Wordtracker was at LinkLove London last week, and we've put together a list of link building tips and tricks picked up from a very practical conference.
General link stuff
1) Right now the only way to get your site ranked is to get links and everything else serves that.
Branko Rihtman
2) If you have trust and brand loyalty, you'll get links.
Rand Fishkin
3) Opportunities are everywhere if you look at your obstacles differently.
Jane Copland
4) Watch out - 700,000 sites have received unnatural links orders (mostly in the US)
Rand Fishkin
5) Link building campaigns - if your campaigns are mediocre, fill the gaps. If they're quite successful, make sure your spikes (the things you're doing well at) are spiky enough.
Will Critchlow
6) For agencies - pitch big visions but small next steps.
Will Critchlow
7) Is the next big Google algorithm change going to be a link evaluation one? Very possible, says ...
Tom Anthony
8) Use the rel=author tag - the rich snippet with a picture of the author helps improve clickthrough rate. It's also becoming more important in Google's eyes because they see it as an indication of trustworthiness. It now appears as a metric on Webmaster Tools.
Tom Anthony
9) Read The Lean Startup
Will Critchlow
10) New sites: avoid bad links by avoiding nefarious schemes. Build up your good links gradually so that if you do attract a bad link it won't make any difference to your ranking.
Martin MacDonald
11) Dropbox were incentivizing US students to link back to them from university sites – offering free space in exchange for a link. Is there anything you can offer?
Martin MacDonald
Content
12) Analyze which content gets shared with Topsy, Facebook graphs, Twitter API and Google+ API
Branko Rihtman
13) Having great content will bring you brand visibility, build a social following, loyalty, get you links automatically.
Rand Fishkin
14) Content doesn't have to be restricted to what we usually think of as content. Build a community, use your product or present data - that's all content.
Rand Fishkin
15) Don't limit yourself to your own subject - find out what your customers enjoy hearing about. Have a look at the content Fuskars (scissor manufacturers) puts up on their blog, Fiskateers
Rand Fishkin
16) Don't be shy about your great content - get it out there and make sure it links back to your site.
Rand Fishkin
17) Can you find 10 target websites for your content in 10 minutes? If not, forget it.
Will Critchlow
18) Building simple widgets isn't as difficult as you'd think - and you'll get lots of backlinks from sites such as Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal if it's useful. The book
Professional WordPress Plugin Development
19) Check out Arena Flowers for ideas on original content.
Will Critchlow
20) Cheat sheets are a good idea - SEOMoz's web developers' cheatsheet gets an inordinate number of links.
Will Critchlow
Social media and links
21) Retweets are better than Facebook shares for getting links.
Branko Rihtman
22) Visit your social connections page on Google for primary and secondary connections details.
Rand Fishkin
23) See who your primary and secondary social connections are on the Google social connections page
Rand Fishkin:
24) Content v link building? Create the great content, engage, build your social following, links will follow.
Rand Fishkin
25) Ask people to link to your pages - a simple "Please link to this page" will do (along with the link, of course).
Rand Fishkin
26) Make your tagline give you great anchor text, eg Feefighters used "Save 40% on your credit card processing"
Rand Fishkin
27) Try choosing a linkbaity sort of style, like the Economist's blog all about graphics
Rand Fishkin
28) Try content curation, and pay attention to the style of your design, eg Twitter Stories
Rand Fishkin
29) Slate's partnership with Q&A site Quora shows that content providers and people who need content should work together.
Rand Fishkin
30) If you're an affiliate site, target your customers properly. See Jane Work is a great example of this.
Rand Fishkin
31) Check Facebook to find out who you and they are connected to and use your connections.
Wil Reynolds
32) Export Twitter followers and friends with this spreadsheet in order to research them.
Wil Reynolds
33) Don't follow people on Twitter just because of a high follower to following ratio. Look to see if they'll provide value first. (NB some people buy followers.)
Wil Reynolds
Tools
34) Use Zemanta which puts your content in front of 800,000+ bloggers while they're actually writing their blogs.
Rand Fishkin
35) Use every weapon you can to get your posts to get out there: Google News, video, rich snippets, rel=author, schema etc.
Rand Fishkin
36) Use Followerwonk to find out who's writing about your subject.
Wil Reynolds
37) Download this RSS extension to find out which sites have their own blogs and subscribe to them to find out what they're talking about.
Wil Reynolds
38) Use iGoogle to set goals and to dos
Wil Reynolds
39) Add Twitter feeds and RSS feeds to iGoogle to keep track of everything in the one place.
Wil Reynolds
40) Use Quora to track questions by people you'd like to follow you and link to you, and answer their questions ...
Wil Reynolds ...
41)... or use Inboxq to find out what people are asking ...
Wil Reynolds
42) ... and if you can't answer their questions, retweet them.
Wil Reynolds
43) Try Kickoff Labs - take one element and launch an experiment (piece of content, for example) as soon as possible.
Will Critchlow
44) Builtwith allows you to check out which technologies the bigger sites are using.
Rand Fishkin
45) Use Mozenda to gather data from other websites, eg authors.
Wil Reynolds
Outreach
46) You have a product, but it doesn't always sell itself. There is nothing dirty about outreach.
Jane Copland
47) Create a pool of domains that you can use for future outreach campaigns.
Branko Rihtman
48) Use 'pridebait' - give mentions to and link to people with HUGE followings eg The Time 100 poll
Rand Fishkin
49) Find out who these people are following, and be more like their followers (but don't change your whole personality).
Wil Reynolds
50) Prune out selfish users, identify power users and relevant users to make your link building outreach campaign focused.
Branko Rihtman
51) You don't get much benefit from targeting people who tweet lots of links, neither do you from people who tweet few - find the middle group.
Branko Rihtman
52) Find journalists by typing "columnist for ..." into the search engines, or "writes for ..."
Wil Reynolds
53) Put good karma out there and good things will happen. Try to understand and help people, and make friends. Friendship=links
Wil Reynolds
54) Try sending outreach emails at the we - try sending outreach emails at the weekend or in the middle of the night. at night, contact by tweet before you send, have a linked logo in your emails
Mike King
54) Contact by tweet before you send out outreach emails.
Mike King
55) Have a linked logo in your emails.
Mike King
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