Link Building oldie ~ but some still goodie

Except for the linking back to other sites -- trading links, this is still a good article even for today.

If you will notice -- even though this article is six years old, some of the people mentioned are like the "who's who" of SEO and link building today.

clipped from searchenginewatch.com 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies July 11, 2002 In search engine optimization, "off page" factors have become more and more important as they relate to rankings. In particular, solid link popularity can literally make or break a site with the search engines. However, one of the most difficult areas of SEO is building link popularity. Why? Because the engines don't want "artificially created" (or useless) links, so there are no easy ways to build link popularity. The days of link farms and huge link exchange programs are over. Try those strategies now and you can easily find yourself booted out of an engine. The Purpose of this Article Start with the Basics: Review any Web site to which you want to link *before* writing to its Webmaster asking for a link. Like all SEO, do it manually. Automating the task is asking for trouble, especially if you haven't reviewed the site before asking for the link. (Gil Sery with Search Engine Optimization Pros)

Link Building Exchanges ~ Good or Bad?

I've seen a few of these link building subscription sites where for $40 or $50 a month you can have a 3 way linking structure.

One site links to you -- you link to another... and another one links to the first one. This way you do not have reciprocal linking that Google supposedly does not like.

The question is -- do you always know the quality of the site linking to you using this Ménage à trois arrangement?

... and is really worth paying 30 to 60 bucks a month when you can do the same thing for free.

clipped from www.andrewdaum.com Link Building ~ the Holy Grail to High Search Engine Listings Or how about this one; utility poster video I’m #1 for that phrase in Google. I could go on and on, give you my most profitable phrases that I rank for — but I’d be messing myself up by giving you those phrases. Besides, the run my car on water phrase is a pretty good one. Whenever I write a post… I first think of the words or phrases I want to rank well for in the search engines. I write down the main phrase… then I write down three or four related phrases and use them though out the post (article). Once I’ve finished with the post, I let the post sit — I don’t link to it from anywhere or basically do anything with it for a few days. No promo at all. I want Google to find it here first — and Wordpress does a good job of that. If you want to cut your learning curve down a bit — (here’s the pitch), I have created a 40 page report on how I do it