Automating A Link Building Habit

Post 9 on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.

Your new website is live, on page optimised and, after last week’s post, indexed. From here it’s time to start link building and link building and link building… did I mention link building?

At first, the concept of link building sounds daunting to new web marketeers. In truth, it all comes down to how we view it. No company would ever look at their marketing and view this activity as one that does not require regular and consistent attention. Link building is perhaps best viewed as the most important form of online marketing. Performed consistently and strategically, it will make a difference.

Like all activities that require ongoing attention, it is best practised through the development of an ongoing ‘link-building’ habit. This post looks at three ways you can begin to develop such a habit for your website.

1. Comment On Relevant Blogs Daily
Google Alerts is a fantastic service that can email you daily updates of keyword relevant online updates. Were going to use Alerts to create a daily email of blogs that have posted something relevant to our target keyword. Browse to Google Alerts, and enter your target keyword into the ‘search terms’ field. Under ‘Type’ select ‘Blogs’. Now enter how often you wish to be emailed by Google and how many results you would like your email to contain, I’d recommend you select 50 results to give you a good batch of blogposts to select from.

Once setup, you should receive a daily email from Google with a list of blogposts it believes are relevant to your keywords. Work through this list by click on the links and quickly viewing the content. Not everyone will be directly relevant to your keyword, read the better ones in more depth and make a short reply from the comment box including your url.

Using Google Alerts, you’ll quickly be commenting regularly on blogposts that are most in tune with your own website, enticing both visitors and good quality links.

2. Answer The Right Questions
Social Mention is a Google Alerts style website that allows you to create an alerts for various kinds of social activity. Were going to use this service to create a daily email list of ‘questions’ that have been posted online that we can go and answer.  Websites like Yahoo Answers and Wiki Answers allow browsers to post questions for the online world to come along and answer. Just like regular blog commentary, posting answers to questions within your subject area enhances your online reputation for your topic and builds good links back to your website.

Click on ‘Create an alert’ from the Social Mention homepage. Enter your target keyword under ‘Search phrase’. Under type, select ‘Q&A’ as below.

You now have a daily method for both relevant blog commentary and question answering. More importantly, you have two forms of regular topical link building.

3. Some Links Are Better Than Others
You may remember one of the very first posts referring to this fact in January this year. Above, we have two methods of gaining regular, topical links to your new website. We need to compliment this with the regular acquisition of plain and simple good links.

Now, unfortunately there isn’t really a good automated way of achieveing this. So, instead please find attached my own list of the best 100 places to gain links in 2010. If you work through this list at minimum of 5 per week, you’ll have worked through 60 by the end of three months. The websites on this list will require you to do anything from post your company details, to upload video, to posting articles. You may have to be ‘creatively resourceful’ to accommodate all of them, but where there’s a hot link, there’s a way! Click here to download the list.

So, we now have three methods for creating a link building habit. Practice these three techniques for three months and review the impact on your website ranking. You should find that link building is a habit worth keeping.

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Related posts:

1. Link Building in 2010: Part 2
2. Link Building in 2010: Part 3
3. Link Building in 2010
4. Laser Target Your Links For Launch!