Difficulty (1-10): How difficult the technique is to apply and obtain a link? 1 meaning it’s a very simple technique and 10 meaning it takes a very large investment of time, money or both.

Effectiveness (1-10): Rating of the overall SEO effectiveness of the technique. Will it generally result in high quality or low quality links. 1 being very low value from the link and 10 meaning the link will deliver great link-juice.

Spam Alert (1-10): Rating that shows our opinion about the legitimacy of the technique, and will it be a spammy-approach. Is it likely to be red-flagged or de-valued by Google now or down the road. 1 being a low spam level and 10 a neon sign applied to the link that screams ‘This link is so worthless, it’s almost funny we got it in the first place!’. Even if it isn’t detected, it may require a total sell-out approach to get the link in the first place. Not a good thing for your online or offline reputation.

Comments: I’ve added some of my personal opinions based on experience or gut feeling.

I’d love to hear feedback on 1) the ideas themselves, 2) my rankings and 3) my comments.

Feedback? What rankings would you change? What comments would you add? Let us know what you think.

Organic Principle:

Simply put, we look at sites that are showing up later in search results, are not doing SEO but have obtained some organic links, and use our best content to go after these links. They do not always have the most gaudy juice stats (Page Authority, Domain Authority, PR, ect.) but have those small-town-all-natural nutrients that will pay dividends over the long haul. We go after sites that are buried deep within an industry. Locations, blogs, forums, organizations where we should be participating anyway- as a natural extension of the business.

Here is the All Natural Goodness process:

Step 1: Competitive Keyword Phrase

Start with a competitive keyword phrase. In this case I’ve used “Corporate Training”. With your SEOmoz toolbar engaged, you will see that the first page is loaded with sites that have been optimized. In most cases it appears that SEO firms have done their best to many links. I pay particular attention to the number of root domains (learned this tidbit from Tom). These site link domains usually contain a lot of SEO company spam-the-crap-out links. These are not the ones I’m really interested in at this time (although I do a robust competitive link analysis- for this technique I’m not interested in these).

Step 2: Go Where the Naturally Grown Sites Are

Once I’ve determined this phrase is fairly competitive- I want to find the sites that are ranking (albeit not too well) for the phrase and are getting their only links organically. So, I go to the 5th-10th pages for the phrase. Here I will see sites that have much lower numbers of domains linking to them- as shown by the toolbar. These inbound links are more likely to be naturally obtains- through online industry participation, valid memberships or sponsorships of local events. I look for one or two that have particularly low inbound pointing domains to take a better look by clicking on the toolbar’s ‘Explore’ link- taking me Open Site Explorer.

Step 3: Tools Show Where the Nutrients are

In Open Site Explorer I sort out internal linking pages and look for the followed links that seem to be more organic and industry specific in nature.

Step 4: Humbly Partake

Once I’ve found a good candidate I look through the site and see if I can request inclusion in the blogroll, participate in a forum discussion or add a relevant comment on a blog post about some premium content on our site.

As this is usually a deep industry site- I’ll want to be sure to add value to the post or site. I like to answer questions or add a link to one of our infographics- so visitors find more helpful information. AVOID THE TEMPTATION TO SPAM. This is not the venue (if there is a venue at all). If ever you’ve wanted to add quality comments, answered questions or found a way to make the webmaster happy with helpful links- this is the time to do it.

That’s it! It’ll take some practice to find the right types of sites, but a nice blend of these nutrient-rich, small-town links are a nice addition to any link building strategy.

How do you build high quality white-hat links? I’d love to hear your ideas. If you add valid suggestions, I’d love to feature your ideas and send some link-love your way.

That being said, a couple weeks ago they posted a two part video about understanding link metrics and I want to share the first video, as it is a nice and easy introduction to many of the metrics we use here at Gravitate Online. We are big fans of the metrics SEOmoz’s tools push our way and I like to bounce them off Majestic SEO’s info aswell. One of our clients asked why some of these metrics don’t agree. Why is it that when I do a ‘link: site url’ search in Google it shows different numbers than when I do a link search Majestic? Or Open Site Explorer? Rand goes into these questions and explains how Google, SEOmoz and Majestic indexes differ and the metrics each use to show link quality.

I especially enjoy the line by line explanation of each SEOmoz metric describing the difference between mozRank and mozTrust. We have included the mozRank into our reporting and may be adding the mozTrust aswell. In our link building, we are paying much more attention to it than we’ve ever done before and make it a mandatory addition to the Domain and Page Authority metrics.

What is the Competitor Link Profile? We really look into 3 competitors that are ranking well when doing our initial analysis. For each of these it is helpful to identify 2-3 different link building techniques that each is using. We call this a link profile. Looking at our 9 levels of link building, we can usually pick out 2-3 that each competitor is utilizing to get their high rankings. Once you’ve identified your competitors, building this profile can be done in 3 easy steps.

1. Enter a competitor name (high ranking competitors, please) into SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer tool

2. Comb through the list of links, looking for different types of link techniques

3. Bucket the identified links into 3 general link building technique silos

The best way to illustrate is by going through an example case. I selected randomly a high ranking site for the phrase ‘Portland Real Estate’. Currently, the #1 ranking site is www.jmaproperties.com. I’ll create a link profile for this site, pretending that I want to compete for the same phrase (I in no way am trying to do so). I’ll follow the steps above to build this link profile.

1. Entered jmaproperties.com into SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer and clicked ‘Get Link Data’

2. Looked through the list of links, and I see a lot of no follows that have high link juice (nice page and domain authority).

3. Next, I filter out the no-follows (using the filter feature at the top of the list) and I look for specific types of in-bound links. Here I see blog comments, guest blogging, a directory and a sponsorship for a local cause.

I need to now see if these are aberrations or if there is a consistent trend towards these types of links…so I’ll look further for more evidence.

Looking over the list further, I see that blog comments, guest blogging and directories are fairly common from the highly potent ‘juicy links’. From this, I would make this list my link profile for jmaproperties.com. Finally, I would run another 1-2 high ranking competitors through the same process, if I create a similar profile for the additional competitors, then I have a great place to start with my link strategy. Why reinvent the wheel, when I can utilize a portion of the strategy used by sites that are already succeeding?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on creating a competitor link profile. Do you have a better way of doing it? Let me know!

1. Research and analysis

2. Actual labor including- on-page changes, content creation and link building

3. Reporting and monitoring

Of the three segments, #1- Research and analysis and #3- Reporting and monitoring are the focus of most software programs. While the middle segment, #2- Actual labor, is by far the most labor intensive and requires the most experience and expertise.

We’ve taken a look at several of the automation tools out there in the video below, to give you an overview of their services and automation features. We used a report put out by Forrester Research. If you want to read the report yourself, download the report now. Take a look and let us know what you think. Do you know of automation tools that address the actual heart of SEO, or research and reporting tools better than those discussed below? Let us know.

We then take a quick look at MyBlogGuest.com, Ann Smarty’s community for connecting content writers with blog owners. We haven’t started using her tool yet, and would love any feedback you may have about it. The good, bad or ugly. From the outside looking in, it looks like a nice product. I love the focus on building relationships, rather than simply submitting content to blog owners.

Take a look at the Guest Blog Posting intro:

Several clients, recently, have specifically asked about the many factors that go into helping a website show up higher is search engines. Particularly, on-page factors. The best resource I’ve found in a long time is SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors resource. One of the reasons this resource is so helpful, is that it’s from a survey they do of SEO professionals. So, you get a true view of SEO…simply a bunch of smart people trying to reverse engineer Google and other search engines. So many of these SEO’s have differing opinions, that it’s nice to get a collection of all of them in one single summary. It helps one understand that many techniques that SEO’s go on and on about are simply their opinion…rather than a hard and fast rule. So, looking over the survey results, one can take what ‘most’ seo’s think, and generally bank on the ones that they all agree on. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Microsites don’t pass the link juice onto your main site like you may think. Instead, integrate your blog or microsite into your main site, and get all the links, with their diversity, etc. into you main site. Helps for the short and long run. Rand walks us through it. Take a look:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – The Microsite Mistake from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

“Thanks for your purchase. Do you have a blog? Link to us! Just copy and paste this code:

<a href=http://www.website.com>Keyword Rich Text Here </a>”

It’s easy- and if placed toward the bottom of your email, shouldn’t ruffle any feathers. It’s a pretty casual and friendly request.