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
