This Guest Post was written by Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home.
Good link love, bad link love, do we really care who links to us? A savvy blogger would say yes and no. Based on the 80-20 rule of business – 80% of your traffic will come from only 20% of your links (by my stats, it’s less than 20%).
Of course, links from A-Listers and high Google Page Rank sites are a worthy pursuit. But why should we care about the 20%, those links from anyone, especially the sites that will likely only send us a couple of visitors a week?
Quite frankly, there are four compelling reasons to care about “little links”:
- Little links can turn into big links. One of my top referrers of all time, Steve Olson, linked to me in the fourth post he wrote. His blog has grown so big that this post still sends me consistent traffic to this day, and we’ve become great friends in the process.
- Technorati. If the A-Listers only had links from A-Listers, they wouldn’t BE A-Listers!
- The long tail of referring domains. If I added up all of the referrals from domains that sent less than 4 people a week to my site, together they would be my fourth largest source of traffic.
- Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first. (Rather shallow of them don’t you think?!)
I don’t advocate spending tons of time in the pursuit of mass quantities of links from small sites. I do advocate spending a little bit of time each month cultivating links from a wide variety of sources, regardless of the amount of traffic potential.
So without further ado, here is the world’s greatest list of posts dedicated to the fine art of Link Love. Note I didn’t say longest, because there are a lot of long lists out there (which can get quite overwhelming). These are the BEST posts on the subject written within the last year…
The Best of the Best
101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006
66 Ways to Build Links in 2007
How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide
Link Strategy
Setting Proper Link Strategy Goals For Your Links Pages
SEO 101: Establishing and Evolving an Effective Link Strategy
12 Different Types of Links and How To Get Them
Developing a Reciprocal Link Strategy
Linkbaiting
An Introduction to Linkbaiting
Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing
The Resource Linkbait – Using Lists to Build Authority, Traffic and Links to your Website
Relationship Building
A Strategy for Relationship Linking
How To Get Links from Bloggers
Link Building is Relationship Building
Buying Links
Great great article Wendy! Thanks for sharing that huge collection of best posts! I’ll have a busy weekend reading!
Derrick Sorles – Web 2.0 consultant
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“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” This is so so right! You are one of the few people that point this out!
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Thanks for the resources, Darren. I have not seen some of them before.
I really benefit from such a article.. I were asking my friends about if I should go when a black guy wants to have dinner with me… I have met a guy on Blackcentury.com and he asked me for a dinner together after weeks online talk. But my friends don’t want me to go because they met liars on the internet before and they said so many difficulties between interracial love.
I agree. I do just that and it helps :)
[…] rankings in Google and the other major search engines. In previous ProBlogger posts Aaron Wall and Wendy Piersall have talked about it. Darren has also been known to create a post here or there on the […]
Excellent post… But, I have a question, what about giving link love to other sites or blog comment community. i know having link backs to your site is one of the top factors to increase ranking on top search engines. But, I came across many bloggers taking their “nofollow” code from their blog html… I’m testing this on one of my blogs, but I want to see if any one have good results from this tactics, other than increase comments on posts.
Thanks,
Luis Galarza
Thanks for the tips. It is tough spending so much time to create a great website just to have nobody visit. Great product + great website doesn’t always equal many visitors.
Thanks
Build links naturally is the best way to lots of link love. drop the idea of getting your link in high pr pages. Do not comment to leave a link because the page is of high pr. Over time, low pr pages will also grow.
Thanks for your great resource. Some of the things are new to me.
Thanks for sharing! I’ve bookmarked this page so I can look back as I go through the tips. Thanks again!