It’s a different story when it comes to link building. This is something that you simply can’t do in one go. In fact, you’re rewarded for regular activity spread over a period of time.

You gain less in SEO terms by doing 8 hours worth of SEO work in a single day, than you will if you do 30 minutes twice a week over 8 weeks.

Why? Because search engines like to see content and backlinks appear naturally over time. The key to success with SEO is a small amount of regular activity spread over time.

It’s worth noting that SEO Research and Content Optimisation are one-off activities. Once they’re done, they’re done until some future date when you need to revisit your content (e.g. you’ve fallen off page one, or there is a major change in the way search engines work).

As such, you may well decided to take on SEO Research and Content Optimisation first and get them over and done with as quickly as possible.

Alternatively, you may decide to employ me to do SEO Research and/or Content Optimisation for you. And take on link building yourself.

The point is, SEO Research and Content Optimisation are tasks you can (and should) get done as soon as possible. Get them out of the way, and then allocate regular weekly activity to link building.

Link bait can only work if people find it useful. In particular, it works best when people who write blogs, “how to” guides and resource sites think it will help their readers. As such, link bait tends to have these features…

• The benefit of having it is easily understood by others
• There is a well-defined target market that will find it useful
• 3rd party blog authors will link to it because it’s useful to their audience
• It’s the sort of thing people will click on if you tweet about it
• It’s not too long, wordy or involved

Examples of link bait include The DIY Guide to SEO, the Web Marketing Process Campaign Plan, and the Lead Generation Campaign Calculator. Each of these tools provides a specific service likely to be of use to the people they’re aimed at.

You can create your own link bait, and make it available for download via your site. Your link bait might take any of the following forms…

• Video
• Audio
• Text
• Slideshow/Presentation
• Flash application
• Ebook
• Top 10 list
• Web utility/application

In addition to the bait itself, you’ll also need a landing page. And if you have a landing page, you might as well collect an email address before making the item available (i.e. for future marketing communications).

Once your landing page is up, it’s time to start promoting it. This can be done via Twitter, Facebook, a Squidoo page, directories, classified sites, forums, and blogs. In particular, find those blogs, forums, etc that deal with your target market. Write to the blog owner, and make him/her aware of your item. With a bit of luck, s/he will spread the word to thousands of people and you’ll pick up lots of powerful inbound links very quickly.

You shouldn’t limit yourself to a single application. Always be on the look out for new ideas, because you never know what people will find attractive. Any given idea might turn out to be the one that gets you right to the top of Google.

• Google: The link command
• Yahoo: Site explorer

In this case, Yahoo’s tool is vastly superior to Google’s.

The Google tool requires that you enter the following into its search engine: link:yourdomain. For example, to see a list of the sites that link to the site google.com, you’d enter link:google.com into Google’s search engine.

You’ll then see a list of all the sites that link to Google. All? Well, no actually. And that’s why Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool is superior.

With Site Explorer (click the above link to visit), you enter the URL of the site into a search box. Then click the “Explore URL” button. You’ll be presented with a list of pages Yahoo has indexed from that site.

Near the top of the page you’ll find 2 buttons. The first is currently selected, and titled “Pages”. The second is titled “In links”. Click the “In links” button to see all the pages that link to the site of your choice.

As you’ll quickly find, the list is far more extensive than Google’s link command. You get more information, and more useful information. This tool provides additional features, allowing you to find out much more about the people linking to you.

From an SEO perspective, Site Explorer is more useful as a way of finding out the the kinds of website that tend to link to you. This makes it easier to find new sites that are likely to want to link to you.

Want more free SEO tools?

Want more free SEO tools to help you with your search engine optimization? Check out my favourite free SEO tools, and download your own copy of The DIY Guide to SEO (DIY SEO).