Link Building in the Modern Age of SEO

Todd from Stuntdubl has been a link building advice monster of late, and his advice is some of the best in the biz.

First, there’s his balancing the link equation. An important bit:

If you are still using the same three title and descriptions for your link acquisitions you are really spinning your wheels. STOP! You will reach a level of diminishing returns very quickly using the same anchor text these days. Use the thesaurus and ontology tools to find synonymous terms and keyword co-occurrence. It’s very easy to get overoptimized on anchor text. If you are much higher for allinanchor searches than you are for normal search results, it’s definitely worth doin’ some investigation on what type of anchor text ratios you currently have to your site.

Then there was his example of a good link request email.

And thirdly he has his 10 tips for training a link developer:

• Teach them the value of a link - TLA Guide to text link purchasing
• Explain the contradiction of PR mattering
• Show them “starting points” like the Google directory, keyword combination tool
• Teach them to mine competitor backlinks with yahoo, link harvester, or other methods.
• Train them to skim and search pages for “hot words” like advertising, sponsors, resources, advertisements, etc. to establish if a site is open to, or currently offering advertising - cntrl+f works nicely
• Show them how to check if a page is cached or in the supplemental index
• Encourage them to be creative and learn link development from the right people and places
• Train them on using ontology tools to write anchor text
• Show them how to negotiate a link trade or purchase
• Let them buy some links to understand the value
• Set them up a paypal account to buy links from other places - trial by fire

All good advice. And be sure to check out Mr. Ploppy’s link list for some great SEO tools.