The Huey Lewis Method of Link Building

“I want a new drug. One that won’t make me sick. One that won’t make me crash my car — or make me feel three feet thick.”

The SEO industry needs to sing that song with just a very minor tweak in the lyrics:

“I want a new link. One that won’t make me beg. One that won’t make me spam your site — or make me look really dense.”

The worst possible way to get links is to go asking for them. Of course, that is what 99% of SEOs do — ask for links. So why is that the worst possible way to get links? Because 99% of SEOs are asking for links.

If it seems like a circular argument, well, the point is that doing what everyone else does isn’t going to help you move ahead of the pack.

Some people do seek links in another way: they write stinkbait — Link Bait articles that everyone else in the SEO industry is inclined to link to. There’s a difference between content worth linking to and stinkbait. Stinkbait relies upon your readership’s loyalty, lack of discerning judgement, and lemming-like response to any mindless sputtering you may be likely to post. With a large enough readership, you can write stinkbait from now until doomsday and never lack for links.

There are also our most favoritist link builders of all: Link Droppers. They sail into blogs, forums, wiki sites, and drop their links without any sense of remorse whatsoever. They exercise editorial judgement so that we don’t have to.

Link Beggers, Link Stinkers, and Link Droppers. Just when you thought it was safe to go out on the Web, hoping it couldn’t get any worse than this, a new kind of creepy crawly reared its ugly head: the Link Advisor.

Yes, Link Advisors don’t actually have to build links for you, they just tell you how to get doors slammed in your face, your fingers crushed by angry children who slam the window down on your hands, and totally humiliated in the world of Internet arrogance.

Link Advisors are also known as Link Gurus, Link Experts, Link Advocates, Linking Specialists, and many other names. They have more aliases than Jennifer Garner. You’ll find Link Advisors at your local SEO blog, SEO forum, SEO newsletter, and SEO mailing list. They come in all shapes and sizes.

Now, just because you share an occasional linking tip doesn’t mean you’re a bad guy. Far from it. I love link tip articles because they help me stay on top of how far behind the wave of link theory most people in the SEO community are. There are, of course, linking technique articles, too. These are the meatier offerings that usually provide better advice.

For example, Eric Ward talks about how he became Link Moses. You wanna argue link building with the man? Okay, people do argue with him. But he gives good advice, in my humble opinion.

There are real link gurus and wannabe link gurus. There are link builders who do all the things I say you should not do and they bring home a paycheck every week. And there are link builders who do all the things I say you should not do and they don’t accomplish much.

What’s the defining factor in link building success? Is there a way to be sure that your latest link building idea won’t become tomorrow’s link spam idea?

Here are a few tips for building a solid link building practice:

1. Don’t put all your faith into well-documented link building techniques
2. Don’t try out the latest and greatest ideas you find on blogs and forums
3. Don’t share your latest and greatest ideas on blogs and forums
4. Observe how active Web sites develop their outbound links and emulate them on your own sites
5. Observe how active Web sites develop their outbound links and practice the things that they reward with links

Can you get some good ideas from other people on the Web? Sure you can. But stop and think about how quickly popular ideas are passed around the SEO community. Say, for example, someone writes a blog post that says, “Contact Web site operators who have pages that look like [some characteristic of a potential linking resource] and ask them to link to your site.”

Okay, now every idiot SEO in the world who reads that blog post is going to start searching for pages with that characteristic and sending out emails to unsuspecting Webmasters. Those Webmasters may respond favorably to the first few inquiries but chances are pretty good they have already been nagged and harrassed by link building SEOs and they may not be very friendly to link requests any more.

Asking for links is inefficient because a relatively low percentage of contactees will respond to your requests. If I could show you how to ask for links and get an 80% favorable response rate, would you be willing to pay money for that technique? (The answer is “yes” for most people who ask for links — and, no, I don’t have such a technique, so the question is purely rhetorical.)

No one gets a 50% response rate to mass link requests. That means you are wasting most of your time and effort when you ask for links.

There are certainly ways to contact even jaded guys like me to get links. Of course, you first have to provide some really unique, special content and then resist the urge to ask everyone in the world for links. There are plenty of sites out there that will accept a press release for content (and you get a link — so there is a free tip). But I won’t accept any press release that has been distributed to other sites in my niche. Why should I do what everyone else is doing?

You have three levels of knowledge among Webmasters:

1. Those who don’t get what is going on (the majority)
2. Those who get what is going on and are willing to participate (the naive few who haven’t been stung yet)
3. Those who get what is going on and don’t want any part of it (guys like me who have war stories)

Basic link building is a numbers game. You’re not being strategic. You’re not being expert. You’re just out there grabbing links any way you can and you have no idea of whether those links will pass value. You have no idea of what you’re doing.

You can build your own links faster than you can ask for them. But building links doesn’t mean dropping them in forums and blogs. It means building copy and placing it on the Web.

A lot of people rely on social media sites for their link building. These types of sites can work well if you put time and effort into them and keep the bias to a reasonably low percentage. Just understand that any self-promotional link introduces bias into your resource.

A few people also build unique Web sites, but of those many make the mistake of linking all their sites together. Each site you build should participate in its own community. You can leverage your sites to help each other but you don’t want to build sites just for the sake of linking them all together. Create some value, give to the community you want to receive links from, and be an active participant in the online network you’re creating content for.

There are time-tested, tried-and-true ways of obtaining links that still work today as much as they worked ten years ago. Unfortunately, some of the old ways have been abused and they don’t work as much as they used to. For example, in the mid-1990s it was customary for people to contact each other randomly and ask for links. The search technology was almost non-existent at the time and there were only a few million Web sites. Linking was the way we connected the Web and we mostly found new content by following links.

It’s okay to link out to random sites you like, but it’s not so easy to build a random site that other people like. Too many sites today lack real content. Too many sites today are just slapped together from a few scripts, maybe a database, and covered with ads. Why should random strangers link to those sites?

Incentivized linking became popular because offering incentives was the only way to get people to link otherwise boring and uninteresting sites. It really does not take that much effort to make the average business site interesting to strangers. In fact, it takes less effort to make a site interesting than it does to ask for, steal, or trick your way into link success.

Less time spent building links equals more time to increase the value you offer people.

Less time spent building links means more time to develop and launch new initiatives.

You won’t get past your need for links, but obtaining those links the same way — from the same places — that everyone else in the SEO industry gets their links diminishes the value of the links you acquire. Your cheap links may eventually get you to the top but you could have done it sooner by improving the efficiencies in your SEO process.

You want a new link building technique, one that no one else is talking about.

You want a new link building resource, one that no one else has spoiled.

You want a new link building model, one that can’t be burned out by the SEO community the way it burns out so many link building models.