learn about the ways of SEO, my young apprentice.