What do you think are the most time- and cost-efficient whitehat link building techniques? Please list your top 3 choices, starting with the best one. For example: 1) Link baiting 2) Guest blogging 3) Article submissions By the way, what do you think about these 3? As for me, I think "link baiting" has become too broad a term, but everyone keeps talking about it, so it probably has some potential. I believe creating valuable tools and resources on your site that cannot easily be scraped, can attract a lot of links. I'm trying that with a statistical significance / split test calculator on my Web Tracking Guide website.
Link baiting can be a challenge, but is certainly worth it. Usually it requires imagination and some ability to make it happen. Time is often the biggest hurdle with the second two. There are a huge number of Pligg and other Web 2.0 types of sites that one can submit posts and articles.
1. Article Marketing/Submissions 2. Press Release Submissions 3. Video Marketing Based on my experience.
Thanks for the insight! Jason - may I ask you for some more details? You obviously know what you are talking about, running your own submission service and having hundreds of articles submitted to different directories. 1. At your submission service, you offer submission to 300+ article directories. How can one evaluate the results of submission to a large number of directories? I tried to submit to about 100 of them, but after observing the results, decided to concentrate on the 20 that had some measurable effect in Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google search results. Am I wrong? Should I submit to hundreds of directories in bulk? I'm concerned that the return on investment diminishes very fast with the number of submissions to less popular directories. 2. Can you provide a few examples of press releases that worked for you? What can be considered newsworthy at an e-commerce website? How do you embed references / links in the press release? 3. By video marketing, do you mean submitting educational videos to YouTube? Can you please elaborate what video marketing techniques work best for link building?
Link Baiting is highly specialized kind of Technique not often used by most of SEO because it involves sheer class of creativity in writing however other two are far popular and influenced by many SEO's
instantit - as for me, I started by creating an online statistical significance calculator at my website. I'm not sure I'm allowed to post a link yet, but you can find it from my recent blog post above. I provided link instructions at that page, and now I'm trying to give it some visibility with blog posts and article submissions. usasportstraining, jezzz - if you speak from experience, how do you suggest to promote the link bait once it's up there? Should I concentrate on SEO, Web 2.0 sites like Digg, or something else?
jayrudalf - why do you disagree about link baiting? Do you think it's too time-consuming? Regarding forum posting - is it really good for link building? Most forum links are "nofollow", and the signatures are not even visible for the viewers who are not logged in. I personally think that forums are mostly valuable for advice, brand building and social networking. Am I missing something?