DoFollow 001Letting the link love flow

Link building, link building, link building – if you don't wake up in a cold sweat in the night over this then you are not serious about SEO.

But there are ways to ease the pressure and help organise your link building campaign.

The simplest method is to write everything you do down on an Excel spreadsheet. That's right: everything.

I'm talking about date; website or page URL of intended link; whether the link will be nofollow or “dofollow” and what exactly your actions were – did you leave a comment on their latest blog post? Did you submit an article for publication? Did you write an email asking for a one way link?

Write it all down and leave a column on the far right entitled “What I did next”, then go back to your action a week later and note the result. Perhaps your comment wasn't posted, perhaps it was; maybe next time they will allow you to use anchor text; did you get a response from that link request? How many viewers have you had to your article? Have you had any requests to reproduce it elsewhere? If so, have they included links to your site?

If you keep your records up to date and keep on top of your link building programme then you won't be waking up with link nightmares.

Planning and coordination are everything if you want to organise your time effectively.

Here are some resources to help in your link building campaign:

Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview

Before you submit to directories read this article:

The Wisdom & Folly of Directory Link Building

Good advice from the professional SEO industry:

7 Tips for Training Link Developers

Some good ideas here:

21 Effective Ways to Build Links, Bring Traffic, and Promote Your Site

SEO Mom Ann Smarty lays down some ideas:

Link Building Tools To Use For Inspiration

And how can an article on this subject be published without a link to the God of Link Builders, Eric Lee:

Aggressively Seeking Links: How Much Is Too Much?

Spotting Unnatural Linking Patterns