If you love link building, raise your hand. Did you raise your hand? I hope not or you’d look awfully silly sitting at your desk with one hand in the air. I have yet to find someone that really loves and enjoys link building. It’s hard work. It’s time consuming and seeing results can take months. I recently gave a presentation as part of an SEMpdx event at Hotel deLuxe talking about this very topic, link building. My position is to automate the process as much as possible, but not in a shady, black hat way, of course.

Here is the presentation in a nutshell.

Why Automate Link Building

Link building is…

• Menial & mundane
• Hard work
• Time consuming
• Difficult to see immediate results

The Benefits of Link Automation

• Offers the “set it and forget it” model, sort of
• Can significantly increase one-way inbound links
• Complete control of anchor text & destination URL
• Helps maintain a natural link graph
• Allows you to focus on other marketing efforts
• Increased search engine rankings, traffic & sales

How to Automate Link Building

Creating Widgets and Badges

• Ensures a link once it is embedded
• Full control over anchor text and destination URL
• Create multiple widgets with differing anchor text

Here are some examples of badges and widgets.

Notice how each badge/widget uses optimized anchor text that link back to a relevant page on their own site. The Facebook badge was from a quiz by The Oatmeal. Do a search for “oatmeal” and see how well he ranks. Oh, what? He’s ranking above Quaker Oats.

Article Marketing

• Use article syndication to help increase the reach of your article
• Easily control anchor text and destination URL so you can direct links to the exact page you’re wanting to obtain increased rankings
• Utilize tools (Content Composer, Mass Article Creator) that will “spin” your articles and turn one into many, unique articles
  • These articles should then be syndicated through sites like Ezine, Go Articles, as well as blog networks (many spinning tools have networks of blogs where they submit your articles)
• Press release optimization is another tactic that sort of falls under this realm as you should be creating & syndicating press releases on a monthly basis

Identifying New Link Targets

• Subscribe to RSS feeds of popular and industry-specific blogs, then utilize comments to add value (and a link)
  • These may be “nofollow”, but I still believe there is value in obtaining links from highly credible, highly trafficked sites/blogs
• Search out “dofollow” blogs to find directories of blogs that do follow all of their comments

There you have it. A few strategies that can help increase your inbound link count, strengthen your link landscape and gently nudge your search engine results up the ranking ladder. When using these types of strategies, you must be careful about your intentions. If Google sees that you’re obtaining a large amount of links quickly, you will be put in the sandbox, or supplemental results. If you’re a new site, be careful about how quickly you start to build your inbound links. It must look natural (gaining inbound links from sites with a low PageRank first, then targeting sites with higher PageRanks), meaning you should have many more low PageRank links than high PageRank links. An unbalanced link landscape may trigger a flag and Google will suddenly throw you to the back of line. If used continuously, and wisely, these tactics can work very well.