Think of link building as Public Relations (PR), not Page Rank (the other PR).

When you do this, you are thinking about quality for your brand and online presence. But, none of the link building effort is worth it, or frankly, matters – if you don’t have a relevant page and strong offer/content to provide to your visitor that is searching for that information. If you do this right – you will get rewarded *everywhere*, from Google, user stickiness, sharing of your information, and opportunity for link reputation, while providing value.

To prepare, ask these questions below – about your page content, about your service, about your product and overall positioning. Can you offer a unique value (or sales) proposition? Are you clearly calling this out in every content piece? (without spamming, of course)

1. What can your product / service do for me? And, that nobody else provides?
2. What can you guarantee me, that nobody else can?
3. What is unique about you, as compared to your competition?
4. Why should I do business with you, and why should I trust you — and nobody else?

These are important questions to ask, and creates a solid foundation for everything you do. Not easy to answer for most, but a necessary discussion along with a SWOT (strength, weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats). This will help keep more visitors on your website, and keep them coming back too.

So, here are reasonable tips that anybody can do.

Controversy tends to work well, but you’ll be amazed how well this can work against you as well. As Matt Cutts (thanks for tips here) at Google says, “it can be okay to uncork a good rant sometimes” but don’t  use this as a norm. You’ll be like a boy who cried wolf, hey, look at me,  pay attention to me, over here, etc – be careful.

You can use humor or bring something original to the table, that’s a lot better. (Dilbert comic strips are classics)

A great way to get links, is to participate in the community. Answering questions on LinkedIn, for example, can work really well for you. If you know the answer to something and say: “hey I know that – I can help you!”. People will be more receptive to clicking to your site and seeing what you’re up to. Answering questions to help other people is really cool. Try Yahoo Answers and even groups in the social media space.

Original research is another great way to create hooks to your site. Danny Sullivan created a comparison of all the spam out there for about 30 days of different e-mail providers and he documented that. He blogged it and a lot of people linked back to him.

You can go out to Google groups, Yahoo! Groups, and other places in the social media space where people are discussing your topic to see what they’re asking.

Social media is really cool. You can enjoy a participation on friendfeed and twitter and look  where people are spending their time. Perhaps it’s more on the Facebook and Twitter – then spend time there. If you have a video and you spoke at a conference, for example – you can you can list that and people will see it.  It helps to create trust and visibility.

The ‘ol “Top 10 lists” are are good, but they have been overused and lost some of their their allure – so you might want to look at that sparingly.

Make sure you get yourself a blog. I set this one up WordPress from an open source download. But, you can try either on WordPress.com, Blogger.com or download the source to install it on your own domain. Update it a couple times a week at first. Then, make sure you join the community and share your blog as appropriate. In the social sense, it’s more about “them” than you, remember that. Your blog can also be a great asset to establish yourself as an authority and thought leader in your business.

How to and tutorials are always great. People are looking for information on the Internet. Your site can be a great way to get awareness to you and your business. And, keep in mind –  if you build this out as useful, quality content pages, you don’t have to think too much about top keywords only – but long tail keywords – that tend to draw really quality traffic  can help you tremendously.

You can make a product or a widget and give it away for free, like a Firefox extension or a WordPress plug-in. Those types of things can be really good. People tend to link back to you as a thank you. You do the work once, and then lots of people can access it and download over time w/links.

Make sure that you have easy access to your site both from a search engine perspective and from user perspective. The site architecture, navigation and structure are very important. Make it easy to get to and links within it. 2-3 link depth is good.

Make sure to create a couple of videos. Short how-to tips or information about your space uploaded to YouTube and others – easy to do.

That’s it!

Stated simply (there’s more to it) – link building pertains to the SEO model where one way back links to a website are made. These are in essence incoming links to your page, and these links act like a VOTE for your page and site.

By creating links from related and authoritative sites back to your own web site you not only inspire additional internet traffic, you can raise your page rank (PR 1-10), and it may help with search website results pages. Some of the most successful link building systems are blogging, forum posting, article marketing and bookmarking and content baiting (writing inspiring content) on related and high quality traffic web sites.

FAST OR SLOW – WHAT’S THE RIGHT PACE?

But – do remember – fast, synthetic development of one way links is suspect so it is much better to form your links steadily as one would expect of a natural site and back link development effort.

It’s much better to use 2 heavy traffic (ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com) article directory sites than to submit your articles to hundreds or maybe thousands of directories as this can create a great quantity of copied content which is devalued by the search site algorithms.

HOW ABOUT DUPLICATE CONTENT?

It’s also a mistake to put articles on your internet site that you have used for repeat marketing purposes because this would create reused content on your site. While you definitely need the advantage of back links to raise your search website results page ( SERP ) rankings, you want to consider other options which can influence your SERP position; like fresh, unique, frequent web copy content.

You can write blog articles on your own blog as well as write comments and postings on other peoples’s blogs that link back to your site.

LINK BAITING

Link baiting is an indirect link building technique in that you don’t immediately place the links, but encourage others to link back to your internet site or, more distinctively, a selected article or page on your internet site. Link baiting is attained by writing interesting, educational, funny or controversial articles that others are probably going to link to from their web sites or blogs. Ask what other info you can offer that may benefit others and lure them to link back to the data.

Discussion, humor, Top 10 lists, How-To articles and controversy are always preferred. Running a web contest is another link bait method, so too is writing free how-to reports, providing unrestricted access to an internet software application, or doing something new on the web that’s interesting or useful and grabs attention. Writing or revising informative articles for online encyclopedias like Wikipedia may also be a good link bait system.

WHAT WORKS FOR YOU?

Link building and link baiting are both effective for SEO, as well as traffic building strategies. If you strategically link one way from topical internet sites back to your own, you’ll gradually enhance your SERP rank as well as increase the number of visitors to your site and so your profits. You can’t optimize your site effectively and forget the significance of back links. It is starting to become more difficult to manipulate Google and other search websites by employing synthetic systems so it is vital to form natural links so as to gain lasting benefits for search site results rankings.

About 75% of all rankings are made from external links, and the number and quality of those links will define how well you rank, and how strong the listing is – for longterm, sustained visibility.

Link popularity is measured as a count of links that are defined as ‘incoming links’ or ‘backlinks’ to your site. 

An external link from a trusted, authority site is more important than just “some odd link”. The code for a link looks like this: <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/file.html”>keyword text here</a>. If you make sure that the ‘keyword text here’ has the keyword term you are targeting, and better yet – matches the destination page in context/reputation, you can rank your resulting page high in Google both from internal and external link work.

Make sure to not get *any* links from spammy networks or crappy directories. Go for high quality and relevancy.

Here’s a great checklist of tools to help you. 

1. History of sites (and links/navigation) – archive.org

2. Powerful SEO and link discovery – SEO for Firefox

3. Domain hosting, IP class discovery – domaintools.com *)

4. Install SearchStatus Firefox plugin

5. Check domain at Yahoo SiteExplorer (Go to Yahoo.com and type linkdomain:<yoursite>)

6. Verify all incoming links on your site, including competition with linkdiagnosis.com

7. Use the MSN “linkfromdomain” operator to find outgoing links like this linkfromdomain:your domain.com

Note *) CClass IP addresses defined

C Class IP addresses are classified as the first three numbers of an IP address. Webmaster can install hundreds of websites on the same web server, which could be used to fool other webmasters into thinking they are getting unique inbound links. The search engines discount links originating from the same C Class IP address

If you want test for duplicate Class C IP address on multiple sites, use the Ip-Report.com tool.

See this page at Silicon Cheat Sheets website.

Some examples you may be interested in are:

Cheat Sheet: SEO
Creepy crawlies and things…

Cheat Sheet: Microblogging
Short and tweet…

Cheat Sheet: CRM
What’s tech got to do with keeping customers happy?

Video Cheat Sheet: Social networking
Not just for ‘the kids’…

Video Cheat Sheet: Blade servers
Slicing through the jargon…

We stand alone in our focus on developing the “perfect search engine,” says Google co-founder Larry Page. … Something that, “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

To that end, we have persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, we developed our serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way searches are conducted.

Read excerpts from Google Corporate and what their senior spam officer has to say about Pagerank. Enjoy!

What are the three most important criteria a search engine robot might consider when it is evaluating an inbound link?

How does PageRank play into natural search rankings and what does PageRank really mean?

Once you’ve established SEO best practices for internal linking procedures, is it worth the time to go back and adjust the entire website? Or should you just move forward with these new practices?

How does the actual text in a hyperlink play a role in SEO?

Will I be passing link value to my competitor if I link out to their website?

From an SEO point of view, when is it advisable to link out to a resource, and will linking out actually help my natural search rankings? If so, can you explain why?

For a under the hood discussion to find answers to these questions and many more articles, please look at this linking article.

Also, as a refresher – make sure to read the “Top Ranking Factors” (SEOMOZ) official document, you’ll understand better how to balance onpage and offpage (links) factors for optimum ranking.