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Creating a Link Building Machine

Social media, linkbaiting, link building, blogging and building an audience are hugely time consuming tasks that require a lot of skill, some great ideas and most importantly a long term vision.

Intelligent online publishers have been creating Link Building Machines for years but others try to rely on short term fixes. The short term fix (as you might have guessed) isn’t a good long term business strategy.

Put simply a Link Building Machine is a site that attracts thousands of links every month and hundreds of links to each one of their recent stories or blog posts without any direct marketing being carried out to create those links.

The BBC is a Link Building Machine, so is Wikipedia, so is Engadget, so is the New York Times. They are all sites that have the following key components making up their Machine.

  • A large number of fans who love to read their content
  • A fanbase that likes sharing content across social networks
  • Fans & readers who publish content on blogs & other websites – the linkerati
  • Good search engine rankings

Any website that has these elements is a Link Building Machine. Take a site like Wikipedia for example, it doesn’t have any RSS subscribers but Wikipedia ranks highly for so many informational queries that the articles are used as citations and reference links thousands of times every single day.

A site like the BBC can release a news story and find it being shared across thousands of blogs and social networks without the BBC having to do any marketing whatsoever.

One of my favourite examples of a Link Building Machine is a site that has thousands of well optimised images attracting millions of visitors from Google Images every single year. This site cleverly uses this script (this one is good too) to build thousands of new links every month with zero effort.

Creating your machine

Publishing one off linkbait articles is great for traffic and links but it isn’t a particularly effective long term strategy – unless carried out as part of the Link Building Machine development process.

Publish one linkbait article and it might get thousands of readers and hundreds of links but if you can replicate that success and publish similarly high quality articles every day for 6 months you might just end up creating a Link Building Machine.

Forget about building links to your site today – concentrate on your long term goal of finding thousands of people who love your website enough to tell the world whenever you write a new post.

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BY Patrick Altoft AT 3:21pm ON Monday, 12 May 2008

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.viperchill.com/blog/ Glen Allsopp

    Great post and I completely agree with you. There are some big link machines that actually have people helping push their content socially but thats not all the traffic they get.

    Submitted to SU!

  • http://www.linkbuilding.info pankaj gupta

    Well said patrick and i agree with you but these days it’s getting very competitive in terms of social bookmarking too.

  • http://blog.penalicio.us Diamond On Wheels

    Great article. Providing good content is still the key to any website becoming a Link Building Machine!

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  • http://homebizseo.com/ Greg from Make Money Online

    That was solid advice. The hardest part of starting out is creating a buzz when no one is reading. Keep posting and social bookmarking and you will be a success.

  • http://www.adtechz.com Aditya

    Great article, Proving cool info.

    thanks

  • http://www.media-mentor.co.uk Media Training

    I am also trying to build in some kind of link building program on our own media training website by using up to date content, but its not working yet! I am resigned to the fact it might take time, but yes content is king!

  • http://www.whitehatmedia.com SEO company

    Link Baiting is a really good way of getting inbound links!

  • http://www.seogeeza.com SEO Geeza

    I also agree that link baiting is the way forward, you can however spend ages managing media buzz, articles and press releases so I think it is important to continue with a constant allocation of time on other link building methods as well, video, bookmarking even directories – I think a combination of many different elements will sustain position due to a more varied collection of links pointing back to a website.

  • http://www.seopositive.com SEO Experts

    Well Said! It’s good to see some companies agree with the natural way of link building. Likewise.

  • http://www.vacation-rental-wonderland.com/ Vacation Rentals By Owner

    I love that script you guys made! The code for the script disappeared tho…

  • http://www.eorganics.com.pk SEO Outsourcing

    Natural Way of linkbuilding is really bets and effective as compared to other methods of link building. Great post.

  • Hypocrits

    You guys are complete hypocrits. I see the same people here putting links to their sites saying “Yeah great article” – but then leaving links for themselves. I have done searches on a couple of ths above bloggers – and one SEO company based in brighton, has 1000s of links.

    I agree with the premise of this article entirely – how many of you will link to it if you think it’s so great?
    SEO companies and baiting is ruining blogs.

    Good article

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  • http://home-business-internet.blogspot.com Jonathan Jenkins

    Leting people like us leave comments is also a way to generate free content automatically, and the payback for that is letting us leave our links here!
    It is a useful post though, and I really am researching link-building strategies for my site.

  • http://www.bmcoaches.co.uk Coach Hire

    I opinion is almost same when it comes to long-term strategies. For over the years I have been using other methods to promote my coach hire business in the UK, and then further to Ireland, Scotland and other Europe and I may proudly say, after reading your post I tried many of the aspects you stated and now the daily rent more coaches, minibuses and van’s than ever before.

    I remember an year back whilst we started our new business on the name of Accommodation in London, I have been looking to target some keywords like “cheap hotels in London” “rooms” rental properties in London, but since all these keywords were very much competitive it took a lots of time to get number of visitors visit our website.

    Just a sunny afternoon, I crafted a question, and posted it in the Yahoo questions, I myself posted an answer lately and yeah around 1000 publishers posted my post on their blogs, website’s, articles, and even press releases and it had helped me get thousands of quality in-links.

    Either it is a coach hire or vehicle rental business or even other travel and tourism, good strategies like you stated will always work!

    Great post and it has already helped me a lot

    Thank You

    Sophia John
    London UK

  • http://www.karban.com/ SEO Tampa

    Thaks for the Information.

  • http://www.internetmarketersnet.com SEO Expert Services

    Submitting to web directories is a vital part of every successful link building strategy. Apart from driving traffic to your website through direct referrals, web directories provide static, one-way links to your site, boosting your link popularity and improving your rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

  • http://www.macgizmoguy.com/apple-software/best-mac-applications.html macgizmoguy

    Two of the smartest things I’ve done for my Apple Mac Gadgets and OSX computer Gizmo sites has been to use two of the best Bookmarking Buttons out there: AddThis – which gives great analytics stats and graphs about Where & How Often pages are being bookmarked, and OnlyWire – which is the best Post-N-Publish tool to send your content to the top social sites you’re registered on with a click.

    Take a look at my Mac Gizmo Guy pages and you’ll see I put BOTH buttons on every page’s top sidebar. Short of adding to the screams of link-bait blather — these two in combo let me submit – and my site visitors toot my horn FOR ME. A very powerful combination for a slow but steady link build.

  • http://www.dizzyheights.com Meri Garcia

    Great article Patrick
    I used to work in online marketing and this is the type of advise I used to give to my clients: Do not just expect that people will link to you because you have a good product. You need to market it well, let people know…how?creating good content is a good start.

    If you visit the blog sites at http://www.websiteredevelopment.com and http://www.analytics.seo you will find more tips, ideas and topics about this and other online marketing stragtegies.

  • http://www.zenoseo.com SEO Services UK

    Great info. Yes one can observe the importance of creating a link bulding machine.
    It’s all about long-term link-worthy content :)
    Thanks!

  • http://www.wpminternet.com SEO ecommerce development

    A link bulding machine is important. Link baiting is a really good way of getting inbound links!

  • http://www.bigseotechniques.com seo services uk

    A great article on link bait – its very important to have strong backlinking techniques in place to ensure high rankings – using the link bait system is one of the best natural forms to gain inbound links.

  • http://www.financebehavior.co.uk Finance Behavior

    When you’re building traffic to your website, there really is never and ending point. Even if you’re ranked number one in search results for several of your most relevant keywords, there are always things you can monitor and continue to do to ensure your rankings increase and/or remain high.

  • http://www.distinctly-digital.com hertfordshire digital marketing agency

    Some great tips which still stand strong even till today. Links are such a valuable resource, it really is a case of the more the merrier!

  • http://www.pluspurple.com Hertfordshire web design

    I agree as well that great content still is the gold-dust for good ranking. It takes time and a lot of effort but it looks and feels good too when written well.

  • http://www.africapresse.com cameroun

    People always talk about great contents. the quality of content is realatif. I still think that the best way to optimize your site and get people link to your site is to forgot about SEO and just naturaly write your content. If you are passionate about somethig there’s people out there who are also like you.

  • http://www.texas-defensivedriving-online.com/ TX Defensive Driving

    I will agree with you, but is this possible to attract readers like BBC, New York Times?. This is very long process.

  • http://www.moveaheadmedia.co.uk Pay on Results SEO

    Content is king but it’s not the only form of SEO to ensure you have top rankings.

  • http://www.moveaheadmedia.com.au SEO Company Sydney

    Building links from numerous sources is key. Some will carry greater weight than others but in a natural link profile you aren’t going to have hundreds of ‘perfect’ links are you

  • http://www.seohello.co.uk/ Glasgow SEO

    For a natural link profile, you’re not going to have all perfect amazing links though. Without content it’s much more difficult, but not impossible.

  • http://www.wagada.co.uk SEO Hertfordshire

    Love the article – you’re absolutely right. Linkbuilding is a fruitless task if people don’t love your website. Linkbait is the way forward. Great quality content plus great promotion equals lots of fans and great results. This is the only way for long-term success.

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