Top white hat link building strategies

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Alan Bleiweiss: Link building strategy needs to be primarily old school high quality, award winning Public Relations based. Links need to be all about: Brand visibility growth Brand Authority building Brand Trust building Because of that, don’t think “we need links”. Instead, think “we need to build brand, based on visibility, authority and trust”. When executed properly, public relations initiatives, combined with top tier social sharing and engagement efforts, inevitably bring tremendous value that happens to include the best possible kind of links imaginable. Fixating on link building as a primary task that is not based on proper PR methodology, inevitably leads to shiny object tactics that work less and less as every year passes. I`m not saying guest posting, when done properly, and not for typical "guest posting" reasons, is bad. Instead, it`s about finding the ideal sites that fit your ideal market reach, and look to become a guest contributor - especially sites that have very strict post editorial guidelines. Then, with some of those, it`s also helpful to seek prospect of eventually becoming a regular writer there. For every one of those you get, it`s worth 10x or 100x "guest post" links. Seek out ways to contribute value to their audiences as a primary purpose, understanding that the level of trust the brand earns is through the roof, and thus with all of that combined, the links you do get, are strong. Think about sites that are specific to the industry in question, and sites that are variants where the story you tell, knowledge shared, is a variation, yet still critical to the overall mix. Think about community participation. Think about getting visible to actual top tier journalists, not just SEO people who write a blog buried sixteen layers deep in Forbes, HuffPo or other sites that have thousands of bloggers in a free-for-all system. Those placements can help, however most people make them the top priority, which is invalid for true success. And if you want a site to really win, get together with somebody like Lisa Buyer - because that`s big league, real deal PR & Social done the right way where 80% of our industry doesn`t even come close to matching quality and value.