Before proceeding into today’s lesson, it is important that you have your on-page optimization done and the basic content on your website is fully SEO relevant. Hopefully by now you have already purchased your own copy of SEOPressor and have your contents fully optimized.

So now that you’ve done your on page optimization, is time for some off-page SEO. There are so many ways to build your off-page links, but we don’t want to overwhelm you with all. Let’s start small today.

When researching link building strategies, webmasters might fall for promises made by many link networks. Be extremely careful about joining link networks as these are increasingly being penalized by Google and Bing. Once penalized, the whole link network may vanish from the Google index and sometimes, Google might penalize your site.

What’s more scary is Google’s rules. It says any links obtained as a result of exchange of money will be considered unethical. And when Google says something, they really mean it. (at-least for now).

But worry not. We still can build a massive amount of links “ethically” using various strategies we will be discussing next. First, the tools needed.

Tools of the trade

1. Raven Tools
2. Plain Old Microsoft Excel
3. Open Site Explorer
4. Ontolo SEO Tools
5. Majestic SEO
6. Citation Labs
7. Link Diagnosis
8. SEMrush

Now let’s dive straight into the strategies.

1. Manual Link Building.

The good ‘ol way. Fire up Google on your browser, search for sites in your niche that are accepting links. Then shoot them an email saying you want them to link to you because you too are offering great information that their audience will love.

Let me illustrate how to do it right. Let’s say your niche is related around the topic “Organic Tea”, then you can use the following search command.

intitle:”organic tea” inurl:”links”

Then explore all the websites in the results. If you think your website and content is a close match to them, then send an email asking if they would like to link to your website.

Send as many such emails as possible. This strategy works and typically you may see a success rate of 5-10% emails resulting in good links for your website.

2. Link Building Using Twitter

Follow people in your niche. Search for keywords related to what you do. Do this everyday. Follow industry trends closely and be the first to tweet about some new developments.

Also, tweet your good insights and opinion about some related topic, tweet them at people in your niche.

Once you have developed good rapport, you can tweet an occasional news about your website or product with links in it. These will get re-tweeted and posted on other sites resulting in links and traffic for your website.

The big idea here is that if you have 100 followers and if only 10 of them retweet what you wrote, and each 10 of them got 100 followers each, then if you do the math, your reach will be

100 + (10 x 100) = 1100

That’s the power of social media. It’s exponential.

3. Link Building Using Facebook

Facebook is similar to Twitter, but relatively easier than Twitter.

Here too, you start with friending people in your industry. Not all friend requests will be successful, but you will start seeing some success if you search and ask for the right people.

Once you get the friends, start posting interesting stuff, news and developments. Gain some respect from the people in the your niche (people who have become friends). Keep posting 10 interesting posts about some helpful ideas, strategies and tips to build your reputation.

After 10 or so posts, you can send them an info link or post about your company or website or product. This is not a sales pitch but a general informational content directly connecting to your website product or service.

Build up the engagement with your peers by asking questions that you really want to know the answers about. Interact with them regularly. Remember, familiarity breeds trust.

Now, you should be getting friend requests from other people in your niche. Chances are 90% of them will be genuine people interested to know more about you or your products. Just keep accepting all.

If you would keep doing the above or hire someone else to do this for you for like a month or so, you will build up your reputation and others will repost content you wrote and your website links will get posted on other blogs. Most importantly, you will start receiving traffic and create some strong social signals that Google will pick up.

And don’t forget the math I have shown you above for Twitter. Same applies here. And this time it’s likes. If you post your content to you 1000 fans, 100 of them like & re-post it and if those 100 people had 1000 fans each, then what happens?

Your reach? Lets do the math.

1000 + (100 x 1000) = 101000

That’s a lot of reach, some of them will turn into potential links.

4. Other Social Media

Think of social media as a huge hungry monster consuming vast amount of content. Content can be for news, information or for entertainment. That’s what we have to feed social media monster.

Now, before you feed this monster know how and where to feed.

Go to http://knowem.com/ and check for usernames available. There are hundreds of social media sites but now you have social media sites for virtually every niche.

For example there are social media sites specializing in Video, Technology, News, Music, Microblogging, Information, Health, Entertainment, Design, Community, Business, Bookmarking etc. Find out which one suits you the most and create profiles in the top 10 influential sites. Use Followerwonk to find the top influencers in your target Niche.

And now start doing what you have done for both Twitter and Facebook.
Let the power of virality, take your traffic, links and profits to the next level. (come on guys, this ain’t the level. Next level is the level.)

To Chapter 11: Link Building Secrets – Part 2