Link Building Strategy

Hey warriors, been away from the scene for awhile and wanted to start my comeback off by giving back to the community.. something I've been meaning to always do but never got around to.

I want to also preface this with a caveat. This was my bread and butter strategy as of a few months ago. I'm sure a lot has changed, and would appreciate anyone who takes the time to read through this to comment on any recommended changes.

So, here is my typical backlinking strategy along with a discourse on article spinning. I used to perform these exclusively as my backlinking/SEO strategy for my keywords:

Main Backlinking Strategy

Acquire keyword and related TLD
Look for keywords that exhibit the follow characteristics:

Local Monthly Searches - # of searches average for the month for the country specified. Also important to review seasonality and trends. Ideal to target a keyword with at least 1,000 monthly searches as your base site if you are targeting a niche. For an authority site you want at least 5,000. Again this is just for the base niche (the “general” keyword so to speak). For long tails you can go as low as 100 LMS volume.

Here are some methods to self check keywords -
Profitability: Google Keywords Tool - Enable CPC. Use exact. Use broad for estimated traffic once in the top 3.

Using GOOGLE.COM to do some market analysis. Replace your keyword in quotes instead of "keyword":
“keyword” - Total # of pages with the phrase anywhere in the site. Aim for 30 - 50k
&start=990 - See total # of page results Google is displaying
intitle:”keyword” - Total # of pages with the phrase in the title. Aim for <30k.
inurl:”keyword” - Total # of pages with the phrase in the url. Aim for <30k.
intitle:”keyword” inurl:”keyword” - Combination of the above. Ideally <30k.

Write some articles
SEE DETAILED NOTES BELOW

Spin all the articles
SEE DETAILED NOTES BELOW

Tier 1 -Create 10 web 2.0 properties
Usually these are including squidoo and hubpages and a random assortment of other blogs. Here's some ones I like a lot:
WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here
http://www.tumblr.com/
LiveJournal: Discover global communities of friends who share your unique passions and interests.
http://www.blogger.com/
Nexopia
Blog.com — What's your story?
Xanga.com - The Blogging Community
Create a Free Blog at Thoughts
Weebly - Create a free website and a free blog

These sites all link back to the money site and contain an assortment of the following:
1 spun article
A few links to other authority sites (top 10 google results for the keyword) such as wikipedia, shopping sites, other articles.
A few links to media on youtube, scribd, slideshare, docstoc for related items.

The goal is to make the web property look legitimate and not just a spammy layered site that points back to your main site.

Tier 1 - Create some media properties
Create some videos, slidedecks, and articles and post them on youtube, scribd, slideshare, vimeo, etc
Animoto and fiverr are my main resource for this.
These sites all link back to the money site. For slide decks, you can just make the last slide have some embedded links, same with pdf's. For videos you link back in the description field.

Tier 1 - Create some articles
Send out spun versions of your article to the major article sites like:
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.goarticles.com/
Free Articles at Amazines.Com - Author Publishing and Free Article Database
Home - Article Blast! Free Articles And Content For Reprint On Your Website, Newsletters and Ezines. Submit Your Articles For Free!
http://www.articlebase.com
InfoBarrel - Crowdsourcing Information | Make Extra Money Writing
Bukisa - Share Your Knowledge

Include one or two links to your money site in these articles.

Tier 1 - Notes
ALL tier 1 links either point directly to your $$$ site or another authority site. You will be building lots of backlinks to these sites.

Tier 2 - Aggressive Backlinking
Take your pick of any backlinking strategy here, the idea is you are going to be backlinking directly to your TIER 1 SITES ONLY. These links will be spammier in nature and you don't want it to touch your money site.

Here's a few methods:
Web 2.0 links
Forum profiles
RSS linking
Article marketing
Scrapebox
High PR backlinks
Social bookmarking

Software I used and liked:
Article Marketing Robot
Scrapebox (I could write an entire tutorial on scrapebox, it's that awesome)

I used to also do blog networks but as I was doing that alot of the major ones got de-indexed so I stopped as I was worried about ROI of them. That said, the strategy above took about 1-2 months to get me in top 5 usually for any keyword that was of average competition. For higher competition, I had began doing this same strat with another quality layer - Tier 2 (no spammy links) - that pointed to Tier 1 sites and then a Tier 3 layer of spammy links that pointed to Tier 1 and Tier 2 properties. I never quite finished that project so I can't comment but this worked well for easier pickings.

Summary
I ignored alot of common trends like:
"Only get nofollow links"
"Get lots of backlinks as fast as you can"
"Only focus on this kind of marketing"
"This kind of backlinking doesn't work"
"Article marketing/spinning doesn't work"

To sum it up, you create nice little Tier 1 properties that look clean and point directly to your money site. Then you slowly backlink the hell out of those Tier 1 sites with any method you like. Make sure to do it over the course of a few weeks so it appears natural. Get links from all over and use a combination of types so it looks natural - get nofollows, dofollows, profiles, blogs, forums, etc.

So, the main takeaways I have are link diversity, link velocity and link protection. That is - acquire a lot of links from a lot of places over a long period of time to a lot of different sites!

The Article Spinning Manifesto

Now that I've outlined my method, I want to talk about article spinning. As you can see this strategy is VERY reliant on spun articles to generate 90% of the content for the site. The other 10% is media which is important also but pales in comparison to the articles you'll be writing/spinning. I actually wrote this as a post I planned to share here awhile ago but never got around to it.

Spinning Articles
This is a CORE ACTIVITY for any internet marketing campaign. As such you should treat it with the utmost priority. It should be the first part of any new campaign (once a keyword is identified)

Key criteria:
90%+ uniqueness over 30+ articles
400+ words
Web 2.0’s - 2 links per article.
Articles - 1 link to homepage in bio box and 1 to a random inner page in the article
Spun anchor text
Spin paragraphs and sentences multiple times

Steps:
Write the Main Article
Note that I don’t like to outsource this step. Actually writing the article lets me set the tone for the entire piece and highlight important aspects of my niche. If and when I outsource the spinning I know the worker has a great piece of content to start with and can use it as a guide for forming their own thoughts and organizing their spins.

Additionally, I get to learn about the niche which is invaluable as I go through (or outsource) different parts of this operation. It helps you determine categories, trends (possibly uncover more longtail keywords), the correct social media venues to target, etc. We don’t learn what we don’t practice. The internet was built on writing. Practice it and perfect it.

Write 1 entire article from scratch. Take your time with this and make it a very strong persuasive piece with valuable information. Make sure to use good transitions and idea bucketing by paragraph. Break the article up by paragraphs

Once complete, label each paragraph by its main idea.

Rewrite each Paragraph
Using the main idea, rewrite each paragraph at least 3 times. Depending on the length of my articles, I will rewrite them up to 5 times. Try not to repeat any sentences and think of new ways of saying the same phrase. They key here is to avoid synonyms. We want to rewrite IDEAS not words and phrases.

Rewrite each Sentence
Same as above, once you have all of your paragraphs rewritten its time to move on to the sentences. This will be a lot easier than rewriting paragraphs but the same rules apply. Don’t just spin synonyms, we’ll do that with our spinning software. In fact, don’t spin any synonyms. Vary your sentence structure, syntax, punctuation, anything you can to make a sentence demonstrably different.

Spin each word or phrase
It’s finally time to bust out the spinning software. Run your entire variation through a spinning software and go to town. Be careful and make sure your spins make sense. I’ll list my spinning best practices below.

1. DO NOT AUTOSPIN
2. DO NOT AUTOSPIN!!
3. If you use The Best Spinner then do >Auto-replace synonym and set it to 1 synonym and select every other.
4. Go through each variation to make sure it makes sense and update your personal library as you go.

Using this method I’ve never had less than a 95% spun article and I’ve gotten as high as 98%.

A lot of people feel like this takes a lot of time or that writing is boring. All I can say is you really picked the wrong line of work if you hate writing! Seriously though, at least write the main article for your keyword (500 words isn’t hard or asking too much per keyword) and outsource the rest of the spinning if you must.

I also want to talk about why this is arguably the most important part of my SEO strategy. The SEO landscape is constantly changing. Google is always looking into ways to “clean up” the internet so to speak. What backlinking methods work today wont always work tomorrow. It was blog farms and link wheels yesterday, today it’s link pyramids, in the future perhaps it’s all relevant blog commenting or social media. Regardless of all of that, content is still king. Google LOVES good content. Why? because readers love good content and Google will always want to provide the best user experience to the reader. Note when I say Google loves good content you may rebut that it’s simply a search engine, it doesn’t know how to read content, or it’s just keywords and algorithms. Well that is partially true. We aren’t just putting out good content for Google. We do it for the reader. And you can always change up your linking strategy and outsource it pretty easily but it’s considerably more effort to change your content across all your sites if it’s garbage to begin wtih. Content is the foundation of your site. Take it seriously and I promise good things will happen. If you build it they will come!

Just think about how many places your spun article is going to end up. At a minimum:
Money Site
10 Tier 1 Web 2.0 Sites
5 Tier 1 Article Sites
3 Social Media Sites (youtube script copy, slideshare, pdf)

And then all of the tier 2 and tier 3 sites to mass backlink your tier 1s. That could be easily over 100 sites using the same spun article. 60% uniqueness vs. 95% uniqueness over 100 sites is a MASSIVE difference in footprint, readability, and overall “reach” of your niche. It’s so much more worthwhile to create 1 quality spin doc before marketing it all across the reaches of the internet.

Your niche site is going to be sitting out there for years and years passively building you income (that’s why you’re here right?) you owe it to yourself to make it the best site it can be. Dominate your niche in backlinks, backlinking strategy, and content. It’s easy to scrape links and copy them - it’s a lot harder to copy content. Build a site that matters.

Good copy is key in so many ways. Persuasive copy will “pre-sell” readers and make them link clicking fiends. If you write good content you will always be safe. It will always be in demand and always be relevant. Plus it’s infinitely easier to turn a niche site into an authority site when the content in place is already 10/10.

But then, why am I spending all this time convincing you to write better content? I truly think it matters. It’s not an easily measurable metric but this is how SEO is evolving. Google wants to move from backlinks and deep links to usability, readability, and content. It's worked for me and I hope it works for you.

I hope to get some healthy discussion going regarding any points here and I'm happy to further talk about article spinning and writing as I'm planning on maintaining it as the core of my strategy going forward.[/QUOTE]