Many webmasters and bloggers think of “link building” as a difficult, boring, mechanical task where the objective is to pile up mysterious things called “links” for the sake of influencing the Search Engines.

This is an old-fashioned, outdated and increasingly ineffective way to tackle the job of putting yourself on the map. In the rapidly evolving world of social media it’s all about getting noticed by real people. And the best way to do that is by being strategic and creative in what you publish.

Link Baiting Revisited

One common practice, much discussed four or five years ago, is “link baiting”. The idea behind link baiting is to publish something so unique, compelling, funny, interesting, entertaining or valuable that others will simply link to it to tell their own readers about it.

Now in case you think this technique is outdated, consider how Youtube videos go “viral” (another concept that is starting to sound old-fashioned). Somebody publishes an outrageous, funny, disgusting, cute or whatever video and the chain reaction begins. Person A tells person B who tells person C and on it goes until a million or so people have watched it.

The same thing happens with blog posts (although usually in a less dramatic way). The trick is to say something interesting, original, or controversial and then tell people about it to get the buzz going. The buzz is helped along by people linking to you.

This article from way back in 2006 describes 5 different types of “hooks” used in writing articles and posts intended to get a buzz. The hooks are News, Contrary, Attack, Resource and Humor. See the article for more detail on each of these.

Strategy: Target influential sites or hot topics

The fastest and most effective way to make a significant splash is to focus on influential websites or blogs within your niche. Find a post or video about some hot topic that is getting a lot of exposure and feedback. Then use that atention – that buzz – to bring attention to your views.

Remember, your objective should not just be to “get a link” from these sites. It is more important to get their attention – make yourself visible – Expose Yourself!, by contributing to the conversation in a significant way. That way you may turn other bloggers into allies in your quest for online success.

Blog Commenting – also revisited

The most obvious and easiest thing you can do is add comments to widely read blog posts. Unless you want to become known as the local attack dog you should try to come across as positive and supportive. But don’t just agree with everything they say. Try to add something new and interesting to the conversation.

Unfortunately most well-read blog posts have many comments and yours will just be one among all the others. So you want to do what you can to stand out from the crowd. One effective way is just to write a longer comment than everyone else. This makes it look like you have something substantial to say about the topic, and it also looks like you have put some real thought into what you have said. Of course it helps to actually have something interesting to say.

Taking blog commentary to the next level

If you find an article or post that really warrants it, go ahead and write a review or commentary and publish it in your own blog. This works especially well for current “hot” topics – or blog posts that are getting a lot of attention.

Make sure you let the original author know about your review. Either send them an email directly, or mention your review in a comment on the original. That way you are exposing your own stuff to readers of the original.

The objective is to “piggy-back” on the success or popularity of the original. At the same time you can bring yourself to the attention of the original author, and gain an ally who can help you become more widely known in your chosen niche.

Other Resources:

Link Baiting & Effective Link Building

While SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not the “be all and end all” of online marketing, it is certainly an important part of it. Many would argue it is the central part, and the foundation for all your other efforts – social networking, email promotions, article marketing and even offline marketing efforts.

That is because becoming serious about SEO forces you to take an analytical look at your web presence and “optimize” it so you “target” it in the most effective way.

If you want to become a Search Engine Optimization expert here are 6 areas or tasks you will have to master.

1. Keyword Analysis – First, you must understand what keywords are and how they function in the world of web search. Your target keywords affect both your on-page (or “on-site”) SEO and your off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to the integration of keywords into your actual content. Off-page SEO refers to the way you approach the task of getting other sites to link to yours.

2. Site Structure – Second, you should understand how the internal structure of your website affects how the search engines view your site. I’m talking here about the way your pages are organized, how they should reflect and emphasize your most important keywords, and how they should be interlinked.

3. Keyword Integration – Third, you must be good at creating content that contains the keywords you want to emphasize. This should be done in an organized way where specific pages focus on specific keywords.

4. Ongoing Content Optimization – Fourth, you should create a plan for creating optimized content on an on-going basis. Your objective should be to flesh out your target keyword list with content that covers all your most important keywords.

5. Create A Link Building Strategy – Fifth, you should create a link building strategy in order to create references pointing to your pages from as many different websites as possible. You want links pointing to as many different parts of your website as possible (not just the home page.) There are several ways you can create or encourage others to create links pointing to various pages within your site.

6. Execute The Link Building Strategy – Sixth, now that you have a strategy for building links you should execute that plan diligently and persistently.

If you follow this outline you are virtually guaranteed to improve your search engine rankings. I will be discussing each of these tasks in future posts.

Building Links with BlogEasy

Here’s how the BlogEasy SuperLink program works – This is a program to help build inbound links to your blog(s).

1. Every time you publish 10 BlogEasy articles we will give you one SuperLink credit.

2. For every SuperLink credit we will create a special SuperLink article that will be posted only on your blog. Or we can use a recently published post of your own as a SuperLink post.

3. Then we will create a synopsis of that SuperLink post with a link pointing to your site and make that synopsis available to our members in the BlogEasy article list.

Can you see the potential here? Publishing BlogEasy posts not only gives you high quality relevant content, but it is an awesome way to build inbound links from just the kind of sites the search engines consider the most important – other active real estate sites.

Go ahead. Sign up for the free 5 day BlogEasy trial right now**