According to Michael Gray ^[1], SEO and Social Media Consultant for Atlas Web Services ^[2], when it comes to link building, your first priority should be looking to get links from trusted, authoritative, and popular sites.

He likens it to high school “If the popular kids say nice thing about you, it’s better than the not so popular kids saying nice things about you. If the English teacher says you’re smart, it’s more important than the janitor saying the same thing.”

But, just how do you find these sites that you want links from? And how do you do you approach the link building process?

Determining Quality Directories

Directories are one of the core link building exercises every website should engage in according to Gray, and he recommends you begin with Yahoo ^[3], Best of the Web ^[4], and Business.com ^[5].

Additionally, look for directories that cover your niche, and then evaluate them for quality by looking at its statistics.

Good tools to use for analyzing directories are:

• Alexa ^[6]
• Quantcast ^[7]
• Hitwise ^[8]
• Compete ^[9]
• Attention Meter ^[10]

Then consider these questions:

• Do any of the pages in your sector rank?
• Is the page indexed?
• What is the last cache date? (If it has been longer than three months, don’t bother with it.)
• How popular/visited is the site?

How to get links from authoritative sites

The best way to get the attention (and links) from authoritative sites is to create content specifically targeted to them. For instance, Engadget has a competition ^[11] every year for the best cake design.

“If I was a baker, or game maker, I’d be making cakes every year and submitting them,” Gray explains. You’ve got to think a little smarter.

Look at the backlinks of your competition

By mining the back links of your competition for links from research sites, trade organizations, etc., you’ll get an idea of what the more authoritative sites are linking to.

Then, go to those sites and look for dead links. When you find a dead link, try to replicate or improve on the content, write your own article, publish it on the Web, and then let the author know about the broken link; of course, you can point out your new article at the same time.

Additionally, if you find an authoritative site that links to a piece of content that is related to your niche, why not recreate a similar article; one that improves on the original – perhaps with more detailed content – then let the author know about it.

TIP: Local sources; local governments, local resources, libraries are often overlooked opportunities

To get the most out of your blog feed:

• Publish full posts
• Include links in your feed
• Embed keyword rich links in your posts
• Embed keyword rich links in your footer
• Embed deep links
• Rotate your keywords every three or four months

Additionally, consider using RSS Footer ^[12] (WordPress plugin). It makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of each post in your feed, and allows you to display a link back to your blog.

Link Building Tips for Bloggers

• Deep link on your blog; link to posts you have written previously, not just to your home page
• Take up guest blogging opportunities
• Avoid blog competitions
• Get involved in social media
• Target different social media sites
• Spread your efforts over a period of time
• Create content for sites like Squidoo and Google’s Knol
• Use image sites like Flickr (only include pictures that rank)
• Use video sites like Youtube and MetaCafe
• YouTube Tip: Youtube always put their logo on the right side; put your logo on the left
• Don’t obsess about PageRank

This post contains content from Michael Gray’s presentation during the Link Building Basics session at Search Engine Strategies San Jose, 2008.

Additionally, I had the opportunity of speaking with Michael about link building for Tech Talk Radio ^[13]. You can listen to our chat by downloading episode 194 ^[14].