Both of those articles are excellent assessments of the link building landscape, both of which I linked to from my Facebook and Twitter accounts as soon as they were published. :) Good. They'll teach you about things to stay away from and to be aware of the larger forces at work around you. Good and good.
I have some links to share myself. I prefer to stick to the positive so here are my positives. I truly dislike saying negative things about someone else's work and I hope you do too. So if you have a nit to pick do it with the respect you would expect to be treated yourself. Do not link to your own blog, please.
Here are my favorite link building articles from this week featuring actionable tactics, both by Adam Riemer:
Guest Blogging Is Not Dead – 10 Reasons Why You Should Do It [adamriemer.me]
Three Ways to Build Quality Backlinks Without Guest Posting [searchenginejournal.com]
Then there's this one from Yoast
Link building, SEO & branding [yoast.com]
The Yoast article is curious because it doesn't actually discuss how to build a link. But the information is good for things you might want to do before you initiate a link building outreach.
If you are interested in building brands, there's a book by
Marty Neumeier called Zag [amazon.com] that has been inspirational to me as I'm revamping some sites to more strongly embrace the brand building concepts. Some of the tips about differentiation are things I have already incorporated into my strategies however many of the other concepts are things I had not considered.
Marty Neumeier wrote a previous whiteboard overview book called The Brand Gap, which tackles what he feels are the major aspects of bridging the gap between strategy and design for the purpose of beating the competition and making more money. Zag focuses on a single aspect, differentiation. Both books are whiteboard style overviews. Haven't read Brand Gap but it's on tap. Zag is particularly good for being a jumping off point to reading other books as the author lists titles for deeper exploration.
What does all this have to do with link building? A lot for some. Not much for those interested in the trick-a-click approach. But here is why brand is good for link building: Once you build a good brand the links practically build themselves. And here's a second one: Once you have a strong brand you now have something to tell others about and it
will positively enhance your link building outreach, i.e. increase conversions and make it easier to score the higher quality links.
I have spent a decade exploring non-SEO link building methods. You know how my business card and website have the tagline, "Shaking Things Up!" on it? That's not just martinis I'm shaking up. It's boilerplate and rote methods that I am shaking up. Which is why I like the cheek of Riemers post about guest blogging because he comes at it from outside SEO. My mantra was and is: Get out of the SEO Box! Things like PageRank scores (among many other metrics) put you in the SEO Box. Which is why I've spent so many years telling people to ignore that stuff. There are better ways of doing things.
